Abstract
Index’s contributing editor in Turkey,
The Man with the Vermillion Fountain Pen
He came here every morning. His torpedo-shaped pen, which navigated among letters, words and paragraphs with the graceful moves of a dancer (despite its weight of 45 grams), had earned him the alias Vermillion. It was a useful invention, since he didn’t really want to be known in the government circles by his real name and there was something pleasurable in using a pen name for an activity that involved the use of a fountain pen which he had purchased in his youth, when he dreamed of writing fiction with it.
As his hand pressed firmly on the top page (a warm, freshly printed, A4-sized article from a dissident website), Mr Vermillion took joy in imagining himself as someone else. He dreamed of not having the reputation of the unsuccessful writer, which his meager career in Istanbul’s literary scene had slowly earned him in the course of the past three decades, but becoming the writer whose power and influence left fellow authors in his shade.
Carefully handling the large white cup, Mr Vermillion took a big sip of freshly brewed coffee and felt lucky to be alive. The smell took him to faraway lands to Egyptian deserts and African shores and South American jungles where he once imagined, as a young man, placing the characters of his future novels. But distracted he could not allow himself to be at this moment: there were more than 50 columns he had to read before 4pm and his contact in the ministry had told him that his vermillion fountain pen would have the greatest day of its existence, if used properly and according to protocol.
Credit: Sam Darlow
The minister for agriculture had given a roaring speech the previous morning and accused skirt-wearing women of being in cahoots with “ultra-secret ultra-secularists” hidden inside the country. “Our modest women wear skirts only for special celebrations,” he had said. “We like our women mature, respectful and silent. And then there are others, the troublemakers…” Mr Vermillion knew in person the speechwriter of the minister and he was in awe of the way that 30-year-old man had designed the speech: the accusation of being a “ultra-secret ultra-secularist” was formulated in such a way that anyone who desired to come to the defence of skirts and women who wore them was automatically labelled persona non grata.
The metal section of Mr Vermillion’s Yukari Royale pen landed on the paper self confidently, circled a word (the surname of the minister for agriculture) and moved ominously to the next line where its vermillion ink connected that surname to an adjective (“shameless”) before reaching the page margin. Once there, the line gave way to a warning (from past experience he knew it would soon become a verdict) in capital letters: SLANDER.
Mr Vermillion’s gaze quickly picked words in the adjoining lines that he knew would be even more discriminating in the eyes of the judge who would look at this case. He steered the metal section in the direction of the word “appalling” before the vermillion-coloured line dived lower into the column’s penultimate paragraph where it firmly landed around the adjective “foolishly”. Mr Vermillion searched passionately for the word “liar” and was disappointed when it turned out that this word (crucial in many court cases) wasn’t there. He dreamed of being able to add that insult to the piece.
But there was plenty he could circle with the vermillion ink: a sentence about the minister’s private life, another about his elderly, single sister who had a relationship with a Christian pop singer and a third throwaway line about kilt-wearing Scots who, the author said, were respected everywhere for keeping their traditions alive. “I wish the minister, too, would wear a kilt one day,” the column’s last sentence read.
Why a writer in his mature and, in his eyes, best years would devote himself to producing such rhetoric, Mr Vermillion could never understand. Many of the columnists who now wrote for these dissident publications were novelists and poets during his own youth and rather than growing up to become wise voices, had become child-like. They were able to attract the attention of readers only when they said silly things about silly people, he thought.
Mr Vermillion personally knew the writer whose column he was presently filling with lines and circles and exclamation marks. Once a handsome, witty and self-confident youth with big hopes, this columnist had faced numerous disappointments in middle age (flopped second novel, pulped collection of essays after accusations of plagiarism, harshly criticised script for television drama by the intelligentsia who accused the author of selling out). Now the fate of this man lay in Mr Vermillion’s hands.
He placed, on top of the first page, a second article so as not to think about his old friend. This was penned by a former student leader known for his never-ending dislike of politicians and the fierce tone with which he had managed to infuriate anyone from feminists to socialists to sharia supporters during the past 15 years. Mr Vermillion drew a large, red star next to a six-line long paragraph where the author fantasised about the kidnapping of a minister, making a joke about how much the people would enjoy such a development. The whole thing was written in a humorous tone, of course, but the idea to kidnap was there. Next to the star, Mr Vermillion noted how this needed to be interpreted as a concealed threat: fantasising about things were an invitation to doing them. He took another sip from the coffee cup.
Why would middle-aged columnists resort to such rhetoric, he wondered, when they were perfectly free to while away their time writing literary studies or novellas or short stories. Even blurb-writing was a more reputable genre, he believed. In Mr Vermillion’s eyes, political columns were the absolute lowest point of literature: he hated those who devoted their lives to the constant forging of political arguments. Why would anyone be so willing to sacrifice everything in the defence of arguments they had put forward sometime ago because people expected them to put forward one and then defend it day after day, as if they were something other than artificial, self-produced extensions of the artificial art of rhetoric. One’s arguments, Mr Vermillion believed, were different from a patch of land, they were not natural, and they did not need physical defending. They were just words and when the timing was right, words could become as dangerous as natural disasters.
