THE INNER JOKE

17/04/2026

The steamboat was at capacity. The final whistle went fweet. The paddle wheels on either side of the boat slowly moved forward with wrathful clamour, like colossal walruses accustomed to waking up startled in narrow cages. The whole steamboat vibrated. The day was bright and beautiful. We were headed towards Kadıköy. Dotted with slender minarets and domes, on the long and sleepy horizon of the Marmara Sea - the furthest shores of which disappeared from sight behind a veil of lilac fog - large clouds outlined in chalk white were slowly growing, dispersing, gathering like mountains of fragmented foam as shades of violet and dark blue piled up within the city's descending curves and atop her towering hills. June’s scolding sun was blazing against the steamboat’s awnings readily darkened by smoke and rain, almost warming up the indecisive wind blowing here and there, contributing to it a promptingly cunning, seductive, and intoxicating quality.

Milky seagulls that almost seemed to have flown in from distant and Sibyllic fairy-tale islands were whirling around us. With their sweet and deep calls, they were inviting city-bound poor souls swamped by crowds, strife, greed, and sorrow to their own secluded, quiet lands far from reality to have a taste of love and poetry. A tale wrapped in deep blue waves, Leander’s Tower – recalling some legendary palace – was playing in my imagination, lulling my senses and my soul with bright, white prayers, and erasing from my mind the echoes of my surroundings and my neighbourhood. I almost forgot that I was on a steamboat. The strange and morbid state of that thinking man who read a few poems a day was ruining my vision: I was erasing from my view the houses, the domes, the minarets and cypresses on the shorelines of Üsküdar and Selimiye, the entire Faculty of Medicine and those big old barracks and replacing them with virgin beech and pine forests through which silver and diamond waterfalls flowed, and under its cool canopy nude and rosy couples lay kissing.

I was gazing at this landscape - this mighty and magnificent landscape - which never existed in reality but only in my imagination and thinking to myself, “Ah, there it is... a land of love.” My fantasy was becom'ng hazy and making me feel dizzy as I listened to the call of the seagulls crying out, “Come away, far away, beyond the lilac fog... There are white flowers, there are girls waiting for you under an eternal and budding canopy, join us there”. I could now clearly see thousands of fairies with gossimer-thin wings flying above Leander’s Tower far in the distance. And perhaps if I went there, I could hold them in my hands. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned:

- Hey there, what a state of mind you are in! Are you daydreaming?

- It’s nothing...

- You don’t remember me?

- Hmm?

- Hey! Wake up. Give me your hand.”

I felt a strong, warm hand shake my cold hand extended unaware as I  began to wake from my dream.  Still in a state of languor, the coin dropped.

- But it’s you...

- Yeah, it’s me!

Standing before me was one of my favourite school friends. We hadn’t seen each other in twelve years. Twelve long years. My God! It feels like yesterday. Life is truly but a jaw-dropping film! My happy-go-lucky friend who made everyone at school laugh, who joked around with everyone and had a nickname for us all had changed so much. He had grown a bushy auburn moustache above his red lips, the hair on his temples was greying, and he had gained a few pounds. But his eyes had not changed at all... These small and shiny organs where our souls reside in the highest concentration and dim away in the darkness that remains eternally shut to human intelligence; and which will remain oblivious to the truth behind the foremost reason for our existence... The blue joy that beamed in his eyes twelve years ago was still burning bright. I don’t know why but it made me happy to come across a face from the past and to realise that the distance had made our hearts grow fonder. I was glad. I was squeezing the warm hand I was given with all my strength. We were on the upper floor of the steamboat. All of the side seats were occupied. The steamboat was frequently whistling at the barges crossing its course. Everyone seemed to be undoubtedly troublesome. There weren't any women in sight. The elderly were sleepily reading their newspapers and having brief conversations with those sitting next to them. The stout passengers were smoking their cigarettes while intently listening to the noise from the paddlewheels; well-dressed youths attired in the latest fashions were standing up tall to keep their monocles in place and showing off their colourful hemstitched socks that were revealed when they pulled up their ironed trousers in order to avoid creasing the fabric around their knees. With their brows knit and lips pursed from the wind, they all looked aged, tired and confused with their hairless, shaven faces scrunched up as if they were suffering from stomach aches.

