Lili Marleen
Suddenly İstanbul Municipal Radio
starts playing Lili Marleen.
Tears in my eyes.
I flunked the entrance exam of the German High school;
Leyla, my steady girlfriend since the first grade,
my eternal love, got in.
Our roads, I know, will separate.
What a beautiful language, says my mother
making my melancholy worse.
Don’t let the girls see you crying,
advises my younger older-brother,
they’ll never go out with you again.
This was the song of the Nazi brutes,
declares my older older-brother authoritatively
as if this historical fact would repair my broken heart
After taking a sip from his lemonade,
my father pitches in, trying to find a gentle side
– as always – in everything:
All soldiers loved it,
Dutch, Hungarian, British,
and of course Italian…
Then he adds dreamily:
Even the Turkish reservists sang it
in the dark, in their barracks.
I see my parents looking at each other
– my father on leave for the weekend
in his meticulously ironed lieutenant uniform,
my mother, beautiful as a French resistance heroine –
sitting in front of our AGA v251 radio
holding hands maybe
and listening to Lili Marleen.