"Kastro" by Serkan Görkemli
I sat at the back of the bus, and Mert sat next to me. I didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at me. I was wearing his spare underwear and sweatpants and my own soaked T-shirt. The unexpected intimacy of the situation was baffling. We both looked ahead as the bus lurched through the woods toward the highway that would take us and our classmates back to our hometown of Edirne. Away from the Kastro mesire yeri, a picnic area on the northwestern Turkish coast, where less than an hour ago, I’d tumbled into a stream that flowed into the cold, choppy Black Sea. Caught between the window and him, and all of them, I contemplated my journey, which now, it seemed, was always headed toward this moment.
Because I studied hard and earned top grades, Emel Hanım, our homeroom teacher in my tenth-grade class, appointed me başkan, the class prefect, for the 1988-89 school year. I enforced the rules when she was absent. I was her ears and eyes during breaks between classes. Being başkan meant being neither the teacher nor merely a student. It meant being respected and sought out when I helped others with their homework, but also being left out, like when some scheme was going on and they didn’t want me to report it to the teacher. Every time they addressed me as başkan, instead of using my real name, it marked me as different. I both treasured and felt uneasy about my title.
My position shielded me from my classmates’ petty fights and cruelty—we were all taught to respect authority—except during the weekly physical education class that I dreaded, yet was drawn to. The room where boys were to change into gym clothes was in the basement of the school building. It was unfinished, with bare concrete walls; it didn’t have lockers or even a door. I hated changing in the cold with the others around, and piling my clothes on the floor amid cobwebs and construction dust. I didn’t like my body and didn’t want others to see it. They made crude jokes and tussled with one another. I wouldn’t engage in this behavior. I was not like them.
Then came the class itself, as if the unpleasantness of the changing room wasn’t enough. I was terrible at all sports—futbol, voleybol, basketbol, you name it—though not for lack of trying. I didn’t want the others to see me fail over and over, class after class. When Oktay Bey, the tall, aggressive phys ed teacher, yelled, “Erkek gibi vursana topa!” Atilla, the burly goalkeeper, laughed at me, and my other classmates joined in. Sure, I could kick the ball harder “to play like a man,” but my aim was just piss-poor. Despite this recurring embarrassment—not only was I still not one of the crowd, I was the worst of all—I did enjoy one thing about the class: stealing glances at the outlines of my buff teacher’s and handsome classmate Mert’s tight sweatpants as they moved. It was exciting and scary. What if they saw me looking and called me an ibne? Who would want a faggot as their başkan?
Toward the end of the fall semester my friend Cemil, a talkative, sickly guy with soft blue eyes and wispy blonde hair, hung back at the end of phys ed. He was nearly as bad at sports as I was, but didn’t seem to care as much. After the others left the locker room, he warned me, “Gökhan, I heard a couple of guys talk about you during recess. I didn’t hear what they said, exactly, but your name was being thrown around. They were laughing, too. You’d best watch out.”
Hearing my name—Gökhan, the ruler of skies—reminded me how Oktay Bey had curled his lips and concluded, to the guffaws of my classmates, “If you continue playing like this, you can forget ruling the land, let alone the skies.” That jab had rankled ever since, like a sunburn that wouldn’t heal.
I didn’t want to be seen alone with Cemil in the changing room, so I said, “I can’t talk right now. I’ve got to go,” crammed my gym clothes in my backpack, and left him standing there. We were friends outside school. Both fans of Sezen Aksu, Ajda Pekkan, and Nilüfer, who sang about love, longing, and heartbreak, we’d bonded over pop music. Our tastes in batı müziği differed slightly: He was a Madonna fan, and I a George Michael devotee. He had True Blue, and I had Faith. We exchanged those cassettes and talked about songs, trying with our limited high-school English to decipher the lyrics to “Open Your Heart” and “I Want Your Sex.” He was very chatty, not reserved like me, and some kids at school were calling him ibne behind his back. I didn’t tell him that because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I did try to avoid being seen with him at school. Others avoided him, too. He was so desperately, nervously chatty because he was aware of this rejection.
