Portrait of a Turkish Family (13 page)

He saw us hanging out of the window and his jaw dropped in surprise because the
kafes
were gone. He was long and lean and bronzed and wore patched clothing but it could not disguise the smooth rippling of the muscles under his shirt. He had a several days’ growth of beard and this fascinated us very much. His voice was the voice of Doom.

‘Milk!’ he barked at us fiercely. ‘Do you want any milk today?’

‘No, thank you,’ we said politely, in chorus, and he grinned sourly and stood back to get a good look at us, the paragons of good behaviour.

Just then the widow opened the front door, thrusting forward a
saucepan
which the
sütçü
silently filled. Then I heard my mother’s pattering feet taking the stairs and she also held out a receptacle to be filled. She bought
yoğurt
for us too, a sort of sour junket which we loved with sugar.

With the coming of
sütçü
, the street came to life. Doors opened and saucepans were thrust forth and
sütçü
did a roaring trade.

My mother called to us from the landing, which had been made into a kitchen, that it was time for us to get up. We began to pull on our clothes, fumbling over buttons and tapes. Mehmet exasperatedly started to cry and said he wanted İnci, and my mother swept impatiently into the room. Suddenly buttons and tapes became docile things under her experienced fingers. She showed us both how our clothes should be put on, how held together – which was the most important so far as we were concerned. She explained that for the time being there was no İnci to help us and that we must learn to do these things for ourselves. She was particularly scathing with me, declaring that a boy almost seven years old should at least be able to pull on his boots, even if he were incapable of lacing them. I hung my head in shame for every word she said was painfully true and I simply had not the remotest idea of which boot went on which foot. No doubt we benefited from her instructions for I certainly never remember another occasion of being helped into our clothes.

Later that day when I was sitting in the so-called salon I saw my grandmother coming up the street. I recognised her by her veil for all the women in the street wore the
çarşaf
– a sort of black scarf tightly binding the forehead and hair and with another piece of material, a
peçe
, covering the lower part of their faces. They looked unbearably ugly and drab and I was thankful that neither my mother nor my grandmother wore such things. I called to her from my little window and she waved her hand to me and I rushed down to open the door for her. She instructed me to leave the door open, as two of her porters were to arrive with more furniture for us.

My mother greeted her, then mocked lightly: ‘But what is this today? No chaperone?’

And my grandmother self-consciously replied that she saw no reason why a poor old woman like herself – she was about fifty – could not walk the daytime streets unescorted.

My mother’s emancipation seemed to be affecting my grandmother too, although of course she would never admit that, holding firmly to the argument that whereas perhaps
she
might be rash enough to venture out alone, by reason of her age, my mother could not do the same thing and for the same reason!

Porters arrived with a sewing-machine that had formerly been used by Feride for the household mending. A large console table followed, a little inlaid Moorish coffee-table, a wooden chest containing God knew what and monstrous armchairs that would crowd everything else out of the salon. My mother’s face was a study as she watched all these things hauled up the narrow stairs and heaved pantingly into the rooms. When the porters had departed she asked my grandmother where she thought everything would be put and my grandmother looked taken aback for, naturally, such a thought had never entered her head. In a sudden burst of generosity she had given this furniture to us and expected pleasure as our reaction and not pointless questions as to where they should all be put. She looked around her, having to admit that the rooms were already overcrowded but she told my mother she ought to be grateful for that. She felt affronted and took no pains to conceal this. I think she saw nothing incongruous in this lovely old furniture adorning these poor rooms, or the silky Sparta and Persian rugs strewn across the uneven floorboards, broken in places. She had wanted to instal her daughter-inlaw and her grandchildren in a fine home and hey presto! had she not done so? Why then was the daughter-in-law looking round her so doubtfully, as though ungrateful for all these lovely things? She must have given up struggling with the idea for she abruptly dismissed the subject of the offending furniture and proceeded to unpack the wooden chest, feeling certain that these treasures would be appreciated. She brought forth curtains, to be hung immediately, she stipulated.
Table-and
bed-linen was dragged out to trail on the floor, heavy silver cutlery, to be used presumably for our dry bread and our black olives. Hammered brass lamps, which would require a gallon of oil a day to keep them going. A silk-embroidered bed-set which, she proudly informed Mehmet and me, had been given to her when she was a young girl for her wedding to my grandfather.

