E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten
Aydemir Djinns
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-916806-03-0
Verlag: Peirene Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-916806-03-0
Verlag: Peirene Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Fatma Aydemir is an author, playwright and journalist. She is a Europe columnist for the Guardian, co-editor of literary magazine Delfi and was a long-time editor at Berlin-based periodical Die Tageszeitung. Her 2017 debut novel, Ellbogen (Elbow), received numerous literary prizes in Germany, and she co-edited the 2019 essay collection Your Homeland Is Our Nightmare, which became an overnight sensation in German-speaking Europe and is now available in English translation. Dschinns (Djinns), her second novel, was a Spiegel bestseller and shortlisted for the German Book Prize. It has been adapted for multiple theatre performances and will soon be adapted for cinema. Aydemir lives and works in Berlin.
Weitere Infos & Material
Hüseyin… do you know who you are, Hüseyin, when you see the shining contours of your face in the reflection on the balcony door? When you open the door, stride across the balcony, and a warm breeze caresses your face while the setting sun glimmers between the rooftops of the apartments in Zeytinburnu like a giant tangerine? You rub your eyes. Maybe, you think, maybe every obstacle and every conflict in this life was only there so that, one day, you could stand up here and know: I’ve earned this for myself. With the sweat of my brow.
You hear the first evening call to prayer from the balcony of the apartment – this spacious, three-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor. The apartment you worked and saved for, for almost thirty years, while raising your four children and providing your wife with an admittedly humble but never meagre life. You lived your days to the rhythm of three shifts, Hüseyin. You took on every Sunday, every holiday, overtime. Took advantage of every available bonus in the metalworks to make sure your family could get by. To buy new football boots for the little one, pay off the older one’s debts and still set a little something aside. And now you’ve finally done it. You’re fifty-nine and a homeowner. In a few years, when Ümit finishes school and you can finally leave Germany, that cold, cold-hearted country, there’ll be an apartment waiting for you in Istanbul with your name at the door: Hüseyin! You’ve finally found a place you can call home.
Enjoy it, Hüseyin. Listen as the blaring music from the shops in the streets below grows quiet. Now there is only the azan. The azan and the honking and the cries of the millions who must still navigate the streets and go about the business of their days. Hear the call of the gulls. Inhale the humid air tinged with exhaust and the smell of burning rubbish. Let your gaze fall on the bustle between the houses below before you go to pray.
Look, a new location of Ibrahim Tatlises’s lahmacun restaurant has opened over the way. You used to love his music so, Hüseyin. You bought one of his albums. Every evening, at the boarding house, you’d pop open a bottle of Kristallweizen; the hum of the record player would follow the hiss of the cap. The baglama in the opening notes of ‘Tükendi Nakdi Ömrüm’. Do you remember, Hüseyin, the countless cigarettes you smoked to this song? How your body dissolved into one single white puff of smoke inside the narrow kitchen of the home? The kitchen at the end of that long, dark hallway. You could feel Ibo because he sang of the people in his songs, of those to whom no one else lent an ear. The poor, the darkling, those hard-working people from the countryside. Those people like you, Hüseyin. And you felt Ibo because, like you, he too had discarded the language of his parents. Discarded it like an unused sack of stones.
But now you can no longer stand him. You despise Ibo, Hüseyin. How he hops around on his show on Friday evenings. Speaking nonsense. And gawping at his belly dancers. This honourless man who had a simple merchant shot at the Urfa bazaar because the merchant did not want to serve him. Or at least so the papers had said.
No, Hüseyin, this is by no means the kind of man whose cassette tapes you’d want to buy or listen to. And besides, Ibo has long since transitioned from folk music to arabesque. And you’ve long since given up both alcohol and tobacco. And without alcohol, it’s almost impossible to tolerate arabesque. And even if you could, what could the songs of such a man provide? A man who beats his women and wears this crime in public like a badge of pride? Nothing. But still, Perihan and Hakan and Ümit will no doubt be impressed by this restaurant. It belongs to the most famous person in the country, after all. You won’t be able to say a thing, Hüseyin, when your children rush over there each day to stuff themselves.
