Portrait of a Turkish Family (30 page)

I walked in through the gates, after a porter had sharply enquired my business. He looked at me suspiciously and but for the fact that I was in uniform I do not think he would have admitted me at all.

A man came towards me, a perfectly normal-looking man, and I asked him where I could find a duty doctor. He grinned at me and made vague gestures with his hands and I looked at his luminous eyes and passed on. I could not control a little shiver of apprehension.

I went up some steps and inside in a hall I saw a door marked: ‘Private. Secretary.’ I went in and stated my business.

‘When did she arrive?’ the Secretary asked fussily, thumbing through a sort of ledger.

‘Today,’ I said, risking the shot in the dark, and he looked in a file on his desk and said, yes, she had been admitted that morning. He directed me to an opposite building for further details. He spread his large, white hands indicating that he was only the Secretary, he could not know everything.

I went out into the hall again and found that it was now full of patients, with their sleeves rolled up, all waiting for injections. I passed through their tidy ranks, feeling horror if I had to touch them, perhaps half afraid of them. They looked at me incuriously and I passed through their lines quickly, my head bent, embarrassment uppermost in my alienability to them.

In the other building I found a doctor who informed me that on no account would I be permitted to see my mother.

‘Come back in six weeks time,’ he said thoughtlessly. ‘Perhaps you can see her then.’

Beaten by his obduracy I asked if she could be moved into a private room and he shrugged, intimating that the treatment afforded her there would be no better.

‘She will feel more private there,’ I said. ‘She will not be all the time aware of the other patients around her.’

Coldly his eyes raked me.

‘Lieutenant,’ he said with terrible hardness, terrible lack of
understanding
, ‘she is not in a condition to be yet aware of anything.’

I hated his cold, precise voice but I insisted nevertheless that she should be moved to a private room. He arranged for this whilst I was there, accepting the cheque I handed him with a doubtful air, as though suspecting that it might not after all be valid. As he was writing out a receipt for me he said: ‘It is preferable to pay with money, lieutenant. I wonder would you be good enough to remember that the next time you come?’

I did not reply and he stood up, indicating that he was a busy man, that the interview was at an end. As he said goodbye his white hand lay limply in mine, his eyes seared through me so that I realised here was a man with a mission, that given half a chance he would put me under observation too.

I left Bakırköy, having accomplished very little. All the way back in the train I speculated wildly as to what they would do with her. Would there be a window in her room, to give her all the fresh air and sunlight that she loved? Would there be a view over the gardens or would they keep her strapped down on her bed, helpless in the face of their sane ministrations? The tears were never far from my eyes and I did not return to Mehmet’s house. There was nothing more to say and I did not want to meet the questions in my grandmother’s eyes, the compassion in Bedia’s.

I returned to İzmir and threw my energies into work and waited for news. Mehmet wrote several times but I did not bother to reply. What was there to say? I hated their continual harping on the subject of my mother. Could they not leave her alone now?

I was glad to be living in the aerodrome, where companionship now assumed a precious quality.

In March 1940 I was given permission to go to İstanbul and took passage in a boat from Galata Bridge; when I disembarked, I went straight to Bakırköy, by-passing Mehmet and his family. I was eager to learn about my mother for myself with no second-hand information to influence the mind.

By great good luck it was a visiting day when I arrived at the Mental Home and the lovely gardens were crowded with visitors and patients, and sometimes I had great difficulty in distinguishing one from the other.

I stated my errand to a crisp-looking, hard-faced nurse and as she walked away from me I hoped she did not have the handling of my impatient, impetuous mother, otherwise her chances of recovery were nil.

I waited in the gardens, feeling unequal to sitting tidily in the bare waiting-hall. My heart almost choked me and my stomach kept turning over and over in the most unmanageable way. Suddenly I felt unequal to this and wished I had waited until Mehmet had been free to accompany me. I felt foolish and full of insecurity as I hesitated on the springy, dry grass and I looked about me at the patients and the visitors, and thought that one should have nerves of steel and the imagination of a brick wall to come here.

