Many and Many a Year Ago (3 page)

I graduated from the Air Force Academy third in my class, with the rank of lieutenant. Although civilians asked us all the same question—“With so much flying, aren't you afraid of dying?”—only half of the graduating class actually qualified as pilots. My loyalty to the most magnificent mode of transport ever invented by man—the airplane—began on my first day of training. At my first Air Force base—my overture, so to speak—I discovered that seductive symphony which is improvised by the sounds of airplanes taking off and landing. Planes are like purebred race horses when they're above the clouds, powerful and skittish. The excitement that stirred me when I accepted my diploma from the President's hand was nothing compared to what I felt on being authorized to “take solo command of the cockpit.”

At 12,000 feet I felt I'd been spirited away from the world's filth and had reached the outskirts of divine tranquility. There I touched eternity. There I could embrace the most meaningful of all music—absolute silence. I was pleased at how my flying skills improved with each flight training. My body would tremble with pleasure whenever I got the order to fly. When I was on the ground I envied those who were in the air. Yes, flying was a test for the body and a ritual for the soul.

At twenty-five I was assigned to the strategic base B. I was the first of my cohort to be awarded the fiercest warplane the sky has yet known, the F-16. I was the youngest member of the team representing our country in the NATO Inter-Army Air Show. When our team was declared champion, and Kemal Kuray number one in the individual category, I felt for the rest of the team, all of whom held higher rank. At twenty-eight I aced the exam for staff officer. Soon I accepted it as normal when people around me singled me out as the future commander of the Air Force. At this time my father, and especially my aunt, wanted to marry me off. But I wiggled out of that by using my officer's training as an excuse. I was happy during that period of my life, perhaps because women weren't a part of it. I'd forgotten to fall in love ever since I hurt the feelings of a ghost.

Now I was counting down the hours that remained for me in the Academy. On a summer morning with 1,551 hours to go, I drew the assignment to head to K. on a reconnaissance flight. North of Sivrihisar I was surprised to see the engine failure light come on. (I believed in my heart that F-16s were
immortal
.) The gauges showed that the engine was losing heat. I tried twice to restart it. Nothing happened. I began to lose altitude and notified the closest base of my coordinates. Three thousand feet from the ground I noted that the area was at least uninhabited. I was forced to abandon my plane in my parachute. In ninety seconds I would have the devastating experience of watching my noble F-16 crash to the ground and explode. I began to weep. I knew that even though I had survived I would always feel the pain of letting a heroic friend, given to me to safeguard, slip from my grasp. A mountain wind caught my parachute and my sweat dried. I could have aimed for the sharp gray rocks below, but I didn't have it in me to challenge nature. “Dear God,” I begged, “please let me be a martyr next to the corpse of my plane.” I closed my eyes and while I prepared to watch twenty-eight years of my life unravel before me, I must have hit something jutting upward and lost consciousness.

I was flown to the nearest hospital by helicopter. After a considerable struggle I opened my eyes; my head hurt and I felt a strange lightness in the lower part of my body. I felt such emptiness that I couldn't answer the doctors' questions. I didn't hear them say how many ribs I'd broken. As they prepared to operate on my right ankle, I remembered how my father had always told me to put my right shoe on first while pronouncing the name of God. I chuckled nervously, but it still hurt.

I was under the care of two dutiful psychiatrists. They thought I was suffering from “post-traumatic stress” but I knew that it was more than that, that I was severely depressed. Despite the handfuls of pills I couldn't forget that moment my plane exploded, and since I couldn't come up with a good reason for its failing, I eased my soul by pleading guilty. It was difficult to keep from snapping at the psychiatrist, who was my superior in rank, so I focused on the spots floating around the ceiling instead, whistling Mendelssohn like a prayer. The first two nights my nightmares jolted me awake, and when I discovered that I couldn't get out of bed I burst into tears.

My family's visits added to the strain. Maybe what I saw in my mother's eyes was the compassion of parents who get over the fear of losing their children. My father and my aunt, on the other hand, were anxious and irritated. Like investors whose efforts have come to nothing, they could no longer swagger around L. as relatives of the future Commander. When my uncle began sermonizing, I had to tell them that my whole body was in pain and would they please leave and stay away until I called them back.