And you will pay for their food, too. You’ll watch them peacefully. And silently you’ll be glad that you can finally provide them with the opportunity to spend each summer here in Istanbul from now on. Istanbul, this splendid city, over which so many centuries of wars were waged and so much blood was shed. And all for naught. For no one has ever understood that this city will never permit itself to be conquered. In the end, the city always conquers you. In the end, you will be nothing more than another layer of dust on the earth beneath the feet of new conquerors, always with the same desires. And Istanbul will absorb and devour all of them, reducing all to dust. Nourishing itself on them, forever growing in its incandescent splendour.
You, Hüseyin, you already knew that someday you would return to Istanbul. Already, the first time you arrived in this city. Back then you’d come by train from your village. You disembarked here for a week, you stayed with relatives before you boarded the bus and then the train to southern Germany, where you were assigned a job. They put you in a line with other workers there, they inspected your naked bodies, and they examined the contents of your underpants. That was in the spring of 1971.
Germany was not what you had hoped it would be, Hüseyin. You’d hoped for a new life. But what you received, instead, was loneliness. And loneliness can never be a new life. For loneliness is a cycle, the constant repetition of the same memories inside your head. The perpetual search for new wounds within your long-departed ego. The longing for those people you left behind. But what could you do, Hüseyin? You couldn’t just return to your village. And so you stayed. And you did the things you had to do so that your coming here would at least make sense.
How time flies, Hüseyin. In the last twenty-eight years of your life, you’ve earned more money than you would ever have dreamed of in Turkey. You earned it because you were never too good for any work. The kind of work no German would do. You could not have known, Hüseyin, that your body would soon, far before retirement age, grow as weary as the German economy after unification. Like your many colleagues, in that moment when the two exhaustions came together and the doors of the metalworks closed, you, too, had wanted to take early retirement. But you received no certification. Although your back had twisted inside like a C after all those long years bent before the furnace. And your knee had begun to ache dreadfully after even the shortest walks.
But even this had some validity, Hüseyin. For how else would you all have got by back then? With three children at home, on a pension of only nine hundred marks? From your savings? Would you have wanted to give up this apartment, Hüseyin, just so you could have started to relax a few years earlier? A few years earlier, but in Germany forever more? Of course not, Hüseyin. And so you went on to a different factory for less pay and even fewer benefits. But it was still enough to amass the necessary savings. To put away a bit more towards your pension. And besides, it was hard to call folding cardboard work, especially after all those years melting scraps of metal at 1,500°C. And so you drudged through five more years, Hüseyin, until last year, when you personally asked your cardboard boss, as politely as you could, to be discharged. And he acquiesced. And you finally found time to look at apartments in Istanbul. Time to rededicate yourself to your faith which had, for long years, wilted like an unwatered flower. Time to listen to yourself and time to make peace with your demons. And next week, when you turn sixty, your pension will finally kick in, Hüseyin. They call it early retirement, but nothing about this feels early.
How the time flies. Who knows, maybe you’ll never go back to Germany again. Maybe you’ll just stay here. Maybe Emine and the children will stay, too, after they arrive and see how perfectly you’ve arranged the apartment for them. Maybe Ümit will just finish his schooling here. Maybe Perihan and Hakan will both fall in love here and finally want to get married. You tremble at the thought, Hüseyin. But why? Was it not you, back then, who wrung your hands and wanted to deliver your elder daughter, Sevda, to a man? Who gave her an ultimatum when she was seventeen and a half years old? You’ll marry this one or that one, you can decide, but you will take one of them and start a family. And then at least we won’t have to worry what Germany will do to our Sevda. Our Sevda, who always wants too much from life, who’s never satisfied with what she has, with what she can achieve. Was it not your idea, Hüseyin, to deliver Sevda into safety in this fashion? Was it not your idea to kill her dreams?
But poor Hüseyin, Sevda did as she pleased. And even with two children on her lap, she kept doing it all the same. Can you not see? So now, instead, you worry about Perihan and Hakan. But you should have realized long ago, Hüseyin, that your fears for your children seldom guide you to the right decisions. Yes, you smile, Hüseyin. And well you should. For today is a good day: perhaps the best day of your life.
All the furniture has arrived....
