Portrait of a Turkish Family (27 page)

Up on the hill, alongside of our house, lived the regimental paymaster, who soon became very friendly with my mother. They both loved
anything
to do with food and spent a great deal of their time exchanging recipes, or sending succulent dishes to each other, all of which my
grandmother
viewed with the gravest suspicions.

He was a strange, odd person living an eccentric lonely life in his big house on the hill with only his batman to look after him. He did all his cooking himself. He devoted hours to this. Sometimes I would drop in on a winter’s evening to find a couple of stray guests lounging in the salon – officers perhaps merely passing through Eskişehir and wanting a bed for the night, and since he was noted for keeping open house they naturally and automatically made for his home. More often than not he would himself be in the kitchen, a large apron enveloping him and his short-sighted eyes peering anxiously into whatever savoury dishes he was concocting by way of surprise for his guests. Sometimes he would let me stay in the kitchen but at other times he would send me away from him, telling me that tonight’s dish was a secret, that I must not see what he was doing, since I might tell my mother and he did not want her stealing his recipes before he was ready to part with them.

I would take the stairs to the salon to stretch unmolested on a divan until a shout from below would tell me that the meal was ready.

There was a very ornate, rococo dining-room opening off the salon and sometimes he would have dinner served here when he wanted to show off, but dinner in the tasteless dining-room was a sombre affair. And he would not let us forget our politeness, chiding us severely if a drop of wine was spilled over his elaborate tablecloth, losing his familiar identity as our contemporary, becoming the Paymaster, a senior officer.

We liked it best when he allowed us to eat in the unrefined atmosphere of the kitchen. Perhaps there would be half a dozen of us or so, and we would squat ungracefully over the huge open fire whilst he roasted slowly a whole lamb, cutting strips for us as they cooked. His batman would place glasses and
rakı
on the bare wooden table and oil-lamps would glow kindly for there was no electricity in the kitchen. The lamb finished, he would produce stuffed tomatoes or some such delicacy. There would occasionally be freshly grilled fish – he furiously exhorting us to eat it immediately and not to wait for each other for grilled foods should be eaten directly they are cooked.

We would stuff ourselves to repletion, glad for once of the lack of women to curtail our gossip and our purely masculine jokes. When we could eat no more, we would stagger up to the salon, throwing ourselves inelegantly on divans and loosening our belts. Our host would turn on the lights in the domed ceiling and draw the curtains against the night. He would feed more logs to the already bright fire in the china stove, and presently the batman would appear with Turkish coffee to take the taste of grease from our mouths and a choice of cigarettes for the smokers. One of us would start up an old Turkish song and soon everyone would join in, well content with the world in that coarse atmosphere of unashamed belchings and loosened trousers. Disreputable and unglamorous we might be tonight, but the girls of Eskişehir would not know that tomorrow when they met us strutting through the city’s streets.

Sinop, Samsun, Çarşamba – three cities on the Black Sea coast – and each of them had bought a plane to be presented to the Air Force.

My unit was given the plane which had been subscribed to by the good citizens of Sinop, and I the task of flying it there.

Samsun and Çarşamba had no aerodrome so the other two planes accompanied me from their different regiments to Sinop, where
representatives
from Samsun and Çarşamba would welcome them and name their respective planes.

We were to fly over all three cities and give an aerial display then return to spend the night in Sinop.

Everything went according to plan. We all three flew low over Samsun and Çarşamba, looping and rolling and spinning and diving, and when we got back to Sinop the aerodrome was crowded with well-wishers – peasants eager to see the planes close up, schoolchildren to shyly present gifts to us and pompous municipal officers. The Governor arrived in his striped morning suit and a tall, shining black hat and we were quite put to shame by such elegance.

The Mayor was late for the ceremonial welcome, and the Governor showed signs of irritation. We all stood about waiting, we three pilots in Sinop and yet not in Sinop if you can follow my meaning. For until the Mayor made us welcome we could not strictly be regarded as being there at all.

Presently a knowledgeable man in the crowd shouted that the tardy Mayor was sighted and we all looked in the direction in which he pointed and we saw a very old donkey carrying a very small man coming down the hill. The Governor made noises in his throat.