My mother looked at all these old treasures and her eyes filled with tears. They reminded her too vividly of my grandfather and my father and the houses where she had been happy and I felt she did not want them here, in this house that held no memories. She said nothing, although the tears began to drop on to her cheeks. Then she recovered herself and bade me blow the
mangal
, so that coffee could be brewed. I went out to the landing, where lurked the
mangal
, a table, crockery for everyday use and several buckets of water. There was no water in the house, although fresh drinking-water was supplied each week by Bekçi Baba. All other water had to be fetched from the local pump, the meeting-place for all the ladies of the district, and only that morning I had staggered twenty times or more with small tin cans to be filled. I could not bear to see my mother do such menial work as this. The darkness hid what was on the landing but the unlovely smell of cooking filled the house perpetually. Cooking facilities were primitive. Charcoal was burned in the big copper brazier, the
mangal
, an iron tripod placed over it and the pan containing whatever had to be cooked stood on it. After several slow hours a meal was either cooked to perfection or ruined beyond redemption, depending on the sort of cook you were. In those first days with this cooking arrangement much of our food was uneatable for my mother was
not
a good cook. She liked good food but had no patience and could not be bothered to do everything the cookery book prescribed. Many years later she became quite an expert but only when she had already ruined our digestion.

That morning she made coffee for my grandmother, handing it to her on a thin, very old silver tray and, if one turned one’s back to the window – ignoring the view – one would have thought that İnci had just left the room and that we were back again in the house that had been burned. So firmly was ritual in her blood that my mother saw nothing odd in the fact that she should continue to serve coffee on a silver tray that would have graced a collector’s possessions. She who had nothing left in the world, who was poorer by far than the widow who lived under us. We saw no incongruity in my mother’s gesture either, but remembering that moment so long ago can bring a smile to me today. There they sat, those two elegant ladies, in a slum room and they sipped coffee from a silver tray. The old order was established once more and presently my grandmother would forget herself and look for the bell to ring for İnci to clear away …

That day, before she left, she pressed gold money into my mother’s hand, the latter protesting that she was not in need of it since she still had the money from the sale of her ring. My mother had very little knowledge of the value of money and absolutely no true knowledge of food prices. If she wanted something she had to have it and if it seemed to cost many gold coins – well, unfortunately that was life and we were in the middle of a war. Consequently, traders robbed her, demanding exorbitant prices for their wares. She was always too shy to argue with them, feeling it beneath her dignity but I had begun to notice that the other women in the marketplace paid much less for their foodstuffs than she did. If I remonstrated with her, she would hush me impatiently, but there came a time when she began seriously to worry about her money. It was inconceivable that my grandmother could continue to support us. We had already heard that her husband had been almost insane with fury when he discovered she had moved all her furniture without consulting him. Still food continued to be our biggest problem and one gold coin seemed to have very little purchasing power – especially if one patronised the Bourse Noir, which my mother did.

About this time in my life I became initiated into the purely feminine mystery of acting nursemaid. My mother had formed the habit of shopping alone, usually after the morning’s meal was over. She would leave Mehmet and Muazzez in my charge, to my disgust, for I hated to be held responsible for everything they did. My duties mostly consisted of saying ‘don’t’ but occasionally I would give Mehmet an exasperated slap, which would make him roar so loudly that once the widow rushed up to see what was wrong and afterwards complained about me to my mother. When my mother remonstrated, I was resentful, blind and deaf to everything save my intense dislike of looking after the younger ones.

One particular day my mother had found more difficulties than usual in getting bread for us. Latterly our whole world revolved on the one word ‘bread’. She had spent most of the morning at the baker’s, returning weary and empty-handed. She went out again in the afternoon, with the same result. Towards evening she set off again, telling Mehmet and me not to make too much noise since Muazzez was sleeping. For a while we played quietly, then Mehmet became tired and fretful, and we gathered our toys together, putting them into a cupboard on the landing and went back to our favourite corner seat to watch for our mother’s return. It was getting duskish and my mother seemed to be away for an unusually long time. The street was deserted and presently we heard the widow go out, closing the front door conspiratorily after her. We watched her black, dumpy figure disappear down the street and we became uneasy, knowing there was now nobody in the house save ourselves.

Perhaps some memory of the darkness which had preceded the night of the fire came up to catch us by the throat, causing us to talk in whispers and look, now and then, furtively over our shoulders into the darkening room. Mehmet was sleepy and begged to be allowed to go to bed but I was loath to part with his company. I longed for my mother’s return. I wished the lamps were lit but dared not touch them, on my mother’s orders. We continued to sit there and still she did not come and the room grew darker and the street was silent as the grave. There was a little mosque near the house and from our corner window we could see it quite plainly, its one, slender minaret piercing the gloom. More clearly to be seen, and within one of its windows, was the tomb of a holy man, with a candle – lit by some pious aspirant – burning steadily in a glass holder. Muezzin had mounted the lonely minaret and was calling the people to prayer, but we could not see whether anyone was entering the mosque or not for the entrance faced in the opposite direction to us. Muezzin’s voice was mournful and mysterious, the liquid Arabic notes rippling from his tongue like strange music. When he had finished reading
Ezzin
and had left the minaret the night seemed stiller and blacker than ever. Only the candle still winked brightly on the holy man’s grave.

