by Loren Edizel
But I was in Nergiz Hanım’s class now and it smelled of oranges. She entered with a perfumed smile and beautiful shoes. The kohl around her eyes made her look like an Egyptian princess. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail and she wore an emerald green suit matched by small emerald earrings. She asked us how we were feeling and if we had had a good nights’ sleep. “Who wants to have slices of orange?” Then she announced to the class that they had a new friend. She asked me to rise and say my name and made everyone in the class do the same. We then sang a folk song called the poplars of Izmir, the story of a beloved bandit and a favourite of Atatürk’s apparently, and opened our math books. She spoke slowly, deliberately, writing on the board and waiting for everyone to copy into their notebooks before erasing. She was politeness personified and I felt I needed to moderate my joy with some deep suspicion that perhaps this was a show. But every day brought new confirmation that she was not only beautiful and elegant, but also polite and kind. I gradually accepted that I was in elementary school heaven and Nergiz Hanım was a woman of distinction.
THERE WAS A NEW BOY in class named Bahtiyar. He came in the middle of the school year and was extremely shy and quiet. He sat in the back, with his shaven head down, kept to himself and carried with him an air of poverty and heartache. His notebooks and books were not covered in blue and red, and the soft covers and pages curled upward like crashing waves. He walked up and down the schoolyard during recess and did not participate in any games or conversations. In class, he never raised his hand to speak. He often seemed absorbed in a realm invisible to us, yet more tangible to him than our presence.
The day I decided to approach him and invite him to play tag during recess, I started walking behind him in the schoolyard as he made his solitary rounds. It wasn’t a spontaneous decision. I had been thinking about it for days. I quickened my steps and called out his name. “Bahtiyar!”
He did not look at me.
“Bahtiyar!”
He stopped and looked down, waiting for me to go on.
“Come play tag with us. Over there. Come!” I pulled him slightly. His body did not resist, but from his eyes I could tell he did not really want to play. He was a good runner though, and before long he tagged Tahsin from Gülbahar Hanım’s class. Tahsin, who was a bit on the heavy side, had difficulty tagging anyone else until the bell rang.
I knew Tahsin’s strategy in the schoolyard. He would recruit one or two girls who could not run fast so that he could tag them easily. By the time the bell rang, there was usually a desperate and sweaty girl running around unable to tag anyone else. He once made the mistake of asking me to play tag, thinking I was easy prey. He regretted it, needless to say, and from there on, ignored me. The other boys did not, however. They knew that I was fast and kept asking me to play. The day I asked Bahtiyar to join us, Tahsin had not had a chance to find a prey to keep busy until the end of recess. I saw a glimmer of hope in his eyes when I approached the group with Bahtiyar trailing behind me looking uninterested. “He’s playing,” I announced.
Tahsin ended up being the tag for a while. When the bell finally rang, he was red in the face with beads of sweat crowding his angry forehead and upper lip. As we all ran toward the building to get back to class, he hissed “Infidel Seed” as he passed me, and then “Dirty Gypsy” to Bahtiyar, who without missing a beat turned around and replied, “I’m a Kurd and you’re a pig.” It was probably a good thing that Bahtiyar was not in Gülbahar’s class. Insulting her protégé would have resulted in a few headers to the blackboard, some epithets from the domestic animal kingdom, and lousy marks for the rest of his life. Tahsin stuck out his tongue in fury and ran to his class.
In those days, Kurds were described as Mountain Turks. Someone had once told me, I don’t remember who anymore, or perhaps I had read it somewhere, that Mountain Turks got to be called Kurds because of the snow going “kard kurd” under their boots in the mountains. Since everyone, even the Sumerians and Etruscans, were originally Turks from Central Asia according to the Sun Theory, so were the Kurds, naturally. They settled in the mountains in eastern Anatolia. I asked him if it was true about snow going “kard kurd” after our friendship had evolved enough to exchange some words in between tag games. He looked at me with blank eyes and said, “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Well then, you go ask your parents if they have,” I said to him.
