Free Bliss: A Novel by O.Z. Livaneli Page A

often wandered back to the days when he and Memo picked melons in the fields, cooled them in the stream, fried fish in an old can, and opened a bottle of rakı with their friends. He had recalled their fantasies about the innocent bride, the sins he committed in his sleep, and the resulting shame. These were the shared secrets of youth. Ambushes, Kalashnikovs, land mines, and the bloody pieces of a friend stuffed in a plastic bag had erased them, one by one, from his memory.
    Every year, on the anniversary of the liberation, Memo had always played a Turkish soldier, Cemal a Russian. Now the roles were reversed. Cemal wore a Turkish uniform, and Memo was the enemy dressed in the garb of the PKK.
    Over the intercom, Cemal would overhear Memo’s conversations in Kurdish with other guerrillas and listen to him calling on the Turkish soldiers to surrender. For a long time he did not utter a word about this to anyone in his unit. It was not easy to be indifferent to that voice on the radio, and finally, one day he had shared his secret with Selahattin, his bunkmate.
    “Don’t tell anyone,” Selahattin had responded at once. “You’ll get nothing but trouble.”
    Respecting his friend’s knowledge and experience, Cemal had taken his advice.
    Selahattin was from Rize on the Black Sea coast, as was obvious from his prominent nose, a hereditary feature common to most Black Sea people. Most of Cemal’s comrades were from the west, Thrace, the Aegean, or the Black Sea. There were only a few easterners like himself. Selahattin often spoke about his family, who had moved to Istanbul, and Cemal enjoyed the tales of his family’s shop in the wholesale fish market, his uncles’ boat at Sarıyer, and their fish farms on the Aegean coast.
    Selahattin was a devout Muslim, and he and Cemal prayed and fasted together. He treated Cemal, the son of a sheikh, with special esteem, and constantly asked him about his father. Although Selahattin, a member of the Ushaki sect, was deeply religious and had studied the Quran for eight years, he had never heard of the Cemaliye sect, of which Cemal’s father was spiritual leader. Cemal told him as much as he understood of his father’s teachings, related in a language that mixed Turkish with Arabic and Persian, which described how the Cemaliye sect was founded on the principle that the face of God made itself manifest in everything throughout the world. Selahattin did not find his explanation very convincing, and he started to wonder if Cemal’s father was a false sheikh, like so many others in Anatolia.
    *   *   *
    After the village had been evacuated, the soldiers conducted a house-to-house search to make sure the dwellings were empty of all inhabitants. Then they poured gasoline over each building and set them all ablaze. As the flames rose, the grief-stricken women began to wail, and their screams soon filled the air. The fire was consuming their homes, their belongings, and their hearts. Holding fast to the halters of their mules, the men watched silently. Not tears, but hate filled their eyes.
    Months ago, Cemal would have felt their anguish, and perhaps even tried to console them, but his experiences in the mountains had numbed him. A few houses collapsing in flames paled in comparison to what he had witnessed. Just two weeks ago he had gazed at the corpses of two schoolteachers executed by the PKK. A band of guerrillas had stopped their minibus, ordered the couple out, and shot them on the spot. Cemal had been struck by how quickly their bodies, especially their faces, had turned black.
    During his broadcasts over the wireless, Memo declared that the guerrillas were the “rulers of the mountains and the night.” They certainly knew each crag and cave better than the soldiers. The local Kurds, as well as their animals, also liked them. Whenever Cemal and his comrades approached a village, they were immediately set upon by dogs and were often forced to kill one or two. Yet, when the