I replayed his warning over and over from the safety of my room at home, considering how to escape becoming another Cemil. A rugged Swiss mountaineer and a sun-kissed Spanish conquistador waved at me from the cover of Dünya Coğrafyası, my world geography textbook, which lay among other books scattered on the floor.
I could curse and crack crude jokes, as the others did, but using words like siktir bothered me because they were ayıp and I was raised not to say things that were shameful. Smoking in the toilets or at the back of the building was no good, either, because as a başkan I was expected to set an example at all times, and getting caught could cause a scandal. Roughhousing simply wouldn’t work because it made me nervous. The most recent fad among my male classmates was to slap each other’s crotches with the backs of their hands and run, or to grab one’s victim from behind, through the legs, which made him lurch forward. I wouldn’t have minded touching or grabbing a few of them down there. What if they saw through me?
That left futbol and girls—and, really, those two enthusiasms were what made men out of boys at my school, in my hometown, and in the country as a whole. As boring as I expected it to be, learning about futbol was something I could manage. Always the dutiful student, I made it my extracurricular project over the winter. I started reading the futbol section of Fotomaç diligently, watched dozens of matches on television, and memorized the colors of the 67 major takımlar. I could identify every player and recite their stats—touches, faults, red and yellow cards, penalties, and goals. My dad was proud because I knew far more than he did about futbol, and the fan boys at school were astonished when I proved myself an authority by resolving stupid hallway quarrels about whose team was the best with an avalanche of stats about performance. Even Cemil, who would roll his eyes at the slightest mention of futbol, was impressed.
For my birthday in February, I received not one but two futbol uniforms, one in the navy blue and yellow of Fenerbahçe, from my dad, and the other in Galatasaray’s red and yellow, from my uncle. As well intentioned as they were, these gifts were annoying reminders that everyone at school knew I couldn’t kick a ball to save my life—nor even to save myself from being jeered at. Being a macho man was a lot of work, but it wasn’t all bad. I enjoyed watching the tight, toned bodies of futbol players in their wet uniforms, slick with sweat. When they grabbed and hugged each other as they celebrated a goal, my heart would jump. Still, I knew men touching men this way on television was only permissible as an expression of team spirit.
The next step in improving my image was dating. Through mutual female friends I arranged to meet with Canan, a pretty, buxom girl with curly, dirty blond hair, green eyes, and a kind smile. I spent a recess period walking in the schoolyard with her, attracting dozens of inquiring glances. Mert saw me with her and smirked. Did he see through my bullshit? Or was he surprised because he was more her type than I was? The fine gravel that covered the schoolyard crunched under my feet, and Canan and I talked about classes, the weather, and her hobbies—as expected, watching futbol wasn’t one of them, but she kindly feigned interest when I gabbed about it at the slightest prospect of awkward silence. I concluded that she and Mert would indeed have been the better match. I never met up with her again.
My next date, Aysel, was very interested in me. For a month we went together to events at school and to the local pastane for tea and pastries, but something was missing. I didn’t feel like putting in more effort. When she asked if we should see a school play together about the heroic efforts of Turkish men and women during the Kurtuluş Savaşı, I said I wasn’t interested in the same old rehashed war story about independence fighters. She said she wasn’t going then, either. We both ended up going without telling one another, and when she saw me during the intermission with my female friends Leman and Gül, she slanted her head and narrowed her coal-black eyes. I said I was sorry and smiled awkwardly. She left before the intermission was over.
If my attempts at dating backfired in the project of improving my image, my friendships with Leman and Gül helped mitigate the damage, to an extent. They had transferred to my class at the beginning of that year, and we’d bonded over American movies like Indiana Jones and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. That they were erkek Fatma, not girly girls, shifted attention toward them, away from me. I could breathe a little, since nobody could blame me for not wanting to date them—nobody, that is, except the strapping neighborhood butcher, who saw me with them one day and questioned me the next time I was in his shop. When I told him we were all just friends, he said something was wrong with a man who wouldn’t take advantage when “piliçler were lining up and throwing themselves at you.” He leered at me as he continued handling the meat.
