To Eileen

This is based on a real story, unfortunately and most bitterly. I stumbled upon her obituary most unexpectedly back in 2003. How time froze around me in an instant at that heavy moment! How all feelings emptied in a flush from the planet! How I wept! How I wept!

How radiantly I can still feel the hot kiss of the racing streams down my cheeks! When the pool of soul and tears were emptied, and the numb grief of my shock was lifted, how hard the bitter grief struck!

She was Şahnaz (pronounced as ‘Shuhnuz’). And we had met on board of the plane, flying from Cyprus to Ankara in March, 1990— we were 21-year-old university students back then.

As good fortune would have it, there was this delay due to poor weather conditions, and I found myself she talking to me. It was a dream unfolding in rosy, fluffy plumes because she was the girl who had passed by me before the check-in an hour ago and ever since I had nurtured a hopeless crush on her. Yes, the fortune had it and she sat beside me, she talked to me, and there was this heaven-sent delay for about an hour on board of the plane!

We had melted all the ice and were pretty comfortable in a friendly chitchat of our education and other major aspects of our lives. It turned out she was a medicine student in Moscow, so she would have a transfer flight from Ankara. I was, however, studying English in Ankara, which meant an immediate split after the descent. Yet brief though the flight was how much space it was able to give us to establish our kingdom of heaven. I felt the whole universe by my side when she wrote her address on a piece of paper in Russian letters and gave it to me. When next she said she didn’t have any aviophobia but she was, nevertheless, terrified with take-offs and asked if she could, perhaps, grip my hand whilst the take-off, I felt like all the universe stop its business and bow before me.

All these were much more than a lucky coincidence, which may make you feel that I am stretching my luck as a writer, but I have told you; this is a memoir. Yes, there was this heavenly miracle unfurling right by my side to take me to its corona and wrap both of us forever. She was either a heaven-sent angel, or I, for one reason which I will never know, was chosen by all the heavens.

Or, it felt like that until I went to the flat where I stayed with four other Cypriot students. Dear friends they were, and still are. It was not long after I divulged the story of the miracle that there was a loud knock on the door at around two o’clock in the morning.

No, it was not her. Even heavenly miracles have their limits and mine had even transcended by any chance any conceivable limit, if any!

The coin had flipped over, and it was time for tragedy to unfold. There were four or five ruffian looking men with automatic guns in their hands. Within a lot of fear and stress, it turned out they were undercover agents from the Bureau of Foreign Terrorism and we were to be taken for surveillance and interrogation with a warrant they deemed unnecessary to show. Were they really from the state? Where were we going?

And no, we were not terrorists, nor political activists. We were a socially active bunch romantics who prepared concerts and drama shows for the summer youth festivals in our own country, Cyprus. We were also writers: we had our culturally oriented journal which we issued 4 times a year. Anyway, we desperately watched some of our personals being confiscated among which was the address which never came to me again. Which no miracle would deliver. Even miracles do have their blind alleys.

The surveillance took three days where we were kept in separate, one-meter square dark cells. Our visitors, some rats on the ***** stinking mat. Then we came out, without our confiscated personals. That’s why some part of me is still in one of those dark cells.

What I love about the belief system of pagan or naturalistic cultures is that they see gods or superhuman forces to be capricious. Most of us, the modern men, are pushed to the edge of an abyss of modernity, feeling desperate within the clutches some meaning-devoid existential crisis. It’s not only to watch all our sand castles being leveled to the ground! Accordingly, there is ample reference to ‘whimsy tides’ in this elegy.

I haven’t seen Şahnaz ever since despite the lengths I went to find her. And you already know what happened 13 years later.

I have found her tomb, though. It is in Lapithos, 16 kilometers to the west of the major tourism hub Kyrenia. Her tomb is very easy to spot in the idyllic cemetery which overlooks the sparkling blue Mediterranean Sea. Her parents must have found solace for their insuperable grief in attributing to her a shrine. This beautiful structure has four marble columns and a ceiling. Next to Şahnaz's resting spot, it also features a marble bench and a faucet. The marble is honey with natural veining. You walk up a short flight of stairs to the entrance of her shrine which is flanked by her initials carved in marble with exquisite calligraphy.

I honored her by riding my father’s ill maintained bicycle with my guitar on my back to her shrine which was on the other side of the mountain. It was a grinding experience but spiritually relieving all the same. With shaking hands, I timorously yet reverently lifted the chain on the entrance and placed my hand on her tomb for a long time feeling the same hot tears pour on the stone. We held hand in hand like we did on the plane ‘many a many year ago’. Then, I sat on the cold bench and played her song to her, getting choked halfway, hot tears everywhere.

How desperately I had believed that if I compose a very beautiful song and played it with my friends in the ruins of Salamis for a large audience, she would rive the standing ovation and run up to me. Even heavenly miracles hit a cul-de-sac...

“I was a child, and she was a child in a kingdom by the sea.” (With due respect to Edgar Allan Poe for his Annabel Lee)

Some of you may wonder what happened to Şahnaz in 2003. It was a car accident. I have been told that on her way back from the hospital where she had checked the condition of a patient she had recently operated, her car skidded into a ditch because of the sudden rain which fell on the hot asphalt and caused oil sheening.
This poem is my first written tribute to her. The next one will be the full cover narrative of what little account I have provided you with above.

But, whatever I do, I feel a part of me will still be on that plane and another one is still in that dark cell, shivering in my father’s souvenir corduroy jacket in the biting cold of early March; tired, leaning against the cold wall.