‘That is the Mayor!’ he said bitterly for he had been educated in Europe and knew what was what.

Many of the happy people surged to meet the donkey and its precious cargo. The donkey suddenly began to trot briskly and reached the
aerodrome
at a terrific speed. The Mayor alighted from its back stiffly and welcomed us so affably and with so much enthusiasm that there was no longer doubt in anybody’s mind as to whether we were in Sinop or not in Sinop.

When I returned to Eskişehir I discovered that Muazzez was temporarily installed in the house, her husband being in Rome on duty. The house had become like a private hospital with my mother in bed with one of her innumerable headaches and my sister complaining of pains in the most unlikely spots.

My grandmother and my batman ran the ménage – one as autocratic as the other and both of them driving the hired servant into constant outbreaks of semi-hysteria. Once, long ago, a faraway Hacer had had to put up with similar treatment.

One morning a doctor was called to the house and I was telephoned at the aerodrome, the doctor testily telling me that both my patients were to go to the hospital. Muazzez he said needed an immediate operation. My mother though was, in his opinion, a very obstinate woman indeed. She refused to listen to any suggestion of hospitals. He ended by saying that furthermore all her teeth had to be removed.

When I arrived home there was bedlam in the house with my sister having the most terrible premonitions of her death and begging my grandmother to look after her baby for her. My mother was sitting up in her bed crying and declaring that never, never would she go into a hospital and neither would her teeth be removed. This was the direst blow for her, that her strong, white, even teeth should be removed. We managed to calm her and told her that they would probably never have to come out anyway. Muazzez was our most immediate problem and we had her rushed to a hospital, where she was operated upon with astounding success, to recover with remarkable speed. She returned to my home for convalescence, cried constantly for her husband and her child and wrote reams of letters daily to all her friends, recounting with the most horrific details her operation. Dislike sprang up between us.

It was she who eventually persuaded my mother to have her teeth removed and when in the course of time my mother received her new ones, my grandmother examined them with great suspicion then handed them back, saying piously that thank God
she
did not have to wear them. This caused my mother to cry and declare she would rather be dead than put such monstrous things in her mouth. Maliciously my grandmother encouraged this attitude. One evening however I lost my temper to such an extent that my mother nervously promised to do whatever she had to do with the confounded teeth if only I would quieten down before the neighbours came in to investigate possible murder.

Not very long after this I was walking home one sunny afternoon from the aerodrome when I saw two fighter planes taking off from the field. They were flying very close to each other and I stood and watched them for a few moments, mentally criticising them. They started to attack each other in mock battle and they flew under and over each other and they flew just that much too close. I walked on towards the town, remembering the crazy things we had done too when we had first become pilots. When I reached the centre of the city I became aware that the sound of the engines up above me had ceased and I turned my face skywards and hundreds of pieces of plane were hurtling down. I remembered their dangerous, too-close flying and thought that I should have known that this would happen.

I hurried on towards home for I had suddenly become sure that my mother had witnessed or heard of the accident and I desperately wanted to reassure her that I was all right.

The streets had become crowded with people, with the wives and the children and the mothers of airmen. Their faces were white and
frightened-looking
, all of them wondering if it was their turn to become widows, orphans or the mothers of the dead.

An ambulance tore by, clanging with feverish urgency, and I had a fleeting thought that if the one pilot who had jumped by parachute was not already dead he most certainly would be by the time that jolting ambulance had got him to hospital over these uneven roads.

The pale, trembling wives and mothers rushed on me like an army of mad things, begging me to tell them the names of the pilots who had crashed and I replied that I did not know. But they held tightly to me, crying into my face that I did know, that I must know who was on duty. Still I said I did not know and they wailed that I would not tell them, beating my arms with their soft, impotent fists, begging the one question over and over again: ‘Please!’ they said, ‘please, lieutenant, tell us the names. Please, please, please …’

I tore myself out of their grasp and their tormented cries pierced my ears all down the crowded street. Suddenly I saw my mother running on bare feet and for an incredible, unbelievable moment I was a child again and our house was burning and I saw her running thus down the desolate garden on her bare feet.

