Letters to Oktay: Letter Two

Dear Oktay,

I can think of a number of reasons why a person would embark on a day trip to Istanbul by plane, but for you, I cannot bring myself to settle for any scenario that is commonplace. I refer to your boarding pass tabs, which were also in your book. They are both dated February 13 with no indication of year, but it's probably safe to assume they're contemporaneous with the electricity bill. 

Here's a question: did you deliberately reserve seat 10B on your way out and 10A on your way back, or was that pure coincidence? My imagination takes to the former, and I see you now as the type that always checks in online before a flight and is particular about airplane seating. Perhaps you're an obsessive compulsive special agent, nay, hitman, whose day job involves taking out foreign attachés and shady businessmen and corrupt politicians (by night you're an interpretive dance instructor). You are quick and methodical; a quiet genius; the best cold-blooded killer money can buy.

Actually scrap that, I see you more as a lady-killer with the sensibility of an unwhittled log. You couldn't give a rats ass about where you sit on a plane. It's your PA who's obsessive compulsive. Your damn PA! She's also enamoured with you and wishes you'd notice the extra mile she goes to ensure your comfort. Little does she know that more than half of those 'business' trips she's organising are in fact for your secret rendezvous with various fake blonds with loose morals. But your philandering days are numbered, Oktay. In less than a year you will contract a horrific, venereal disease, which will force you to spend the rest of your days indoors for fear of being stoned to death by children. Your PA will mort herself. Your wife will leave you for a man named Bigus Dickus. And 'twill be a fitting end for the boorish, Turkish male that you are.

...

...

My dearest Oktay, you cannot possibly know the treacherous terrain of ever shifting sand hills, monstrous red winds and the spontaneous fluctuation of extreme temperatures that is a woman's innards. Poets of old have likened woman to the sea. Not so. A woman is more like a dune desert. I know that I am more right.

The morning of the day I found your book, it had been especially difficult to get out of bed, Oktay. But get out I did. And as I said before, it was snowing out; and in the car it was hyperborean; and my hands on the steering wheel were frozen; and on the radio a Turkish folk singer put his sadness into words that rang truer than everything I'd ever known in this tapering life. Such was the brittle state of my woman's innards on the day I discovered your book. And the moment I found those boarding pass tabs between its pages, I felt an instant and curious affinity towards you.

Don't get excited, Oktay. This isn't me making a pass. Perhaps I felt that way because I too use my boarding pass tabs as bookmarks when I travel, and often forget them (sometimes on purpose) inside once I'm finished reading. 

Laughable, isn't it? How simple we are. How eager to empathise, familiarise, share with others. How desirous of meaningful connection. Do you think it's so because we are all, in actual fact, so utterly and irrevocably alone? I asked myself this question a lot this weekend past, and all of today. And as I asked and asked (in the way you do when u already know the answer but can't bring yourself to accept it), my pensive feet took me to Melankoli Sahaf on my way home. Ismet welcomed me with a victorious smirk of a point well made (something immaterial about the cellist at the Baroque concert I attended Friday night and he Thursday). I sifted through the molehill some more till he was finished with his gloating and then asked him the question.

“Ismet,” says I, “what do you think?” The place was quieter than usual. We were in between playlists, and even Dolma, who'd calmed down a bit, was snoozing under the overgrown bonsai. Ismet was making himself instant coffee (I'd politely declined) and stopped to consider me at length, until it began to feel like he was gazing through me. Then he blinked and returned to stirring in his mug with marked wistfulness. It left a lump of something cold and indigestible in the place between my gut and my stomach. And the grave slurp with which he punctuated his response grated further on my nerves. How does a man, who takes such pride in having such refined tastes, drink that instant muck and be satisfied. I thought. I don't understand people sometimes, Oktay. I really don't. 

Letters to Oktay: Letter One

Dear Oktay,

TL 77.20. Sound familiar? It's the amount you paid for electricity for the month of February, back in 2011. It's hard to imagine what a person is like based on their monthly energy usage six years ago. TL 77.20 is pretty standard really. Not too frugal, nor excessive. I wonder if you know about vampire energy. It's the power consumed by household electronic devices when they're switched off but still plugged in. If you didn't know, now you do. And the question is, will you start unplugging your TV and whatnot before bed every night, to knock a couple of digits off your next bill? If a couple of digits don't matter to you, would you do it for the environment? Maybe you'd start with good intents, but maybe after a few nights of the ritual, you'd get lazy and fail to see out the month... Now that would tell me something about the type of person you are. Which is interesting isn't it? Knowledge. Are we defined by what we do with the knowledge we acquire? 

Here's another thought. Perhaps if you knew about vampire energy back in 2011, you would have acted on it, but now you couldn't give a shit. I can relate to that I think. I too have grown more disenchanted in recent years. I wish I could offer some measure of consolation in these bleak times. But consolation is a thing I'm no good at. Escapism -now there's a solution. It's also how I happened upon your electricity bill, and some further mementos of you besides, pressed between the pages of my recent purchase from Melenkoli Sahaf -that secondhand bookshop off Cinnah Caddesi. 

I wonder if you frequent the place often, or if the occasion you stopped by to drop off this unwanted book, was your one and only visit. I wonder if you've met the owner's cat, Dolma. She's got Multiple Sclerosis, so she can't stand up right or walk to save any one of her lives. Instead, she rolls about like those tire-twister toy cars that can get out of every corner. The day I bought your book, Dolma was in heat, and kept yowling something awful above Ismet's (the owner) carefully curated playlist of classical music. Yowling and rolling and toppling all over the place. She gives me anxiety, that cat. I worry about her toppling into one of the electric heaters Ismet's got on the floor. I told this to him. He just lit a second cigarette and looked at me, apparently untroubled by the possibility. 

I went back to my molehill of foreign language books, piled up against the bit of bare-brick wall between two shelves. Ismet doesn't believe in order when it comes to his books, so I was excavating: removing the top layer of commercial fiction, teen romance and 70s erotica, to get to the good stuff in the center. Pachelbel’s canon in D turned into Bach’s Suiten fur Violoncello and eventually Ismet lit his third cigarette. Outside it was snowing, and if the world was going on, it was going on somewhere far away from where I was sat, on the floor at the foot of the molehill, surrounded by book towers of my own making.  Every so often, Dolma on her ceaseless rounds of the tiny shop, stumbled into me, then picked herself up again and rolled on. The towers grew. The snow fell. Bach became Ravel's Bolero, slowly building up to its epic crescendo. Then suddenly, about twelve minutes into the track, there it was.

In hindsight, your unwanted book was not the most exciting second hand book purchase I've ever made. But when you've set aside enough copies of Twilight and Fifty Shades, you appreciate the little things.