Forty-eight hours later the colonel leading the Accident Investigation Team stopped in with his lieutenant. Despite the sensitive way in which they questioned me I could barely refrain from crying. What finally ended my nightmares was the report they filed concluding that the crash hadn't been caused by pilot error. But my lack of interest in the outside world continued. I was susceptible to sudden headaches, and my right hand had developed a tremor.

They said I would walk again in six weeks, and I did. My appetite returned and I started reading the newspapers. A week later the hospital chief paid me a visit. His tone was carefully optimistic as he told me that my recovery was underway and that my place at the Air Force Academy was being held for me. Flawlessly modulating the tone and dosage of command and advice, he informed me how helpful a period of desk work would be in regaining my concentration. I was sure they wouldn't even let me get close to a helicopter if I failed to resolve my psychological problems.

It was a good two months after the crash before they assigned me to a temporary job at Air Force headquarters. I went to Ankara full of misgivings, responsible for coordinating a top secret translation project on which ten hand-picked university graduates were working while performing their military service. The job had to be finished by the time their term of duty was up three months later. Though they'd all come from good universities in England and the U.S.A., they acted like high-school delinquents. I knew I wouldn't be bored living with them in our military housing. Suat Altan, the most efficient and mysterious one, held diplomas in literature and computer science. While looking through the staff files I discovered he had been a technology consultant in New York. Like the old-time Indian chiefs, he said little but what he did say was meaningful. He had no trouble beating everybody else in chess and backgammon and sat in the corner reading tomes while the rest of the group sat around talking big. He seemed fragile, and maybe it was because of this and because of his mournful blue eyes that I felt sympathy for him. Twice I reprimanded the surly banking trainee, Mahmut, for harassing Suat; I even went so far as to dock his holidays when I caught him bullying the poor guy one day.

I ran into Suat once on a bus to Istanbul, and after that we started traveling there together the odd weekend. On others, if we stayed in Ankara, I would take him to a concert or a play. His attitude seemed at once calculated and suspicious. Once, when I invited him to my usual kebab joint in Istanbul, he seemed startled and pretended he hadn't heard me. He reminded me of those mysterious priests in Westerns to whom the Mexicans readily confess their sins. Three weeks before his mustering-out I summoned up, without quite knowing why, my life story for him. He listened attentively with his head bowed.

As for him, I could tell all I knew in a few sentences. He was the son of a rich father and a Sephardic Jewish mother, and he'd obviously had a colorless but carefree childhood and youth. His superior intelligence ill-befitted his environment, and I was sure he bore a secret wound he was cavalierly disregarding.

When the time came to say goodbye I embraced everybody on the team except Suat. He shook my hand distractedly and practically ran away as he murmured something like an apology.

Later I heard that he beat the daylights out of Mahmut when they left our living quarters for the last time. According to the soldier who witnessed the incident, he used karate moves straight out of the movies to pound the big banking trainee into a condition fit for hospitalization.

My own monthly visits to the hospital nauseated me. Unable to deal with my deep-seated concentration problems, I broke into a sweat during the stress tests. I didn't even bother mentioning my itching abdomen to my psychiatrist as I couldn't even make him believe in my “phantom” headaches.

I knew that I would be assigned more and more to less and less exciting jobs. For a while I tried to accept and understand this reality. Since I was without sin and a model individual, I believed that by God's grace I would in the end be rescued from my psychological problems. Still, I could see in my doctor's eyes that it wouldn't be easy for me to lose the traces of my trauma and I was slowly losing hope. I could even say that my passion for flying was beginning to diminish, though of course, as the hottest pilot in the Air Force, I couldn't stomach the idea of rotting away at a desk in some godforsaken corner of the country. I began looking for a way out. I had to find out, if I requested early retirement, if I could survive civilian life. I decided not to rush things, and meanwhile took comfort in Schoenberg's musical labyrinth.