On an unseasonably warm day in March, the three of us went to see The Underachievers, an American movie about a group of misfits at a night school. We laughed a lot, acknowledging in the darkness of the theater that we too were misfits, of sorts. After the movie, the girls gushed about the dumb blond jock in the film. I stayed quiet and smiled, remembering how my body became warm and tingly and my jeans felt tighter as I watched him make out with the cheerleader. This made me think of Mert in his gray cotton sweatpants, which scared me.
I’d learned about homoseksüellik and AIDS a couple of years before, when Rock Hudson died in October 1985. His death made headlines and broke the hearts of many women, including my mother. News reports compared his healthy black-and-white snapshots from the 50s and 60s with his more recent, emaciated color photos. During the Friday prayer I attended with my father that week at the grand Selimiye Mosque, Edirne’s Islamic architectural landmark and a site of pilgrimage during Ramadan, the imam made Hudson the subject of his Friday vaaz. He warned the gathered men and boys in the cemaat against this particular “Amerikan ahlaksızlığı.” When my eyes wandered toward the men in the mosque, I squeezed them shut, reciting ever more intently prayers I didn’t understand but had memorized in their original Arabic. Now, standing with the girls in front of the theater, thinking of Mert, the blond jock from the movie, Rock Hudson, and the imam’s warning about vice, I shuddered at the trio of homoseksüellik, AIDS, and death that circled like vultures around my future.
After we parted ways, I headed home, weaving through the busy downtown streets. An older man, perhaps in his thirties, stopped me and asked, “Do you know how to get to Arka Sokak?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know,” I said. I had never heard of such a street.
“That’s okay.” He stepped closer. His hair was slicked back, and he wore tight blue jeans and a shirt open all the way down to his stomach. A pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses hid his eyes and reflected two fisheye images of me—a pair of warped, oversized heads that the surrounding world and my own body seemed ready to squeeze through and explode. My longish black hair clung to my distorted face. My dad was right: I needed a haircut.
“You’re so polite and tatlı,” he said in a slippery tone. He put his right hand on my shoulder and squeezed it, and asked, “Would you like to walk with me to Şehir Parkı?”
“Uhh, hayır, I have to go.”
I walked away quickly as he stood there simpering. I was nauseated, and the sound of the traffic and people around me felt amplified. This man was what my guy friends called an ibne and news reporters called a homoseksüel. I hated myself for recognizing him for what he was, revolting as I found him. It took one to know one, right?
Soon after that, Mert asked me to help him with his algebra homework. His name meant “manly” or “manful” and, as my grade’s popular athletic çocuk, he lived up to it. When he asked for my help, I found it exciting; when it came to math, I was the man. I stopped by his apartment before school (we were both öğlenci, so we had classes only in the afternoon and could catch up with homework in the morning). His parents weren’t home. He was wearing Adidas shorts and a Metallica T-shirt. It seemed as if he had just woken up. The back of his light brown hair was standing up, and his hazel eyes, set deep against his smooth oily skin, lit up when he looked at me. He seated me at the dining table in the misafir odası, which was reserved for entertaining guests. Large, cushioned furniture fanned out along the two windowed walls across from the table. A thin lace curtain covered the large bay windows that overlooked the bustling çarşı outside, and thick, tasseled curtains were hitched to brass hooks on either side of the window. An imposing vitrine spanned the length of the windowless wall. Shelves on one side displayed a porcelain dining set and a traditional set of kahve demitasses behind glass doors. Various keepsakes his parents must have bought during their domestic and international travels stood on the other side—some had English and other non-Turkish words on them. In the middle of the vitrine was a large Sony television, a videocassette player, and an Atari console with joysticks and an impressive stack of game cartridges. The marble coffee table in the center of the room dug its mahogany feet into the plush carpet. On a lace runner atop it sat a crystal vase of multicolored papier-mâché flowers.
This was not a typical apartment for my neighborhood. As I had suspected, based on his brand-name clothes and confident demeanor, Mert’s parents were well off. He must have gotten whatever he wanted. I eyed the expensive videogame console; I had wanted one for a while now but had never asked, because my parents couldn’t possibly afford it.
