//ed. note: Ebüzziya Tevfik continues on the train
toward Aya Stefanos in secret police custody.//
Nevertheless, I can assure you that I left
nothing there of any importance.
But I did surrender the packet of documents in
my breast pocket.” Yet,
my words did not
sit well with the policeman, whose kidney-purplish
skin tone changed to an even
darker liver-colored purple, as if he’d just
suffered a sudden stomach
ache. Next, I untied the package
containing
the half-okka of lakerda in my hand, saying that I was bringing it
home
to my son Ziya, who loves lakerda.
From my other pocket, I pulled out my bank
checkbook and asserted
that “this doesn’t concern you, so I see no need to hand
it over to you.”
However, the policeman
assured me that I had to turn over anything
and everything to him. He added that in the event that the Minister
gave the okay, then these items would be returned to me. I wondered
what business he would have with my
financial affairs and I asked him
whether his search mission extended to my
money drawer, to which he
responded with a sly grin, saying “don’t worry, we
will return
everything to you, including your wallet.”
From this point on until we reached the
Makriköy station, I said not
another word to him. Meanwhile, at every subsequent station the
policeman furtively stuck his head out the window, seemingly unsure
whether he
wanted to be seen or not. He was
probably looking for
some of his police colleagues. As for me, I chain-smoked and
worried mostly
about how my son would react to this situation.
He
wouldn’t show fright or anxiety about it, being very self-possessed
by
nature. Still, having such an
unpleasant situtation in our midst at dinner
time at home would disturb him,
even if it didn’t exacerbate his illness.
When
the train arrived at Makriköy, I stuck my head out the window
looking for
Ziya. Not seeing him, I asked one of the
teleğraf workers
whether he was there. Yes, he said, so I asked him to send him
to our
train compartment. At the same
time, the policeman was giving orders
to the Makriköy station police chief to have such and such persons sent
to the
police station and to have others come back for interrogations.
Ziya came and gestured toward the policeman
sitting across from me,
wondering who he was. I told him he was a policeman and that he
would be coming home with us to search through my papers. Ziya
was not pleased and indicated so by
curling his lips disdainfully. I
warned
him to speak only Turkish and not French.
Upon our arrival at Aya Stefanos, as soon
as he got off the train the
policeman was taken aback at the sudden sight of
Mr. Marnich, the
second translator of the English embassy, whom he knew. His shock
was not unwarranted. Two days ago on Sunday, there had been a
lavish dinner held at the Florya park, attended by 32 people, most of
them
foreigners. The gathering, which was to
include the lateYeni
Dünya Dimitriyadi Efendi Celeb, who reportedly said that
“even if I
am prohibited from going, I cannot stop others from going”, had
been banned by the Ministry of Public
Security. He did not attend,
but Mr.
Marnich did. A few villagers who had
passed word about
the meeting but did not attend mentioned accusations with
some
relationship to the son of the Çatalca subdivision governor. For my
part,
although I had only a passing acquaintance with him over the
past two
years, I defended him, knowing that no one in his family
would partake in such
a vileness. Nevertheless, since there was a
high likelihood that one or two
individuals could dare to do just
about anything, like others, I judged that
the son’s zealous endeavor
was somehow involved.
So when Mr. Marnich saw the policeman he
assumed he had come
in connection with Sunday’s gathering. While I was busy chatting
with some of the
women at the station, I noticed a four or five
individuals who seemed out of place, not resembling the local populace,
who were observing me. I judged them to
be “hafiye” ((secret police)).
I broke
off my chat with the women and headed toward these
individuals, with the
policeman following us. Ziya was a few
paces
ahead of me so a young man in the policeman’s entourage said to Ziya
“Hey, let’s all go together.” , in order to keep Ziya among us. Probably,
they were thinking that Ziya would
try get to our house first and either
hide or destroy “certain important
documents!”
When we entered the house, neither the
women of the house nor my
younger son were there, all of them having gone to
Makriköy two days
ago. I was pleased
about this. At the house there was a
Greek
housekeeper and an Armenian cook.
As always, the housekeeper had
prepared a tray of something. My custom upon coming home is to
undress,
take a shower and don some light clothes to go for a walk so
the housekeeper
assured me that “your shower water is ready.”
With
a chuckle I said “the shower I’ll take now will be one of sweat.
You
can remove the things you’ve prepared.”
Then I ushered the officials
into the room.
I
gave them the keys to my desk and cabinets.
