“It just doesn’t feel right,” they added. “All alone over there.”
I was busy with classes, I told them; I barely had a minute to myself.
6.
When I lived with my boyfriend, Luke, in London, I didn’t call him by his name. I called him “Buddy” even though that’s not a word from my own vocabulary. I don’t know how I came to call him this, and without any irony, as if I were a native speaker of English. But then, as I said, I was building my life piece by piece and it seemed that I had started from scratch.
He called me “Buddyback.”
“You’re my buddy,” I told him one night, and he said, “You’re my buddyback.”
And then that’s what he called me.
“Hey, Buddyback,” he said.
“Hey, Buddy,” I said, when we woke up in the studio we had decorated with all the objects of our new selves: piles of psychology books, decorations from countries we hadn’t visited, little ritualistic objects with which we ordered our days—incense sticks, candles, ceramic mugs.
Luke was more advanced than I was in the piece-by-piece construction. He talked about setting boundaries, about the thresholds of maturity, about healing the inner child. He told me about his family as if opening envelopes one at a time, putting each one aside before moving to the next. We started with his mother, moved on to his siblings, arrived at his father.
He once made me a diagram that listed all the combinations of adult-child-parent relationships and asked me to populate the empty boxes with the people in my life. We used to do this sort of thing to get to know one another. Questionnaires, mental maps, associative drawings.
“Adult-to-adult,” I wrote in the box representing our relationship.
In the box for my mother I wrote, “Adult-to-child.” Then I changed my mind and wrote, “Child-to-child.”
When I first came to England for university, I had read a rhyming children’s book while visiting the home of my roommate, Molly. She told me this was her favorite book growing up and I wished that it would have been mine, too. It was constructed from pure nonsense, full of delight at its own sounds. More than the book, I envied the type of child Molly must have been, and the childhood she must have had.
I bought the book when I moved in with Luke and told him that it was one of the treasures of my own childhood. We read it aloud in bed, giggling. Luke didn’t ask whether the book had rhymed in Turkish as well. And I was swept away by the pleasure of this invented intimacy.
“Buddy,” I used to say. “Buddy, buddy, buddy.”
7.
During my childhood, on the evenings that she did not go silently to her room, my mother would stand at my door before I went to sleep. I would have put away my books, my clothes, the bits of paper strewn about from my various projects. I would fold my socks together as my grandmother had taught me and tuck them inside a slipper before getting into bed. This was the ritual that brought each day of my childhood, after my father’s death, safely to a close.
“Nunu,” my mother said from the threshold.
“Nejla,” I said.
Sometimes she said, “Nunito.”
Sometimes she said, “Nunu, Nunito, Nukotiniko.”
Other times, my mother looked at me as if trying to determine who I was. Then she came and sat at the edge of my bed.
“What a tidy room,” she said. I didn’t know if she meant it as praise.
On the best days and on the worst, she would say, “Let’s remember our day.”
“First, we had breakfast. You cut your cheese in the neatest triangles . . . On the way to the ferry we saw a yellow car, which reminded us of a turtle . . . The brass handle of the Baylan patisserie was shaped like a dolphin.”
She never recounted the day’s significant events, like the time we ran into her friend Robert on the ferry, or the Sunday afternoon when we left a restaurant mid-meal because of a group of men. Nor did she offer any commentary about the items on her daily catalog. But I knew that they were included for a reason. I guessed that the rusty yellow car had reminded her of the one we had when my father was alive; or that she mentioned the patisserie’s brass handle to tell me in her own way that there had at least been a sweet moment during our day, despite her long silence.
“What a day,” she said, to conclude. “So much to remember.”
8.
Paris was full of people having meals. This is what I remember from that time. And also, the terra-cotta pots of plants squeezed side by side on the tiniest balconies. The first impression of a city is supposed to be the most authentic—the only time an outsider is allowed to see its essence. Everywhere around me, I saw life sprouting.
One time when I returned from a walk, I sat down at the Café du Coin and decided that I would have a good meal. I asked for the menu and looked at it for a long time.
I ordered tartare and I also ordered a steak. Then I asked for hot chocolate.
Only when the waiter stood looking in disbelief did I realize the incongruity of my order. He brought the tartare first, and the hot chocolate only when, out of pride, I reminded him.
When he saw that I hadn’t touched the raw meat, he asked if I still wanted the steak. I told him I did. Afterwards I asked to have the whole thing packed. I knew that wasn’t a usual request in Paris. (Neither was it in Istanbul.)
“Sure,” the waiter said. “You can have it for breakfast, with a cup of hot chocolate.”
The box of meat sat in my refrigerator for weeks. I would open the fridge and see that nothing had changed of its outer appearance. Sometimes, sitting at the kitchen table, I looked at the fridge and was surprised that everything appeared normal. I imagined the rotting, molding meat inside and yet I saw no sign of decay, no inconvenience to my routine. Day after day, I saw that all looked well, surrounded by the box and locked in the fridge.
