by Loren Edizel
Later, after a shower, I slip into a light summer dress and meet them on the marble veranda for lunch. The daughters are there, sitting at the table, impatient to eat and leave the house to meet their friends. They’re not particularly sociable, and I’m already too exhausted from the mannered conversations with his wife to try and engage them in further nonsense. He is smiling in his white shirt, unbuttoned enough to show some chest hair and tanned skin. He’s got some grey scattered among his dark brown hair. The blue eyes are exactly the colour of the sea behind him. Very trim and sinewy, his body. My knees weaken. I can see nothing else when he stands there smiling at me. Am I blushing? Can his wife see what I feel? It’s profoundly embarrassing to become so overtaken by the beauty of a man. If I were to swoon looking at the hazy seascape stretching beyond the terrace, it would make me a curiously sensitive person, perhaps a poet, a nature-lover. I would not stammer or blush. Swooning over a man is foolishness. In my defence, he is not merely attractive or handsome. His nose is slightly crooked, and perhaps his eyes are a tad too close. His eyebrows could use a trim. Yet, these irregularities enhance his magnetism. Not that he would ever; but if he asked to sleep with me I would. Immediately. No matter the cost. There, I’ve said it.
“So, Fehmi has brought you safe and sound, Giritli! Welcome!” He calls me by my family name. My parents are from Crete, thus the name. Giritli. Apparently his father’s ancestry is also Cretan. This, he told me when he hired me. Since then, I’ve been Giritli, to him. I like it, too. It makes me feel masculine in a sexy way, independent, special. As we embrace and chat standing around the table, I wonder if he would call me Giritli in bed, immediately blushing at the thought, hoping it could pass for sunburn. I look at my plate as the housekeeper heaps it with pilav and chicken and some okra cooked with tomatoes in olive oil. Farther away, on the veranda at the side of the house I see the driver, sitting and smoking at a small table set for two. He will be eating with the housekeeper. She’s wearing a uniform. A short-sleeved dress with thin white and grey vertical lines, buttoned in front, a white collar, white shoes, and stockings. He bought this uniform in Germany for her, as a gift, as if getting a uniform would ever enchant a maid. “I want her to quit wearing that flowery shalvar5 and look like a modern housekeeper,” he had explained. When the sweaty housekeeper returns to pick up the empty plates in her squeaky white orthopaedic shoes, I thank her for the delicious meal and for toiling in this hot weather to prepare it. “Good health to your hands,” I say. She wishes me a good digestion and pats me in the back with familiarity. The boss’s wife has a generic, ready-made smile. “Sultan, we will have coffee in the living room.” The housekeeper’s name is Sultan.
“Giritli, what do you think of my garden?” the boss asks suddenly.
“It looks exactly the same as last year,” I reply, uninterested.
“So you have not seen my new rosebush! The one I brought from Denmark.” I cannot say I don’t care about his rosebush and I don’t want to pretend admiration for an anaemic little stick of a plant from a distance, but he’s already dragging me towards it and away from his wife. “I have to get away from here and you must help me,” he whispers as we walk toward the stub. We stand about two feet away from the plant. The gardener is a few feet to the left, planting some other things. “I know it doesn’t look like much yet, but the roses will be the colour of peaches, and very fragrant when they bloom, and the size of grapefruits,” he says loudly and cups his hands to show me. “I have asked Fehmi to drive you back in a couple of hours. Gönül will call me in an hour. I’ll pretend I got a call from a client, the Belgian, and have to go to the office and take you with me to send an urgent telex. About a shipment. Big problems. Okay?” he whispers.
“Don’t involve me in your lies, Patron!” I hiss. He begs like a boy, the sea in his eyes rolling here and there to invoke sympathy. I nod, “Well, you’ll have to send me some of these fabulous roses, then, when they bloom,” I speak louder hoping the gardener and the wife will hear it as we turn around and walk toward the house.
