TE23 Double Feature

Selim Özdo ğan

52 Factory Lane

hide the hurt that Ceyda’s look has caused her. ‘All I’m saying is, we mustn’t lie. We can’t hide anything from God. We have to be good people. Just look at your nene. You know she’s not my mother and we didn’t always have it easy with her, and, as God is my witness, even she lies sometimes, but I’ll always be grateful that she taught us not to lie. ‘It’s what we hear that makes this life. We have two ears, but only one mouth, which means we can listen twice as much as we speak. We bought Dede a telephone so we can listen to each other. Everyone says something, but when someone tells a lie, false deeds follow. And the words you speak can never be taken back, they stay there forever. When you say something that’s untrue, you’ll always carry that unease around with you; you won’t be able to sleep, and you’ll be unhappy. You mustn’t lie, not for my sake but for yours. Because I want you to be happy.’ Gül is a little surprised at how she’s just explained this to her daughter. Ceyda looks at her mother and says: ‘I didn’t crank it.’ The moment when she tells Gül the truth about the crank will come decades later, when they’re 214

at a health resort in Germany. The problem isn’t that you can’t get enough of your loved ones’ voices when you’ve been apart so long, the problem isn’t all the longing for their scent and their warmth, those calloused hands Gül longs to touch when she hears her father’s voice. Phone calls aren’t just hard because a voice can quench and feed your longing all at once, they’re not just hard because they cost a lot of money and you always feel rushed. No, the real difficulty is being unable to reach each other. She can’t just dial the blacksmith’s number and let the phone ring in his house until he picks up the receiver and says Gül because no one else calls him. First, she has to request the call at the post office in Germany because there’s no option to direct dial. And then she has to wait. If she’s lucky, it’ll be an hour, or maybe two or three, until the phone rings and she’s connected. If she’s less lucky, it might be seven or eight hours, and then the phone will ring in the middle of the night, and the voice at the other end, which sounds as if it’s coming from the bottom of a well on the other side of the world, will be accompanied by a drowsy 215