Walking on the Ceiling

by Aysegül Savas

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Ayşegül Savaş

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Savas, Aysegül, author.

  Title: Walking on the ceiling / Aysegül Savas.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018019889 (print) | LCCN 2018023114 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525537434 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525537410

  Classification: LCC PR9165.9.S28 (ebook) | LCC PR9165.9.S28 W35 2019 (print) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019889

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design and art: Jaya Miceli

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Maks

  Who at such a time

  has come to the edge of the doorway?

  Apollodorus

  1.

  For a short time when I lived in Paris, I was friends with the writer M. He was a foreigner to the city, too, which may have been one reason for our friendship. We went on walks around the city and we wrote to each other.

  What remains of that time is a photograph of M. standing in front of a marble wall, looking at me with bewildered eyes. Above his raised eyebrow, a pale and jagged scar rises, deepens, disappears.

  Actually, this may not be a scar at all, but a trick of the shadows, or the author’s face folded with age. I do not recall a scar from our walks, but I often walked alongside him with my head down. And I’m not sure whether his eyes are really cast up in surprise, as I said, and not simply with impatience at having his photo taken.

  Still, I remember M. as always a bit bewildered, and with the scar on his eyebrow—a sign illuminated in that brief moment of documentation when he looked me straight in the eyes.

  But here, too, my account is faulty, since between my eyes and his stood the comforting length of the camera lens. As far as I can remember, I never looked M. in the eyes, even when we were seated across from each other at a café.

  Some days, it’s difficult to believe that this friendship really existed—with its particular logic, its detachment from the world. What I remember has the texture of a dream, an invention, a strange and weightless suspension, like walking on the ceiling.

  In my childhood, I would hold a square mirror up to the ceiling. I examined every inch of this flat, white expanse, entirely removed from the jagged world on the opposite pole where people lived in shadows, weighed down by troubles. I understood that all anyone can do in the midst of darkness is retreat to their own, bright landscapes.

  * * *

  —

  I think more and more these days that I should set down some of the facts of my friendship with M., to keep something of this time intact. But stories are reckless things, blind to everything but their own shape. When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind. And I have to admit that there is no shape in those long walks and conversations, even if I think of them often.

  Let me place the photograph here, as the tangible remains of our friendship.

  What follows is an incomplete inventory.

  2.

  I met M. some months after I moved to Paris from Istanbul. I arrived in the city without a job or a place to live. I was enrolled in a literature program in order to obtain a visa, but I knew even before I came that I would not attend any of the classes.

  I had enrolled in the same program once before, a few years after I graduated from university in England. I had a different vision of myself then, and I worked steadily to achieve it. I was living in London with my boyfriend, Luke, and putting together my life piece by piece. I imagined that Luke and I would move to Paris, become its natives, and lead the kind of creative life attributed to the residents of the city. We even spoke to each other in French while we cooked dinner, in preparation for our new life.

  On the phone, my mother had urged me to go to Paris. I hadn’t been back to Istanbul for several years and she always found a way to make this sound natural.

  “Of course you should go, Nunu,” she said. “What’s there for you in Istanbul, anyway?”

  I hadn’t proposed returning home as an alternative.

  It wasn’t from my mother but from her aunts that I found out she was sick. I went back to Istanbul soon after this, c
anceling my Paris plans.

  The second time I decided to go to Paris, my mother’s aunts, Asuman and Saniye, warned me that it was foolish to live a life without roots. It was the type of thing they might have told my mother as well, the type of thing that would have made her silent. The aunts said I should be wise and build myself a life in Istanbul, as if building a life were a matter of simple engineering, as I, too, used to believe. A steady job, an easy commute, a reliable husband.

  “Your poor mother never managed,” the aunts said.

  To build my life, I should have them nearby to make sure everything was done the right way. They wouldn’t allow anyone to think that I led the drifting life of an orphan. When the time came, they would arrange for wedding presents, bed linens, tablecloths, dinners.