I don’t know what it was, but I was testing something. The order of the world; its tipping point.
9.
Luke would say that people lived their whole lives telling stories, and by story he meant something like delusion. Everyone, he said, had a story of themselves. They told it again and again, at every chance they got.
It seemed like an obvious statement to me even though I never told him that. I told Luke that I had not had an easy childhood, aware that this sounded dark and exotic. My father had been a poet but had died at an early age, when I was very young. I still remembered what it was like to live with a creative mind, I said, how it hovered above us.
In reality, I had never seen my father write. He’d given it up before I could remember. I’d seen only how he retreated within himself.
I also told Luke that my mother hadn’t been able to see my father for who he was. She’d wanted him to be like everyone else, I said. She rejected his creative world, so harshly that it shattered him. That was the language Luke and I spoke. Perhaps I even felt that these words didn’t quite belong to me, and so I could say anything at all. But I was aware of the itch, quietly insistent; I tried to get at it with my words.
I told Luke I’d grown up in the shadow of my mother’s unhappiness. My childhood, I said coolly, had been washed away by her own sad story.
But I had come to terms with this, I said, and to support my point I used words like self-worth and compassion.
At the time, I hadn’t been back to Istanbul in three years.
Luke listened gravely, nodding his head and reaching out to squeeze my shoulder from time to time. Those were exciting moments, those indulgences. I thought I could tell him anything at all.
10.
When my father was alive and we lived in Moda, my mother would take me out in the early evening for a walk. We always left in a hurry, without calling to my father to say goodbye, slamming the door behind us.
Once we were outside, we walked as quickly as we had left, past the grocer’s, past the mosque, following
the curving tram tracks. I would have to run to keep up with my mother. We would arrive at the Moda cape, at the hour when seagulls cried in panicked flocks, trying to ward off the sky from collapsing in deep colors. We stood silently watching the ferries in the distance. After some time, when I began to feel worried and asked to go back home, my mother might tell me about the emerald peaks of the mythical Mount Kaf, whose reflection gave the sky its hues. This mountain, she said, was very far away. It was farther than the dark sea surrounding the earth, which even the sturdiest ship could not sail, and its sole inhabitants were djinns and fairies.
It was as if she offered me this place in exchange for our own apartment, for my father sitting in the armchair.
On our way back, we sometimes saw the chestnut seller rubbing his blackened hands over the coals. Then, my mother would stop and say, “Let’s have a celebration.” Chestnuts, I learned, were something special, despite the ease of acquiring them, their dry taste, and the unsmiling man who sold them to us.
When we returned home, I called to my father to include him in our celebration.
“We brought you chestnuts! Come and get your chestnuts!”
I don’t remember him ever responding.
“Come get them before we eat them all!”
“Your father’s writing,” my mother would tell me.
But my father would be in his study, sitting in the armchair by the window, softly muttering to himself. From the way he rocked back and forth, I thought that he might be cold.
“What’re you saying?” my mother asked when she saw him like that. “Please stop playing games.”
Sometimes she shouted.
But even I could see that my father couldn’t stop himself. I felt sorry for my mother’s ignorance, her childish belief that my father was pretending, like the games I played when I lay down dead and listened to life continuing in the city outside.
11.
Some days, I could not see Paris for what it was.
Those first months, I read and reread M.’s novels. I slipped effortlessly into that world I knew so well, where insight was spared, where tragedy occurred in parentheses, and moments of great joy were subdued.
From my window, I saw pools of orange light beneath lampposts, circles of leaves on the pavement. The city changed day after day, slipping into a new season, without my taking part.
I read absently, forgetting for pages at a time what was happening, then coming to a detail so crisp—a round tray of cucumbers in a grocery store, lit by a single fluorescent bulb—that it felt like I could reach out right in front of me for my own city.
I read, morning changing to afternoon, afternoon to night, the station outside gathering and dispersing like a beating heart, the shadows looming and contracting. And my room grew bigger and dimmer with the echoes of Istanbul.
12.
After the sun had set and we returned home from our walk, my father would get up from the armchair and leave the house without a word. Our lives were like a dance—arriving and taking off. Passing each other day after day.
When he came back, it would be late, and he would have been out for a long time. We heard him, my mother and I, in our separate rooms. I knew my mother heard him, too, I can’t say how. Silence is its own language.
We listened to him turn the key, close the door, stand in the hallway. Already, with those sounds, I could feel my mother’s anger.
Then he came to my room. Sometimes I kept my eyes closed and pretended to sleep, letting him sit on the floor to gather his energy. Other times, I propped myself up against the pillow.
He would ask me what I wanted to see in my dream, and I told him zebras, elephants, lions.
“In that case,” my father said, “we’re both going on long journeys tonight.”