Suddenly I began to be afraid. Fear and hunger and tiredness combined, loosened my tongue. ‘Dead man is coming! Dead man is coming!’ Mehmet looked at me in the semidarkness and his lip started to quiver. He looked in the direction of the candle and began to howl with fear too. We rushed from the window and over to the sofa, which was draped with an old Persian praying-mat, and this we pulled over our heads, whimpering in terror. We whipped up our fear to a greater frenzy, telling each other that the holy man had got out of his grave because he was cold and lonely there and was coming to take us back to his grave, so that we should keep him warm. We shivered and our teeth chattered and scattered remnants of İnci’s ghostly lore kept coming back to keep our terror at fever pitch. We lay clasping each other in desperation, muttering that the holy man must be very near to us now. We pushed each other in our extreme agitation, pulling the too-small praying-mat first over his head, then over mine. In the midst of all this I heard footsteps, slow, furtive footsteps.

‘Here he comes!’ I yelled, panic-stricken in earnest this time.

The footsteps drew nearer and nearer, entered our front door and mounted the stairs – slowly, wearily, heavily, just as I supposed a
long-dead
holy man would walk. My heart was ready to stop forever and I lay under the praying-mat, with Mehmet screaming his lungs out, and a stern hand pulled the praying-mat away from our faces.

‘What is this?’ enquired my mother’s voice.

I was so relieved to see her that I was totally unable to reply but Mehmet managed to stutter ‘D-Dead man!’ and then went off into a fresh paroxysm of wailing. My mother strove to make him cease, sorting him out from beneath me – where he had wriggled – and trying to wrest the corner of the praying-mat, which he tightly clutched, from his fingers.

When she had finally extricated him, it was discovered that he had wet his pants a couple of times, and looked as if the slightest cross word from my mother would cause him to do the same again.  

Life was by no means dull in our street. From the arrival of the first, early morning
sütçü
, to the departure of the last evening
yoğurtçu
, there was noise and bustle and arguing and laughter. I used to sit in my corner window, a pile of cushions placed on my chair so that I could see the better, and watch the street vendors leading their lazy-looking mules up and down, up and down, crying their wares and shouting insults at each other. There were the aubergine sellers, the tomato-sellers and traders with great, glowing heaps of lemons. And, in their seasons, the water-melon sellers and grape-sellers. They would lead their mules drowsily, enormous baskets strapped on either side of the beast to display the aubergines and the tomatoes and the tender, young French beans. They would cry hoarsely to the listening houses that no finer vegetables than theirs were to be found in any part of the world. A shrill housewife would demand the price and, upon hearing the reply, would commence to abuse the seller. Perhaps even a battle would ensue, the trader and the housewife each vying with the other for the honours of the slanging match. Sometimes other housewives would join in, defending their representative. A few of the other traders would listen sceptically, and after a while the battle of words would reach such a pitch that the combatants had to search deeply into the opponent’s antecedents, in order that fresh fuel might be added to the fire. There was never any danger of either side running out of words, even if it meant reiterating the same ones over and over again. It was nothing to hear one of them informing the other that he was a son of a donkey or that he was the husband of a prostitute or the father of innumerable illegitimate children. These were mild epithets against the stronger ones that could be used if the housewife really got into her stride. She usually bested the trader, for she almost always had grown sons, ready to defend her honour should he reply to her in like manner. And of course there were always the other housewives, who would think nothing of setting about the poor unfortunate seller, beating him with whatever came to their hands, whilst their children would rifle his laden baskets, lying across the back of the phlegmatic mule.

There were a great number of children in the street, dirty-nosed,
underfed
children who were tougher at seven or eight than many a man is at forty. Mangy cur dogs roamed the dustbins, which were left outside the houses, for we were no respecters of authority in our street. Thousands of cats, in all stages of growth and development, ranged the rubble-heaps and chased the rats from the sewers, and were even capable of eating each other when their hunger became maddening. Through all this wretchedness and dirt and poverty, my mother walked with her proud, firm step and the other women eyed her suspiciously and murmured against her because she thought so little of their censure, that she had torn the
kafes
from her windows and walked amongst them as
shamelessly
as a prostitute. And the small boys threw stones after her and the men leered into her veiled face and she passed through their malevolent ranks like a queen. She would not allow us to play in the street, for despite her destitution she retained her snobbishness. Our daily exercise depended on the amount of time she had left over from her shopping expeditions. She rarely bought from the street-sellers, having no bargaining capacity and rendered shy before the cold, appraising scrutiny of the other women, who automatically crowded their doors to see what she bought and how much she was foolish enough to pay for it. She bought in the local marketplace, a street urchin – always to be found in the markets – to carry her wares in a basket slung over his thin shoulders. She would walk home before him, direct him upstairs to the smelly landing, tip him and send him away.