We were leaning against the deck-rails painted white. My friend asked,

- “Are you in some kind of distress? I noticed you as soon as I stepped out onto the deck. You were so absent-minded that you didn’t even sense me approaching. What’s bothering you?”

- “Nothing really, nothing at all. I was just having an inner joke.”

- “An inner joke about what?”

- “Love!” I exclaimed, laughing.

- “Are you still single?”

- “Very much so.”

That old blue spark of joy in my friend’s eyes had gone out. He momentarily looked at me with pity – as if he were helplessly and downheartedly looking at some poor soul who was bedridden in the last stages of tuberculosis and could offer neither consolation nor courage. Then he removed his hand from the deck rail and put it in his pocket. He turned slightly towards me and, with an earnest gaze, met my eyes:

- “You are still single and joking about love, eh! If that’s true, old sport, don’t take this to heart but you are a drifter. We haven’t seen each other since school. If you like I can tell you about everything that has happened to me. Seeing as you joke about love, you’ve obviously not understood life, you’ve overlooked the hard truth staring you straight in the eyes. And since you are such a stranger to truth, you will not be happy until the day you die.”

- “What truth is that?” I smiled.

- “What truth, you ask?” The social truth... If you could come to grips with this truth you would never even bother with love.”

I was clueless, I was smiling at him as if to say, “But why?”

He elaborated:

- “There is a social milieu, a social conscience in its own right in all places. It prevails in a most absolute and tyrannical manner, in opposition to all science, reason, knowledge and thought. And in our neighbourhoods, the neighbourhoods of the Turks, love is severely prohibited. As prohibited as a contraption of hell, a bomb, or a box of dynamite. Once a Turkish boy hits age fourteen he can no longer see the face of a female other than his mother's, older or younger sister's, or ultimately, his aunts'. If that’s the case, whom can he love? No one. How else can I tell you about the power, the terror of this social milieu, this social conscience? A philosopher whose name now escapes me makes reference to God's influence on people, his relationship to them and the idea of morality and  says, “All of that, is no other than social milieu.” I think there’s some truth to that. The God that keeps today’s new world turning around with old holy books continues to crush defiers and non-believers everywhere and in every era for different reasons and in various ways. The power that once brought down Galileo no longer cares about the millions of school children who are studying Galileo’s great and horrific crime¹ as a lesson. Had the bullets they put in Ferrer’s² head in Spain also made holes in the heads of French intellectuals, there would not be anyone left in France other than demented and old women and priests. The philosopher whose name I cannot recall, passes this judgment because he sees that our God always uses the social conscience of the neighbourhood in order to execute his eternal laws, which not only differs from country to country and continent to continent but from city to city and village to village. What is deemed as a good deed in one place is considered murder in another; what is considered good service there is disservice here; all the commands of holy books which should remain the same regardless and in spite of the laws of nature are bowed down to by people in different places in various modes. Christianity, the fundamentals of which are one and the same for all, is practiced differently in Europe than in America or Africa. It is the same for Islam! It’s practiced one way in India, another way in Liverpool, completely and utterly differently in Bukhara and in Türkiye. And if you happen to visit Arabia or Iran, you’ll notice it’s altogether different there. Our God’s eternal and irrefutable law in Türkiye, in other words our social conscience, prohibits love to us. No one in Turkey can make love. And as of this very moment, no one will. To love, one must first see. In order to build a nest and to live a happy life with a young girl you need to be able to see her face just once, let alone to talk, to agree and to make love until death. 