I remember that the apartment in Moda was long and narrow, with rooms following each other like a train: the hallway, my bedroom, the kitchen, my father’s study, the dining room, the television room, my parents’ bedroom, the balcony. I remember it as a train, because that’s what my father told me.
“Two compartments crossed,” he said. “Six to go.”
But in truth, the eighth and final compartment in this game—when he reached the balcony—was the reward, and didn’t count. Even when he was back home, he wanted to be out again, to stand in the open air.
So I counted on my fingers and told him:
“Only five more.”
The most challenging was the final compartment, through my parents’ bedroom where my mother would be awake.
The eight compartments of this journey, my father said, were like the eight rooms of my full name. “I gave you this name,” he used to say. “It’s a present from me.”
Then he started counting on his fingers: N, U, R, U, N, I, S, A.
Perhaps he was teaching me to read. I can’t know for sure. This isn’t a story I’ve ever told.
And I even wonder at this memory, unlike most others of my father. This moment of clarity.
My father said that there were two sets of paired compartments in his quest to reach the end of the train. The two N’s—the hallway and the dining room—were places of transition, where he would have to stop and listen before he could go on. The U’s—my bedroom and his study—were points of rest, where he could gather his strength.
When he was leaving my room, he said in a voice like the robots in cartoons, “Second round, complete. Next stop, R.”
He waved at me from the door and I wished him luck. I listened to his steps, from room to room, counting along with him, holding my breath when I heard him approach the bedroom. My mother might get out of bed, then, and present an obstacle, and my father would not be able to reach the balcony.
13.
One afternoon in Paris, when I was going home from an aborted walk, I saw M.’s name in a bookshop window, announcing a reading by a group of English-language authors, unified under the title “Narratives of the City.” One of the authors on the list had recently become famous for his novel about Paris’s golden age, about a time when artists and writers had shared ideas and drinks. The book was immediately identifiable from its bright yellow cover—I had even seen translations of it in Istanbul—with a crowd of people sitting at a piano, a desk, or standing behind an easel, all of them dressed up for dancing. Though I had not read the novel, its subject did not seem too different from the life I had imagined for myself in Paris with Luke.
On the evening of the reading I arrived at the shop early and took a seat in front, close to a wall. M. arrived some minutes later and excused himself to the bookshop staff before taking the last chair on the small makeshift stage, directly opposite mine. Then he started leafing through his novel.
He was different from his pictures. I had not known that he was very tall and thin, and he sat hunched on the chair, as if trying to diminish his size. He was wearing a crumpled shirt and a navy-colored sweater, a bit too big for him. I’d thought he would be neatly dressed, even meticulously, perhaps because of the way he named streets one by one in his novels, listed trees, shops, and foods, building an entire world with the patience of a miniaturist.
The year I lived in Istanbul, taking care of my mother, I had read a review of M.’s last novel in a Turkish newspaper. The reviewer said that while it was a pleasure to see Istanbul through foreign eyes, it could be tiresome to look at it stone by stone. It made me happy to read this, as if I alone understood M.’s writing.
I had read in the same review that M. went regularly to one of the burger stands in Taksim Square and I would imagine what it would be like to run into him there. The reviewer questioned what it meant for a foreigner to share the rituals so dear to us, İstanbullus. (I hadn’t realized until then that the burger stands were so special.) The reviewer also wondered whether the love of a Turkish woman—a painter to whom M. had been married for a short period—was enough to grant a writer access
to the city. Surely, he wrote, Istanbul was much more than its sights and sounds recorded with patience, and carried like a wound by M.’s lonely character, whose withdrawal from the world was perhaps a sign of M.’s own foreignness to the city, not to mention his limited understanding of it. There was never the possibility of sharing the joys and sorrows of the character, the reviewer concluded. In the end, reading M.’s novels, despite their wealth of detail, was like walking through Istanbul on a foggy night.
As I said, the review made me happy.
In my daydream about running into M., I imagined that we would be reading the same book, while we ate standing at a counter. We’d laugh at this coincidence, start a conversation, then walk all the way down İstiklal Street, jumping from topic to topic or walking silently like old friends.
* * *
—
When people in the audience began taking their seats, M. put away his novel, which he had marked with bits of paper. A woman who was standing at the back of the room asked loudly whether this was indeed the reading about Paris. M. looked at me and smiled.
“Better leave while you still can,” he said.
The famous author was the last to arrive and he came with a group of young people who might have been his students. He walked up to M. and slapped him on the back, telling the students that they were in good company.
“Forget about me,” he said. “Here’s the real author. You should all discover this man’s brilliant writing.”
M. was the last to read. Before he began, the program host asked him to describe his connection to Istanbul.
“For many of us,” the host said, “Istanbul is a mythical city. It is Constantinople, it is the fallen Rome. It’s the meeting point of East and West.”
Walking on the Ceiling Page 2