by Loren Edizel
The girl was Nuray’s childhood friend. And so she wept, disconsolate. To be maltreated so horridly over some skin, to be considered nothing more than an intact membrane; is there truly greater insult to a human being? I hugged Nuray as she sobbed into my shirt at work. There was not much more I could do, except nod as she swore she would never ever let that happen to her. “So, we, the so-called daughters of the Republic, are still ruled by the hidden veil within us in this men’s world. I’m so angry….” She sputtered and I held her in my arms, rocking side to side a little to calm her down, thinking, “Here we are, two spinsters forever.” What else? You either die an old maid so that you never give any man the satisfaction of seeing you as a prized piece of membrane, or you get rid of it somehow so that if it doesn’t belong to you, then it will belong to no one else either.
WEEKS HAVE PASSED, but I’m still thinking about the suicide and Nuray’s anger, which is also mine. A plan is coming together in my mind. Nuray, like me, lives alone, at the other end of the city. I’ve asked her today how she feels about coming to live with me. She can rent out her own house, then she would have fewer expenses, and so would I. We would go to the movies together. We could even take trips with the money we saved. Go to Europe, for instance, visit Kerime in Germany and perhaps I’d meet a university professor with modern ideas, have a torrid affair, and return to an unsuspecting Izmir, disguised as a Shelved Virgin. Perhaps he would keep me there, in Cologne, beg me not to leave. We would smoke in bed after lovemaking, like they do in French movies. I would make him Turkish coffee to sip and kurabiye to nibble on while reading Deutsche Zeitung or some such thing. Or better, the Kamasutra, with pictures, like the one the boss keeps in his office. I may go to university and study philosophy, like Helmut or Werner. Not Helmut. It rhymes with Kel Mahmut8 or Armut.9 Helmut, Armut, Kel Mahmut! No. Werner, possibly. Or Dieter. My family name would change to something unpronounceable like Kreutsbergerschmidt. My daughters would not have to wax from head to toe like I do. They would be bald in all the right places, tall, and naturally athletic.
She seemed interested. Said she’d think about it and get back to me. It’s exciting to have someone like a sister to do things with; perhaps a new and more exciting chapter in my life is about to begin.
IT’S DONE. SHE’S MOVING IN by November. I’m surprised at how fast she organized everything; I would have taken at least a year to think it over, then another one to decide how to move. But she accepted almost immediately as if she had already pondered it long before it occurred to me. She has asked me to go to her house to see about the furniture she should move to my house other than her bedroom set. A renter has already been found; a distant cousin from the provinces, moving to Izmir with his wife and children.
She prepared a list of her potentially annoying habits, “so you have time to adjust yourself,” she laughed. (A numbered list!)
1) Singing in the bath
2) Squeezing the toothpaste tube in the middle
3) Putting a tea-soaked spoon in the sugar bowl
4) Leaving wet towels on the bed, underwear on the floor
5) Smelling the food in the plate before eating
6) Washing sheets every two days
7) Sleeping naked.
I anticipate two, three, and four will be a problem; I like order. Number One is fine, unless her voice is atrocious. And it probably is. I should ask. Number Five I can live with. Number Six, I don’t care as long as she does the wringing and hanging and ironing of those sheets herself. As for sleeping naked, it gave me a little jolt to hear this, like the time I unexpectedly fell upon dirty pictures in Patron’s desk drawer. My heart raced. I felt like a spy, uncovering secrets that could start wars. It embarrassed and confused me with those nameless yearnings that rise from the depths of forgotten dreams.
