“ ‘Your shoes,’ he’d cry each morning. ‘What are you doing to your shoes?’
“ ‘Good morning, Baba,’ the girls would say, each in turn, youngest to oldest, and they would run, barefoot, to kiss him and hug him and not ever answer his question.
“Then one morning he said, ‘You must stop this. Your mother is weeping. The princes are weeping. The cobbler is weeping. He has threatened to kill himself if he has to make any more shoes.’
“ ‘Tell him not to cry, Baba,’ the oldest daughter said. ‘We don’t even like shoes. He need not make us any more.’
“ ‘Yes,’ her sisters echoed. ‘He need not make us any more,’ and the youngest daughter started a pirouette on her bare toes, but the oldest caught her in her arms. ‘Not now,’ she whispered in the youngest daughter’s ear.”
“CELINE, YOU’RE STILL NOT telling it right,” Fadime said.
“Shush,” we told her. “Let us find out what happens.”
“THE COBBLER KILLED HIMSELF,” Celine said, and we could hear her lips press tight.
“Oh, Celine,” we said. “He didn’t.”
“I don’t want him to,” Fadime cried.
“Fine,” Celine said, “he didn’t kill himself but he refused to make any more shoes and so the girls had to dance barefoot and the next morning when their father woke them he found their sheets soaked in blood and their toes worn down to nubs.”
“Celine!” we cried out.
“The daughters could not walk so they spent the rest of their lives in bed where nurses brought them food and drink and they peed in pots that were kept under their beds and they even got married in bed and their husbands, all princes, lay in bed next to them. Twelve big beds all in a row.”
“I don’t want to grow up!” Mualla cried out.
“Don’t worry, you won’t,” Celine said.
“Oh, Celine,” we said. “You don’t have to be so mean.”
“I’m not mean,” she said.
“You’re selfish,” we said. “We all know it.”
“I’m not selfish,” Celine said. “Say it. I’m not selfish.”
“Celine,” we said.
“Please, I’m not,” she said.
She was and she wasn’t; we all knew that.
There was a pause and a stifled hiccup or sob and Celine said, “Tell my brother I’m sorry I stole his Fenerbahçe jersey.”
We were quiet, until Gül said, “I’ll tell him.”
There was another pause and another stifled hiccup or sob.
Then Sahiba said, “But are you sorry?”
Celine often wore the jersey under her uniform or slept with it in her arms as if it were a stuffed animal. We had even named it Mehmet after her favorite player.
We giggled.
She giggled.
“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe you should tell him it was a comfort to me.”
“We will,” we said. “We’ll tell him.”
“Yes, yes,” the others said. “Tell my brother my sister my mother my father my aunt my grandmother my best friend from when I was five the boy I never talked to the boy I never met the husband I would have had the children I would have had tell them we are sorry we love them we are all right we will never forget them never forget us. Tell them.”
“Yes,” we said. “We will tell them. Unless you tell them first.”
“Everyone be quiet,” Celine said, and we could not help but smile. “Once there was and once there wasn’t,” she said, “in the time when genies were jinn and children remained children and nobody was born and nobody died, in the time when the earth stood still and the sun shone bright, in that time, there were fourteen princesses. And they loved to dance. They danced all night when they were meant to be sleeping, and then in the morning when they slept they dreamt of dancing. Night and day, they spun and spun, circling round and round, arms out wide and arms at their sides, spinning wider and wider until they could not even be seen.
“ ‘Aren’t you tired,’ people would cry at the fourteen dancing princesses but inside the dance the fourteen princesses saw only each other and heard only each other and they spun and they spun and they never stopped spinning and their feet never hurt and their heads never hurt and their hearts never hurt. Inside their circle, they spun and they never stopped, not ever, not to grow old and not to die and not to work and not to marry and not to have children and not to eat bread and butter or sleep in the cold or the hot, not to do anything but spin. Together. Always.”
She was quiet and so were we.
“Thank you, Celine,” we said.
“I don’t care,” she said, but we knew she did.
“You’re not selfish,” we said. “We didn’t mean it.”
“We’re spinning, we’re spinning,” the dead girls said. “Watch me,” Fadime said. “Can you see me spinning?”
“Yes,” we said, though of course we couldn’t.
The history of girls is always told as a tragedy. Growing old is a tragedy and so is dying young.
WHAT, WE HAD ALWAYS asked each other, could it be like to be stoned? Were girls pelted like the stray dogs we saw being chased away with rocks by shopkeepers? Was it like dodgeball, which our American teacher made us play in the yard until only Celine was left standing and we all refused to play ever again because she was so vicious? Was it like the snowball fights we read about in books? Or was it more like being hit with a hammer, close and bloody? Maybe it was the weight of human hatred that knocked girls from their feet.
Once we tossed rocks at each other just to see, but we missed every time.
SOMETIMES WE FELL QUIET. Sometimes another girl died. She would let out a small sound or a loud one, death still a surprise, even under the circumstances.
“Hello,” the other girls would say, as if she had entered a room they were in. There were so many more of them then.
