Songs My Mother Never Taught Me by Selcuk Altun

Author:Selcuk Altun
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Saqi

I was taken aback when I saw the instructions, (‘Get ready! Take aim! Fire!’) as though I had arrived at the Abu Ghraib prison. But the ramshackle shooting range was as harmless-looking as a deserted police station. Suspiciously I approached the room from which the sound of music was floating through a half-open door. Behind a rough table under a wall sat Adil Kasnak, a massive hunk of a man, reminiscent of Anthony Quinn. His body spilled over the chair and seemed to be resting on the table as his left hand waved his amber prayer beads and summoned me in to him. Garish postcards were scattered on a glass coffee table next to the chair where I perched. Behind Kasnak was a portrait of a smiling Atatürk in a fur coat. (I felt myself begin to sweat.) In heavily accented Turkish he quizzed me about my life. As his eyes checked me over and he began to grin, I gave up explaining why I wanted to investigate my father’s file. His bead-counting slowed down, he sighed noisily and, his body relaxed, he began to utter each separate word distinctly, as so many officials do.

‘At the time of Professor Mürsel’s murder I was a newly recruited superintendent in the Criminal Investigation Office. I followed the progress of his file until I retired and I even remember its number. The conspiracy had been planned by experts; they picked a suitable time for the event and a place that was isolated but near a main road, and not a single clue was left for the ballistic team to follow up. Your father, who was caught in front of the Rumi Mehmet Paşa Mosque, was often seen hurrying through the streets by people in the neighbourhood. We found your late father’s jaunts through the dark byways of Üsküdar quite bizarre. Your mother fiercely denied the possibility of une affaire de coeur and claimed that he researched even stranger localities for his studies. God forgive me, but what an aggressive woman she was, she insisted emphatically that her husband had been threatened and shot by a gang of fanatics. According to her, your father had never taken the situation seriously enough to inform the police ...

‘The so-called gang that undertook the job, and whose name I’ve forgotten, was never heard of again. But my gut instinct is that the event was not the work of a gang.

‘I wonder if the soul of your father haunts you in your dreams because his death remains like a pair of his own unsolved equations, but I’m certain of one thing, that you personally want to find his killer.

‘If you accidentally came across his killer I’m equally sure you wouldn’t know what to do. Don’t take offence, but even as you sit there listening to me, you look uneasy. You don’t look like a young man of this country! You seem like someone who grew up in a time capsule till he was twenty. I’ll bet you’ve used

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