She was only partially dressed, having run out in the middle of changing, and my batman was running after her with a cloak in his hand. I was numbed with shock and felt coldness creep all over my body. When she saw me she stood still and the batman caught up with her and threw the protective cloak over her bare, white shoulders. I cannot forget her eyes, those wandering eyes that told their own story, only we were still too blind to read their message correctly, even though fear stirred somewhere, warning …

We none of us knew then the madness that would one day leap out at us, when all the bottled thoughts and memories of a quarter of a century would darken the over-tired brain, dim the bright, mournful eyes.

‘Take that uniform off!’ she said to me, her voice so low and hoarse that involuntarily I backed away from her. ‘You will send me to my death!’ she said. ‘You will make me lose my mind!’

Her voice died away in a great, strangled sob and she half collapsed into my batman’s arms. He picked her up as if she were a baby and carried her home through the oblivious streets and I walked beside him. My mind was numb and cold and drained of all thought and I could only see before me, imprinted forever on the summer air, the gentle madness that had looked out of her eyes. 

I suppose the memory of that day never quite left me. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, tormenting myself with the reminder of my mother’s eyes that tragic afternoon. She steadily declined – at least physically. She lost weight to such an extent that a doctor started giving her injections to fatten her. He said she was anaemic and recommended red wine so we bought her a bottle a day and thrust it upon her. He recommended plenty of red meat so we forced that on her too, but still she did not appear to improve. I took to watching for signs of mental illness and almost gave myself a nervous breakdown in consequence. Was it my uneasy imagination or did she seem ever so slightly neglectful of herself – not caring any more about her appearance, once her main concern? Did I sometimes only feel that one eye drooped just the littlest bit seemingly half shut, whilst the other ranged with every show of normality? Oh, I watched for a thousand signs and all the time the fear inside me refused to be stilled.

For days at a time she would be her old self, then, without warning, irritability would break out stormily; moroseness and dissatisfaction accumulated, and she would fretfully, like a child, complain of headaches.

I took her to a well-known nerve specialist, who questioned her, set little traps for her and examined her physical health – then said there was nothing wrong with her whatever. We came away from his
consulting-rooms
, I conscious of relief that was yet only half relief. Uneasiness persisted in the face of medical opinion. I could not trust them but I could not trust my own intuition either. I took her to another specialist with similar results – except that this one ordered a course of injections for her, perhaps so that I should not feel cheated in the face of the large fee asked. I did not know what to do. She
seemed
to be better and so pathetically eager to please me, so like a child wanting my approbation that my heart was wrung with pity.

I remember that during the winter of 1937, on a Saturday when I was doing a spell as Duty Officer, my batman telephoned to me in a terrible state and asked that I should return home immediately. He said that my mother was ill again and urged me to make haste. He sounded so agitated that I at once asked for permission to leave the aerodrome and was even given my senior officer’s car to deliver me to my home with all speed.

When I arrived home, there was my mother sitting up in bed and with a swelling on her neck about the size of an orange. It was a ghastly, horrible thing, a great excrescence of flesh weighting down her neck and face. She was trembling with terror and I asked my grandmother if anything had been done about it.

‘Oh, no,’ she said, looking surprised. ‘It came very suddenly a few hours ago, getting bigger and bigger until we thought it would burst and then we sent for you!’

‘Great God!’ I cried, exasperated, ‘could you not have immediately sent for a doctor and me afterwards?’

My batman was sent for the doctor and I sat down to wait, unable to hurt my mother by leaving her room, yet at the same time totally unable to look at the large ugly swelling. Within a very short time a doctor arrived, an elegant, bearded fellow, his whole attitude very finished and complete. He examined the neck, prescribed medicine and directed that my mother should be brought to the hospital on the following Monday.

After he had gone I asked my mother if she was in any pain but she said no, it did not hurt at all, it just felt very heavy and she could not bear to look in a mirror. There seemed little that I could do so I left her to return to the aerodrome, sternly instructing my careless grandmother to be sure to call a doctor again if anything else seemed likely to go wrong and to telephone me afterwards. She meekly agreed that she would but I felt that her meekness was deceptive.

