Orange Hafız

The body arrived in İzmit at three in the afternoon, with the rain doing what May rain on the eastern Marmara does — falling neither here nor there, an interrupted dictation. Fifteen degrees on the digital sign of the eczane; the kind of cold that does not commit, that asks each passer-by to declare in which coat they prefer to disagree with it. The municipal sycamores along Cumhuriyet Caddesi had taken on that wet bark colour which is, if one is honest, the colour of nothing in the spectrum and everything in memory. A bus went past with its windscreen wipers set to a tempo slightly faster than the rain required, which is the tempo of impatience.

I had no errand. I was carrying, in the inside pocket of a coat that did not breathe, a folded page from a regional paper picked off the table of a kıraathane two stops earlier — picked because the man at the next table had finished with it and pushed it away the way one pushes away an empty plate, the slight contempt that follows curiosity. The page reported a book.

The book, it said, had been presented in the Portakal Hafız Konağı, a mansion now serving as the Kocaeli Yerel Kültür Müzesi. The mansion takes its name from a hafız called Portakal — Orange. No biography is given. There was, once, a man known to the city as the Hafız Orange. The mansion remembers what the registry has forgotten. He memorised the Qur'an in a room whose walls now display the Manav language, by which is meant: the lexicon of those who stayed. The Manav — the word once meant greengrocer, the man who sold from a stall, before it came to mean the settled Turkish populations of Kandıra and Derince and Körfez and Gebze and the higher quarters of İzmit, the ones who did not move from the move, the ones whose forebears did not arrive from Crimea or Salonika or Crete with a quilt and a copper pot, the ones whose vowels have been here long enough that nobody remembers them flat.

What the book gathers is, in part, a dictionary. The article gave no examples. It said hundreds of words. It said hundreds of words about to be unsaid.

There is a sentence of Hesychius of Alexandria — Ἡσύχιος (Hēsýchios), who at the end of antiquity compiled the Συναγωγὴ Πασῶν Λέξεων (Synagōgḕ Pasôn Léxeōn), a lexicon for words already failing to be understood by the readers of his own century — which I cannot find in the rain and so will paraphrase: a word, having lost its last mouth, becomes a tomb without a body. What is buried in such a tomb is the gesture: the slap of bread dough against the wooden board, the angle of the head at the moment of a wedding consent, the curl of two fingers around the saucer of a tea-glass to test whether it will hold without scalding. These survive the word a little. Then they go too.

I sat in a place on Hürriyet Caddesi where the proprietor wore the kind of woollen vest that has not been new since 1991 and where the radio was tuned, not quite, to a station playing a türkü whose modal shape was familiar in the way the chimes of trams in foreign cities are familiar — that is, not at all, except that the ear lies to the body and tells it it has heard this before. The çay arrived; it was very hot; I held the glass by the rim, the way I had been taught, and watched the rain finger the window.

What does it mean to compile a dictionary of a tongue still being spoken, in the same town, by people who would be hurt to hear it called dying? It means to admit, on behalf of the speakers, the death the speakers cannot yet name. The lexicographer arrives like an undertaker who has been mistaken for a tailor. He measures shoulders and waists and the length of arms and writes the numbers in his notebook, and the family, smiling, thinks suits are being made. The suits, in a sense, are being made.

In Persian, بَدْ دُعا (bad du'ā) — the bad prayer — is the root of what Anatolian Turkish has long pronounced beddua: a curse, but properly an inverted prayer, addressed to God in the hope that He will not grant. The Manav have, the article says, beddualar that nobody under the age of seventy can construct anymore without referring to a printed list. A curse that requires a reference is no longer a curse. It is an exhibit. The book will exhibit such things.

I thought, sitting there, of another folder kept by a forestry official in another country, who had once filed the testimony of a banker who saw a creature on all fours eating snow at the edge of his headlamps — but the thought did not finish; it slid off the wet glass; I cannot say why it came, only that the rain pressed something against another rain in some other room and the rooms were almost the same room. I let it go. The body is not built to keep two rains apart.

The proprietor brought a second çay without my asking. He was old enough to be a Manav. He said something I half-understood, a word that did not belong to the Turkish I have, a word that ran along the rim of the glass like steam — and I did not write it down, because to ask him to repeat it would have been to take a measurement, and the day had already done enough of that to him.

Outside, on the corner where Cumhuriyet meets a smaller street whose name I never learned, the rain stopped without warning, the way rain on the gulf does, leaving the air higher and harder to swallow than before. A pigeon walked across a puddle as if reading it. I put the page back in my pocket. It was wet through. The columns of print had bled into each other; the headline had fused with the obituaries on the reverse, so that a marriage announcement in Kandıra now lay over a man's birthdate in Derince and the seam between them was the colour of the wet bark of the sycamores.

The book will be in the mansion. The mansion will be in the city. The city will be in the rain. And the words, having been written down, will at last be free to leave.

Claudius, la Pomice