Mehmet and I were always given the job of sorting the vegetables into their respective places, for in those days she soiled her hands as little as possible. She hated the street and its inhabitants, their coarse humour and their impure speech. She had an almost academic passion for purity of speech. Once home, she would remove her veil, sink into a chair and look about her at the treasures of my grandfather’s day. Gradually peace would creep back into her face again. She lived always in the past, emerging unwillingly for the daily routine. Each night saw her tranquilly sewing in a deep chair, where the lamplight caught her hair, or tending her nails, the curtains drawn and her face composed, as though no hostile strangers lurked outside in the mean street. Her habit of going back to the past, of turning her mind ever inwards would become perilous in later life but none of us knew that then. She roamed around always in her memories, refusing to recognise the ever-encroaching future of penury.

Money was very scarce but still she spent what we had like water. If she thought she was going to start worrying about it, down came the shutter over her mind and the thought was pushed into the uneasy background – along with all the other unpleasant thoughts she did not want to recognise. When my grandmother frequently remonstrated about the way money was slipping from our grasp, my mother would turn the subject aside, perhaps showing my grandmother some piece of embroidery she had just completed and the discussion on money would be dropped almost as soon as it had started. And my mother would talk vivaciously about many things, eagerly switching the conversation if money threatened to crop up again. She acted the part of a fashionable young woman of position and began to talk of my father’s return from the war, and after a time a disquieting note crept into her talk for she began to forget that there was any war at all and took to mentioning names of men long dead. She would not accept defeat but defeat crept up behind her like a stab in the dark. She planned a visit to Sarıyer, animatedly promising Mehmet and me a long holiday there, but now and then a little shadow would cross her face as though she knew she was talking nonsense but preferred her nonsense to the unsavoury truth. The more contact she had with the outside world the more she turned her thoughts inwards, the more extravagant became her plans.

I never remember her to be demonstrative, clasping her children to her or kissing them in moments of nearness. We never had any moments of nearness to her but, nevertheless, she remained our only bulwark against the world, our one security. The touch of her cool, remote hand, the rustle of her skirt or the sound of her light, emotionless voice was enough for us. These things could still all our fears or soothe away pain. As time passed, she grew more cordial to the widow below us, although my grandmother did her best to discourage this. But my mother genuinely liked the widow. She had a sort of sure instinct for human nature, ignoring the outward pattern and swooping down to discover the heart, with a beautiful compassion.

The rest of the street shunned the widow, hinting that she was no better than she should be. My mother, shunned and shunning, had a deep sympathy for this. She would ask the widow to come upstairs and drink coffee, ask her mature advice on the method of making clothes for Mehmet and me, or how to cook such and such a dish. The widow became very grateful for these little attentions from my mother, these subtle flatteries, and rapidly became the devoted slave of the family. She would sit with us and amuse us when my mother was out, wash us and feed us and dandle Muazzez for hours on her capacious knees. She was a sort of unpaid servant, an İnci and a lewd Hacer rolled into one and was, no doubt, very useful to my mother. She even took to preparing all the food for us but this my mother put a stop to, for the widow’s hands were seldom clean and she had a habit of scratching her sparse, grey hairs so that some usually fell into whatever it was she was cooking. My mother’s passion for cleanliness was as great as her passion – an odd one in the old, vanished Turkey – for fresh air. One morning there was a great knocking at the door and I heard someone asking for my mother. I called out to her and she ran down the stairs, then her voice cried: ‘Hasan!’

And whilst I was wondering whom ‘Hasan’ might be she thanked Bekçi Baba for having directed her visitor here. Then I suddenly recognised the voice of the mysterious ‘Hasan’ and he was no mystery any longer for he was the gardener from Sarıyer – the gardener who must be commemorated forever because he liked small boys.

My mother and he came up the narrow stairs and into the salon. Hasan greeted Mehmet and me then with the privilege of a very old family servant, looked all about him and said querulously: ‘What is this dreadful place,
hanım efendi
?’ and before waiting for any answer shook his old white head sadly. He peered at my mother with his near-sighted eyes and said uncertainly: ‘I went to your house first. Such a shock I got!’ he grumbled. ‘I did not know it was like that,
hanım efendi
; the news has not reached Sarıyer.’ He paused for a long minute, still grumbling into his beard, then continued, ‘It was Bekçi Baba who directed me to this house. Eh dear, dear! To think of you in a place like this!’