Those who stand in the way of this severe prohibition will face a demise similar to that of anarchists, nihilists or old-time non-believers who ventured in entrepreneurial circles. Waning slowly, they fall out of grace in social circles and face a most pathetic death. Whereas those who are crafty, the master smugglers of prohibited love never tire of their robbery like an old and brave contrabandist of tobacco or a Greek pickpocket. They always live with their hearts beating in their throats. They wait for hours in desolate streets and on the cold, damp and windy corners of shady gardens. And for what? A couple of meaningless words muddled with fear, a tasteless, rushed, and fleeting kiss... That is all! The love stories and poems – inspired by that of Iran in old literature, and in new literature by that of France – penetrated these smugglers body and soul like cases of incurable syphilis. They forever seek adventure. For instance, they would like to introduce habits that are contrary or foreign - or daydream about things such as making love - to a particular neighbourhood where women being seen out in the open and in a certain way is severely prohibited. They empathise with protagonists in novels set in foreign and faraway lands. Sure, you read many poems in literary magazines. The subject: Woman and Night. In fact, neither exist in Türkiye. In a Turkish neighbourhood, the night is alla turca, after one o’clock all curtains are drawn, the streets desolate. Each return to their own home and village, and those who are homeless to their ratholes. Night clubs, ballrooms, theatres, and god... the vicinity of Beyoğlu is not Turkish at all. That’s where foreigners live in their own neighbourhood according to their own customs. They go to public gardens and restaurants with ladies in their arms; they talk, have fun, and make merry. The Turks who literally cannot find a rathole to dwell in can also be spotted among them. They dose off at the tables. They look at foreign women, foreign beauties, and foreign busts with yearning. In short, Turks do not live the night. Just to add, in the new literature they keep mentioning lakes; I ask which lakes! I don’t recall a lake other than Lake Terkos in Istanbul. And I am sure none of our poets have been there. There’s no place to stay overnight near Terkos. Those hundreds of lines and long verses dedicated to lovers and lovemaking are also lies. The poet has a lover. But where? The poet is talking to his lover, he’s kissing her. But where is she? Only to be found in his dreams! Making love in the true sense, being able to talk to a young girl for even just a few minutes and to do such things in today’s Turkish neighbourhoods is as impossible as fish flying out of water and perching on the branches of poplar trees in market gardens.  In and around Istanbul, it is dangerous enough to get into a carriage in daylight with your slightly young-looking mother let alone wandering the streets arm in arm with a young Turkish girl at night, and to whisper words of romance accompanied by the nightingales’ song. Just ponder that! Love is not permitted in picnic areas, you poor soul, and not even in squalid and grotesque places. Men and women can never mix. There are always a few hundred steps between them, and other than a few hundred steps there are a few dozen policemen each of whom have the authority of a supreme king who does not have to answer to any members of parliament or a parliament at all in order to fulfill the desires of a conservative and ignorant giant with seven heads. They are always there to protect the social conscience of the neighbourhood. If you talk to your sister on the street, they create a scandal. Off to the station at once. Consider yourself lucky if you are not beaten up during the few kilometres to the station until you can prove who you are and that the person you were talking to is actually either your sister or your mother. 

Leaving to one side religion, traditions, customs, the elderly, the powerful and the police, do you know who it is that demands the prohibition of love so vehemently? Women! Turkish women! They are the greatest enemies of beauty and love. They won’t let their men – who are already barred from seeing the face of any woman from their own nationality out on the street – look them in the face at home. The severest of all guardians on the streets are those at home. Let's assume they are going to take in a servant. They’ll find the ugliest. A pockmarked, big-mouthed, plump-lipped, crooked-toothed, eagle-nosed specimen. They have a special secret, a talent or genius if you may call it, in order to mar this girl who walks around the house all day and brings you your meals. They dress them in the baggiest dresses, so that their curvy and formidable hips are concealed. They make them bind their hair with kerchiefs with the excuse that they lose a lot of hair. They turn the poor girl into a real orangutan. They are always quick to instruct them, “You shan’t look at the gentleman’s face, you shan’t speak in his presence, and if he asks you something you shan’t reply.” Speaking in favour of a servant, they use the following adjectives, “hardworking, clean, alert but unfortunately, good-looking.” To these women, being good-looking is the most unforgivable act of treachery. Since meeting and romancing with young girls is never possible, the matter of “marriage” is a gem only they can polish. They manage such affairs according to their own interests. Their primary goal is to find an ugly girl for their sons or brothers. They visit unfamiliar households just to see young girls suitable for marriage. And most men are still blind to the fact that these women who are looking for marriage material girls on their behalf tend to seek ugly ones. And most often, they find what they are looking for. The idea that they could become disposable to their sons or brothers once they are married and in love with a beautiful girl is more than enough to drive them insane. They are mortally horrified by beauty. That is why in Istanbul ninety percent of the girls who cannot find a husband and thus become spinsters are the most beautiful, the most charming and the most likeable of all.