When I went so far as
to identify the writers and print shops of the
documents they were
searching for, they said that they weren’t sure what they
were looking
for. Perhaps they said this
because it served their purposes.
In any event, first they opened the desk
drawers. In the first drawer
there were quite
a few articles that I had started writing but had not yet
finished, along with
some scraps of paper concerning things I’d written
satirically or about medicine. Also, there were some anecdotes and
verses I
had written on envelopes, a story I’d written about exile, some
translations
from famous people, small notebooks with notes about my
recollections, about
ten albums of pictures I’d drawn to take a break
from writing, a large envelope filled with small pictures I
considered
nice that I’d taken from magazines, my water color paints and
brushes,
together with a poem I started to write for Emile Zola that I knew
would never see the light of day.
I said to the searchers: “As you can see,
these papers constituted the
contents of this drawer. You can wrap them all up in newspapers and
take them. Some of them, of course, have nothing even remotely to do
with what
you’re looking for.” In the middle
drawer, though, there
were some things that gave me pause - writings I’d been
keeping for a
quarter of a century, including even some from yesterday – that I
was
intending to read. None of them were
particularly important but how
could I convince the searchers of this! They would have to read each
one of the papers to understand
this. Yet, there was no doubt that
regardless of how much time it took, and even though the contents of
the papers
were harmless, to be absolutely sure they would take
them all.
One of the searchers was named Hüseyin
Hüsnü and the other one was
Hüseyin Daim.
They didn’t trust each other but,
beyond that, they were
even ready accuse one another, as such search officials
are wont to do.
So when one of them
would discard a paper he considered unimportant,
the other one would drop the
paper he was holding in his own hand and
rush to grab the discarded one.
As
my son and I watched this, we could help but laugh. And then there
was the former train conductor
Williams, whose new name was Henry!
He
would observe them and, without letting them know, he would roll
his eyes and
make a face to express his disdain for their stupidity. After
we noticed Henry doing this a couple of times,
my son said to me in
French “which side is this guy on?!”, prompting both of us
to have a
good chuckle.
In any event, they took all the items in this middle drawer, even
though
there was nothing of value to them.
Then they opened the third drawer,
which was filled with drawings. They rummaged through them all and
left them
there. Having finished with the desk drawers,
the searchers
turned to the cabinets to the right of the desk. There were four of them
and in the first
there were envelopes containing some letters and my
Cufic and French ‘enisyal’. They examined
them and moved on to the
next three, which contained one or two thousand pages
of examples of
the most beautiful pictures from the German press, which I had
collected
since the first day I opened my own print shop and which I hoped to
one
day arrange in albums. Since I was
loath to have them mishandled, as
much as a miser trembling at the thought of
strangers looking through
his books, I showed them each one by my own
hand.
Nevertheless, I was unable to prevent them
from taking them all because
the papers were European. I scolded them for not having brought
someone
with them who was acquainted with English, French and
German and who could have
explained the papers to them. But
Hüseyin Hüsnü assured me that they would
return the papers to me
undamaged. I
realized that arguing with this dolt would be like asking
a camel to jump over
a trench so, in the end, I said rather harshly
“Do whatever you want!”
I
had the housekeeper prepare a tray.
Meanwhile, Hüseyin Hüsnü
was saying to Henry “why don’t you help us a
bit, otherwise we’ll miss
the eight-thirty train.” Evidently, he didn’t know that the
eight-thirty
call to prayer had come and gone. On the way here he had heard
that
the last train from Aya Stefanos to Istanbul was the eight-thirty, but he
didn’t realize that when he spoke it was already past nine o’clock.
Nevertheless, Hüseyin Hüsnü was fixated on
the eight-thirty. But
his request for
help from Henry didn’t seem to indicate that he wanted
help examing the papers
or that he wanted Henry to comment on the
contents. Rather, he just seemed to
be overwhelmed by his task.
Now the time came for them to look through
the cabinet on the left,
containing some photographs and about 1,000 pictures
I’d had made
in connection with a piece I was writing about the travels of
famous
people. Also in this cabinet were
700 pieces of paper and some
22,000 postage stamps that I had been collecting
since 1863, along
with Cufic script caligraphy samples I’d done over the past
12 years.
The thought of them taking
these things prompted my son to say
“How foolish would it be for them to take
these!” Hüseyin Hüsnü,
as if to display
the charm I described earlier, then said spitefully to
Ziya “Hey kid! You’re
going to tell us what to do?! We know
the
importance of these photographs and stamps. You two think we
don’t know anything.”
//END of PART TWO, section two//
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