When my grandmother came to pick me up I asked her about it, too. She said, “I don’t know about that. I know Kurds are Kurds, Armenians are Armenians, Laz are Laz, Rum are Rum…”
“Yes, but do you know where they all come from?” I cut into her pointless enumerations.
She shrugged and winced to show I was giving her a headache. “From their villages and provinces. Where else?”
“Granny, don’t you know that everyone comes from the Taklamakan Desert?” I felt extremely proud knowing something she didn’t. “We’re all from there. Even Cretans must have been from there and so this makes me pure Turkish once and for all. And,” I added, so she wouldn’t feel left out, “I think Italians also come from there, so you know, you’re also a Turk, in origin.”
She chuckled, shaking her head, “I’ve never heard of this. But if you’re learning it in school who am I to argue?”
Social anxiety coloured my entire childhood. I came from everything weird; all my family associations, my adopted grandmother with the un-Turkish name of Inez, not to mention my mother with the name of Maria—thankfully she went by the name of Meryem, the Turkish equivalent—the censored Greek mother tongue at home, and our lack of religiosity, the fact that I was registered as Moslem but accompanied granny to church on Sundays where I learned to say prayers in Latin, all those things that just did not fit in with being Turkish demanded a need for secrecy and lies. I lied about my origins, about my grandmother’s name, and asked Inez to say her name was Huriye if asked when she came to pick me up from school. I would drill her on the way there to make sure she wouldn’t forget her new name. One morning she finally said, “Lying’s no good, Mehtap. Sooner or later, the truth comes out. Besides, I like my own name. Why are we changing it?”
“Because it’s not Turkish.”
“But aren’t we all from the Taklamakan Desert anyway? You told me yourself.”
“That was too long ago. You didn’t even know anything about it until I told you. Nobody knows it. Only the book says it.”
“I can say ‘I’m Inez, originally from Taklamakan. And you?’” She put on her mocking little grin.
“It’s not funny.”
“It is, too. Listen, child. I can’t change my name for anybody. I was baptized Inez and will die Inez. Stop calling me Huriye.”
I sulked all the way to the gate, and told her I couldn’t wait to be old enough to walk to school alone. She looked crushed when I didn’t wave at her.
I was around nine or ten at the time, I believe. Bahtiyar and I had become a tight team in the schoolyard where we made sure to get Tahsin to sweat a little every day. He hated me for siding with my new friend, but he had no recourse; he could not get Gülbahar Hanım to do anything to me since I was no longer in her class and whenever he protested I simply told him to stop playing if he didn’t like it. He never stopped, though, and I was glad because I would have not enjoyed myself as much in the schoolyard without Tahsin to annoy.
As the months followed one another, I got to learn more about Bahtiyar’s life. Mainly, that he did not have much to say about it. I knew he spoke a different language at home, just like I did. He spoke Zaza and I spoke Greek; because we could only speak our mother tongues in the privacy of our homes, we were both not very fluent in them. After making me swear not to tell anyone he told me his family was from Dersim. I did not know where it was so he showed me on the map a spot near the source of the Euphrates River. He said his family all died there and he was living with his aunt and uncle in Izmir now. I had no idea why t
his had to be a secret, but I respected his wishes and told no one. I thought perhaps the fact that he was an orphan, and poor at that, was a source of shame for him. Long after elementary school was over and we had lost touch completely I heard some stories about what took place in that region in the couple of years preceding his arrival in Nergiz Hanım’s class. Another thing struck me many years later, as I was reading an article in the newspaper.
Notebook II. The Cretans
THE DERSIM UPRISING TOOK PLACE in the years 1937 and 1938. In the mountainous region mostly inhabited by Kurds, there was a feudal system resistant to change and modernization; the Aghas of the region did not want to relinquish their power over the peasantry and an uprising against the Turkish state was fomented, which was then successfully suppressed by the army. This was the version that became common knowledge through the newspapers and school books, etc. God knows, in the early years of the Republic there were many uprisings, many opposing forces wanting the pull the country backwards into the darkness of religious superstition and feudalism, and this was Atatürk’s biggest challenge as he tried to pull the debris of an old empire, now reconstructed as the Turkish Republic, into modernity, laicism, and enlightenment. There were stories that went around if you knew someone who knew someone whose uncle perished or was a soldier.