For the rest of that night I was consumed with worry and the vagueness of this continued illness that haunted the house. As soon as I was free on the following morning I rushed home on feet that had to be chided into hurrying, for the message the brain was sending to them was to go slowly – lest other, greater troubles be found at home awaiting me.

When I rang the electric bell which made a star of pattern on the air with its shrill sound, my batman opened the door, a large grin on his moon-like face. I looked at him enquiringly and he directed my gaze to the garden doors which opened off the back of the hall in a direct line with the street door. There an amazing sight met my eyes. The mother I had left in bed only the previous evening was calmly watering flowers, her face turned towards the house and the swelling, to all appearances, entirely gone.

I walked quickly out to her and she smiled at me. I caught her two hands in relief and the water-hose fell spurting to the ground and the smell of the wet earth came up refreshingly.

‘Am I dreaming?’ I asked. ‘Or did you not telephone me yesterday? Did I not come home and find your neck three times its normal size? Did I not get a doctor for you?’

‘You are not dreaming,’ she said happily, her eyes childlike and wide yet concealing their secrets.

‘Well, then!’ I said, ‘what is this? I cannot believe that the medicine cured you so quickly!’

‘Oh – the medicine,’ she said as though she had forgotten all about it. ‘No, that did not cure me. In fact I am afraid that we threw all the medicine away. It was not necessary after all.’

‘But – ’ I protested, utterly at a loss, perhaps even thinking a little bit impatiently: these women and their feminine secrets.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let us tell you all about it, my son. You will see – doctors are not always necessary.’

I turned to the grinning batman behind me and asked what the devil it all meant and then I heard a most curious, almost unbelievable story – except that it happened, thereby giving credence to it. But for the fact that there were three witnesses, besides my mother, I should have thought I had been the victim of a hoax.

Now there was in Eskişehir at that time a reputed Wise Woman – an Albanian, old and wrinkled like a crab-apple and at least one hundred years old. My mother, having been born in Albania of Albanian parents, had a very soft spot for this old woman and, because she lived in appalling poverty, now and then sent food and other things to her by my batman. Incidentally they both fondly thought that this was being done behind my back, but in point of fact there was not much that happened in the house without my knowledge – even though I did not always make use of that knowledge.

It appears that after I had gone back to the aerodrome the previous evening and the batman had returned with the medicine prescribed by the doctor, a little conference had taken place around my mother’s sick bed. My grandmother automatically distrusted all doctors – especially after they had ordered the removal of my mother’s teeth, nearly causing her to bleed speedily to her death. She had eyed and smelled the medicine with great suspicion. The servant had made sympathetic noises in her throat to intimate her profoundest suspicions too; she had then gloomily said that medicine would never cure
that
swelling. This dire prophesy had alarmed my already alarmed mother, who was suddenly all for rushing to the nearest hospital to have the offending, painless lump removed by a surgical operation.

At this the servant snorted and said that that would be useless too, and the conference was temporarily in a state of deadlock. But the servant, resuming authority as the undisputed leader in this affair, slyly reopened negotiations by remarking that in such a case as this the Wise Woman ought to be called in. Seeing no noticeable reaction to this, she followed up by saying that the Wise Woman had already performed a remarkable number of cures in the district and pointed out some of them to my mother, who was in no position to argue with her as many of the cases were already quite well known to her.

The result was that my batman was despatched to the mud house of the Wise Woman to ask her assistance.

She came to my home with him, in a great state of fear for she half expected that I would return from the aerodrome and ruin everything. I might even have her arrested, she confessed to my grandmother.

My grandmother pooh-poohed this idea uneasily, then briskly said a prayer that I would not suddenly take it into my head to come back and bade my batman double lock all the doors so that in the event of my return I should have to ring the bell, thereby giving them warning. She even thought of a place to conceal the Wise Woman should this happen. When the doors had been locked and they felt safe from all outside interference they set about the serious business of what was to be done with the offending growth on my mother’s neck.

The Wise Woman looked at it with one eye half closed, then heavily pronounced that undoubtedly someone had put the evil eye on my mother. Everyone readily agreed that this indeed might be so and the servant said with triumph: ‘There’s doctors for you!’ or words to that effect.

