52 MEN 52 WEEKS/ 29 HAŞMET TOPALOĞLU
It Hangs in the Air
Click to read the article in Turkish / Kurdish
Hanging in the air, intense and silent. I don't need to lift my head and look; I know it's there. It's always been there anyways. For as long as I can remember violence hovers over us blatantly.
It's sure of itself because it knows that it's rooted in us.
When the dinner is late my father heads to the kitchen with harsh movements, he hastily takes some cheese and tomato from the fridge and sits at the table. That was the limit of his tolerance. He eats quickly. He frowns and knits his eyebrows. The dinner is ready now but he does not touch the plate, does not look at my mother, does not talk.
Violence has turned to silence, and now it's spread to the whole living room and even to the corridor and the rest of the house. I am aware that I won't be able to breathe even if I go to the back room.
I don't have a name. None. None at all? No, none at all.
I cannot understand how it happened. My name wasn't mentioned even as class president let alone when they were reading the names of cluster heads.
The feeble girl with her hair in plaits is smiling, actually outright laughing. She is now the president of three joined rows of eight people. Her looks say, "Now it's my turn". It seems she will take revenge for last year.
Why would I be jealous of her; she cannot even point the location of Yugoslavia on the map. It feels like the class is closing in on me. The bell rings, I jump from my seat. As I pass by her, my elbow hits her back, a bit harsh. She starts crying right away.
It wasn't that bad, what's the big deal!
Our neighbor woman comes back from the market. She unloads virtually the entire market at the doorsteps of the building. She is exhausted, rings the doorbell of her own apartment. The only reaction from the household with five men is to buzz her in.
No one is coming down, looking down the window or calling out to ask whether she needs help. They don't care, they don't mind.
Anyway, all we've heard to date from the other side of the wall are overbearing screams, demands in the imperative, curt replies. Ahead of the woman, an unripe violence climbs up the stairs like a subtle breeze and seeps in through the half-open door.
One part of the closet which I've been working on for hours doesn't fit the other. When I affix one side, the other side is coming off. Again and again, over and over. Finally, I run out of patience, I force it. That part breaks, the rest falls apart.
My disappointment is completed now.
That which has been hovering over me now gushes in through my nose, my ears, my mouth, my eyes. It is not possible to bear this steam, I burst out. I release my rage onto the still standing pieces, the doors and walls.
The person I love looks at me with genuine concern.
We are looking out of the windows. I, two men working at the office across and the manager of the apartment building on the corner. In front of the grocery, a woman is standing on one side of the cab and the taxi driver on the other. They are fighting, shouting at each other. No swearing but strong language, nevertheless.
Two meters down the road, the grocery boy is leaning against the ice cream counter, with a cigarette in his hand, watching them.
The taxi driver keeps saying the same things and waving his hands as if to say "get out of here". And his face has turned red. It seems the words are hurting his pride. Perhaps also the eyes looking out the windows. It is clouding up, soon it will pour down.
I get tenser and tenser and suddenly move away from the window.
I am gripping the handset a bit tighter in my palm. The woman on the phone insistently asks me to enlarge the ad sample and fax it again. I'm trying to tell her that there is no point in doing that until the draft is approved, my voice is starting to shake.
We keep telling the same things to each other for maybe 15 minutes. She is the new representative of the client and I am the last on the agency's chain of command. Her tone of voice is always the same and mine keeps rising.
I do have a complex of some kind.
She talks down from above, I scream out from below. She reminds me of my duty, and I remind her of her inexperience with a constant emphasis on the word "lady" and I bring the subject back to the approval of the gentleman who is her manager. She says her final word and hangs up on mine.
The cloud of violence hovers on this side of the phone. Everyone in the department is already looking at me nervously. They intend to calm me down, but my intention is bad. I am saying anything and everything that crosses my mind ranging from the woman's lack of experience to her foolishness; and as I speak incessantly, I am inserting and emphasizing the word "woman" after each adjective. It is only when my rage starts to subside that I remember five of the six people in the room are women.
My friend says, let's get a coffee from the shop at the corner and sit in the park. It is the first time that I sit in the park right outside my house, it is odd. The conversation is deep, the coffee is good. On the bench nearby sits a man from the neighborhood who has been without a job for years. He greets us a bit meek, a bit shy. There is always hopelessness and the look of a defeated person in his eyes. I return his greeting. He swiftly lights up a cigarette, sometimes looking at us, sometimes at the children playing.
A boy and a girl are jumping around and chasing each other. When the boy gets caught, he hits the girl and escapes again. The man shakes his leg without even realizing it. He is looking around, shaking his leg, looking around and shaking his leg. He takes a deep breath.
All of a sudden he jumps to his feet and runs towards the children. He first slaps the one, then the other in the face. First, he holds the girl by her arm and tosses her aside, then, holds the boy by his ear and drags him towards the other.
We sit up and protest. The man waves his hand at us as if saying, "OK, sorry" and goes out of the park, sweeping the children, his children, before him. As they are moving away along the wall, he looks at us with a cigarette in his mouth and slaps the children in the face one more time.
What is left to us is to curse after him.
The screen does not show whose turn it is, it is broken. When the door opens and someone comes out of the room, a sour and exhausted voice calls the next person. We are sitting in the hard yellow connected chairs, slightly bending forward, watching out for both the door and the people around us. We are nervous. We do not have the least bit of intention to give our six-minute appointment to anyone.
A man behind me is talking incessantly on the phone. More like he is trying to speak. The person on the other side is obviously crushing, firing away, accusing him. The man is taking it lying down. The curiosity gets the better of me and I look at him over my shoulder. He is a young man, stroking his forehead as he speaks; his quiet wife and quiet children are sitting side by side.
The conversation ends, after a short silence the man starts firing away. He is firing away at the broken screen, at his turn that does not come, at the doctors, the healthcare system, the ones administering the system...
The resentment that he harbors evaporates into the air, it changes form and spreads all over the waiting room.
The language of the man is becoming uglier and uglier, his every word is accompanied by a curse. The woman is looking at the floor, the child is looking at the floor. In their eyes, there is the fear which stems from having experienced the language of violence many times before.
When we are about to open our mouths to say something, I think it was only I and the old woman next to me who were about to say something at some point, the security guard comes.
The man's resentment instantly fades away, but the violence that has fallen upon us has no intention of leaving.
We are sitting around a big table and looking at each other, a bit sad, a bit embarrassed. It has been a long time since we came together and spoke so freely. We slowly get up from our chairs and go out. Everyone making for their homes.
We have shared our regrets to our hearts' content and our bad experiences, the lessons that we have learned, our comments and suggestions.
It is the first time that we have talked about our weaknesses, mistakes and their reasons so openly.
But, for some reason, we are still not relieved.
Is it really over now, will it not happen again?
Do our weaknesses such as intolerance, jealousy, resentment and disappointment that cause us to become somebody else justify what we have done?
Or can we be stronger and free from violence now that we have expressed them?
We are slowly raising our heads and looking at the sky. (HT/ŞA/APA/SD/TK/IG)
* Images: Kemal Gökhan Gürses