And to my acute embarrassment large tears dropped from his eyes, spilling down his ancient coat.

‘Now, Hasan!’ said my mother, reprovingly, much as she would speak to one of us children if we too easily gave way to tears.

Hasan wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

‘Ah!’ he said deeply and darkly, ‘things are altering,
hanım efendi
. Nobody knows from day to day what will happen next, but to see
you
in a house like
this
– ’ and he paused, trying to find the right words.

My mother covered the gap by asking swiftly: ‘And what news of Sarıyer, Hasan?’

The old man’s eyes filled with tears again, the weak, easy tears of a very, very old man but I could feel the laughter bubbling up in my throat, like water from a spring well. My mother’s eyes reproved my levity, which made me worse, so that I got quite red in the face with the effort to contain myself. But my laughter flew before Hasan’s next words, which were so unexpected that they hit my brain like a little series of electric shocks.

‘The master is believed dead,
hanım efendi
– ’ he said, then broke off to cry bitterly, unable to contain himself any longer and my mother looked over his bent head, blindly and with a face that might have been carved of stone.

‘Dead!’ she said. ‘Ahmet dead!’

And frightened of her white face, I began to cry too and Mehmet followed and pandemonium was let loose in the room. I am sure I did not cry for Uncle Ahmet, being still young enough not to fully appreciate the meaning of the word ‘death’. And I did not cry because I would never go to Sarıyer again, for that I did not know.

I cried, I suppose, because Hasan cried, because my mother had turned to stone and had gone far away from us and this still, summer room. I cried on and on, bitterly, not knowing why I was crying but liking the noise I was making. Even when the tears had stopped flowing I still cried on, broadcasting my woe to the house-tops and never wishing to stop. There is something so elemental, so primeval about human tears that the sound of them causes ripples and tremors to course up and down the spine and through the blood-stream and my own tears that day had just that effect upon me. It was my mother’s sharp, stinging hand on my cheek that made me cease, bringing me up short in the middle of a particularly heart-rending sob.

‘Stop!’ she cried so imperiously that stop I did immediately, my mouth still foolishly open but no sound emerging. Mehmet and I were sent to the sofa, in the far corner of the room, where we gulped and sniffled our way back to sanity.

‘Hasan,’ I heard my mother say gently, ‘tell me all about it. How did your mistress discover?’

The old man made a valiant effort to recover himself and after a moment or two, began to speak.

‘My mistress has been worrying for many months and last week she sent me to the War Office to ask if they knew anything about my master. But they knew little there. At last a Colonel was found who said my master was believed dead. They know nothing else about him. Nothing!’

‘But that is terrible,’ said my mother in an odd sort of voice and was my father’s image in her eyes, I wonder?

Hasan continued: ‘My mistress took the news very hardly,
hanım efendi
. She has not eaten for three days now and her cough does not get any better. Last night she had a haemorrhage.’

‘Poor Ayşe,’ said my mother. ‘Of course we guessed she had
consumption
– ’

‘Do not tell this news to the old lady,’ warned Hasan, the ‘old lady’ being my respected grandmother, who would have been most indignant had she heard this term applied to herself.

‘Certainly I shall not,’ said my mother. ‘But she is sure to find out. Oh, Hasan, the terrible things that are happening. All the doors are closing one by one and all the happy families dying. Oh, Hasan!’ and she covered her face with her hands but she did not cry.

This was another thing to be bottled up, to be pushed into the back of her mind and not to be thought about, until one day the top would come flying off and all these fearsome things leap out at her with a snarl.

‘It is the will of God,’ said Hasan simply, and my mother uncovered her face and said: ‘A hard will, Hasan.’

‘Do not say such things!’ cried the old man, forgetting his sorrow, so thoroughly scandalised was he that a woman should question the will of God.

My mother ignored his remark and said instead: ‘Do not tell your mistress of the fire, not just yet anyway. She has enough trouble now and the fire is over and my house gone and talking will not bring it back. We are comfortable enough here – ’

Her eyes ranged round the room uncertainly, as though seeking reassurance of comfort.

The old man got ready to leave, placing a basket of food on the table and my mouth began to water as I saw the contents being emptied. My mother thanked him and he looked sad and doubtful, as though reluctant to leave. But he bowed to her and spoke a few more words, then went shuffling down the stairs and we could hear him muttering to himself all the way down.