I HAVE TO FIND THE FLAG TODAY and hang it out the window. Tomorrow is October 29, the anniversary of our Republic. The crescent moon and star reflected in a pool of red will be exhibited from every house or apartment balcony. You can tell where the foreigners live at a quick glance by the absence of flags on their balconies. My father had bought this flag thirty years ago. The cloth is of very high quality and still looks good as new. I can easily wrap it twice around me and it will go all the way to the floor; my parents made sure they bought the largest and most expensive flag they could find in those days. He used to hang it out ceremoniously, as if to show all the neighbours indubitable proof of his citizenship. Although he had learned Turkish relatively well, his accent gave him away as a non-native speaker. “Where are you from? Are you Greek?” he would invariably be questioned. “Turkish, from Crete,” he would stress the word Turkish and soften the rest, so that Crete came out sounding like an afterthought. He had been called infidel sapling too often in his life and the large flag was his defiance. As he lay dying in the hospital, a few days before October 29, he opened his eyes wide and I knew he had something important to tell me, his parting advice. “Don’t forget to hang the flag. Top shelf, my closet.” He fell into a coma soon after that, so these were in fact his last words to me. Don’t forget the flag. Top shelf, my closet. In Cretan Greek. Every time I unwrap the flag, the smell of his hospital room returns to my nostrils; iodine, alcohol, and various medicated smells emanating from an emaciated frame topped by his shrunk head with terrifyingly large protruding eyes, their whites yellow. I hear the traffic sounds coming in from the open window, one particularly abrupt nurse letting a door slam somewhere down the corridor, and the moans of patients rising from the ward like a tone-deaf aria, an a cappella ode to pain, reaching my dying father to remind him of his finite number of minutes and days which will stretch longer and longer at the very end; Mother Nature’s sadistic indifference meant to extinguish all hope in another fleeting moment of well-being. Don’t forget the flag. One could say my father died a patriot. Until his last minute, his thoughts were with the Republic. I should have had such words carved on his tombstone. But I did not. Now he is with me every time I unfurl the flag and hang it from the window. I wished for different last words, such as: You were everything to me. I did my very best for you. I have loved you so much. But, “top shelf, my closet” it has to be.
NURAY’S VOICE IS DECIDEDLY ATROCIOUS. She sings loud and off-key as she monopolizes the bathroom for hours on end. She did warn me, didn’t she? If she takes her bath as soon as she returns from work, her repertoire consists of songs learned in elementary school, joyful marches sung to the beat of a drum. She splashes water around too. Who does that at our age? Late at night, if she takes her bath before going to bed, she sings à la turca, all the vowels rising and falling through the entire gamut of possible and impossible notes, the tremolos and falsetto mockingbird sounds. She extends those vowels, and replaces do with fa, sol with re. In fact she replaces entire keys, to make the songs unrecognizable. I can’t stand it! But she is such a sweet soul, and how can I forbid her from singing? I’d rather hear chalk screeching on a blackboard, though. And that is the honest to God truth. I know I won’t last if she continues singing. On top of all this, she wets the entire bathroom floor with her splashing, leaves her wet towel crumpled on the floor and walks around in the nude while I run frantically to pull curtains shut. Any neighbour passing in front of the house could crane his neck and see her pubic hair.
The gevrek boy is infatuated with her. She waits for him, sitting on the steps, her voluptuous pale flesh escaping from armpits, V-necks, and false pleats around her hips, like sausage meat stuffed into a sheath too small to contain it. She is bursting at the seams. And she intends to remain single all her life. How? Even the stray dogs and tomcats must get erections when she sits on those steps. She has taken my gevrek boy away too. He pays no attention to me whatsoever. She pats his head and offers him a gevrek that she just bought, invites him to sit beside her on the steps and eat it. He does, too. He puts his platter down and munches away next to her with a beatific smile. I watch them from the c
umba above, envious, and the rancour remains within me like tapeworm, discarding innocuous bits here and there; distant proof of the jealousy eating me from within. Yesterday, as she was reaching for yet another slice of bread during supper, I said, “Are you sure about this? Your dress may rip in the bum when you least expect it.” Her hand stopped before touching the basket and retreated. I felt ashamed as soon as I saw that. She avoided my eyes until we finished eating. It’s not as if I’m thinner. We are probably the same weight. Bread makes me look boxy, whereas on her it settles on the hips and bosoms; making her look even more opulent and voluptuous.
WE WERE ON THE TRAM HOME TODAY. She asked the driver if he could leave us close to our street, and not at the designated stop so we wouldn’t have to walk on account of her new shoes which are KILLING her. “Look, look at the back of my ankle! I’ll DIE if I have to walk home from the bus stop,” she told him theatrically. The man could lose his job if a controller would see it, or if the small and sweaty ticket guy in the grey uniform rushing to and fro to sell tickets on the streetcar reports him. But no, he had a large grin and stopped the streetcar right in the middle of the street for the Countess to descend. He added, “Only for you, Missy! I’d do it for no one else.” She neighed a sort of “hneehneehnee” with her head tossing around as if she wanted to unscrew it and winked before going down swaying her hips.
I followed feeling like her ugly cousin, head down, sulking, and burst out once we had crossed the street, “What was that all about?”
