Portrait of a Turkish Family (12 page)

‘The garden door!’ my mother was saying piteously, but we had not been able to get to the garden door, for the flames in our house had been worse in the back. Did we stand foolishly in the flaming street for one petrified moment? Who knows? Memory has shut down on that for I can only coherently remember running along the street, clutching my mother tightly, whilst she sought a way to turn off, to reach the waste field that lay at the back of our house, at the bottom of the garden. The street was full of humanity gone momentarily mad. Maidservants, old men in their
nightshirts
, screaming, petrified children and tumbling down on us, great, fiery rafters from the derelict, deserted houses. One fell in my mother’s path and I heard her give a sort of gasp of horror, a moaning, inhuman gasp. Pitter patter pitter went our bare, running feet on the hard cobblestones and our breaths emerged harshly from our chests and all the time the fires crackled merrily. Down a dark street this time, with no falling rafters to block our path. Frantic men and women at their doors, wondering if the fires would spread to threaten them too.

‘God save us! What a terrible night!’ said their grotesque faces but we panted on to reach the open fields.

Waste ground at last, soft grass under our bleeding feet and mass hysteria to greet us under the fig trees. Mehmet and I fell on the ground, sore and bleeding, our hearts thumping to bursting-point, our thin nightshirts bound with perspiration to our shivering bodies. My mother laid Muazzez across my lap and leaned against a stunted little tree in a posture unendurably touching and desolate.

‘My money!’ she said over and over again, ‘and all my jewellery.’

And suddenly like a mad thing, and indeed I believe the dark, feathery wing of madness touched her brow eternally that night, she darted away from us on her weary, bleeding feet.

‘An-ne! An-ne! (Mother! Mother!)’ I shouted in a fresh paroxysm of terror. ‘Don’t leave us, oh don’t leave us!’

And then I started to cry in a weak sort of way for I had no energy left to put into crying.

But my mother ran unheeding of my crying voice, stumbling a little, falling over, picking herself up to forge ahead again. Muazzez lay on my knee, wrapped in a little lacy woollen shawl, and I bent over her, wearily trying to hush her whimpering. Mehmet plucked at my sleeve, wanting sympathy too, and I put an arm about him and drew him against my shoulder. We watched the fires and our own house burning with the rest and our brains were numb, no longer functioning properly. Even fear and tiredness had dropped away to leave us mercifully empty. All about us, children were crying and women were wailing but these were only external things, having no power over us. Even the knowledge that my mother had gone back to that burning house could arouse no emotion, revive no terror. We just sat there, Mehmet and I, and the fig tree stretched above us and now and again Muazzez softly whimpered.

Before us lay our garden and farther back was our home, our home that had been our comfort and our childish security. The district
tulumba
had arrived and were trying to find water, and their frantic shouts echoed to us across the gardens. We could see them running from place to place, trying in vain to stem the fires. They had only one pump but at least ten houses were burning and on the other side of the street, which we could not see from here, as many more burned. So they ran and they shouted, throwing ineffectual buckets of water and the fires roared triumphantly. I was watching for my mother to come back but there was no sign of her for a long, long time. Then I saw her running to us down the garden path, for it was as light as day, and I plainly saw her night-dressed figure and the thin, white, delicate feet running, running, running …

She came to us and flung herself down, utterly exhausted. Her hair hung wildly about her face and in her mournful eyes was a glare, a brilliance, which knew nothing of sanity. She looked towards our house and I looked too and the last bit of the roof came down into the greedy inferno that waited for it. Our house, like all the others, had blazed up like matchwood, like a piece of paper, and now only its ghostly shell remained to remind us that once we had been happy there.

Still, thirty-three years afterwards, I have only to close my eyes to be back again to that night and see our home burning. It is as clear before me as if it happened only yesterday.

A woman came with a crying child and threw it on the grass beside us, then ran off again to God knows where. Surely she did not hope to go through that hell to salvage anything? My mother stared before her with dilated eyes and my heart turned over in fear, so still and pale she looked. She said very loudly, as if to make sure I quite understood,

‘Everything is lost. Everything – do you understand that?’

And she fixed me with that hard, brilliant stare, her nostrils quivering, then suddenly she heeled over in the thick, soft grass, oblivious to the sounds about her or her ruined, blackening house.

How long she lay there, how long we children sat there, I do not know. I think perhaps Mehmet cried himself to sleep and even Muazzez at last gave up her whimpering. Dawn was breaking over the desolate scene and the fires had died down, only a pall of thick, black smoke lying over the empty shells of the houses and there was the chill of early morning in the air. Presently in all that dead, exhausted place I discerned my grandmother with Feride and İnci coming over the fields, looking to right and to left, as though searching for us.

