Many and Many a Year Ago Read Free Page B

chose for me—“Çakır,” “Blue” (because of the color of my eyes, I suppose)—didn’t bother me. My mature attitude in comparison to my classmates’ was put down to my military ancestry by my weary and ignorant-of-Mozart teachers.
    I began preparing for university entrance exams in tenth grade. In order to get an Air Force Academy interview one had to come within the top ten percent of the million or so who took the exam. This I was reminded of repeatedly on weekends when I was home. I was pleased with how my ambition soared whenever my classmates, who were looking for the easiest possible schools, made fun of my hard work. Elgar’s concertos offered me moral support as I struggled with science. With the exam looming, my father, who had managed to procure a list of questions asked by interviewers over the past five years, warned me continually to keep my eyes healthy. He had heard, I don’t know where, that they were the most important item on the health checklist. “Work hard but don’t let anything happen to your eyes!” he’d say.
    As it happened, I was in the upper two percent and sailed through the physical and psychological exams without a hitch. When the interview results came in I was duly accepted by the Air Force Academy as their second-best candidate.
    I thought it was a joke, at first, when they told me I’d be sharing a room with four other guys. My roommates were from the countryside, sons of government officials. You couldn’t say that we had much in common other than having had English prep classes. I didn’t really expect them to defer to me as their leader simply because I was the tallest, or came from Istanbul, but I enjoyed their panic when they discovered my passion for classical music. Weekends when I came home my father would finger the white braid on my jacket respectfully, and before I changed clothes we would stroll through the market together. It was embarrassing watching him walk two steps ahead of me, nose in the air, hands behind his back thumbing his prayer beads. But I couldn’t help smiling at the disheveled greetings accorded us by the shopkeepers who thought that not jumping to their feet would be disrespectful to the Armed Forces.
    The military-school way of life soon became mine. Like the works of Bach, the system was shored up by mathematical principles. I soon learnt that the friend of a person with goals was “discipline.” Only six of the 250 students were girls, and those of us who didn’t fall in love with Gülay were considered perverts. I flirted for a while with Asu, a second-year student at the nearby sports academy. She was surprised when I broke up with her for saying “Yo dude” all the time. After a while civilian life began to look strange to me. The
lumpen
who obeyed traffic laws whenever it suited them and had no idea how to navigate shopping malls infuriated me—especially those whose boom-boxes constantly blared. My belief was that by choosing to be an officer and taking refuge in classical music, I had rescued myself from the city’s chaos and superficiality.
    I graduated from the Air Force Academy third in my class, with the rank of lieutenant. Although civilians asked us all the same question—“With so much flying, aren’t you afraid of dying?”—only half of the graduating class actually qualified as pilots. My loyalty to the most magnificent mode of transport ever invented by man—the airplane—began on my first day of training. At my first Air Force base—my overture, so to speak—I discovered that seductive symphony which is improvised by the sounds of airplanes taking off and landing. Planes are like purebred race horses when they’re above the clouds, powerful and skittish. The excitement that stirred me when I accepted my diploma from the President’s hand was nothing compared to what I felt on being