Many and Many a Year Ago Read Online Free Page B

out of Mahmut when they left our living quarters for the last time. According to the soldier who witnessed the incident, he used karate moves straight out of the movies to pound the big banking trainee into a condition fit for hospitalization.
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    My own monthly visits to the hospital nauseated me. Unable to deal with my deep-seated concentration problems, I broke into a sweat during the stress tests. I didn’t even bother mentioning my itching abdomen to my psychiatrist as I couldn’t even make him believe in my “phantom” headaches.
    I knew that I would be assigned more and more to less and less exciting jobs. For a while I tried to accept and understand this reality. Since I was without sin and a model individual, I believed that by God’s grace I would in the end be rescued from my psychological problems. Still, I could see in my doctor’s eyes that it wouldn’t be easy for me to lose the traces of my trauma and I was slowly losing hope. I could even say that my passion for flying was beginning to diminish, though of course, as the hottest pilot in the Air Force, I couldn’t stomach the idea of rotting away at a desk in some godforsaken corner of the country. I began looking for a way out. I had to find out, if I requested early retirement, if I could survive civilian life. I decided not to rush things, and meanwhile took comfort in Schoenberg’s musical labyrinth.
    As I was paying my check in a Kızılay restaurant one night, about to bolt from the place in exasperation, I realized that the cellphone ringing so insistently was my own. (Civilian life can be a real pain.) A confident voice said to me, “I’m Suat Altan’s twin brother, Lieutenant. We need to talk about something important that concerns you.” My head instantly began to throb. I couldn’t remember Suat ever mentioning a brother, let alone a twin. The voice continued imperiously, directing me to be at the lobby of the Sheraton in half an hour. “You won’t have a problem recognizing me.”
    This magnificent hotel was my favorite building in the capital and it was with some excitement that I started walking toward it. It was like a lighthouse on the city’s horizon. I used to gaze at it from afar, wondering whether my feelings toward it would change if I saw the interior. Not until the moment I reached the grand entrance did it occur to me to wonder why I had been invited here. It had been a good while since I stopped thinking about myself in relation to God’s chosen few. Now I remembered the expression “No good deed goes unpunished.” I felt sure that some kind of chore awaited me thanks to that schizophrenic conscript I’d once helped out. I could have sworn, if the man who stepped out of a cloud of smoke and noise with an artificial smile on his face had not had a cigar in his hand, that he was Suat Altan himself.
    â€œWelcome, Lieutenant,” he said. “I told you you’d have no problem recognizing me. Aside from my being born twenty minutes before Suat, we’re identical twins.”
    I had the feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d made this clichéd introduction. Would I come up to his room, please, the better to chat? As we entered the elevator with a group of mustachioed civilians conversing in an accent I didn’t recognize, my back began to itch. The elevator began its ascent to the top floor and I knew it was time to consider what my next dramatic surprise would be. Fuat led the way into the suite. I moved to the big window with the panoramic view. It was as if I were back in that peculiar funhouse world of mine in Z. If Fuat hadn’t broken in on my thoughts by asking what I wanted to drink, I would have started categorizing the buildings spread out before me: the prettiest, the ugliest; governmental, private; and so on.
    â€œMineral water,” I answered, and took a seat on the humblest chair in the room.
    Fuat fished