HOW HARD IT IS to explain, what it was like. We were together, as we were so accustomed to being. We made our present worth living, as we so often had. But then the rescue took so much longer than we expected.
“OH, WE’RE ON TELEVISION,” the dead girls said. “There are cameras and reporters and even Americans.”
“What can you see?” we asked but the dead girls wouldn’t say.
“Are our parents there?” we asked but the dead girls wouldn’t say.
“Are you still there?” we called out and they did not answer.
What is the heaviest thing you can imagine? A boulder? A house? An airplane? In all of the world, what is the heaviest thing? Can you even imagine it?
“Where are you?” we asked.
But they did not answer.
How quickly it happened then. One girl, then another. Gone.
“PLEASE,” I SAID, “don’t leave me.”
“Where are you?” I asked. “Can’t I come, too?”
“Please,” I said. “Precious,” I said. “Precious.”
But they did not answer.
“I hate you,” I said. “You are all mean.”
“Take me with you,” I yelled. “Please take me with you.”
And from somewhere I could not see and in voices I could barely hear, they said, “Oh Zehra, don’t be silly” and “We’ll miss you. Don’t forget to tell them” and “Goodnightgoodnightgoodnight.”
“I don’t want to grow up without you,” I said.
But they did not answer. And though my arms were at my sides, and my legs were beneath me in a way they never should be, and my voice could not be heard, and my eyes could not see, I felt twice over that I always would be—and I never would be—without them.
Have you ever seen a girl?
She is my history.
A CAUTIONARY TALE
In the last years of the nineteenth century, the third-strongest man in the world was said to be a Turk named Yusuf Ismail, known in his homeland as Yusuf the Great or Yusuf the Large, and known everywhere else as the Terrible Turk. He was the first of a line of legendary, savage, monstro
usly large wrestlers all called, one after the other, the Terrible Turk.
It’s true some of the Terrible Turks were fakes, not actually Turks at all. And though later some would say Yusuf Ismail was a French dockworker in a fez with nothing more than an out-of-control appetite and the ability to spike men into the ground so hard they could not rise without help, he was indeed a Turk, a sultan’s favorite, born in a corner of the then-immense Ottoman Empire, and though he was in the end perhaps a showman, maybe even a stooge, he also once was a hero and a champion.
When he was six years old, Yusuf could pin twelve-year-olds to the grass in less than a minute. When he was twelve, he could pin full-grown men using just his legs, and by the time he was thirteen, nobody in his village would spar with him. He had to strengthen his fingers by kneading balls of mud, his legs and arms by pushing on walls of stone, and his shoulders by hoisting fallen trees. By fourteen, he was never seen without a large and heavy object in his hands.
By then he was already the village champion, and he traveled regularly to competitions at weddings and other festivals, where he was matched against other village champions, all older and more experienced, and they would lean on each other for hours, testing for the smallest sign of weakness. It was then, when Yusuf was not yet the biggest or the strongest, and his matches seemed as if they would never end, that his skills and his fame grew. He had great patience then. He knew how to push men muscle by muscle until finally they fell.
By the time a French manager found him and imported him to Europe, he was already the head wrestler of the Ottoman Empire, thirty-seven years old, six foot two, 250 pounds. Not so big now, but big then. Twenty pounds heavier than his average opponent.
It took him four seconds to win his first European match, in which he lifted the French champion, Sabès, by the throat, then turned the Frenchman upside down and held him at arm’s length while he twisted and turned.
It’s said the Turk had no neck and that was why Strangler Lewis, the American heavyweight champion, could not defeat him. It’s said it took six men, three on each arm, to stop the Turk from killing one of his opponents.
It’s said he promised to cut his own throat if he was ever beaten.
It’s said he had a dagger in his turban even when on the mat.
It’s said that he had a cruel face, that he ate ten times a day and never paid for a meal, that he had a childish love of finery, that he had a sluggish Oriental brain, that he did not understand paper money, that he liked the shine and clink of gold coins. That he was once a bandit.
It’s true he wore his gold belted around his waist. Eight thousand dollars on the day he died. Or maybe ten. Or maybe five. At least forty pounds in weight, anyway.
And it’s true he drowned, just months after the fight at Madison Square Garden, along with nearly six hundred other passengers and crew, when the French ocean liner La Bourgogne hit the British ship Cromartyshire on the American Independence Day, just on the edge of the nineteenth century, July 4, 1898. They died, all of them, off the coast of Nova Scotia, in the North Atlantic, while the ship was on its way to Le Havre, where Yusuf was to join his wife and two children, so that they could travel home together.
It’s said the Terrible Turk refused to remove his belt full of gold when the ship went down, and he leapt, dagger in hand, onto a lifeboat full of mothers and children, dropping it deep into the sea.
It’s said he wailed from the ship’s rail begging Allah to save him.
It’s said he fell into the water and tried to lift himself onto a lifeboat, rocking the craft so severely with his great weight that a crewman first tried to push him away with an oar and, when that failed, took an axe and cut off each of the Terrible Turk’s grasping hands, the Turk’s grip so tight that his hands remained clinging to the lip of the boat while his body and his gold sank into the sea.