Through the years, Mehtap had vaguely heard those whispered insinuations and the hush-hush tone and the don’t-repeat-this looks but had not given it much thought given the lack of support and evidence. They came to her ear in the same breath as the story of the woman in such and such a village who gave birth to a two-headed serpent, from the mouth of her talkative cleaning lady who swore it was God’s truth.
The newspaper article that Mehtap was reading with some difficulty, using her magnifying glass as she sipped her tea in the sunny cumba on the second floor of her house, confirmed that a massacre had taken place; it involved mass graves and aerial bombardments on innocent villagers. It was the object of a state-issued apology and some political upheaval. There was mention of Atatürk’s adopted daughter Sabiha, celebrated as the first Turkish woman pilot, being implicated in the aerial bombardment of the villages back in those days. Heroes and heroines of old were falling from grace, crashing down. Mehtap took off her glasses and pushed the newspaper away.
In her school years she could not have known this, nor could she have guessed that Nergiz Hanım’s handsome fiancé had been one of the few pilots flying the handful of fighter planes owned by the army in those days. Her teacher’s dashing lover stopped coming to meet her outside the schoolyard around the time that Bahtiyar joined the class. These two seemingly unrelated events were connected for Mehtap as two facets of the same incident even many decades after the fact. It was perhaps a bomb released by Nergiz Hanım’s fiancé that vaporized Bahtiyar’s entire family and caused him to move to Izmir where relatives took him in. When this idea took root in her mind, Mehtap shed tears of inconsolable sorrow for her long-forgotten childhood friend Bahtiyar over the pages of the newspaper she was reading in her solitary old age, sitting by the bay window of the cumba on the second floor of her house.
She saw in her mind, the pilot being called for a top-secret mission and taking leave from the beautiful Nergiz in Izmir, promising to marry her upon his return, and Nergiz gracing his departure with her luminous smile. The sinewy pilot in his sharp uniform being given the mission to bomb insurgents hiding in mountain caves only to find out after the fact that the cave he had targeted was inhabited by fearful elderly people and children who had run up to the hills for protection. She imagined Bahtiyar cowering in some corner of a closet, surviving the attack and then being sent to Izmir by some kind-hearted person who found him in the ruins, perhaps even a soldier who could not live with himself after following the order to kill unarmed villagers. After putting the child on the train and giving him pocket money, she imagined this very soldier going back to the barracks and hanging himself with his own belt. She wept and wept imagining Bahtiyar’s childhood buried in a mass grave along with his parents, grandparents, and siblings. She understood the sorrowful silence enveloping the boy like a tattered coat in the schoolyard. What happened to Bahtiyar? She wondered about this for a long time and dreamt catastrophic scenes involving the boy with whom they had shared the secret of secrecy as children.
Nergiz Hanım lost her radiant smile around the time Bahtiyar came. It wasn’t due to Bahtiyar’s presence, of course, but to the inexplicable withdrawal of her lover’s affection. He returned from his secret mission a changed man, one who awoke screaming from nightmares and would suddenly start shaking and sweating in mid-sentence for no apparent reason. He could no longer work as a commercial pilot and was fired for incompetence and alcoholism. He stopped coming to visit Nergiz altogether a year after his mission and withdrew his proposal to marry her, telling her he was a broken man, unable to support her and unworthy of her love. She started coming to school with her eyelids swollen and her once impeccable clothes frumpy, her beauteous smile and movie-star looks forever gone. Many years after her graduation from elementary school, Mehtap encountered Nergiz Hanım on the quay walking alone. She kissed the top of her teacher’s hand and touched her forehead with it to show respect. Nergiz Hanım asked her about her parents and grandmother, in her usual affable politeness. Throughout this exchange, Mehtap kept trying to find her beloved teacher in this now somewhat swollen, pasty face and heavy trunk. The eyes that used to light up from inside had a matte, dead-fish look to them. She told Mehtap she was still teaching and invited her to visit the school one of these days. This was the last time she ever saw her teacher and after taking her leave, Mehtap walked away heavy-hearted, carrying the crushing disappointment of witnessing the transformation of her heroine into someone utterly banal, lost in the crowds.
