didn’t want her to be mine. No. I wanted her to entertain me. To excite me. I wanted to win her heart. I wanted her to betray her love with me. That’s what turned me on. I confess that I felt a kind of malevolent joy as I challenged an overwhelming and absolute love that had nothing to do with me. I wanted to break it apart.
Lacerating her love and the man she loved gave me a feeling of triumph; but I didn’t really understand that I was also hurting myself – conquering them left me cold.
But if the wounds were opening, I still couldn’t feel them.
Sometimes I can’t solve even my own mysteries.
Was there any reason for me to feel jealous? I know the emotion. It’s easy to describe. But not to be jealous in this situation? It was inexplicable. If she left Mustafa and gave herself to me, but still loved him, would I be jealous? I suppose so. Was I not jealous because she didn’t give herself to me, didn’t choose me? Mulling all this over, I hadn’t noticed the words flashing on the screen.
‘do you miss me?’
‘yes.’
It was the truth. I missed her.
‘what do you miss?’
‘i miss everything about you.’
‘everything? tell me.’
I knew straightaway where the conversation was going. I was already aroused. We were going to make virtual love.
Our relationship had two principal foundations: the pure love she felt for another man and the pure lust she experienced with me through written words.
The former was such a powerful bedrock that it seemed as if the relationship would be shaken if she were to one day leave Mustafa; something would be missing.
We began to make love.
I don’t know if it was because of this virtual lovemaking, or because we’re all born with the need to feel another living being, or because of the darkness in the unseen face of my life, or my fondness for the prostitutes who eke out their existence in darkness, but it wasn’t long before I discovered Sümbül. That was her real name. She was honest about that and the kind of life she led. Between the wealthy neighbourhood where I lived and the lower part of town where the middle class had settled there was a belt inhabited by the very poor.
The neighbourhoods had not been arranged in hierarchical order.
The poor had settled between the rich and the middle class.
In fact the middle-class homes that extended as far as the centre of town were the newest and most unattractive. The rich lived in vast old mansions and the poor lived in little old stone houses, while the middle class lived in short apartment buildings.
Sümbül’s home was in the poor neighbourhood. But I never went there. She came to me. She had a pink telephone with sparkling gems (something I’d never seen before), and music for a ringtone. She was always getting calls. But I was usually her last customer, calling her around midnight.
It was strange the way people in town looked after Sümbül; they never let anything bad to happen to her. Once a drunk teenager was rough with her and the next day they broke both his legs and left him on a street corner. The kid never even went to the police and hobbled around on crutches for months.
They called him Sümbül’s gimp.
I suppose people felt that her presence offered some security, stopped the young kids in town from pestering other women and provided an outlet for their wild desires. She had friends and neighbours. Like the other poor women, she carried her groceries in a mesh bag and covered her head with a scarf when she left home.
She wasn’t beautiful but she was cheerful – she had a good sense of humour.
‘I’m this town’s lightning rod,’ she would say. ‘Lightning always strikes me first. I keep this place honourable.’
It’s not easy for me to make friends with other men but I can quickly befriend women. For me talking to a woman is like wandering into a gift shop filled with a thousand different ornaments. There are so many different things to talk about – gossip, secrets, petty jealousies and personal troubles – that speaking with a woman is like playing with little ornaments that you can pick up and look at without getting bored and without having to buy them. If you don’t bore women by over-selling yourself, you can talk about things that will entertain you for hours.
They have none of the boring, ostentatious self-satisfaction that men have, and to those men who proclaim themselves able to solve all problems they say, Well, go ahead and solve it then, and seem to leave all kinds of problems on the sideline as they have a good time; they know that these problems can be solved easily and believe they can solve them much better than men, and they do. I enjoy them most when they’re putting men down but they really have to believe I’m a true and close friend to do that. Sümbül and I quickly became good friends.
She came to me around midnight. Somehow she’d picked up the habit of drinking whisky and cola – she must have had customers from the big city who met her in fancy hotels.
‘Take off your clothes,’ I would say to her, and she would undress and sit in front of me. She was completely comfortable naked.
Unlike the other women in town, she was fascinated by politics, and she never missed the nightly news. Occasionally we’d discuss popular issues. I always found it amusing to talk politics with her when she was naked. I suppose because I was a writer she always enjoyed talking with me and in time she started telling me about her other clients, though never disclosing names. She pitied men’s hang-ups but was never surprised.
‘Write about prostitutes,’ she’d say, ‘there’s great material there.’
‘Now I’m not the type of girl to just finish the business and send a fellow on his way. But that’s not to say I can’t finish a guy off in five minutes – they just can’t last any longer – but that’s not my style. There was the miserable guy who came to see me, his wife never listened to him, no one ever listened to him, but I did, which is why he even called for me when he was out of town. There’s nothing I won’t do, I never say no.’
Men can never really know other men and that’s why I was curious to hear about what these men did with her. And she told me. There was one I’ll never forget. She didn’t give me his name but I assumed he was one of the town’s better-known gangsters.
‘The man would come and just sit down opposite me, look at me and then start crying. We would never speak. Never did anything either. He’d just look at me and cry. He’d bawl his eyes out. Then he’d pay me and leave. Once I asked him why he was crying and he said that if he told me he’d never come back. I didn’t push him but one day I’m going to ask him again, I’m dying to know.’
One night I asked Sümbül what the people in town thought about me.
‘You got off lightly.’
‘Got off lightly?’
‘One of Oleander Ramiz’s men was going to beat the living daylights out of you.’
‘Why?’
‘So