  They even offered to help renovate my mother’s apartment.

  “We can make it just the way you want,” they said, and told me about their plans. We would paint my mother’s bedroom and change all the furniture. We would move my bedroom to my mother’s study, where she had kept all my father’s books. Once we took down the bookshelves, they assured me, the room would actually be very spacious.

  My childhood bedroom would serve as a guest room for now.

  “And later,” Saniye said, “who knows.”

  They also said, on the afternoon when we went to the notary to finalize the sale of the apartment, that it was a waste. I had already told them I would use some of the money to go to Paris and pay for the program and my living expenses.

  They said it again after I signed the papers. “What a waste. Your poor mother’s home.”

  This was a name they gave her afterwards—my poor mother.

  3.

  In Paris, I moved into a studio apartment close to the Gare du Nord train station, where frequent arrivals and departures gathered and dispersed people at every moment like a beating heart. I liked to think that I could board a train and leave the city anytime I wanted. The neighborhood disassembled itself and came back together several times a day and was an entirely different place at night. I did not feel in those first weeks that I was living in the city, but in the residues of many places.

  I was renting the studio from a man who owned the Café du Coin at the entrance to the building. After our brief meeting at the café, he carried my single suitcase up the uneven wooden stairs and unlocked the door.

  “If you need anything . . . ,” he said at the threshold. Then he seemed to change his mind and went back downstairs.

  My room was bare but not neat, as if someone had moved out and left behind belongings no longer needed in their new life. There was a mattress, a square table, a stove with a kettle, and four mismatched chairs. I had brought photographs, a small vase, and two porcelain statues from Istanbul and I put them around the room for decoration when I arrived. They seemed tiny and pathetic, and after several days, I put them back into my suitcase.

  From my window, I saw a new pile of abandoned furniture on the sidewalk each day, for a municipal truck to pick up. Men in long and colorful tunic shirts would stop by to examine the pieces before walking up the road to congregate around the station to watch the new arrivals to the city.

  In the afternoons, I walked down to boulevard de Sébastopol, where I stopped at a grocery store called Istanbul-Grill-Foods to buy a pack of roasted chickpeas. I followed the boulevard south, to the Seine, with the thought that I would walk to the neighborhoods of the Left Bank, or along the river to the gilded monuments—all the places that appeared in postcards of Paris and defined the city for those who didn’t live there. But when I reached the river, I felt overwhelmed by the thought of everything that lay ahead.

  One evening, I stood watching the brown water, panic rising up my throat. I found a bench and sat down, and I thought that I would not be able to get back home because I was so tired. After a while, I got up and started walking slowly, recovering my energy. By the time I approached my neighborhood and could see the turn to my street, I was thinking that I should have walked farther, and told myself that I would explore more the following day.

  Some days, I sat at the Café du Coin at the entrance to my building. I often came there at lunchtime, though I did not eat, just sipped coffee, and was ushered to a small table by the back wall. Even after several weeks, the young waiter did not seem to remember me. He asked for my order with impatience and always brought a different size coffee than I had ordered. The café regulars ate copious salads piled with meats, or a tagine served with pickles and dried fruits. Some days they had a glass of beer, other times they ended their meals with dessert. I was struck by how appropriate their choices seemed. How they managed to pick the most fitting dish for that hour of that particular day. I wondered how it was that people knew what to do. Small things, I mean. The rituals of a day. The hours.

  After the waiter cleared the regulars’ plates, he brought them coffee and joined them outside for a cigarette. But first he would come to my table and tap twice, meaning that he wanted to settle my bill. I sat for a few more minutes, then gulped the remains of my cup, left some coins on the table, and climbed the stairs back up to my room.