‘Grandmother!’ I called but my voice was no voice at all, only a thread of sound, a croak that could not disturb the silence.

I placed Muazzez carefully on the wet, dewy grass and stood up stiffly, walking towards the three who were searching for us. I walked haltingly, for my feet were badly torn and the blood had dried between the toes and the soft dawn air whipped through my thin nightdress like a gale.

They saw me and ran crying to me and put their kind arms around me and my grandmother warmed me with her coat. I stood looking at them as if they were strangers and in a sense they were strangers, for they came to me out of another life, a gracious, easy, friendly life that might never come again. I told my grandmother my mother was safe, and my brother and sister too, then led her across the grass to them.

Feride knelt down beside my mother, taking off her own warm cloak and wrapping it tenderly around her. I saw her force cognac down my mother’s throat and heard her cough and choke a little with its burning rawness. Then she opened her eyes and looked at us for a moment, uncomprehendingly. She looked at each of us in turn, then picked Muazzez up in her arms.

‘If you had not taken Feride,’ she said to my grandmother, ‘something would have been left of my home. I could have saved the only money I had, or my jewellery – if you had not taken Feride.’

Then her stiff body relaxed and the hardness left her eyes. She looked at me, at Mehmet, and at our poor, cut feet and smoke-blackened faces, at our quivering, unsteady mouths and she put out a hand to draw us to her.

‘But I still have my two big men,’ she said and we fell on her and shed the tears that had been dammed up inside us for too long. Then my grandmother got busy with hot drinks, which she carried in a sort of flannel bag, and we were taken to her home.

And of all that little group perhaps it was I alone who said a long farewell to my burned home, that had smiled so brilliantly in the sun, only yesterday. 

So to my grandmother’s house, where we were bathed and fed and put into warm beds, whilst Feride was sent to buy clothes for us.

My mother became very ill with a fever and the doctor called many times each day and we were constantly told to keep quiet. My
grandmother
’s house held an alien quality for us, more than the quality of strangeness. We used to sit out in the gardens with İnci, feeling unwanted in that childless house, and we rarely saw the old man. As a matter of fact we were so terrified of him that if we ever saw him coming we used to run like the wind in the opposite direction. Nobody knew how long we were going to remain in this house, my grandmother only saying that when my mother was well again something would be arranged. Mehmet and I felt cut adrift, not being allowed to visit our mother, never seeing Yasemin or Nuri for they had moved to another part of İstanbul, their house having perished with ours. Changes began to take place. One morning Feride bade us goodbye for my grandmother had found another situation for her, knowing we could never afford her again. İnci left too, with many tears, for she had never known any other service but in my home. Now she was being sent as a nursemaid to a strange family, even she would be separated from her mother. Saying goodbye to İnci frightened me for I did not know what we were going to do without her. It was almost like losing a limb, a part of one’s self. One morning we were allowed to visit my mother, who lay in her big bed looking like a doll. Her appearance shocked me. Her dark curls had all been combed flat against the sides of her face, her cheeks were pinched and taut from the fever. Although she reached her hands to us there was no welcome in her face and her eyes were expressionless. She looked as if coming back to life was too much of an effort for her and that given the slightest opportunity she would slip loose.

As I grew older and came to a better understanding of things I realised that my mother was a woman predictable only if things went her way. Poverty she had to face but many people in the world face poverty, if not with contentment at least with resignation. She was unable to do this, yet unable also to escape. The sight of her burning house was a far greater shock than my father going to war, the loss of her possessions the worst blow. With money she could have built a new life, without it she was unable to accept what other people did for her. It was not so much pride, although that entered in too. It was more an incapability to deal with life on any other terms than with money behind her. I think she had hoped to die the night of the fire. The thought of having to rear three children and one of them an infant was almost too much for her simple, inexperienced mind to bear.

She was sick of a fever for days and emerged from it quite another person. She had always been quiet but now her silence was a fearsome thing. She had never been known to lose her temper, now she flared into easy rages that were all the more alarming because of her usual chilling quietness. The shy beautiful young woman came out of her fever with a different personality. When she was able to get up, she would sit in the gardens, looking at nothing and seemingly unaware of her surroundings. She never once asked for Feride or İnci and would gaze speculatively at the infant Muazzez, who was being looked after by a wet-nurse.

