‘Stability’

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While I was doing my military service, there was a group of four friends in our company. They used to spend all their free time together and did not talk to anyone else. They would get together as far away from the other soldiers as possible and when a stranger came near them, they would keep silent and wait, not answering the questions of anyone except for their commanders.

Their way of communication was very much based on punches, kicks and swearwords that I had never heard anywhere else. They always seemed to be having so much fun; but, during all this fun, one of them would punch the other on the shoulder, another would kick the other in the ass and afterwards they would just burst into louder laughters.

And they swore in an extremely foul language with sexually explicit themes, usually referring to mothers and sisters. Those swears were resembling mini-scenarios, which were very detailed and employed a series of instruments, foremost their rifles.

It was difficult to grasp the dynamics among them from a distance; however, one of them seemed to be coming to the fore as the "alpha" of the group. He was the one who decided what would be done when, and he was talking with an air as if he had an old head on young shoulders.

One day, when I was the sergeant on guard duty, they were again sitting afar in the lawn, snatching a newspaper from each others' hands and laughing at one another. At one point, one of them turned to the "alpha" and shouted, "Yo sonny, hand it over dude". Everyone suddenly fell silent. The other two walked away from them a bit, their faces struck with fear.

When the alpha slowly stood up, his friend rose to his feet in greater panic. I could not grasp the situation, I could not figure out what could have caused this sudden tension. All of a sudden, the alpha punched his friend on the face and, right after that, kicked him on the hips.

Though the boy stumbled, he was not surprised, neither were the other two. "Who are you calling sonny'?", shouted the alpha. "Who is the son of whom!" The boy was aware that he had made a mistake, but as far as I could tell he was supposed to protect his own honor in some way; otherwise, he would disgrace himself.

He immediately threw a punch, which landed on the alpha's ear; the alpha put his hand over his ear in pain, he seemed to have lost his balance. His friend, who did not miss the opportunity, knocked him down with a kick. "I say 'sonny' to anyone I please, you bastard" shouted the boy and sat on the alpha and threw another punch.

I was just standing there and watching the scene in utter bewilderment. I was supposed to intervene, but, I had long understood that as a "short-term" soldier, I should not mess with the "long-terms", who did not take us "short-terms" seriously.

I looked around, but since everyone was away from us, nobody had noticed the incident. The alpha shook off his friend somehow, rose to his feet and started kicking him on the head. He was shouting, "You cannot call me 'sonny'."

I had to intervene now; I ran towards them saying, "Stop it, what are you doing?". I don't know why, but, when they saw me approaching, the other two, who were standing at a distance, broke up the fight saying, "Come on, stop it."

In the meanwhile, others also noticed the incident and rushed toward us. The alpha quickly walked away; the face of his friend was drenched in blood, he was not in a state to get up.

They helped him to his feet and took him to the infirmary. When I asked them why they had a fight, they did not give an answer. The alpha was sent to the disciplinary ward for a month, which means that the duration of his military service was also extended for another month. When the commander interrogated them, he said that his friend had cursed at him.

***

I had a friend who had told me that his parents were fighting every night at the top of their voices, he was dreaming of the day they would get divorced. He was the son of a well-off, established family; in the vogue words of the time, they were a family "who had seen Europe". Then, one winter, it turned out that his father, who was supposedly on a business trip, had in fact took his lover to "see Europe".

A friend of his mother coincidentally saw them in a luxury restaurant in one of the capital cities of Europe. When the father came back, there naturally erupted a big fight and they got separated.

They had a huge detached house, the father refused to leave it and settled in one of its rooms. It was not possible for him to cover the expenses of two houses under the current economic conditions. He would go to work every morning and come back to his room in the evening.

My friend started bringing his dinner to his room in a tray, he took on the role of a servant, so to speak. The father would sometimes attempt to persuade the mother, but all those attempts would end with shouts and the slamming of doors.

One night, when he came home from school, he again heard shouting. As this was a routine thing, he quietly went to his room without being seen by anyone. When the shouting suddenly stopped, he had a weird feeling.

When he went to the living room, he found his father choking his mother. His mother's face was crimson red, her mouth was frozen in a muted scream. He immediately pulled his father away and kicked him out of the house. They did not talk for a while, then one day his father called him, apologized, and invited him to his new place to talk.

From that moment on, my friend somewhat distanced himself from us. He would not join us when we went to the movies or dinners or on school trips, not even to cut class and walk around İstiklal Avenue, which was one of his favorite things to do. We were thinking it was because of sadness, that he would get better after some time.

I learned later that when his father left home, he stopped giving money to them because "it was not possible to support two homes". The home that he supported for himself was a luxurious hotel room with a view of the Bosphorus. My friend would visit him there once or twice a week, at times getting significant pocket money.

Every time they met, his father would say things like, "This is nonsense. Convince your mother so I can return home. All I did was a little philandering, no need to make a big deal out of it".

Once he even told him how meticulously and cleverly he had planned that holiday, had her mother's friend not been there, his plan would have worked perfectly, like a movie scenario.

His mother first borrowed money from her friends to support their home, then sold everything she had. His father was still grumbling "No way, she cannot kick me out of the house". At one point, he even began trying to scare his son, saying "Your mother cannot take care of you. She cannot handle this, she will lose all the money."

***

These two seemingly unrelated incidents involving people from different backgrounds and different generations have stuck in my mind because it was not possible for me to make sense of either one of them.

I could not understand why the soldier laughed at all those insults but felt humiliated and overreacted when he was called "sonny", and similarly I could not understand how a father could be so stubborn as to put his beloved son's life and even future into danger to save a relationship that had already ended.

Many years later, when I was pondering and making research for a project on the states of manhood in Turkey, these two stories became more meaningful for me. I saw that the states of "being a man" and a set of behaviors pertaining to manhood, which are imbued in us since childhood, leave deep marks on every man from all walks of life and all ages.

A life that begins with supposedly endearing sayings like "I'll eat your weenie" that you hear as a child, and continues with sentences like "If you are man enough you won't put up with that "...

Transforming into a wretched herd of people who constantly feel in their subconscious that they have to prove how much of a man they are at any time, at any place...

Men who are actually losers and thus feel threatened all the time and turn every moment of their lives into a show of force... The person who thinks that he holds and must hold the reins of stability, and views this as proof of his manhood, resorts to violence like a cornered animal when he loses that stability.

This violence can be physical, emotional or economic, but its essence is the same. The violence of the soldier who took offense at being called "sonny" and the violence of the father who was caught red handed and kicked out of the house come from the same place. The loss of stability and the feeling that their manhood is under threat.  (RM/ŞA/APA/VK/SD/IG)

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