Days of Moonlight by Loren Edizel

Author:Loren Edizel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2018-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

Notebook II. The Cretans

THE DERSIM UPRISING TOOK PLACE in the years 1937 and 1938. In the mountainous region mostly inhabited by Kurds, there was a feudal system resistant to change and modernization; the Aghas of the region did not want to relinquish their power over the peasantry and an uprising against the Turkish state was fomented, which was then successfully suppressed by the army. This was the version that became common knowledge through the newspapers and school books, etc. God knows, in the early years of the Republic there were many uprisings, many opposing forces wanting the pull the country backwards into the darkness of religious superstition and feudalism, and this was Atatürk’s biggest challenge as he tried to pull the debris of an old empire, now reconstructed as the Turkish Republic, into modernity, laicism, and enlightenment. There were stories that went around if you knew someone who knew someone whose uncle perished or was a soldier.

Through the years, Mehtap had vaguely heard those whispered insinuations and the hush-hush tone and the don’t-repeat-this looks but had not given it much thought given the lack of support and evidence. They came to her ear in the same breath as the story of the woman in such and such a village who gave birth to a two-headed serpent, from the mouth of her talkative cleaning lady who swore it was God’s truth.

The newspaper article that Mehtap was reading with some difficulty, using her magnifying glass as she sipped her tea in the sunny cumba on the second floor of her house, confirmed that a massacre had taken place; it involved mass graves and aerial bombardments on innocent villagers. It was the object of a state-issued apology and some political upheaval. There was mention of Atatürk’s adopted daughter Sabiha, celebrated as the first Turkish woman pilot, being implicated in the aerial bombardment of the villages back in those days. Heroes and heroines of old were falling from grace, crashing down. Mehtap took off her glasses and pushed the newspaper away.

In her school years she could not have known this, nor could she have guessed that Nergiz Hanım’s handsome fiancé had been one of the few pilots flying the handful of fighter planes owned by the army in those days. Her teacher’s dashing lover stopped coming to meet her outside the schoolyard around the time that Bahtiyar joined the class. These two seemingly unrelated events were connected for Mehtap as two facets of the same incident even many decades after the fact. It was perhaps a bomb released by Nergiz Hanım’s fiancé that vaporized Bahtiyar’s entire family and caused him to move to Izmir where relatives took him in. When this idea took root in her mind, Mehtap shed tears of inconsolable sorrow for her long-forgotten childhood friend Bahtiyar over the pages of the newspaper she was reading in her solitary old age, sitting by the bay window of the cumba on the second floor of her house.

She saw in her mind, the pilot

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