She shrugged and lit a cigarette, removing bits of tobacco from the tip of her pink tongue. “Cheer up, I just saved you two blocks of walking!” Smoke came out of her nostrils.
“When did you take up smoking?” I demanded to know, breathing all that noxious cloud in.
She raised her eyebrows and closed her eyes, “Sometimes, I smoke. Is that a problem? What are we cooking for supper today?”
“I don’t know; are YOU preparing?” I made sure to add all the sarcasm I could.
She didn’t flinch. “Yes. We’re eating fried eggs. Soft yolks, lots of butter. I’ll make tea and toast too. When I was a little girl, this was supper when mom was too exhausted to cook. It was my absolute favourite and I’m starving.”
We walked up the stairs leading to our narrow street. She flicked her cigarette and took another deep breath pushing the smoke out of her nose, like a bull about to take on a torero. Stone buildings were covered by a bluish hue in the dusk, their windows shimmering with the last reflection of the sun’s glow. We walked through the tentative scent of jasmine that blew our way from someone’s backyard mixed with the paper and candy smell of the grocer’s shop. Abdullah Efendi was sitting with his son on the sidewalk, playing tavla.10 We greeted each other and as we approached my house, Nuray took out the key from her purse and skipped up the steps to open the door, entering quickly in what struck me as a proprietary move. She seems at home and happy; and instead of simply rejoicing in that fact, my mind seems to perpetually make lists of grievances and slights. I envy her carelessness. I only know how to be careful and proper. I blend in; she stands out. If she wants to laugh out loud, she does. If she wants to shake her popo when she walks, she does. Next to her, I look like I have a severe case of haemorrhoids impeding my stride.
I ASKED HER TO HELP ME LOOK MORE, I don’t know … feminine, I guess. My hair is straight, my clothes are monochromatic; greys, beiges, and navies. I don’t wear makeup and I favour flat shoes. She pulled the same trick again with the streetcar driver and he let us off close to our house. She pulled me by the hand as if I were a small child, to work on my “transformation.” I was glad there would be no marches or splashes in the bathroom that evening. “Come on” she rushed me up the stairs, “this is going to be so much fun!”
We sat in the dining room, with all her equipment; there was a large makeup kit with brushes and pencils, curlers, a blow-drier that had a nylon tube and a cap stuck to it. You put it on your head with your curlers on, and it was better than a salon job, she said. She brought a small mirror that looked like a magnifier for me to look into while she was tweezing my eyebrows. I could count every pore and blackhead on my skin. I could even see the beginnings of a small pimple that was going to erupt in a week. “Why do you carry such a depressing thing around?” I left it on the table face down, feeling irritable. She frowned as she continued tweezing the area between my brows. “You used to look like Brezhnev, darling, and now you will have two thin arches, like Greta Garbo. It will open up your face, bring out your eyes. You’ve got lovely eyes, you know.” She was really getting into the role of an all-knowing aesthetician. “Where did you learn all this?”
“My mom had a beauty shop,” she shrugged. “She did nails and hair and everything. I watched.”
Fixing me turned out to be a bigger job than I anticipated. While she had me holding the hair dryer that sent scalding air through the intestinal tube into the puffy cap on my head, she rushed to the kitchen to fry eggs again. If you do something more than twice it becomes a habit, someone once told me. That diet of greasy fried eggs and toasted bread was becoming one really quickly. She rushed back to the table with the steaming teapot then ran to the kitchen to finish the eggs and toast. Within a few minutes she had set the table—not adequately, mind you, but still—I was amazed by her agility and speed. I turned off the noisy machine and sipped my tea and ate my eggs sitting beside her. She stopped me as I was about to pick up the dirty plates. “Let them be, for heavens’ sake! Let’s finish this and go out. What is the point of all this work, if we’ll go to bed right after?”
When she was done I had red fingernails and toes to match the red lipstick. She had glued fake lashes on my eyelids and given me Egyptian eyes with the black eyeliner. I had a smooth bob and was trying on her corset. A tight mermaid suit squishing and puffing my bosom so that her blue and white polka dot dress with the plunging v-neck the gevrek boy liked so much turned me into a sultry vamp.
“I can’t go out like this. This is not me.”
“Sure it’s you, silly. In a different dress and a bit of colour, is all. Don’t be a bore. Come, zip me up.”
We were out of the house just as the sun was setting.