  * * *

  —

  There is a scene in one of M.’s novels, set in Istanbul. I read it when I came back to take care of my mother, and read that scene again when I moved to Paris. I already knew, in those first weeks, that M. lived in Paris as well, and this seemed strange to me. I couldn’t imagine him anywhere other than Istanbul, in the landscape of his lonely characters.

  In the scene, an old man walks past a bakery one evening, around sunset. It is the month of Ramadan and the bakery has a line of people waiting to buy bread before joining their families for dinner. (I forgave M. this cliché of writing about Istanbul on a Ramadan evening.) There is a long description of desserts filling up shop windows as the time for breaking fast approaches. For a second, M. seems to forget about his character and indulges in a description of mounds of shaved pistachio, rose-scented dough, and buttery pastries, like jewels that decorate the windows. It’s just like him to turn away like this, to give in to the temptation of a feast in his writing. But the sentence that follows has remained with me ever since:

  Seeing all the people standing in the bakery line with purpose, the old man feels embarrassed and turns away from the steaming stacks of bread on the counter.

  When I first read this, I thought that the old man was embarrassed of the bread itself, and not just the people at the bakery, and I remembered this description when I came home from my walks, those first weeks in Paris.

  I would sit down at the kitchen table and feel the objects of the room taking note of my brief absence and prompt return, and I was embarrassed.

  4.

  “Shame on you,” the aunts said when they called me in London to tell me that my mother was sick.

  By this, I thought that they might mean one of two things. The first, that a daughter should know without being told about her mother’s illness.

  The second, that I had made my mother sick.

  I realized later that the aunts were using this opportunity to tell me what they thought about my living situation—far from home and with my boyfriend, Luke, whom they hadn’t met. Without a care for the world, they said. For the proper way to do things.

  “Nejla let you run wild. And now she keeps quiet because she doesn’t want to upset you,” Saniye said.

  “That’s the truth. But we won’t let her tiptoe around you anymore.”

  It had never occurred to me that my mother had allowed me to run wild. I would have said that all my life, I was the one who had walked on tiptoe.

  5.

  In Paris, there was a Dutch boy in the program I’d enrolled in. I met him the only time I went to the university, to hand in my registration forms. We exchanged phone numbers, and we both said how much we were looking forward to the semester. The Dutch boy told me he had spent all
summer reading. He named book after book in an expanding web as if he were trying to sum up the world. I nodded my head at his list.

  “You and I have so much to discuss,” he added when he was done, and I agreed.

  He sent me a text message some days later to ask why I hadn’t come to the first class. I told him I was sick and asked him to send me the readings assigned for the following week.

  He invited me to a picnic on the riverbank that weekend, on one of the islands. “A couple of us from class are meeting up while the weather’s still nice. You should come and cure yourself with a celebration.”

  I walked all the way to the river, crossed to the Île Saint-Louis, and spotted the gathering from a distance. My classmates were dressed in somber, stylish colors, holding their glasses with both hands as if they were precious objects. They all had so much curiosity on their faces as they chatted and nodded, nimbly holding their drinks, that I could not even imagine what they might be talking about. It occurred to me that I hadn’t brought anything for the picnic and turned back.

  On my way home, I watched a group of rollerbladers on the Pont Saint-Louis dressed in tweed suits and bowler hats, weaving in and out of plastic cones in tune to classical music. (M. would tell me later that he did not like this bridge, because it was not part of the real city; it belonged to tourists. And the two of us always walked the adjacent Pont de la Tournelle.) One of the rollerbladers, an older man who was a bit slower than the others, tipped his hat at me as he twirled around a cone.

  When the Dutch boy sent another text, I told him I had enjoyed the readings and I would see him soon. After that, I mostly kept my phone turned off, except for the times I called my mother’s aunts.

  I told them Paris was beautiful, the true capital of the world as they liked to say.

  “Sur la rue de Rivoli, un jeune homme et une belle fille,” the aunts chimed in chorus.

  This was something they said whenever Paris came up in conversation. A line they remembered from their schoolbook.