[1] Translator’s Note: Ömer Seyfettin is referring to Galileo’s advocacy for heliocentrism which led to his trial and condemnation by the Catholic Church for heresy.

[2] T.N: Francisco Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859-1909) was a Spanish radical free thinker, anarchist, and educationist behind a network of secular, private, libertarian schools in and around Barcelona. He was executed by a firing squad following a revolt in Barcelona.

Women who seek girls for marriage do not favour these poor, pretty Turkish girls. “Oh sister, she’s beautiful but smart as the devil, isn’t she? For our son, we are interested in finding a girl, not a djinn.” They find any old excuse not to prefer a pretty girl; she’s too French, too skinny, too shrew. What they like is a plump, whitish, quiet, sluggish, dumb, ignorant girl who also happens to look like a wet hen. When they find a girl who fits that description, they cry “Oh, what an angel!” and begin talking tall tales about her to their sons and brothers... The poor man subjected to this charade begins to believe that lady-luck has sent him a fairy, only to discover on his wedding night as he lifts the thick veil covering his bride’s face a clueless, clean, white, and formless pile of flesh who cannot even answer the question, ‘What’s your name, my dear?” These women who deprive their men of seeing beauty, love, and romance at first chance, tyrannise their own kind in the same way. Should a woman they know accidentally have an adventure, should “a letter” of hers fall in the wrong hands, or should she divorce her husband and marry another, they all turn their backs on her and direfully ostracise her. Even after many years, when they see that woman on the street they change their course; some even dare to spit in her face, and others who are more merciful, pity her: “Oh poor thing, what an awful fate she’s had.” In our neighbourhood mothers who know what a dangerous lie is to say “The first duty of a woman is to be beautiful”, prevent their daughters from thinking about beauty, lightsomeness, coquetry, and the freedom to the best of their capabilities.  The unchanging advice these mothers whisper into their daughters’ ears as they walk out into the street is: “Put down your veil, girl. Keep your hands inside your burqa. Don’t put your chin up, they’ll call you a hussy. Look down. Don’t hop about like a French broad. Walk slowly. Don’t put your shoulders back, they’ll follow us. They’ll call you hysterical. You’ll ruin your reputation. You’ll become a spinster.” To add to this, each and every family that frequent one another’s homes seem to be the most natural inspector of each other's domestic lives. God forbid there should be a trivial fling in a family. What a scandal, the gossip will go through the sky, they’ll ridicule the protagonist. Friends of mothers who turn a blind eye to their sons and daughters secretly meeting with their lovers disapprove of their conduct and talk behind her back in disgust: “Can’t believe she’s cuckolding at her age!”

With regard to the world of the recognised gentiles in Türkiye, which is also narrated in some of the new novels... That world is a figment of imagination in its entirety. There has never been a privileged class among the Turks. The whole setting is an artificial world of gentiles created by high up government officials, old time pashas, and the families of those who attained relative wealth by sacrificing their own principals and undergoing so-called Westernisation or Europeanisation. And what would come of it? The whole neighbourhood would turn against them. If in a neighbourhood there should be a family whose females may appear slightly interested in male relatives who are free to marry, they are first labelled as “bad people” and then they are boycotted. The happiness of such cosmopolitan families soon expire with heightened gossip – deep hatred and accusations of rape – circling around them. They become forced to abandon their homes, and to retreat to far away, desolate mansions and remote coastal villas. Yes, just as it is with the lakes, evening parties and romances depicted in recently written poems as well as the bodies of women who flirt with their relatives or friends of their husbands in newly published novels are also lies. It’s fiction. These novels are nothing other than a shadow, a repetition, an interpretation, and an imitation of the Western novel. I am ready to hand over five years of my salary if you can show me one Turkish family in Istanbul whose women try it on with bachelors who are also their relatives. The Europeanised families narrated in these novels are as inconsistent with true Turkish identity as the peculiar and anonymous plays of our famed actors Kel Hasan³ and Abdi Effendi⁴. The fictive scenes in those plays are as impossible and disgraceful in real Turkish families - such as male servants constantly walking in on the ladies of the house and squeezing the bosoms of milk nannies, exclaiming “Oh how creamy” -  as the brutish, tactless, cold and fake illusions that couldn't be further from the truth in new literature where female protagonists are depicted as women who shake hands and converse with foreign men, and who accompany their husbands out into the street adorned in revealing clothes – free of the burqa and the headscarf, perhaps with even low-cut dresses. 

