Free Arabesk by Barbara Nadel Page B

give the Ministry of Culture some sort of award for attempting to get this dross banned back in the eighties.'
    'That's Tansu at her best!' his wife answered as she walked over to the stereo and made to turn up the volume. 'She sings of universal emotions, Çetin; of love and loss and—'
    'Don't touch that dial!' he shouted. 'In fact, turn it down, will you? Makes me want to jump into a bottle of brandy and stay there. I don't think I can stand any more ungrarnmatical sorrow-filled insults to my intelligence.'
    'All right, all right!' Fatma said as she laid the towel she had been using across the back of a chair and then turned the music down to almost silence.
    'No wonder the suicide rate in dumps like Sivas keeps on going up. They listen to this stuff all the time out there. Being in the country is bad enough but with this going on day and night. . . I'd be slitting my throat within hours.'
    Fatma, already wearied by the younger children, who were on vacation, and the housework, sat down beside her husband. 'Oh, you've been listening to Arabesk all your life without noticing,' she said. 'People play it everywhere. I play it I like it'
    'You,' he replied, touching just the end of her nose with stern affection, 'should know better.'
    'It's romantic.' She shrugged. "The stars themselves are romantic. Women like such things. Even Cicek will sing along to Arabesk at times, when she's not listening to those Western musicians. We are Turks, we like to imagine ourselves involved in grand passions like the singers. And then we like to have a good cry.'
    'A rather sweeping generalisation there, Fatma,' her husband said with not a little amusement in his voice, 'confounded, of course, by people like myself who want to vomit when we hear it.'
    'Oh, that's just you!'
    'And Suleyman and Arto. I can't really even see Commissioner Ardiç. getting damp around the eyes just because some spoilt old plastic-surgery victim has been cast aside by a lover who is young enough to be her son. I may be wrong, but... It's just all "Oh, I can't live without you", "I think I want to die"; it's so unremittingly morbid! It's helpless too, which I don't like. I mean, have you seen that photograph of Tansu on the front page of Hurriyet?’
    'No. I haven't really had time for reading.'
    He reached over to the table and grabbed hold of one of the newspapers stacked behind a heap of ironing.
    'Look at this,' he said as he spread the paper across his wife's knees. A large photograph of an anguished Tansu howling into a white-and-silver lace handkerchief screamed off the page. 'Poor Mrs Urfa lies dead on a slab, her baby, who is described but not shown, is missing and what do we get? A photograph of some adulterous old has-been who reckons that her poor Erol is so badly traumatised their love will never be as it was ever again. It's sick!'
    'I agree we should see a photograph of the baby. If members of the public are to look for her they need that.' Fatma's face was set with the seriousness of the subject 'But people do like this romance thing with Tansu and Erol. I myself find it disgusting because he's so young. I would hate it if one of our sons became involved with an older woman. But bad as they are, Allah has punished them now and it is not for us to judge.'
    Ìkmen, whose opinion of religion of whatever type placed such phenomena somewhere between folk tales and the astrology columns in newspapers, rolled his eyes with impatience.
    'And also,' Fatma continued, 'you have to remember that Tansu, anyway, is not always helpless.'
    'Oh, I know that, 'Ìkmen blustered on a laugh. 'She's reputed to have the most volcanic temper, be totally selfish—'
    'No, I mean in her music,' Fatma said. 'There are some songs where the words are resentful rather than sad. They're often songs about her lover being stolen by another woman. They're really quite, well, I suppose you'd call them sort of tough.'
    'A bit masculine, you mean?'
    'No, her tone is much the same as in