Many and Many a Year Ago Read Free

while I could always save up to buy a radio, to buy a guitar I would need a really solid reason.
    He had me sit on the bamboo divan. I was to call him “Abi”—“older brother”—and think of him as such. He dropped a tape of Chris Rea in the cassette player. I didn’t like it a lot when Hayri Abi began whispering to me about my responsibilities because it sounded like he was giving me orders. But when he called me “Kemo” on my way out, I felt as honored as a bodyguard who has just been given his code name.
    I started carrying bags whose contents I knew nothing about to the well-to-do districts of the city every other day, sometimes twice a day. I received a “Bravo” and $5 from Hayri Abi when I brought back the sealed envelopes handed to me by those tense young folk who seemed to relax a bit on seeing me. I memorized the addresses on the lists he gave me and then tore them up. I didn’t take the usual taxis. I paid no heed to Aret when he said, “That pimp is making you deliver sex videos.” Hayri Abi laughed and said, “It’s just because Aret can’t jerk off. Eros took revenge on him by tearing off his right arm.” When he wasn’t yelling into the phone in various languages, I would wait impatiently for him to ask, “How about a little concert, Kemo?” The way he played left-handed guitar was amazing, but his repertoire never changed. “I’m going to sing for you the best ten love songs in the world,” he would say. Then he’d close his eyes while he played—“Over the Rainbow”, “Moon River”, “Autumn Leaves” … I often thought of asking Aslı why love songs were all so sad, but I always forgot, maybe because L. was there like a bogeyman to greet me every evening after work.
    To keep my father from taking half my earnings, I didn’t tell him about my second job. My tips accumulated at Hayri Abi’s until they grew into a fund sufficient enough to buy a good radio.
    The summer I qualified as a seventh-grader I went back to work at Cisum. Everything was as I had left it. By the next month I had a little three-band radio with headphones. I had never known a happier moment in my life. I decided not to hide the radio from my father. He was as pleased to hear my lie about how I’d bought it secondhand from the neighborhood grocer’s delivery boy as the father of a son who’s scored his first goal in a football match. At night I used to pray to Aslı not to be upset with me, before falling asleep listening to familiar tunes on unfamiliar stations.
    That summer I developed the ability to solve the tabloid crossword puzzles in half an hour and gravitated toward classical jazz. When Hayri Abi proclaimed, “You’ve got gourmet musical taste,” it was the most meaningful “Bravo” of the first fourteen of my twenty-eight years. “Music is to feel, not to understand,” he’d say. “The structures of genuine music conceal within themselves poetry, narratives, and images that can’t be put down on paper.” Perhaps these weren’t his own words, I’m not sure.
    Even if they wouldn’t let me deal with customers, I still wanted to go back to Cisum the summer after I graduated from secondary school, because Hayri Abi had told me that he was going to “orientate me” in classical music. Maybe what added to my excitement was this exotic-sounding word “orientate.” On those nights when we watched videos of symphonies conducted by famous maestros, my father assumed I was working overtime. I closed my eyes as those surly men in penguin suits let the oboe or viola perform solo. Maybe my images failed to reach the heights of dream, but in my foggy way I was inventing plots like those of
The Thousand and One Nights
. Opening my eyes again, I would feel calmer, but those ruthless conductors who could hush twenty wind