‘Lie back on your pillows,’ commanded the Wise Woman, having the situation well in hand now that she had so satisfactorily gained the entire confidence of her ‘patient’. She added that my mother would be quite better by the next morning.

She then turned to my batman, that poor, long-suffering soul at the mercy of three determined women, and commanded him to go to the graveyard and bring her back the bone of a dead person.

This terrible, unexpected request almost shook his determined loyalty to my mother, for the thought of scrabbling about in a dark cemetery with all the blinding white tombstones to watch him, made him shiver with fear. His fear of what I might have to say when I heard about it was infinitely more manageable.

Despite his terror he still had sufficient spirit left to argue with the Wise Woman and told her that he could not be expected to find the bones of any dead people since they were all safely in their coffins and he absolutely refused to prise open any coffins.

The Wise Woman remained completely unmoved by this state of affairs and said that she wanted a bone from a dead person and that was all there was to it. She told him with obvious knowledge that all he had to do was to go to the old part of the graveyard where none were buried any more and there, just beneath the soft earth, he would be able to find plenty of bones for her. She assured him that she knew there were bones there and, alarmed that, if he refused, she might turn him into a toad or a frog or something even worse, he set off on his gruesome errand.

His eyes revealed the remembered horror when he told me of the darkness of the night, the tall cypress trees guarding the lonely dead, the sinister sound of the wind in the poplars, the screeching of the owls and their terrible swooping about his head, and he all the time scrabbling furiously in the earth until at last he found a bleached, dry human bone. It was so ghastly-looking, so frightful to the touch; then his vivid imagination looked for ghosts to lay their clammy fingers on him and he perspired until all his clothes were soaking and he had ran, terror-stricken, from the cemetery.

Re-entering Eskişehir he had tried to control his shivering and had become conscious of the odd-shaped, gruesome object in his hands. He had thrust it swiftly into a pocket where it unpleasantly jabbed his thigh and had sidled past a policeman, anxious only to get home before anything more unpleasant happened to him.

When he arrived home, still in an abject state, instead of receiving thanks that he had gone at all on such an errand, he had been severely chided by my grandmother for being so long away. Her whole attitude suggested that had
she
gone she would have brought back an entire skeleton in that length of time.

The Wise Woman took the bone from him and went out to the kitchen to cleanse it. She then demanded an egg which she broke into a bowl, another bowl which she filled with cold water, and then handed the batman a lump of lead which she instructed him to heat for her. When she had finished her preparations she went back to my mother’s room, the batman following her, for having done so much for the cause he could not bear now to be excluded from the rest of the ritual. For quite a long time nothing was done. The Wise Woman sat reading from the Koran and all the others remained uncomfortable and silent in the face of such holiness. Then the Wise Woman stood up and massaged the swelling with the cleansed human bone and asked that the heated lead should be handed to her. She placed a large towel over my mother’s head and stood the bowl of cold water over this, balancing it precariously with one hand; but by this time everybody was too open-mouthed in amazement to care very much whether the water upset or not. The lead was put into the water and made a sizzling sound, then the egg was poured in and the Wise Woman said with appalling anti-climax: ‘Everything is over. I shall remain here all night so let us have something to eat now.’

The batman was disappointed that nothing more spectacular had occurred and sat down to his meal in a very disgruntled frame of mind, for he rightly felt that after so much effort on his part, something really dramatic should have happened. After she had eaten, my mother was told to sleep and forget everything and, amazingly, she was able to do this.

When she had woken up on the following morning her first thought was to feel for the offending lump but to her amazement it had entirely disappeared.

She had rushed to a mirror only to find her neck back to normal once more; then she had started to cry with joy and immediately called all the household to witness her marvellous recovery.

I listened to their combined story with growing horror and indignation, furious that my mother had allowed herself to be persuaded to employ the wiles of an old half-crazy woman.

I gave tongue to my feelings but when I had finished, my grandmother said perfectly reasonably: ‘But what is there to be cross about? The swelling has gone and your mother is better.’

This I could not dispute.

My batman brought the bowl to me so that I could see the aftermath of the wonderful cure for myself and when I looked into the bowl I saw the queer, twisted shape of the lead and the egg floating on top, looking indeed oddly like a giant eye.