My visit to Çeşme will probably end before I get another chance to swim. On the long way back home, Fehmi will ooze into his soggy jacket with stoic professionalism, Patron will fidget with the radio button absentmindedly thinking of his romantic escapade with Gönül, and I will pout trying to suppress my inner torment. It will be an hour of silence, interrupted by the Beatles and Bach. But I will surely say, “For the love of God, Patron, please tell Fehmi Bey to remove his jacket. The mere look of him makes me sweat!”
And Fehmi Bey will raise his hand in dutiful objection, “Please, Mehtap Hanım, I’m used to it.”
When Patron turns to look at me, I will glare back. “Go on, Fehmi, you heard the lady; take it off,” he will say, looking sheepish.
I MISS MY GRANDMOTHER. I believe she is the only reason why my parents did not die of heartache and grief when they had to leave Crete and arrived in Izmir as teenagers. That is what they always told me. Even though she was not my real grandmother by blood, she was the best a child could hope to have. Her tenderness made me feel safe even from the other side of a room, even when I could not see her, even now. Some days, like today, I awaken and she is present within me. I feel her gaze, and her hardened palm caressing my cheek and momentarily a wave of grief-filled happiness washes over me. How does one describe this feeling? I’m not sure. When I say, “I miss her” can those miserably common words truly describe the moment when my love reaches for her and tumbles down the precipice of absence? Death is a formidable enemy and I cannot forgive God for it. I cannot forgive God for leaving us here, at the mercy of a universe we don’t understand, without enough words, without enough solace, endlessly waiting for our turn to disappear and become nothing.
WHEN MY PARENTS DIED one after the other a few years ago, I thought I had lost all my anchors. Whom else did I have in this world? Some cousins I have not met, others I have met only once or twice in my life, all scattered along the Aegean coast after the population exchange. I took a bus soon after I buried my father and went to Bodrum where some of my relatives lived, running a small family bed-and-breakfast. Another bus took me to Marmaris, where one of my great-aunts lived. In Ayvalık another uncle and cousins in the olive oil business consoled me, greeting me with affection, as Mehmetaki’s daughter. I was told stories of my father’s childhood, my grandfather, our ancestry, and everything to do with Crete. The hope remains, in some of these elders that they will return to Crete someday to see it once more before they die, or to be buried there. We all speak Kritika when we get together. I and all my cousins born here are not fluent, so we incorporate many Turkish words into the conversations. I love the sound of it; there’s a lot of “tch-tch-tch” and hearing it soothes me. Spending time with my extended family gave me a deep sense of comfort and belonging at last, and freedom from practicing the art of invisibility in public, my Cretan origin with its broken Turkish and its Greek customs, my Christian mother, safely unseen and unheard.
FROM MY GLASS-COVERED CUMBA I get a westerly view of the sea and the sunset, every evening. I’ve just realized I’m spending a lot of time sitting here, so much so that it wouldn’t surprise me if the wooden floors caved in one day to drop me onto the sidewalk in my broken chair, glass of tea in hand. Especially if I keep buying—and eating—so many gevreks every morning! Every time he passes at six in the morning, I ask the boy if he’ll go to school after work. Every time, he shrugs without responding. “Look,” I said yesterday, “I can see you’re a very hard-working boy. You would do very well in school if you put that effort into studying and advancing in life. You’re still young. Why don’t you do it?”
He gave me half a smile, a sad one, and nodded. Then asked “Is this going to be all, ham’fendi?”6
I nodded and gave him the money. “One day, you’ll be an old man with crooked legs and a hunchback if you keep doing this, and how are you going to sell your gevreks then?” I shouted after him as
he slinked away and up the street, placing his pan on his head.