As a group of men and women in aqua-coloured suits entered the coffeehouse, Mr Vermillion became conscious of his own presence there. He put the fountain pen to rest, next to the bundle of pages. With its cap on, Yukari Royale was a harmless instrument, an object of beauty and elegance. Mr Vermillion’s fingers pushed it a few centimetres away from the pages as if he wanted to take a break from the fountain pen. Now Mr Vermilion looked at the young financiers whose enthusiastic faces pleasantly surprised him. His gaze searched their bodies for signs of youth and found plenty of such signs there – from the tidiness of their garments to the freshness of their appearance they were the image of optimism, energy and hope. How free of bad feeling their bodies were! How unconcernedly they chatted with one another! How little history they have had behind them and how helpful that last thing was to be in a cheerful mood on a Monday morning.
Mr Vermillion remembered his feeble attempts at producing a political tract as a 17-year-old pupil, when he was at studying at Istanbul’s Robert College. Like a minority of rich Turkish kids do in their teenage years, he had adopted socialist ideas so as to distinguish himself from fellow students: it was, Mr Vermillion had felt, the most interesting way of becoming someone different. Among wealthy people, the hatred for wealth set one apart; as a young man Mr Vermillion had excelled at turning that hatred into passionate prose.
In those years Mr Vermillion had loved borrowing words from the socialist glossary. Accusing books and buildings and beautiful paintings of being petit bourgeois, emphasising the importance of raising class consciousness, constantly using the words “class conflict” and seeing all phenomena in relation to it – those were the features that defined Mr Vermillion’s writing as a young man. After a few tries, he had realised how easy it was to forge a political rhetoric and reproduce it in numberless tracts. Mr Vermillion’s skill at writing them as a young man made it easy for his middle-aged self to locate the incriminating content the modern version of such tracts had. In this new era in his life Mr Vermilion would wonder at the continuity and longevity of the dissident mind. Was it natural that all dissident minds would end up using the same phrases, concepts and the same tone, Mr Vermilion would ask himself, or was it the other way around – was it only because they used the same phrases, concepts and tone that some people were called dissidents?
He placed a weekly news magazine, with a circulation of 4,509 copies, in front of him.
“Made-up charges used to lock up Turkish republicans,” the headline of one article read. Mr Vermillion was yawning even before he started reading the opening paragraph of what turned out to be a six-pages long indictment of the charges against “ultra-secret ultra-secularists” hiding in the country.
“How stupid,” Mr Vermillion mumbled, and for the first time that morning, raised his head to look outside the coffee shop. “How stupid to devote one’s time to writing this article, which so clearly spells trouble.”
At a coffee shop on the other side of the street, a young woman with curly blonde hair was listening to something the man sitting next to him was telling her. The woman’s eyes followed his every move, and she seemed set to be totally under his influence until the story’s completion.
Drawing a large triangle next to the magazine correspondent’s name, Mr Vermillion noted: “Potential ultra-secularist.” He then wrote a sentence about the correspondent’s past activities and was just getting ready to begin another sentence when, much to his chagrin, realised that his Yukari Royale pen had run out of ink.
By the time Mr Vermillion separated his buttocks, numb from sitting too much, from the bar stool, young financiers in the adjoining table were cracking jokes and sharing anecdotes. They all have had their first cups of coffee for the morning and were ready to enjoy the rest of the day.
Mr Vermillion knew from the experience of observing them in the past month that they would leave in about five minutes’ time for the office and emerge seven hours later from the sliding doors of the opposite building. Now, as he walked past them, Mr Vermillion distinguished their gazes scrutinising his body – the expression on their faces, Mr Vermillion thought, asked what on earth this elderly man had been doing in this coffee shop every morning for the past few weeks. He imagined them wondering how on earth they had not asked this question before. What did they make of him, he wondered.
Mr Vermillion headed to the loo where he expected some solitude, which he was partly allowed to have. The large mirror on the bathroom wall was perfectly clean; and yet, it framed and reflected his face in a way that the elderly man found disturbing. Mr Vermillion heard the lunch-break bell go off in the high school next door. This was closely followed by the cheering voices of high school kids running around on the long street. Mr Vermillion heard children running in the distance, laughing and cracking jokes and shouting obscenities. Some of them, he knew, would come to the coffee shop to buy lunch. He regretted leaving the Yukari Royale and his bundle of newspapers, magazines and printouts unattended on the table and yet he didn’t feel like going back inside. Instead Mr Vermillion looked carefully at the mirror and scrutinised his brow. He looked at the lines formed on that surface, and saw words he had devoted his life to producing and then to criminalising appear as if by magic. Mr Vermillion tried to figure out what the person in the mirror was thinking about. He then opened the little bathroom window and watched a kid walking cheerfully towards the coffee shop.