Let’s get to the heart of it all. You tell me what you reckon. Isn’t seeking love and insisting on the act of making love no other than vagrancy in a neighbourhood where men available for marriage and women looking to find a partner never get to encounter one another; where love is prohibited by religion, traditions, customs, laws, governments, policing, family structure and even by women. Isn’t it absolute folly to oppose the social conscience of a such a social milieu than to practice anarchy against the most powerful and the greatest of states? I am really upset that you – whom I deemed to be highly intelligent – are still bothering with this impossible reverie. Oh my poor friend, you should have bought a lottery ticket by now, settled for whatever is in your kismet – be it a heap of meat or a field of flesh – and raised little soldiers for the army... That is the only way you could have found happiness. Yet, you are still here making inner jokes about love and running towards an infinite desert of dismay, a lava-spurting cliff-edge of hell, an artificial, a deceptive and distant oasis concealing volcanoes that squirt fire. You have no idea how much I pity you.

The steamboat had arrived in Kadıköy. Sitting lightly on the deck rails, I had carried the weight of my entire body on my heels throughout my friend’s monologue. I stood up. My right foot was terribly numb. I couldn’t step on it.

“Hold on a minute, pal” I said, “my foot’s dead. We’ll leave last.”

“It’s not your foot that’s dead, it's your mind!” he said chuckling.

The steamboat had closed in towards the jetty. Men were exiting the boat from the lower and upper decks. The sun had disappeared behind thick clouds, the air had turned a dark, iron-colour, quietened like a washy eye brimming with tears. I watched the people disembarking. I was thinking about the things that my friend said; his words had transformed the cradling waves I found myself riding half an hour ago into a terrific storm. As I likened those who were timidly treading over the plain wooden gangway placed between the boat and the pier to the hurried escape of a startled herd of animals, I was wondering what could come of a nation, a society that divides its people, that deprives them of love and love-making, that never wakes up from a dreamless and stone-cold perennial sleep, that imprisons its mothers, wives and daughters. There wasn’t a single female in sight. Children and adolescents, elderly, young adults, rich and poor, they were all male. Rubbing my knee with my hand, I said:

“There aren’t any women on board.”

My friend laughed yet again and replied:

“Be patient... It is forbidden for them to mix with the men. They’ll get off last.”

The steamboat was almost completely empty. We were still on top of the paddle box, leaning on the white deck rails. My leg was still numb. Beside my friend, I began to limp my way towards the pier.

Stumbling and shuddering, the women tried to see their footsteps from under their thick, black veils with their heads down so they could avoid falling down, touching anything, bumping into one another or taking a misstep. They slowly moved to alight the boat like sick and mute phantoms cursed and sacked from life, shackled to the heaviest and most concealed chains of slavery and oppression wrapped in cotton so that their clinking could not be heard from under their raven burqas.   

[3] T.N: Kel Hasan Effendi (1874-1921), Turkish actor who pioneered in improvisational theatre and “middle show” – ‘orta oyunu’ in Turkish – the first type of genuine theatre Turks and Muslims in general enjoyed. On stage, Kel Hasan predominantly played the role of İbiş which was created by Abdülrezzak Abdi Effendi.

[4] T.N: Abdülrezzak Abdi Effendi (1835-1914), Ottoman improvisation artist who brought to life the character İbiş inspired by the court jesters depicted in Western theatre.

N.B: The original of this story was published under the title, Aşk Dalgası. I opted to give it a different title because I feel it works better in English translation.