Mert placed his notebook on the table and showed me his attempt to solve the problem set assigned for that day. He stood next to me and leaned on the table. A fair attempt, I thought, as I inhaled his cologne, which made me slightly dizzy. I tried to explain how to solve the equations, but he was restless and asked me to do it. He shuffled around in his shorts while I corrected his homework for him, and joked about the possibility of repaying me by sharing his Playboy stash. I laughed and blushed, but didn’t look up. The man outside the theater flashed in my mind like a celluloid nightmare. I blocked him out. Mert sat on the sectional as I finished his homework, and I caught a glimpse of him adjusting his shorts now and then. Five minutes before we needed to leave, he ran to his bedroom and put on his suit.
We had to wear suits to school, complete with neckties and jackets. As we walked through the çarşı, our reflections in the shop windows looked like two boys playing businessmen. The collars of our slightly oversized dress shirts rubbed against our necks, and our Adam’s apples bobbed up and down as we drew saliva to spit on the ground. As we walked by the retail shops that flanked both sides of the main road, under the empty gaze of bored shopkeepers, I relished the illusion that I was a buddy of Mert’s, an equal. In that moment I believed that I could will away the desire for him that gnawed at me.
Our school trip to Kastro was on a Sunday in April. I’d looked forward to it as a diversion. For most of the two-hour bus ride the sky was gray and rainy, though faint sunlight broke through the clouds now and then. The spring rain had let up by the time we arrived, but it still wasn’t a good day for a picnic; the weathered wooden tables were soaked, so we had to eat our sandwiches on the bus.
After lunch, our teachers suggested that we walk around and take a few pictures to make the trip worth the trouble. They told us that kastro, an old Greek word, meant kale, a castle, and that the name of the park probably referred to the Byzantine fortress in nearby Kıyıköy. I wondered how many men had died over the centuries, defending that fortress and securing the surrounding lands, and whether we’d spot any ruins or tombstones. We didn’t. Kastro was a quiet wooded area through which a stream snaked into the Black Sea. Most of my class opted to trek the rocky banks of the stream toward the beach. Our teachers told us to be careful—dikkatli olun—and stay in sight—gözümüzün hizasından çıkmayın—before they huddled under a tree to smoke. The Black Sea was famous for its eddies and rip currents—not that anyone would go into the water this early in the year, but we all had been warned at the beginning of the trip about the unforgiving nature of the mighty sea and the lives lost on that part of the coast every summer.
In typical fashion, the boys ran ahead and the girls lagged behind, chatting and laughing. I trudged along in the middle. Fortunately or unfortunately my friend Cemil, who’d surely have tagged along beside me, had called in sick and skipped the trip. The stream, swollen with rainwater, flowed vigorously as it approached the sea. Leman and Gül yelled my name. They knew I preferred their company, but like the coward I was I ignored their calls, and jogged ahead to catch up with the guys. This was when it happened. Atilla, who sometimes sought my help with homework, ran toward me from the side, smiling and waving. I stopped and faced him, thinking that he wanted to talk to me. Instead, he shoved me in the chest with both hands, sending me stumbling over the rocks and into the water rushing by, about a meter below. The freezing water seeped through my jeans, sneakers, and jacket, and knocked the wind out of me. For a few seconds, while I was under, I wondered if this was how death might feel.
Disoriented, I flailed and gasped in the stream’s chilling embrace, until someone extended a hand into the water. I grabbed the hand like a lifeline and was yanked up and helped onto the rocks. As I sat, soaked, my fingers wiping silty water from my burning eyes, the view of Mert squatting in front of me, a concerned look on his face, materialized as if through a thin, opaque layer of ice on a windowpane.
Atilla snickered behind him and yelled, “Look, the first person to drown in waist-deep water!” Mert gave him the middle finger. Leman and Gül, who’d seen what happened and run to my side, called him a havyan, an animal, and I yelled, “Siktir git.” Everyone seemed taken aback by my rare use of obscenity, despite having just seen what happened and knowing that he no doubt deserved it.
The teachers, who’d seen the commotion in the distance, sauntered up to yell at Atilla, me, and everyone else for horsing around. The gym teacher Oktay Bey handed me a towel and told me to clean up. Murat Bey, the head teacher, announced earlier than planned that it was time to leave. The weather wasn’t getting any better.
