them: “Those damn movies!” cried the son.
The man in the street began to lose his authenticity because of those damn movies that came in canisters from the West and played by the hour in the cinemas. Abandoning their own, our people began to adopt other people’s gestures with an unaccountable speed. I won’t go into the son’s justifications of his father’s rage, which he portrayed in great detail, concerning these new, pretentious, and incomprehensible movements. He sketched in, line by line, all those fine manners and the violent behaviors that have annihilated our own crude innocence: bursting into laughter or opening a window or banging a door shut; holding a teacup or putting on a jacket; all those acquired and inappropriate gestures—the nodding, the polite coughing, the shows of anger, the winking, the shadowboxing, raising the eyebrows and rolling the eyes—all learned from the movies. His father didn’t even want to see these impure, crossbred movements anymore. Afraid of the influence of these false movements which threatened his “children’s” innocence, he decided not to leave his workshop. He shut himself into the cellar of his house, proclaiming that he’d already discovered for some time “the meaning that has to unfold and the essence of the mystery.”
As I viewed the masterworks Master Bedii had created in the last fifteen years of his life, I perceived, with the terror of a “wolf child” who discovers his true identity after many years, what this vague essence might be: among this crowd of mannequins who eyed me, who moved toward me, among the uncles, aunts, friends, relatives, acquaintances, among the grocers and the laborers, my likeness also existed. Even I was present in that moth-eaten, abject darkness. Almost covered by a layer of leaden dust, the mannequins of my compatriots (among whom were Beyoğlu gangsters as well as seamstresses, Cevdet Bey whose wealth was legendary, Salahattin Bey the encyclopedist, the firefighters and the singular dwarves, old beggars and pregnant women) reminded me of the gods who had suffered the loss of their innocence as well as the loss of their awesome shadows exaggerated in the dim light; of penitents who consume themselves for not being someone else; of the unfortunates who kill one another because they cannot fall into bed and make love. They too, like me, like us, had perhaps discovered the mystery one day in a past as far away as a remnant of paradise, but they’d forgotten the secret meaning of their vague existence which they’d tumbled into by chance. We suffered from memory loss, we were doubled over, but still we insisted on being ourselves. The gestures which made us ourselves, the way we wiped our noses, scratched our heads, stepped upstairs, our looks of sadness and defeat, were in fact punishment for our insistence on being ourselves. When his son characterized Master Bedii by saying, “My father never lost hope that some day mankind would achieve the felicity of not having to imitate others,” I’d been thinking that this crowd of mannequins was also dying to get out of this bleak and dusty dungeon as soon as possible and, like myself, emerge on the face of the earth, to observe other people under the sun, to imitate them, and live happily ever after like ourselves by trying to become someone else.
That desire, as I learned later, wasn’t all that unrealistic! One day a shopkeeper, whose hobby was to attract attention through curiosities, bought some of the “merchandise” at the workshop, perhaps because he knew he could get them on the cheap. But the gestures and the stances of the mannequins that he bought and displayed so much resembled the customers and the crowd that flowed by his store window, they were so ordinary, so real, and so much “of us,” that nobody paid them any attention. So the skinflint shopkeeper sawed them into pieces, and when the totality that gave meaning to their gestures vanished, the arms,
The man in the street began to lose his authenticity because of those damn movies that came in canisters from the West and played by the hour in the cinemas. Abandoning their own, our people began to adopt other people’s gestures with an unaccountable speed. I won’t go into the son’s justifications of his father’s rage, which he portrayed in great detail, concerning these new, pretentious, and incomprehensible movements. He sketched in, line by line, all those fine manners and the violent behaviors that have annihilated our own crude innocence: bursting into laughter or opening a window or banging a door shut; holding a teacup or putting on a jacket; all those acquired and inappropriate gestures—the nodding, the polite coughing, the shows of anger, the winking, the shadowboxing, raising the eyebrows and rolling the eyes—all learned from the movies. His father didn’t even want to see these impure, crossbred movements anymore. Afraid of the influence of these false movements which threatened his “children’s” innocence, he decided not to leave his workshop. He shut himself into the cellar of his house, proclaiming that he’d already discovered for some time “the meaning that has to unfold and the essence of the mystery.”
As I viewed the masterworks Master Bedii had created in the last fifteen years of his life, I perceived, with the terror of a “wolf child” who discovers his true identity after many years, what this vague essence might be: among this crowd of mannequins who eyed me, who moved toward me, among the uncles, aunts, friends, relatives, acquaintances, among the grocers and the laborers, my likeness also existed. Even I was present in that moth-eaten, abject darkness. Almost covered by a layer of leaden dust, the mannequins of my compatriots (among whom were Beyoğlu gangsters as well as seamstresses, Cevdet Bey whose wealth was legendary, Salahattin Bey the encyclopedist, the firefighters and the singular dwarves, old beggars and pregnant women) reminded me of the gods who had suffered the loss of their innocence as well as the loss of their awesome shadows exaggerated in the dim light; of penitents who consume themselves for not being someone else; of the unfortunates who kill one another because they cannot fall into bed and make love. They too, like me, like us, had perhaps discovered the mystery one day in a past as far away as a remnant of paradise, but they’d forgotten the secret meaning of their vague existence which they’d tumbled into by chance. We suffered from memory loss, we were doubled over, but still we insisted on being ourselves. The gestures which made us ourselves, the way we wiped our noses, scratched our heads, stepped upstairs, our looks of sadness and defeat, were in fact punishment for our insistence on being ourselves. When his son characterized Master Bedii by saying, “My father never lost hope that some day mankind would achieve the felicity of not having to imitate others,” I’d been thinking that this crowd of mannequins was also dying to get out of this bleak and dusty dungeon as soon as possible and, like myself, emerge on the face of the earth, to observe other people under the sun, to imitate them, and live happily ever after like ourselves by trying to become someone else.
That desire, as I learned later, wasn’t all that unrealistic! One day a shopkeeper, whose hobby was to attract attention through curiosities, bought some of the “merchandise” at the workshop, perhaps because he knew he could get them on the cheap. But the gestures and the stances of the mannequins that he bought and displayed so much resembled the customers and the crowd that flowed by his store window, they were so ordinary, so real, and so much “of us,” that nobody paid them any attention. So the skinflint shopkeeper sawed them into pieces, and when the totality that gave meaning to their gestures vanished, the arms,
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