One day my grandmother told her that the old man was willing to give us rooms in one of his many houses. My mother listened to her and agreed to accept the offer, but my grandmother had to urge her almost forcibly before she would give her decision. She had one good diamond ring, which she had been wearing the night of the fire, and she asked the old man to sell it for her. I remember she held it out to him disdainfully, between her finger and thumb, and the sun touched rays of fire from it. As he took it from her, her eyes flickered uncertainly. When he returned and handed her the money from its sale she thanked him and said she would be glad to move into the rooms he proposed to give her as soon as possible. The old man replied, but with courtesy, that nothing would please him better and his cold eyes raked Mehmet and me with such an expression of active dislike that I was quite breathless with astonishment. This old man had centred all his dislike on us children. He had hoped that his marriage would give him children, sons, to carry on his name and his business. I think my grandmother’s refusal to share his bed had damaged some part of his pride to such an extent that he could not bear to look on us, the fruits of her life with my grandfather.

To my grandmother, I never saw him anything else but coldly polite. She was an obstinate, self-willed woman with a wounding tongue and I imagine his pride suffered badly beneath her hands. Looking back, it amazes me to what extent she over-rode him since he could have, in those days, thrown her penniless from his house by simply saying: ‘I divorce you’, three times in the presence of witnesses. Many a wife, thirty years ago, was a good wife simply because she lived under the threat of those words. With the Atatürk régime all this was done away with so that nowadays, in Turkey, the divorce system is so complicated that many couples effect a reconciliation long before the slow-moving, intricate machinery of divorce goes into action.

Servants were sent to the house we were to occupy, or, more accurately, the rooms we were to occupy. I was permitted to go with them. The house was behind Bayazit Square, two-storeyed and so old that one wondered what it was that continued to hold it erect. There was no garden and it fronted the narrow, dreary street, all its windows covered with
kafes
– closely latticed harem shutters always used in old Turkey to prevent passing males from catching glimpses of the women who moved within the house.

The upper floor was to be ours. It consisted of three large, very dirty rooms, a big square landing with no light save the greyish haze which filtered through the unclean skylight. All the rooms were dark and airless, because of the
kafes
covering the windows. My mother told one of the servants to tear them off but he trembled with horror to attempt anything so revolutionary, without the old man’s permission.

My mother knew it was useless to insist. She looked impatient and the servants started to scrub the floors, and she took my hand and we went back to my grandmother’s house. She seemed very determined and I had difficulty in keeping up with her hurrying figure. These odd, inexplicable moods of hers tormented my heart and gave me a feeling of insecurity. Too much seemed to be happening at once and I had mental indigestion trying to keep up with events. Lately I clung to her passionately, watching her face anxiously for signs of storm, learning of the coldness of the world before my time. My mother represented love and stability and, to be trite, children are conservative.

When we arrived at my grandmother’s house, she asked to see the old man and finding I would not be dissuaded from her side impatiently allowed me to enter his room with her. He sat in a big chair in front of the window and looked irritable, for it was a day when his gout was giving him its own particular hell. My mother, with remarkable docility, asked if the
kafes
might be removed from the windows of our new abode. He sat looking at her for a moment or two, she staring steadily and coolly at him, and surprisingly he agreed to her request. He added that he would instruct his men to paint the rooms for her and hoped that she would be comfortable there.

His voice was quiet and formal but I think he liked my mother in his own way for he liked so few people. He probably felt a certain
understandable
pity for her distress but her relationship to my grandmother alienated her.

My mother was pleased with her victory and hummed a little air, a sure sign that things were going well with her. I was overflowing with
thankfulness
to have her back with us again, even if it was only for a short time. For ever since the fire she had been unapproachable, far away from us, and several times I had caught her remote eye fixed on Mehmet or myself, as though she asked herself what we had to do with her. I smarted under this unawareness for she was all that we had left, having lost so much from childhood.

When my mother told my grandmother what she was doing about the
kafes
, the latter was appalled – in much the same way as the servant had been earlier in the day. She told my mother she must not do such a thing, that she would be stoned as a prostitute if she exposed herself in this shameless fashion. My mother laughed at her and afterwards, when we were returning to the house, she disdainfully refused the offer of a maid to accompany her, saying that in her new station in life she could not afford the luxury of a maid.

