Songs My Mother Never Taught Me Read Free Page A

She’d also rebuked my uncle for buying me a sports car.
    My world darkened that summer night I heard of Iris Murdoch’s terminal illness while I was driving along the Bosphorus. My mother later reported that ‘the minibus that hit your Ferrari from behind flew into the sea at Yeniköy and the pervert driver with his Slav slut are now feeding the fish.’ I remember my inner organs shifting at the moment of impact. As I was gradually sliding down that dark tunnel perhaps I smiled at the consoling thought that sooner or later my mother would drag me out into the light. I had severe head injuries and was subsequently admitted for surgery and diagnosed with acute subdural haematosis. Despite a successful operation, and because of the possibility of chronic bleeding, I was flown to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, USA, in an ambulance plane brought from Switzerland. It seems a second operation was performed to prevent blood accumulating between the brain cells. For seven months I wrestled with visual and speech difficulties, partial memory loss and, most embarrassing of all, incontinence. I recall only half-seeing my mother and being unable to remember if my name came from a river or a lake. If she wasn’t beside me when I woke, I’d hear her crying in the next room and start to worry. A doctor of Tartar origin conveyed to me in his broken Turkish that if it hadn’t been for my mother not only would a quick recovery be out of the question, but I’d probably have remained partially disabled. During my convalescence I’d longed in vain to be rid of my cerebral talents. I vowed, as we boarded the New York–Istanbul flight, that I would never ever again upset
my saintly mother
.

    As the noon ezan ended and before her ghost entered the scene, I had to throw the cigar butt that had fallen on the floor into the Ottoman ashtray. My mother’s soul was even capable of arriving uninvited while I was wrestling with whatever old bottle of booze was at hand. Then I could wonder if she’d put the Tartar doctor up to that last compliment.
    I can’t just invent a shower of autumn rain as in trashy novels and then drop off to sleep. Instead, I’ll doze off humming a passage from Küçük Ä°skender’s
Rock Manifesto
2 ...

    Â 
    1    A mischievous wandering djinn in Jewish folklore which takes over a human soul until driven out by prayer.
    2    While I weep in my room, take a shower in blood, Mother! Warm me up milk and menstrual blood! Please don’t be startled if I howl to the full moon, don’t be angry with my friend the devil for staying over now and then, don’t be angry with him having an orgasm and yelling, ‘666 666’ as he urinates in the toilet ... you sing and dance, Mother, while others are being murdered! Clean my weapons, oil them! Don’t even try to understand why I masturbate till dawn! We are alone, all of us alone. I know it’s very funny, but now it’s time for you too to learn this, Mother!

B
    Our Lord the Prophet read the following prayer for Hasan and Hüseyin, his grandsons:
    â€˜Lord God! I seek refuge in nurturing words, against all humankind, djinns, devils, all harmful things and the evil eye.’
Buhari:
Tecrid-i sarih
, 1348
    I confess I’m the poet who wrote the following graffiti on the wall: ‘How can I yearn for tears when I haven’t been given a taste for laughter?’ and: ‘Show me the poor soul who has never been victimized first by his own family!’
    My master Baki, may he dwell in paradise, uttered the words, ‘How can the Four Sacred Books fit into a single volume if they’re not more poetically precise than
Hamlet
?’ In the first twenty-five years of my life – shall I see a second? – spent struggling to survive, I couldn’t even enjoy my unhappiness to the full. If your humble servant is not to upset you with episodes from his naive