There was a tall old man making an impassioned speech to a dim, elderly lady who might have been his wife. He talked at her without ceasing, scarcely seeming to pause for breath, his bony fingers wagging before her passive face. Occasionally he would thump his chest with a massive, destructive gesture and let out a roar like an angry lion. A doctor halted by me, his distinguishing marks in all this mass of doubtful humanity being a white coat and a stethoscope dangling from his pocket. ‘The old man is not really so bad as he looks,’ he said amusedly to my disbelieving face. ‘We hope to have him completely well again in another twelve months.’

A young girl held court with her father and mother, who watched her with fond, anxious faces.

‘So of course I could not marry him,’ she was saying in a light, scornful voice, ‘I could only refuse him – ’

She looked all around her, so pretty and young and witless with her chestnut hair and large eyes. She caught sight of me and smiled entrancingly, pointing me out to her parents.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘That is my husband. Do you not think he is very good looking?’

I pulled the doctor by the arm, hurrying away across the lawns. I asked him about my mother.

‘Has she any chance of recovery?’ I asked and he paused for a moment and I paused too, turning to face him. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘I should like to know.’

He replied, not looking at me: ‘She has very little chance. She became worse suddenly, you know, and we have to keep her quiet with injections – ’

I saw her in my mind’s eye, knowing the place she was in, wanting to get away to freedom, becoming violent because they had thwarted her, kept quiet with the injections that would be ruthlessly, relentlessly shot into her. We must have quietness here, I could hear them all saying. This patient is not quite mad enough yet. She needs disciplining.

The doctor was watching me now, reading perhaps many things from my face. He said gently: ‘She will die soon. You would not wish her here for perhaps many years, would you?’

I thought of my grandmother and the words she had spoken that morning in İstanbul, when Bedia had told me the awful truth.

‘Is she dead?’ I had asked and she had answered sternly: ‘Better if she were.’

But I could not face the thought of her death like this. She still represented all the things I had looked for in life, even though I had never found them in her. I started telling the doctor all the things I had thought to be forgotten, things from childhood that suddenly for this brief, illuminating second stood out in high relief. I told him of my father’s going away, of the fire, of poverty, of the years in an orphanage in Kadıköy, of my mother’s working in the Sewing Depôt at Gülhane Parkı, of the old, old hatred that persisted and magnified with the years between my mother and my grandmother. I spoke of the love that had tried to chain me, of the restraints imposed, and all the time the doctor listened, nodding now and then as if he were beginning to understand her better. Presently he left me and I stood alone on the sunlit grass, trembling, glad to have spoken of these things to another person.

I waited for my mother.

Presently I saw her coming, with two nurses, one on each side of her, supporting her. Her high, querulous voice reached me across the space that separated us and she tried, in vain, to rid herself of the encompassing arms of the sturdy nurses. My heart bled for her and I thought it would have been better not to have come here, not to have seen her so defenceless.

She stopped in front of me and I said, ‘Mother,’ and I saw a wary, trapped look come into her eyes.

She looked at me as if she did not recognise me. I said: ‘Don’t you know me?’

Then she said: ‘Oh, it is you? My eagle, my airman son – ’

But there was no emotion in her voice, nothing save haughtiness, the voice she would have used to a stranger. She pointed to a man and said: ‘He is our cook. Not a very good one, I am afraid, but we could not get anyone else.’

I looked at the man she pointed to, a visitor, and she saw my look and added: ‘He is really far too distinguished to be a cook, but there you are – ’

Her voice trailed off and she turned away from me, ignoring me and began to tremble with such frightful violence that the nurses had to lead her to a seat.

I followed them and when she was sitting down I took one cold hand in mine and kissed it but she did not pay any attention to the gesture. All the time she persisted in treating me like a stranger. After that first flicker of recognition in her eyes she had withdrawn from me. She felt me watching her and turned her head to me, saying: ‘Once I had a son too who was an airman like you. He broke my heart.’