My westerly view, I was saying. If you touch gold and make a wish as you gaze at the sunset, it will come true. I have been doing this since I met Him. I want to have him all for myself; I want him to need me and to be the whole world to him, as he is to me. I don’t care about his money and his idiotic notions. I just dream of a moment, here in this cumba, when he will say, “Why have I not noticed you before? It is you I love. Not my wife, nor my mistress. What a fool I’ve been!” And kiss me, with a long and passionate kiss, like in the movies, where men are hopelessly blind where women are concerned, except momentarily, when the veil of obtuseness lifts from their minds and they see true love in all its splendour. Would he ever realize that this love would overflow from the confines of the reality to which he is so accustomed? Would he dare enter it and get lost in its vastness? Would he sense that love is to life what death is to nothingness? And I, insignificant, homely secretary to the king of zippers, can I live this entire life, day in and day out with such secret and painful yearning?
I CALL HIM THE KING OF ZIPPERS because we manufacture zippers at the factory and it makes the girls at work laugh to hear the epithet, especially when he is in a bad mood and gets tyrannical, which is often. I suppose it coincides with instances when Gönül has a headache or tortures him with some new caprice, or when his wife nags. I know immediately from the way he opens the door to the office. He turns the knob and pushes it open with sudden force, as though he were coming to arrest someone, and then his face appears from behind the half-opened door, rigid, jaw clenched, ready to find fault with the dust on top of the file cabinet that he otherwise rarely notices. “Mehtap!” He barks. No “Giritli” when he is mad. “I want to see The Books, now! And have the girl bring me some coffee.”
I do some very simple bookkeeping for him, but the accountant is responsible for The Books. They are under lock and key, in the glass cabinet right behind his large and ornate oak desk. If only he would turn from his desk, he could unlock the door and take out all the books he wanted. They are chronologically placed. But no, he is fuming, so I have to go around his desk, squeeze myself behind him and unlock the cabinet to take out the books he wants to examine, because he is in a terrible mood, because his mistress spent too much money or his son wants to go to summer school in England or something. It is a great emergency. The King of Zippers needs the girl to bring him coffee. Cancel all the meetings, stop people from entering his office. Send them back where they can make more zippers. Why do I get the feeling that my year-end bonus has just shrunk by a third?
So, I’m sitting at my desk outside his office, writing in my journal. Might as well ... nothing else to do. I watered the plants. The girl came with his coffee. Her name is Gülşen. He never remembers it. The other day he called her Gülbahar and reminded me of my elementary school teacher, that awful witch. I won’t have him call her Gülbahar; and not just because it is the wrong name for the poor girl, but because it is a terrible memory for me. I said to him, “Patron, what is so difficult about the name Gülşen? Think of a laughing, happy rose. Picture it and you’ll never forget her name. It is insulting to be called by all sorts of names. At least call her ‘daughter,’ if you can’t remember, for heavens’ sake!”
He started calling her Gülen. Then he said it was my fault, because now he thinks of a laughing woman. Why is laughing and rose the same blasted word, he exclaimed. “Why is everyone naming their daughters a variation of Rose or Laughter? Why can’t her name be Star, or Fish or some other thing? Have we run out of names?” He jumps a little—more like a spasmodic little hop—when he gets excited or upset. I find it endearing to see that little boyish hop and the arms going up in the air and his thick dark eyebrows pushing his forehead up into a crease. If only I had met him when he was younger. Perhaps I would have had a chance. There are so many movies—Turkish movies—about rich men falling in love with poor girls. Well, it takes an entire movie and a large string section to make it happen, but still, in the end, the moral of the story is that these things do happen, and the rich spoiled boy gets a chance to redeem himself. Of course, the poor girl never looks truly poor in a Turkish movie, plus, she has to wear puffy wigs tied in pig-tails and braids to look young, and all that does is make her look like an older woman in denial. But it’s all about the idea, naturally. The rich boy will abandon her and take up full-time drinking after he marries a girl of his class he ends up mistreating. He may throw furniture around in one of his drunken rages, spill his drink or slap his wife. She will pack her bags and leave, rubbing her cheek, never to be seen again. Life may deal him a terrible blow, after more decadence, making him lose his fortune, which now opens the way to accidentally running into his poor long-lost beloved on her way to the factory, because he too now lives in a working-class neighbourhood. Or very many years will pass before they meet again, and she will be wearing a puffy grey wig and really awful makeup. Sometimes the rich one is the girl. She is made to marry some other rich boy who cheats on her, throws furniture around, spills his drink, slaps her face etc. He may die in a car crash at the opportune time, after the poor boy has managed to educate himself and become an engineer, thus affording a convertible Chevrolet in which he is driving around with a platinum blonde woman of dubious morals on their way to a party where everyone is debauched and dancing the twist. He sees the rich girl crossing the street, and she sees him. Her face darkens with sorrow. He drinks some more, remembering the rejection he faced when he was a young man. This causes another car accident. His convertible Chevrolet days are over. He must now buy a Devrim.7 The first Turkish automobile ever made, in 1961, which conked out after one hundred metres when our president Cemal Gürsel got in it with great fanfare to pay a visit to Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s eternal resting place. But before he buys a Devrim, our sultry hero will lie covered in plaster in a hospital bed struggling between life and death. The heroine is coincidentally a nurse now, with a different kind of wig and a little white nurse cap, having lost her fortune when she was married to that abusive rich brute with a gambling habit. With money and good cars out of the way, they can finally reunite and be happy.