WHEN YOU WERE A CHILD, did you find that story credible?
When I was a child I didn’t know what “credible” meant.
It means believable.
I know what it means now.
Did you find the story believable as a child?
I think most people would do anything to save their lives.
Did you think that when you were a child?
I have no idea.
So now, you think Yusuf Ismail was just trying to save his own life?
I was referring to the crewman. Who cut off his hands.
You think the crewman cut off Yusuf Ismail’s hands in order to save his own life?
—
You don’t think the crewman was trying to save the lives of the women and children on his boat?
—
So, did you find the story believable as a child?
I don’t recall.
But you find it believable now?
I think it’s possible.
Probable?
Possible.
Does the probability of the story’s veracity—its truth—influence its effect on you?
I know what “veracity” means. And I said, it’s possible, not probable.
Does the possibility of the story’s veracity influence its effect on you?
The story has no effect on me.
Why not?
Why should it?
Some would find that a sad story. Or a story from which something could be learned.
Well, I don’t.
Why do you think that story is told to children?
Because it’s entertaining, I suppose.
Not to teach them a lesson?
Yes, I suppose to teach them a lesson.
And what is that lesson?
To be ashamed of themselves.
You think that is the intended lesson?
Maybe not intended, no.
But that story makes you feel ashamed of yourself?
—
As a child, did it make you feel ashamed of yourself?
No, it gave me nightmares.
Why?
Because of the hands, of course. The way they cut off his hands.
Why does that story make you feel ashamed?
It doesn’t.
It doesn’t make you feel ashamed?
No, it doesn’t.
But you think its lesson is to make children feel ashamed when they hear it?
Not all children.
Which children?
Turkish children, of course. The terrible Turkish children.
You don’t think Yusuf Ismail was a hero?
I don’t really care one way or the other.
The Fight at Madison Square Garden
New York City, 1898
Four months before he died
At the time, Madison Square Garden could seat eight thousand and stand a thousand more. On the night Ernest Roeber fought the Terrible Turk, perhaps another two hundred crowded their way in. There were five matchups, but it was clear that all nine thousand, two hundred men and women of the crowd were there for the main event. They each had the air of fighters, sweating, shouting, impatient, and often indignant. Fights broke out, men screamed, women fainted, some were nearly trampled.
The Terrible Turk was believed to be honest, unwilling to lose, and therefore unwilling to fix matches. It was meant to be a return to glory for the oldest sport among men.
No holds were barred. American Greco-Roman rules.
The Turk wore a turban of plaid.
A fall had to be made on the mat to count. The best two out of three falls would earn the winner five hundred dollars and half of the gate.
There was no rope, no posts, no ring, really. Just a mat on a stage, six feet above the crowd, only that height separating the fighters from their audience.
The Turk was six inches the taller.
They shook hands at the start.
Reporters lifted their notebooks, the referee took his stance, trainers and managers and people all across the arena planted their feet as if the fight depended on their ability to keep their balance.
The T
urk could throw a man to the mat with such force that the fall alone knocked him out.
He wrenched men’s necks so badly that for days they could not look straight ahead.
But Roeber was one of the most popular champions of the past twenty years. A handsome man. A crowd favorite.
On the first move, without ceremony, seemingly without effort, Roeber was dropped, so fast that to the people seated at the top of the arena, who could not see where he lay, it was as if he had vanished. But just as fast, Roeber leapt to his feet and then off the mat and out of the field of play. If there had been a rope, a ring, Roeber would have been outside it, and if the Turk dropped him there, the fall wouldn’t count.
There Roeber stayed, orbiting the mammoth Turk, still in the center. “Fight!” one man in the crowd yelled. “Fight!” But nobody took up his chant. Periodically the Turk leaned forward and tried to swat Roeber back onto the mat, but the champion stayed on his feet, just out of reach. Finally the Turk, too, stepped off the mat, grabbed Roeber’s face in his two hands, and tried to lift him back into the field of play. But Roeber wiggled and writhed, and soon he was free, orbiting again. It was only seconds later that the Turk grabbed him once more, harder this time, and pushed him, threw him really, off the platform, so that Roeber dropped six feet to the ground below, landing first on his shoulder and then on his head, unconscious.
The audience thought he was dead. A madness overtook them. Words frothed out of their mouths. “Kill him!” they screamed.
The Turk looked out at them, used his long fingers to mimic Roeber’s running around the ring, pointed to his own chest, then pantomimed two men wrestling. He seemed to hold a match in his own imagination. Not my fault, his fingers seemed to say. Police surrounded the platform, and the Turk was led away, saying in Arabic and then French, “I only want to fight.”
The Turk was in his dressing room when the match was declared for Roeber.
The New York Times called him “almost frenzied with anger.”
“Kill the Turk!” “Lynch him!” the New York Times said the crowd called.
The Trojan War Museum Page 2