As I was paying my check in a Kızılay restaurant one night, about to bolt from the place in exasperation, I realized that the cellphone ringing so insistently was my own. (Civilian life can be a real pain.) A confident voice said to me, “I'm Suat Altan's twin brother, Lieutenant. We need to talk about something important that concerns you.” My head instantly began to throb. I couldn't remember Suat ever mentioning a brother, let alone a twin. The voice continued imperiously, directing me to be at the lobby of the Sheraton in half an hour. “You won't have a problem recognizing me.”

This magnificent hotel was my favorite building in the capital and it was with some excitement that I started walking toward it. It was like a lighthouse on the city's horizon. I used to gaze at it from afar, wondering whether my feelings toward it would change if I saw the interior. Not until the moment I reached the grand entrance did it occur to me to wonder why I had been invited here. It had been a good while since I stopped thinking about myself in relation to God's chosen few. Now I remembered the expression “No good deed goes unpunished.” I felt sure that some kind of chore awaited me thanks to that schizophrenic conscript I'd once helped out. I could have sworn, if the man who stepped out of a cloud of smoke and noise with an artificial smile on his face had not had a cigar in his hand, that he was Suat Altan himself.

“Welcome, Lieutenant,” he said. “I told you you'd have no problem recognizing me. Aside from my being born twenty minutes before Suat, we're identical twins.”

I had the feeling this wasn't the first time he'd made this clichéd introduction. Would I come up to his room, please, the better to chat? As we entered the elevator with a group of mustachioed civilians conversing in an accent I didn't recognize, my back began to itch. The elevator began its ascent to the top floor and I knew it was time to consider what my next dramatic surprise would be. Fuat led the way into the suite. I moved to the big window with the panoramic view. It was as if I were back in that peculiar funhouse world of mine in Z. If Fuat hadn't broken in on my thoughts by asking what I wanted to drink, I would have started categorizing the buildings spread out before me: the prettiest, the ugliest; governmental, private; and so on.

“Mineral water,” I answered, and took a seat on the humblest chair in the room.

Fuat fished a half-empty bottle of cognac from a drawer and took a long sip as he walked to the elegant desk. I hadn't expected a CD player to be there. But he extracted a CD from a heap of newspapers and magazines and put it in the machine, then parked himself in the armchair opposite me. His face wore a sour expression, perhaps from the effort of executing an order that he hadn't been able to comprehend himself. While Vladimir Horowitz's magic fingers mastered a Chopin
mazurka
, I wondered how he would begin his speech. I didn't expect us to start with “May I call you by your first name?”

“Maybe in a few months, but not now,” I replied. I knew I would be nervous and my right hand would shake.

Another sip from the bottle and the face turned sour again. It was if he were in the company of a person of inferior rank who habitually annoyed him. One more ill-mannered gesture and I would be on my way out.

But after a brief hesitation and an artificial laugh he said, “Listen to me, Lieutenant! I have a message for you from Suat. He told me about what you've been going through. I hope you'll overcome it in good style. Let me tell you straight off that I haven't come here to add another burden to those you've already got. If you can manage to hear me out patiently, you'll see that I might even have something that's good for you.

“My mother gave birth to us at San Francisco Hospital after a complicated labor. I was born at midnight on 21 May, and Suat twenty minutes later, on 22 May. This interval put us under two different zodiacal influences—me, Taurus; Suat, Gemini. My brother began to walk when he was ten months old; me, two months later. About this time my paternal grandfather died and we moved back to Istanbul to live with my grandmother.

“Though we were identical twins, Suat and I had diametrically opposing personalities. It looked as if the plusses and minuses of a whole had been parceled out to us indiscriminately. Maybe that was why we were so fond of each other. I was known as the calm, tolerant, decisive one, whereas he was distinguished by his aggressive intelligence and mysterious nature. He alternated between being an introvert and a social butterfly. I didn't take it amiss that I was overshadowed by his genius. In fact I got used to my grandfather's witticisms at my expense—like ‘When God was handing out the brains, he gave a portion and a half to Suat, which left a half of a half for you.' My brother was a fragile child, and when necessary I acted as if I were twenty months, not twenty minutes, older than him to protect him.