Notebook III. Autobiography
WORLD WAR II HAD ALREADY BEGUN when I started middle school. It was a time of deprivation, even though we did not enter the war. There were dinners of chewy bread, grapes and weak tea, most days. That is what I remember. And the Wealth Tax that ruined my grandmother. In November of 1942, a law was passed enabling the state to collect this tax from all business owners, estates, property owners, and so on. It was devised ostensibly to fill the coffers of the state in case the country had to go to war against Hitler or Stalin. It was also a way to push all non-Moslem minorities’ influence out of the economy and transfer their assets to Moslem, and therefore “pure” Turkish hands. The Armenians, Jews, Greeks and Levantines were taxed severely, and many lost all their assets. Those who couldn’t pay the tax were sent to a forced labour camp in Erzurum. Some of my grandmother’s acquaintances, tradesmen all, were sent to Aşkale to break rocks, for being unable to pay the exorbitant tax imposed on their fledgling businesses. My grandmother’s haberdashery, still run by my mother to keep her busy, had been generating just enough income to keep it going till then. But when the tax came, Granny had to sell the house we lived in to pay the tax on the haberdashery. Mehtap Tuhafiye closed its doors. I remember my grandmother sitting on her bed, holding her prayer beads. She couldn’t pray. My mother who sat beside her, was rubbing her back, telling her we were a family and not to worry, that just as she took care of them when they got off the boat, they would now take care of her. Her tears kept streaming down her face as she mumbled incoherently. “Spared from the great fire. I was born. Gave birth … where my baby … all my memories…. Why do this to an old widow? We make next to nothing with this shop. Why?” And so it went. She sobbed, and my mother wiped her tears reminding Granny that she was a brave woman and would come out of this stronger. I suppose there is only so much the heart of a brave woman can take. For my grandmother, this was the breaking point.
We moved to the house where I now live, in Karataş. A Jewish family was renting it out after having moved in with relatives to pay for the tax. A decade or so later, my father was able to buy the house with his savings when the owner decided to move to Israel with
his family. My grandmother’s health and spirit were forever altered by this event. She didn’t know the new neighbourhood, and made no effort to acquaint herself with it. She had the room where I now sleep, which was the sunniest and most spacious in the house, but spent her days in the small cumba in her armchair, sitting in the exact spot where I’m writing these words today. She stopped teasing me, and did not enter the kitchen to cook a single meal until the end of her days. My mother had to learn to cook. It was a most unhappy time for us all. Mom, who saw herself as a businesswoman running a store, looking fashionable and trendy, had to contend with the role of a housewife in a frilly apron, making uninspired meals that had a bafflingly absolute lack of taste. My father would take a forkful during supper and make a face behind my busy mother’s back that made me smile in complicity. Granny did not participate in our secret. She ate impassively and thanked my mother for feeding us at the end of the meal with polite indifference. My dad and I would join her dutifully in the thanking, and he would then carefully venture, “Next time, a touch of salt and pepper would make it even tastier.” My mother would get defensive immediately and snap, “I’m sorry I don’t know how to cook better. You can try your hand at it next time if you wish.”
He would cautiously retract, “No dearest, it is very good; I was just making a suggestion, to be helpful.”
She punished us for the events that took her out of Alsancak and changed her daily routine to one that stuck her in this old kitchen with steam from pots frizzing her hair and giving her pimples. My father secretly begged Inez to start cooking occasionally to give Maria a break from the kitchen and most importantly to give us a break from her atrocious cooking, but Granny wouldn’t give in. She said the inspiration and desire were gone from her and the food would turn out worse than Maria’s. “Trust me, nothing you could ever cook would turn out worse than this. If not for me, do it for Mehtap. She is still a growing child and is losing her appetite.” There was no budging my grandmother. We forcibly developed a taste for bland, loveless dolmas, chalky pilav, and fat köftes.21