We met some of her friends—she called them cousins—a group of about seven, men and women combined, and went to a disco on the seaside. In the car, the man who was driving us, Kudret, opened a small flask of scotch and passed it around so we wouldn’t spend money on drinks at the bar. Joni Volker he called it. I was the only one who didn’t drink. We got out slamming the doors of his new Impala. Kudret got irritated. “Don’t slam! This isn’t your father’s barn, guys! This car costs a fortune.” He took a quick petulant walk around it to make sure there were no scratches and we went into the disco. Nuray danced, I sat. One of the men was also not dancing and he tried to strike a conversation with me that went nowhere. I kept asking him “Pardon? What did you say?” over the music, and if by chance I caught the gist of it and replied, he couldn’t hear me over Mahalia Jackson and Rolling Stones and whatnot. Then they played the slow music, and he ventured to ask me for a dance. “I promise I won’t step on your feet,” he hollered. I nodded, tired of all the shouting and rose. He held me in an awkward, distant embrace and forced my body to move in unexpected directions, his limbs apparently unable to gauge the movements his mind prescribed. It was a simple beat, one-two, one-two, and we managed to dance off it. My back started aching from all his unpredictable decisions to move here and there, fast and slow, plus he never got quiet. I can’t even remember the things he was saying. Something political. About Inönü. They must have been jokes because he would make a few bleating sounds after he finished the story. I smiled vaguely and looked away so he would take the cue and give my ears a rest, but he kept on going. Someone must have told him he really knew how to tell good jokes and this was the night he remembered them all. As soon as the song ended, I went to the washroom to get away from him. I s
tood there surrounded by the smell of old pee and new shit, in front of the mirror, dazed from trying so hard to hear the man I had no desire to listen to, and unable to breathe from the tightness of that polyester corset squeezing my stomach.
I left the stench of the washroom behind and wiggled my way through the crowded disco looking for my group. Nuray and her cousins were gulping down Coca Colas, their faces covered in sweat. “Nuray, I want to go home. We have to go to work tomorrow. This smoke is making me ill.” I shouted. She nodded and went looking for the male cousin who owned the convertible Impala. One of the girls said, “If it weren’t for Kudret, I would never go out. My parents would never let me go with anyone but my own brother and cousins.”
“Who is that guy over there?” I pointed to the man who had eaten my ears off all night and had now moved to another table, where he was shouting his jokes into another victim’s ear.
She shrugged. “Never seen him before.”
On the way home someone explained that he was a regular at the disco and would pounce upon anyone sitting down long enough to hear a joke. That is why none of the regulars ever sat down to rest. It was a kind of initiation; even the shiest girl ran to the dance floor the second time around. They all laughed when I said, “I thought he was one of you, a cousin. Was he not in the car with us?”
When we got home and I finally got rid of that corset, I thanked Nuray for all the trouble she took fixing me up, and told her that I was not too much into dancing. She nodded and closed her door, saying nothing.
The next morning, on the streetcar she broke the silence, giving my usual navy-blue pants and white blouse combination a sidelong glance. “You don’t like to have fun, obviously. Not with clothes, or dancing at least….”
We started what I hope will become our Friday night tradition. So far we’ve seen To Kill a Mockingbird, Spartacus and Psycho, Cleopatra, The Guns of Navarone, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Lolita and A Bout de Souffle, and many others I can’t remember to name now. There is a theatre not far from my house, and there, on Tuesdays we go watch Turkish movies. The open-air theatres in the summer are my favourites. Sitting on creaky wooden chairs in a schoolyard converted into a theatre for the summer, drinking Cincibir11 and eating sunflower seeds. The entire neighbourhood is there—families, grandparents, friends—having fun. Nuray falls asleep sometimes and snores with her head on my shoulder. If the woman is not talking, dancing, eating, or making a racket in the bathtub, she’s sleeping. Going to the movies is her way of making me happy while taking expensive naps. In return, I have decided to go wherever she drags me with her “cousins.” She comes alive when her makeup kit comes out of the drawer and she starts tweezing, brushing, fluffing, and painting. Every time she tries to give me that Cleopatra look, with the heavy black eyeliner that goes far beyond the limits of my eyes I feel ridiculous, but I don’t have the heart to say it. She says this is the Juliette Greco look. Very fashionable, she says, very “je ne sais quoi,” whatever that means. To me, I look like a stout second-rate casino singer who turns tricks between gigs. I hope to God I won’t attract anyone’s attention in the discos where she takes me, because they will surely ask me “how much?”