Dad held a finger over his lips, then continued, "So, she's out there thrashing in the sea, yelling something. Sounded like 'hari kari'. Then your mother starts looking around and she yells, 'Isn't anyone going to save her?' No one moved. The murmur was that it was a Kurdish woman. Then she nudged me and told me to jump in. And I said, 'They'll turn the boat around.' But after a few seconds it was clear they weren't going to turn around; in fact, you could see the pilot on the bridge with a smile. So your mother says, 'Jump, Mick. Jump now.' But I didn't move. So, suddenly she just calls me a fuckwit, climbs upon the rail, heaves herself into the Bosporus and starts swimming toward the damsel in distress, who kept screaming 'hari kari' like a maniac. I turn to this guy next to me and ask him (some French bloke) why she's talking Japanese, but he says it's not Japanese but Kurdish and it means, 'help me'. And so I say to him, what the f*ck is she yelling 'help me' for, if she's trying to drown herself. And the French guy smiles and says, 'She's being metaphorical. She means her people. The Kurds. She wants someone to rescue the Kurds from their troubles with the Turks.' (To tell you the truth, Chris, I wanted to punch Froggy in his smug little face.) So, anyway, when the pilot saw your mother jump in, he threw down his falafel and turned the boat around. And there's your mother, holding up this crazy Kurd from behind so she doesn't get pulled down. Now your mother won't forgive me. Said she was going to write a story about me and call it 'The Coward of Leander Light.'"
Before I knew how to respond, the cops returned and entered the cafe'. Then we were being ushered out of the cafe' by the waiter. "Yani, we must close," he said, with a fatalistic shrug. "There was a bomb in the district a few days ago and the police are nervous. Happens all the time, I'm afraid"
Dad and I silently meandered down cobblestone paths and narrow alleyways, over garbage bags and through assorted rank debris, until we came to Taksim's red light district. We approached a booth, guarded by a nervous cop with the requisite machine gun, where Dad forked over 70 lira for two tickets to enter an alley filled with the sounds of disco music and rap, cigarette fog and flashing neon. Rouged-up girls from Romania and Russia gestured with fingers and hips in window displays, like mannequins gyrating to life, and made extravagant promises of bliss with their eyes. A diminutive pimp with a powerful voice said, "You must choose." It felt like we were trapped in a Fellini film, or like some cinema playing Fellini--the strands of projected light shifting from frame to frame like currents in the ever- shifting river of Heraclitus. Dad was fond of saying we lived in a world ruled by "unseen forces too big to fail." This alley seemed to prove it.
When Dad and I returned to the hotel later that evening, just as the muezzin was making his last daily call, we found a note in the centre of the table: "No more. No more. I love you both. Goodbye. Tracey." We anxiously wondered where she'd gone. "Probably joined the Kurds, knowing that woman," said Dad, fear in his eyes, hands trembling. We never saw her again.
IX.
On the telly in the hospital room, they were showing images of the blind, golden catfish of the Kalahari, unseen except by camera. Streaming through the underground sluices beneath the vast, sandy emptiness, like dharma monks in endless pilgrimage, they seemed fused with the water itself.
As Dad's life escaped him, I could feel his blood recede, like the opposite of automatic gain: the mike intensifying the silence to the point where silence itself seemed to scream. I sat stone still in this new silence, the moment's Big Bang, before the monitor alarm sounded and the nurses bustled in, turning on lights, and the comforting darkness was gone in a blink.
X.
Back in Denmark I'd secured a lecturing position at the University of Copenhagen, in the English language section. I was leading a course on Kierkegaard, titled "Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity," in which we spent a lot of time examining dialectics - Socrates, of course, and Hegel - and how it related to problems in relativism and global humanitarian crises. I also taught a couple of writing courses, and worked in the university's language lab. I shared a flat with Sven, a younger local lad, who tutored in the philosophy department and some welcome interest in Heraclitus and all the pre-Socratics. Some students, and no doubt some staff, seemed to regard Sven and I as a couple, referring to us as Hamlet and Horatio, one young blonde student wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt, her breasts popping Che's eyes out, once exclaimed as we walked together, "Something's hotting in the state of Denmark," which turned out to be as clever as she got, her work on Fear and Trembling a mess of memes and pop psychology seductions. Still, all in all, the studies, the rumours, and the possibly legitimate attraction between Sven and I (although, our trips to Amsterdam together were orgies of heterosexual excess, so there's that), -- all of it kept me occupied and I gave no thought to gum trees or Dad's limitations or Mum's adventures in freedom.
But, of course, what seemed to me later as an inevitability suddenly happened. A postcard arrived in my box from Mum. "Go to your father; friends say he's dying; he needs you." Friends? So all those years there were confederates in our midst who knew her whereabouts and told us nothing? Did they also report back to her on our devastation, provide a play-by- play, like the cricket? She added, "I've discovered the Persian poet Attar. Did you know it was he who moved to Turkey and started the whirling dervishes? Apparently, while he was reciting a poem he would pirouette and the fad caught on. Hope you're well. Go to Dad. I love you. Mum." The card's picture featured some leafy valley in the Khorasan region of Persia.
The next day, I took emergency leave and flew back to Oz.
XI.
A week after the funeral (Mum didn't appear, as I had hoped), I stood outside in the garden watching chummy mates unload a bulldozer from a semi. I took one last look inside the granny flat, Mum's studio. It was no longer a museum but a mausoleum, Mum's pieces like old knuckles and ligaments and bones of her long ago desire. It only took an hour for the bulldozer to level the house and studio, neighbours looking on from their properties, and that's the way I left it - driving off in my rental, not once looking back.
Back in Copenhagen, my disposition is melancholy. My Danish 'mates' all say, Chris, you've got to move on. Sven's medicinal antics are without felicity. He talks of moving in with the Che Guevera blonde, who's found a way into his heart. And I have long moments of loneliness, when all seems bleak. And yet, there's a chorus in my head, a siren's polyphonic wail, filled with the ululations of desire, a call from deep within my own twisted cerebral recesses, where the dervishes whirl into eternity and the mother of my being, of all being, is with me again, and I am right as rain once more, having taken the leap of faith into the void. The void I call Glenda.
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