At the house, the scrubbing had been finished and clean, naked floors gleamed wetly. A man was busy removing the offending
kafes
from the windows, whilst another mixed distemper in a bucket. They were very polite to my mother but it was plain to see they thought her very odd to want the
kafes
off the windows, to let the unaccustomed daylight into these depressing rooms. She was very gay all that day. Her gaiety
transformed
her so that one could see she looked twenty-two again, beautiful and high-spirited but husbandless. And the men servants were probably prophesying amongst themselves her downfall. She was an odd
contradiction
, one moment spineless and the next bounding with immense vitality. In one way, her own unobtrusive way, she was the forerunner of Kemal Atatürk – for she emancipated herself years before his time. That the people in her new life would talk about her she did not care.

She had always lived in houses which admitted fresh air and she intended to do the same thing here, and if there was no garden to protect her from eager scrutiny – then she would have to get used to the peculiar ways of mankind. But fresh air she intended to have even at the cost of her reputation. So she snapped her fingers at the gossipers and acted the lady in her three mean rooms and lamented the loss of her diamond ring. Now that she had found a home again, her vitality was boundless, colour seemed to return to her cheeks, the flesh to the delicate bones. To Mehmet and me her courage was terrific and we still think so today. We cannot help but admire her colossal struggle, her intrepid spirit and even as children we were aware of this courage. We could forgive the lapses into depression and bad temper, the seeming ruthlessness when she banished her children eventually. Today we see these things in their true perspective and can only see the wit, the bravery and the gaiety which transformed three mean rooms in a mean street into a formidable bulwark against the rest of the world.

My grandmother arranged to let us have the most of her furniture, the cumbersome, handsome walnut furniture she had moved from our house upon her remarriage. From her vast stocks she provided curtains and linens and rugs and tapestries which had once graced our salon in my grandfather’s house. The three rooms and the dark, square landing took on a joyous air, as if they had been waiting for just such a transformation. The windows stood wide open to the world and if the neighbours gasped at such audacity in their midst, my mother I am sure was totally unaware of it. Naturally they knew her story, for gossip has a way of travelling in İstanbul as rapidly as it has in any other part of the world. No doubt the good neighbours thought she had brought these ‘fast’ habits from her former life.

The first evening we were established in the new house we discovered that, so much else having been thought of, we were without lamps or food. My mother went down the naked stairs to the widow who lived beneath, thinking perhaps she could oblige. Their conversation must have been pathetic. The grand lady in her fine silk dress and the poor, wretched trollop, shunned by the neighbours because of her reputed ‘goings-on’ – she must have thought it was the Sultan himself, no less, who had descended upon her to request the loan of a lamp! Unfortunately she had no lamp, or if she had was far too flustered to search for it, but she produced a scrap of candle. This my mother triumphantly bore upstairs, to place in a silver candlestick on the buffet. So much had been lost and was irretrievable but a silver candlestick was a necessity. Nothing less would have done, not glass or china or even just plain, honest tin, nothing but a silver one was good enough, for ladies only used the best … The room in the candlelight hid some of its secrets and the cracks in the ceiling might have been gold-encrusted ornamentations in that kindly glow – if you had enough imagination, and I had plenty. Well, there we were in our new home, in our new clothes provided by my grandmother – and we ate dry bread and a handful of black olives to still the ache in our stomachs. Then we settled to sleep, far away from the murmur of the sea or the scent of the flowers from an almost forgotten garden and for me, at least, it was as comfortable as the Dolmabahçe Saray. It probably was too, for the white, iced-cake-looking Saray with its echoing dungeons had no great reputation for comfort – or so I heard afterwards.

And I wonder what my mother thought that night, as she lay down in my grandfather’s exotic bed – the one where I had once played ‘lions’ – and the legs of which were placed in glass bowls of water, to prevent the bed-bugs from becoming too adventurous? Did she thank God for safe deliverance into a new home, however mean, or did she pray for guidance for the future? Perhaps. Perhaps not. She was never a religious person, being too impatient to accept the Muslim teaching of Fatalism, and with a mind so hurrying that God must have just flitted through it with barely a hurried nod in her direction. She had been born in Albania and her unorthodox views of life and religion derived perhaps from some far-off Christian ancestor who slept uneasily in her blood.

The next morning,
şütçü
– the milkman – awakened us by his violent assertions that his milk was the best in İstanbul. Mehmet and I leaped from our shared bed and rushed to the window, to see this remarkable apparition who had dared to disturb our dreams. Always before,
sütçü
had decorously called at the back door and in a series of sibilant whispers conducted his business with Hacer or Feride, never dreaming of loudly crying his wares for fear of waking the sleeping occupants of the house. This was a great change. In our new life, people set their day in motion with the arrival of the milkman and
sütçü
himself had no false illusions about his value, and firmly believed in thoroughly arousing any sleepy heads who still remained in bed.