As we walked back to the bus, I shivered in the wind.
“You okay, bașkan?” Mert’s eyes met mine briefly.
“Yes,” I said quietly, and looked away as another shiver ran through my body.
“Hold on,” he said. He rummaged through his backpack. The front zippered pocket sported Metallica, Kiss, and Rolling Stones patches. He pulled out and extended a pair of sweatpants and black boxers, printed all over with hundreds of tiny red-and-white tongues sticking out of hundreds of mouths. “That’s all I have, but here, put them on. I told my mom it was too cold to swim, but she packed these anyway in case I got wet. Maybe her treating me like a child will help this once.”
He smiled in a way that begged for a response. I remained silent, but accepted his offering. The boxers felt soft and warm in my hands, and the print looked familiar.
Murat Bey told the bus driver to let me in to change before the others boarded. In my few minutes alone I took off my T-shirt, wrung it out, and put it back on. I tried putting myself in Mert’s shoes—I was in his underwear after all—and wondered at how easily he had offered me something so intimate. Could I ever be so smooth? Could I ever not give a damn what others might think? As Mert’s underwear and sweatpants slowly absorbed the moisture from my wet T-shirt, I thought of Cemil’s locker room warning, a few months back. You’d best watch out. Realizing that all my efforts had been so transparent, that I had no protective cover whatsoever, was like being shoved into cold water again and again.
When I got home, I went straight to my room and changed quickly. I threw the wet clothes into the laundry hamper. It was good to finally be dry, but I felt as if bedbugs were crawling all over me. I tried not to think about what happened, or about Mert. When my parents asked about the trip, I said that it’d rained all day, so there was nothing much to tell. We ate dinner as usual in the living room. We didn’t have a dining room or a separate room to entertain guests. Our living room overlooked the neighbor’s concrete yard and was sparsely decorated. Two brown futons on opposite sides of the room faced one another over wall-to-wall navy blue carpet. In the middle of the room there was a coffee table with a vase of plastic flowers and an ashtray. For meals, we pushed it to the side to make room for the sofra, a low, small, circular table we stowed in the pantry; we sat around it on the floor. A clock hung on the light blue wall above one of the futons, and a framed picture of the Kaaba in Mecca, embellished with verses from the Koran in Arabic calligraphy, hung above the other. Otherwise, there was nothing to remind us of the world outside Edirne except our Grundig television on a stand in one corner. As far as my parents were concerned, other countries and cultures only existed in the televised world.
I tuned in to a movie on Star TV after dinner. My mother, who sometimes did laundry in the evening if she had been too busy socializing during the day, asked about the unfamiliar wet clothes in the hamper. I told her I’d tripped and fallen in the water during the school trip, and a classmate I didn’t really know had lent me his spare clothes. She didn’t see my pained expression. The thought of Mert and what happened had turned my stomach into a volcano ready to erupt. She gave me a hug and said that I should’ve been more careful. I resented being held like a child, so I squirmed out of her embrace.
After she finished the laundry, she sat next to me in the living room, where I was watching Die Hard. She told me to return the sweatpants she had just ironed and the boxers with tongues, teeth, and lips to the nice boy. She held up the boxers, pinching the elastic band between her index fingers and thumbs, and frowned as if she was trying to solve a puzzle, saying, “Why would anyone wear underwear with so many mouths, or any mouths? It’s like the world’s upside down!”
Looking away from Bruce Willis for a second, I said, “Yeah, really weird.”
I decided to banish any thought of Mert that night. I resolved not to be friends with him or to repay his kindness by helping him with his homework, or even to return his underwear and sweatpants. He seemed to have multiples of everything—I remembered the huge stack of game cartridges—so he probably wouldn’t even miss his clothes. On the way to school in the morning, I threw them into the garbage bin outside our building.
Serkan Görkemli’s short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station. His nonfiction on media and Turkish queer activism has been published in the Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Enculturation, Reflections, and Computers and Composition Online. His book Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press, 2014) won the 2015 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award. Originally from Turkey, he is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Stamford.