I’m mixing a few plots here, from different movies. I probably watch too many. What else is there to do?
THE ACCEPTED NOTION IN SOCIETY, at least here and now, is that the destiny of a girl is to get married and bear children. Past the age of twenty-five, which has been my case for more than a decade now, we are not desirable. Then, family and friends conspire, as I said before, to arrange meetings with mature men who may still be living with their mothers. They may be widowers or divorcés. There may be a damn good reason why they are still out there, unclaimed and should remain so. And so as a single woman, I can’t help but remain suspicious of divorcés and men whose mothers have ironed their shirts for too long. Widowers are another category. They have children who will not accept a replacement to their beloved mother.
I’m picky. I admit it. I want love. I want passionate fumblings in dark alleys. I want a man who looks and smells exactly like my boss to ravish me, spend my body, and cast my soul to the open seas. I want to be treated like a lady. I want to make my own choices. I’m too strong-minded for my own good. Perhaps my independence is all I have to hold on to:
1) Despite the dusty silence that descends upon my evenings in this house.
2) Despite the fact that my girlfriends have disappeared one by one into the world of marriage, diapers, and laundry blue.
3) Despite the lonely trips to the movies where I’m the only unaccompanied young female, prey to creeps moving in the darkness of theatres.
Kerime who has lived in Germany for the last two years writes me she can go to the movies alone, to a restaurant or a café unaccompanied and will not be accosted by lewd men. Mild-mannered, they are, in tight jeans, reading Albert Camus in used pocketbook editions, pulling their beards and sipping espressos. They’ll ask permission to sit at the sa
me table with her. They will smile and dive straight into deep conversation without small talk. She is lucky. She really is. She says she has had lovers, and I’m the only friend she can tell about it; the others will not understand and will judge her as being immoral.
NURAY WAS TELLING ME ABOUT HER FRIEND today, at work. Apparently, this friend of hers had an arranged marriage, the modern way. They were made to meet at a family function or such, and then made to go out a few times chaperoned by her younger brother, and an engagement date was set when the couple decided that they liked each other enough. He was a catch, she thought. He had gone to university in America, a chemical engineer now, with a good job, apparently modern ideas, not bad looking, and from a well-to-do middle-class family. All was well until the wedding night, when the expected blood stain did not materialize on the sheet. The groom threw her out of the house in her nightie and told her never to return. The girl swore she was a virgin. Her parents took her to a doctor who confirmed that hymens could tear without causing bleeding, and that she’d most likely been a virgin until her wedding night. They made him write a note to the groom. The groom’s family would not budge and a divorce ensued within a week. The bride tried to commit suicide in the bathtub, with the same Gillette razor that shaved her legs. She was hospitalized for some weeks. Then, she returned to her parents’ house with her emaciated face and haggard eyes and was rarely seen in public. She tried to kill herself another time, apparently, and was saved, until she jumped off the balcony of a seven-storey building and died instantly.