“Now look at that, it turns out you aren’t deaf and dumb after all, and look how beautifully you speak.”
“You can’t keep this on your person, sir, it could be used as a weapon and cause serious injury!” said another soldier, one of higher rank. “But fine, take it, just be sure you don’t bring it out with you again. What line of work are you in?”
“I’m a businessman.”
“Do you pay your taxes on time?”
“I do.”
They didn’t say anything more. I’d suffered a little heartbreak, but I was glad to be reunited with the grater. As Çetin drove us home, slowly and carefully, I realized I was happy. These dark, empty streets that now belonged to Istanbul ’s dog packs, these avenues so ugly by daylight, hemmed in by concrete apartment buildings in such dreadful condition that it sapped my will just to look at them-now they looked alluringly mysterious, like poems.
67 Cologne
IN JANUARY 1981, over lunch at Rejans, Feridun and I talked business as we drank our raki and ate our bluefish. Feridun was making commercials with Yani, a cameraman he knew from the Pelür, and while that caused me no misgivings, he was upset about doing such work “for the money.” Having observed the precocious ease with which Feridun had mastered the art of always looking comfortable and taking life’s pleasures as they came, I might at one time have found it hard to understand his moral qualms; but because suffering had caused me to mature beyond my years, I had come to realize that most people are not what they appear.
“I have a screenplay that’s ready to go,” Feridun said then. “If I’m going to work for the money, it would be better to be working on that. It’s a little crude but it has good prospects.”
It was at the Pelür Bar that I’d first heard screenplays described as “ready” or “absolutely ready” to be filmed; it meant that the screenplay had passed the board of censors or had been granted all the permissions from the state that would guarantee its safe passage. In times when very few screenplays with popular appeal passed the censors, directors and producers whose livelihood depended on making one or two films a year were prepared to shoot screenplays they’d not even considered, provided they were “ready.” Over many years of the board’s smoothing over the edges, and cutting the prickly bits out of everything that was interesting or original, films had assumed a dreary uniformity, and so for most directors it was no hardship to make a film about which they knew nothing.
“Is the plot suitable for Füsun?” I asked Feridun.
“Not in the slightest. It’s a very suggestive role, perfect for Papatya. The actress will have to wear revealing clothing, and she also has to strip. Plus the leading man has to be Tahir Tan.”
“It can’t be Tahir Tan.”
We bickered for some time about Tahir Tan, as if the heart of the matter were not our using Papatya instead of Füsun in our first film together. “Let us not be ruled by emotions!” Feridun said, insisting the time had come to forget the incident at the Huzur Restaurant. Suddenly our eyes met. How much was he thinking of Füsun at that moment? I asked what the film was about.
“A rich man seduces a beautiful girl who happens to be his distant relation, and then he abandons her. The girl, having lost her virginity, takes her revenge by becoming a singer… As it happens, the songs were written for Papatya… Hayal Hayati was going to make this film, but when Papatya refused to become his slave he got angry and pulled out. The screenplay was left in the lurch. It’s a great opportunity for us.”
The screenplay, songs, and all else about this film were so bad as to be not just unsuitable for Füsun but a discredit to Feridun. Though my beauty had been sulking through every supper, bolts of lightning flashing in her eyes whenever she looked at me, I thought there might be a virtue in making Feridun happy, at least, and so before the lunch was over, encouraged by the raki, I agreed to back the film.
In May 1981 Feridun began to shoot his “ready screenplay,” called Broken Lives, after the eighty-year-old novel of the same name by Halit Ziya; but there the resemblance ended, for this tale of love and family ties in the Ottoman mansions of the Westernized bourgeoisie and the imperial elite was a world away from the screenplay set in the muddy streets and gazinos of 1970s Istanbul. Sustained only by rage and pure will, our heroine (played by Papatya, who earnestly threw herself into the part) becomes famous for the love songs she performs in the gazinos as she devotes many patient years to plotting her revenge against the man who took her virginity; unlike the heroine of the novel, she is miserable not because she is married but because she cannot marry.
We began filming in the old Peri Cinema, in those days the location favored for all films with scenes in nightclubs offering traditional music. The theater seats had been taken out and tables put in to make the place look like a gazino. The cinema’s stage was wide and deep, if not quite as large as the one at Maksim’s, the largest indoor gazino of the day, or the Çakıl Gazino, which was housed in a large tent in Yeniköy. From the 1950s through the 1970s there were many such places, modeled on French cabarets, where patrons might eat and drink while being entertained by a lineup of singers, comics, acrobats, and magicians; they featured Turkish singers with Western as well as traditional repertoires, and many musical melodramas were filmed in them. Typically it was in the gazino that the heroine would first make a florid confession of her consuming pain, and when, years later, she drew wild applause and tears from another audience, it would be understood that she had achieved victory in the gazino as well.
Feridun had explained to me the various ploys Yeşilçam used to avoid paying the extras in scenes where wealthy spectators applauded impoverished singers pouring their hearts out; in the old days, real singers like Zeki Müren and Emel Sayın would usually play themselves in such musicals, and the filmmakers would admit anyone in a jacket and tie who knew how to sit quietly and politely at a table. The gazino would be packed with people eager for a free show, in return serving free as extras. But in recent years filmmakers had begun to use lesser-known actresses like Papatya in musicals. (These young starlets would play singers much more famous than they themselves were, but after one or two films the gap between the film and real life would close, whereupon they could begin to star in films about impoverished singers much less famous than they now were. Muzaffer Bey had once told me that Turkish audiences would quickly tire of anyone who was as rich and famous in real life as represented in films; a film’s secret power derived from the discrepancy between the star’s real-life circumstances and her character in the film. The very point of the film being, after all, to show how that gap was closed.) As we could find no one willing to put on their best clothes to come to the dusty Peri Cinema and see a minor singer they’d never heard of, free kebabs were offered to any man who turned up wearing a tie and to any woman not wearing a headscarf. In the old days, whenever we were together with our friends or out on the town, Tayfun had always enjoyed making fun of the Turkish films he’d seen over the summer in garden cinemas; after mimicking the affectations and phony gestures of poor extras trying to play the rich spectators with full stomachs, he would, with the genuine pique of someone wronged, insist that rich people in Turkey were nothing like that.
Before we even began filming, I knew from Feridun’s stories of his days as an assistant that cheap extras caused problems far more serious than misrepresenting the rich. Some would try to leave once they’d finished their kebabs, while others sat at their tables reading the newspaper, or carried on joking and laughing with their fellow extras even as the singer star uttered her most affecting lines (though this last detail was at least true to life); some simply grew tired of waiting and fell asleep at their tables.