Forgetting to Forget, 1923–1944 embrace the homeland, perform military service, and speak Turkish at
home have been treated the same as those who betrayed the fatherland.”^56
Repeating to himself that he has only been doing his patriotic duty, he
finishes dressing in his brown three-piece suit, which hangs loosely from
his stocky frame. He ties his best yellow polka-dotted silk tie and pats
down his short, dark hair while looking in the hotel mirror, bends over to
polish his shoes, purchased while in two-year exile in America during the
recently ended banning of his newspaper, and steps out into the hot and
dusty afternoon. It is early autumn in Ankara, the remote, quiet, yet ever
dusty new capital of the Turkish Republic, established on the ruins of the
Ottoman Empire in 1923. How many times will he have to shine his shoes
to look respectable before arriving at his important meeting?
For over two decades he has been a vocal Turkish nationalist, yet there
have always been people who doubted him. Today is no different. Walking
out of the hotel, he runs into a parliamentarian who shouts from close
range, “They should lynch you for what you wrote.”^57 Unshaken, he
realizes how much the World War has changed the city. It has become
meaner, more isolated and insular, more closed into itself than before, if
that were possible. He does not have time to stop to greet the owners of
some of his favorite shops, but that is pointless anyway, as they have been
deported to labor camps in the east, and their businesses taken over by
others whom he does not know.
The doorman hails a taxi, which drives across the city to the Parliament
building. When he arrives at the monumental, symmetrical, cut-stone
building, the white-helmeted, goose-stepping guards recognize him.
Ahmet Emin Yalman is the editor of Vatan, the second leading daily in
the nation—when it is not banned. They wave him in to the grounds, and
others escort him to the Office of the Prime Minister. Şükrü Saracogˇlu is
not his favorite politician. He is very unlike the recently deceased Atatürk,
whose corpse lies at the Ethnography Museum. The nation’s founder had
been on very good terms with Yalman, a fellow Salonikan, whose father
had been Atatürk’s penmanship and calligraphy teacher.
Saracogˇlu looks up from what he is writing at his oversized desk. He is
prime minister during the worst of times, the war years, and it has taken
its toll. Although his appointment as prime minister had been met with
great hope, two years of wartime policies have changed people’s opinions
of their leader; the stress has changed him as well. Gone are the pleasant
demeanor, the little jokes and stories he used to deploy to lighten tense
moments, the gift of gab.^58 The office is beyond his abilities, he can’t
handle it. He is exhausted. His dark hair is already receding, his tightly
stretched skin seems taut to the breaking point.