Many and Many a Year Ago Read Free Page A

instruments or start thirty violins whining with a single gesture still frightened me.
    Then I’d head home on city buses filled with workers returning from the night shift. I wondered whether to reflect on the fact that those poor souls would die without ever hearing the name Vivaldi was just something to bolster my ego. I was never satisfied with the Bach overtures I tried to whistle on the walk home from the bus stop. It came as no surprise that, while I was lost in my fantasies of directing the Berlin Philharmonic or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Aslı abandoned me.
    Hayri Abi had gradually grown more nervous. Though I wasn’t making deliveries anymore, he still gave me $5 tips, which I was slightly reluctant to accept. At the beginning of August Aunt Ikbal sent me to England to attend a three-week language course. When Hayri Abi heard that I was going to Bournemouth he said, “That’s like going to Siirt instead of Istanbul to learn Turkish.” If the school administrators hadn’t taken us to London on our first weekend I would never have realized that I was abroad. I complained to my father that the plane home hadn’t produced any “authentic” music, but he just replied, “Beautiful melodies can only be felt by airplane pilots and Rumi’s grandchildren.”
    I went directly to Cisum to distribute ballpoint pens with “London” and “Bournemouth” printed on them. Then I planned to see Hayri Abi and give him the CD of Vladimir Horowitz’s latest concert. The shop was silent. Aret, who was talking on the phone, lifted his artificial arm and beckoned me over. He wore an irritatingly cynical expression on his face as he dug out of his drawer the third page of a yellowing newspaper and showed it to me. “Gang Selling Drugs to Youth Nabbed,” said the headline. When I saw this, and the name Hayri Tamer just below, it was as if the notes of “Sleeping Beauty” had turned into arrows to pierce my brain one by one. I was afraid to close my eyes for fear I wouldn’t be able to open them again. I ran out of the shop because I didn’t want them to see me burst into tears. I remember walking without stopping until I reached home. That night in my dreams I saw myself conducting, with great difficulty, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in “Swan Lake.” I suspected Aslı was laughing and crying at the same time.
    I didn’t have the heart to give up the radio that I’d acquired with my tips from Hayri Abi, so I sentenced myself not to listen to music for a month. My relations with certain people in the neighborhood seemed about to cool off. I knew they were irritated by my trip to England. If they happened to hear that I’d started listening to classical music too, I might have been in for the “gay treatment.” So as not to be excommunicated I decided to be one of them until school started up again.
    I’d forgotten that I’d sat the entrance exam to H. High School on the Asian side of the city, a state-run boarding school, but in early September the news came that I’d won a scholarship. Even my mother rejoiced. The first time I walked into the building I thought it was like a jail, then a dead whale.
    â€œStarting high school is the second step to manhood,” my father declared (the first being circumcision).
    I shared my dormitory room with forty boys who came from districts of the city that I’d never heard of, as well as from neighboring towns. The first night, as though it would identify the traitors amongst us, we all asked each other what our fathers did. When my turn came, even
I
could barely hear myself whisper that he was a municipal bureaucrat. I was studious and disciplined and could never get along with the country yokels who thought that being in a boarding school was synonymous with being on holiday. On a scale from “Gnat” to “Bastard,” the nickname they