Many and Many a Year Ago Read Online Free

authorized to “take solo command of the cockpit.”
    At 12,000 feet I felt I’d been spirited away from the world’s filth and had reached the outskirts of divine tranquility. There I touched eternity. There I could embrace the most meaningful of all music—absolute silence. I was pleased at how my flying skills improved with each flight training. My body would tremble with pleasure whenever I got the order to fly. When I was on the ground I envied those who were in the air. Yes, flying was a test for the body and a ritual for the soul.
    At twenty-five I was assigned to the strategic base B. I was the first of my cohort to be awarded the fiercest warplane the sky has yet known, the F-16. I was the youngest member of the team representing our country in the NATO Inter-Army Air Show. When our team was declared champion, and Kemal Kuray number one in the individual category, I felt for the rest of the team, all of whom held higher rank. At twenty-eight I aced the exam for staff officer. Soon I accepted it as normal when people around me singled me out as the future commander of the Air Force. At this time my father, and especially my aunt, wanted to marry me off. But I wiggled out of that by using my officer’s training as an excuse. I was happy during that period of my life, perhaps because women weren’t a part of it. I’d forgotten to fall in love ever since I hurt the feelings of a ghost.
    Now I was counting down the hours that remained for me in the Academy. On a summer morning with 1,551 hours to go, I drew the assignment to head to K. on a reconnaissance flight. North of Sivrihisar I was surprised to see the engine failure light come on. (I believed in my heart that F-16s were
immortal
.) The gauges showed that the engine was losing heat. I tried twice to restart it. Nothing happened. I began to lose altitude and notified the closest base of my coordinates. Three thousand feet from the ground I noted that the area was at least uninhabited. I was forced to abandon my plane in my parachute. In ninety seconds I would have the devastating experience of watching my noble F-16 crash to the ground and explode. I began to weep. I knew that even though I had survived I would always feel the pain of letting a heroic friend, given to me to safeguard, slip from my grasp. A mountain wind caught my parachute and my sweat dried. I could have aimed for the sharp gray rocks below, but I didn’t have it in me to challenge nature. “Dear God,” I begged, “please let me be a martyr next to the corpse of my plane.” I closed my eyes and while I prepared to watch twenty-eight years of my life unravel before me, I must have hit something jutting upward and lost consciousness.
*
    I was flown to the nearest hospital by helicopter. After a considerable struggle I opened my eyes; my head hurt and I felt a strange lightness in the lower part of my body. I felt such emptiness that I couldn’t answer the doctors’ questions. I didn’t hear them say how many ribs I’d broken. As they prepared to operate on my right ankle, I remembered how my father had always told me to put my right shoe on first while pronouncing the name of God. I chuckled nervously, but it still hurt.
    I was under the care of two dutiful psychiatrists. They thought I was suffering from “post-traumatic stress” but I knew that it was more than that, that I was severely depressed. Despite the handfuls of pills I couldn’t forget that moment my plane exploded, and since I couldn’t come up with a good reason for its failing, I eased my soul by pleading guilty. It was difficult to keep from snapping at the psychiatrist, who was my superior in rank, so I focused on the spots floating around the ceiling instead, whistling Mendelssohn like a prayer. The first two nights my nightmares jolted me awake, and when I discovered that I couldn’t get out of bed I burst into tears.
    My family’s visits