The calmness of her light voice was terrible.

‘Oh, mother!’ I said, trying not to weep for her and for myself too. ‘Don’t you know me?’ I asked.

It was cruel to go on knocking at memory like that but I could not help myself. She did not answer me, only commenced to hum a little nameless tune, an odd thin sound, and the shivers still spasmodically shook her frail body. I gave her some Turkish Delight and she ate it and then asked, with incredible courtesy, if she could have some more as her friends were too poor to buy any for themselves. I handed her the box but her hands were too unsteady to hold it so that it fell to the grass, spilling its contents and the nurses stooped to pick up the pieces for her.

She turned away pettishly, refusing to speak to me any more, and all the time she trembled. Her body and legs and arms were wasted, only skin and bone remained of her. She persisted in keeping herself turned from me and presently one of the nurses said she would have to be taken back to her room. She was to be put to bed.

She went away with them docilely, never looking to me, never turning her head backwards from the door as she went through, not caring that I stood there looking after her, not knowing who I was.

I stood there for a long time, watching the dragging, bent, trembling figure of my mother and I thought I should not come here again. Silently I said my goodbye to her and then she vanished from my sight. I felt the tears running unchecked down my cheeks.

I wept for myself and for the young lover who had once imprinted herself on the memory, the day she bade my father goodbye in the gracious salon of a long-dead house. I wept for the beauty who had flashed jewels and hospitality, who had brought poetry into a house in a back street of Bayazit. I wept for the pale young girl who had drudged untold hours in an army Depôt, sewing coarse linen for soldiers. I wept for the middle-aged woman of the fugitive, persistent beauty, who had worn a flower in her hair against my return from the aerodrome, who had once sparkled and shone like the noonday sun and who had withered to dust inside the body of this bent, trembling old woman who knew no one. But I wept most of all for my mother.

A light touch on the arm made me turn to see a nurse with a face of great gentleness, of compassion. She said: ‘We have put her to bed now. Would you like to see her room?’

‘No,’ I said; ‘no, thank you. There is no need. I am sure she is very comfortable.’

She did not say anything to this and I asked: ‘Is there a window in the room?’

Her eyes lit with that rare understanding that comes so seldom in the world.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She likes us to keep it open for her. And we bring her to the garden quite often too. She loves gardens, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and saw the gardens she had made in İstanbul, in Eskişehir, in Kütahya and İzmir and I wondered if loving hands still tended them.

‘She had green fingers,’ I said irrelevantly and the friendly nurse smiled.

‘Well, goodbye, lieutenant,’ she said. ‘Come again, won’t you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I shall not come again. It is better not.’

And suddenly the face of the friendly nurse closed up and grew hard, unable to understand. She said tartly: ‘But you can help her so much, you know.’

I remembered that the doctor had said she would not live for long, that she would never get better and I wondered at the terrible, ruthless sanity of the sane, at the stupidity that asked me to come back and see my mother, to force awareness of myself upon her when she did not want to be reminded, when her son was dead for her because once he had broken her heart. Such pitiless cruelty I had thought was alien to the friendly nurse. But there was no way of explaining to that closed face that there was nothing more to be said between my mother and me, that both of us were gone from each other.

My mother had travelled farther than we who stood here in the sunlight. She had gone to that world of soft illusions where she was always a young girl, the world to which she had tried to escape when her home was burned, when she learned that her husband had died on a faraway road under a blinding sun. She had wanted to go there long ago but always we held her back, called to her to stay with us but now she no longer cared and could not have been persuaded to stay any more.

I turned away from the gardens. The same man still speechified impassionedly, the same young girl haughtily told her parents that she could never marry. All of them living in their illusory world where hurt could not touch them. Their voices followed me to the high, iron gates and the porter opened them for me to pass through. I went out to the quiet, country road.