Walking on the Ceiling

by Aysegül Savas

  I was surprised at the ease with which M. settled into this conversation, no different from the way he veered into a list of foods in his writing. We talked for several minutes about the dishes on their menu.

  When we reached the Seine, M. asked where I was headed and I pointed straight ahead, even though I was moving away from home.

  “Well, then,” he said, “lucky me.”

  We crossed the bridge to the island, mostly empty except for a few tourists in front of an ice-cream shop, then the Pont de la Tournelle to the Left Bank, standing a moment to look at Notre-Dame glowing with a strange light through the mist. M. asked what I was doing in Paris and I told him the answer I had already prepared—that I had come there to write.

  “An İstanbullu, a colleague, and a kindred appetite,” M. said. “Don’t tell me you’re Catholic as well.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not your double come to haunt you.”

  M. laughed—a loud, generous laugh.

  “The evening’s taken a delightful turn,” he said.

  We continued up a narrow street with art galleries and a monastic bookshop. Behind the forged iron gates, courtyards were crowded with the shadows of plants, fountains, rows of bicycles. This was the city I had imagined all along, and the one I had been trying to get to in those first weeks.

  After we crossed the boulevard Saint-Germain, we continued up to the Panthéon. I was seeing it for the first time and I contained my amazement at its size. A group of teenagers sat in a circle with bottles of wine, their silhouettes swallowed by the giant pillars behind them.

  M. was telling me about one of his neighbors, from when he lived in Istanbul. This man owned a newspaper stand and would look up from his book and wave whenever M. walked by. It was one of the most cherished rituals of his Istanbul life.

  This neighbor was the one who told M. about the fish restaurant in Moda. The two of them had even gone there together one time, though M. had never managed to become his friend.

  “He was a solitary person,” M. said, “but maybe that wasn’t the issue.” He added that his Turkish was too rudimentary to form a meaningful friendship, even if he had always wanted to know more about him. And the stand owner didn’t speak any English.

  He told me he had recently heard of the neighbor’s death.

  “You know,” he said, “I wanted to share this with someone from Istanbul. I don’t know what his death would mean to just anyone. That’s what I was thinking about at the reading, when I was asked that question of the mythical city.

  “Do you see what I mean?” he continued. “It was a silly question, of course. But if I were to respond to it, I’d say that you cross the threshold of myth with such people. Their passing means something about that place, it shows you that the city is not immutable.”

  For a moment, I thought that we were talking about my mother. Throughout my friendship with M., I felt that he said things in roundabout ways, as if he were telling me that he knew something. I cannot say what he knew, only that I was uneasy under this piercing gaze. Of course, it’s possible that time has added meaning to memory.

  We had made a circle around the plaza and were back at the pillars.

  “But I’m talking in circles,” he said. “I’m not a very good guide.”

  We talked timidly and with enthusiasm. But without exaggeration. And there was a moment, once we crossed the river to the Left Bank—or maybe it happened earlier, when we stood on the bridge looking at the cathedral—that things were settled: M. didn’t ask again where I was headed, and I didn’t apologize for taking his time as I had planned on doing when we first started walking.

  As we were going down from the Panthéon back towards the river, we paused in front of a café. I can’t remember which one of us suggested that we should sit down for a drink. This, too, was settled without unnecessary explanations. We took a table on the terrace. When the waiter came with the menu, M. waved his hand and asked for two glasses of wine without consulting me, as if he did not want to pause our conversation.

  We continued sitting at the café for some time after we finished our wines. Then, I asked M. whether he would join me for another glass.

  “I was hoping you had that spirit,” he said.

  I don’t remember them all, but there were many things he said during our friendship that made me happy.

  19.

  When I found out about my mother’s illness and returned to Istanbul, I received an e-mail from Luke. He wished me strength in the months ahead. He considered it admirable that I was back with my mother, despite everything.

  “Your every move is selfless,” he wrote.

  He added that I should make sure to take care of myself.

  “Don’t just think of others, Buddyback. Know that it’s important to be kind to yourself.”

  “Luke,” I wrote back. “I don’t think you understand what’s happening.”

  I already knew then that I would not see him again. Perhaps I’d felt all along, even when I lived with him, that I was passing the time, that my life hinged on the single moment when I’d learn that my mother was dying. Then I would set everything else aside.

  Luke wrote again, some weeks later. By that time, he must have realized I wasn’t coming back and he must have been angry.

  He told me he could understand why I was hiding from him; because he alone knew the honest truth.

  And the honest truth, he continued, was that I’d succumbed to my mother’s wishes once again; I let her dictate my life. It seemed that he was suggesting my mother had lured me back with her sickness.

  All he’d ever wanted, Luke wrote, was to help me heal my wounds. But he couldn’t do that when I continued to live without confronting my mother.

  “You mustn’t let her crush you,” he said. “All your life, she’s made you feel guilty. Because she couldn’t bear her own guilt. She’s never been accountable for your father. She pushed a helpless man to the edge of despair.

  “And now she wants you to tell her that all is forgiven,” Luke wrote. I didn’t hear from him again.

  Everyone, he’d concluded, had to live and die with their own failures.

  20.

  When we were at the fishmonger or buying flowers, my mother would list the names of everything she saw. She was not trying to teach me, but simply honoring the sights with their proper titles. Mullet, sardine, sea bass, she said. Tulip, hyacinth, anemone. Some flowers had their colloquial names, like a type of clover that was called lady buttons in Aldere, where she had grown up.

  In these moments, it seemed impossible that my mother’s mood would darken. The world would be crisp with color, its every line easy to identify. It seemed that my mother knew the name of everything in the world, unlike the days when she was silent and the hours blurred from one to the other. We lived in a sort of cloud then.

  But whenever my mother made her lists, the cloud lifted and I gained points in the game.

  Sometimes, she would say one of her strange words and I wondered whether she did not live in two places at the same time. The word that comes to me now is kukuleta, which, the first time I heard it, sounded like a birdsong. I was sick in bed and my mother was showing me pictures from her childhood in Aldere. She pointed at herself wearing a hooded cape, among a group of men coming back from hunting.

  “Look at me with my kukuleta,” she said, and she laughed, though it seemed that this was a private laughter, meant for herself. These were the moments when I could see the glittering remains of a person I had never known.

  21.

  After our drinks on boulevard Saint-Michel, M. and I walked back to the river, this time crossing at Pont Neuf, then walked all the way up to Gare du Nord. I parted with him some streets away from where I lived. I didn’t want him to see my building, whose entrance after sunset was often occupied by women waiting for customers.

  “This
was wonderful,” M. said, and I wondered whether I should give him a hug, or kiss him on both cheeks. But he took his hand out of his coat pocket and raised it in the air for a moment, before putting it back and walking away.

  The next morning, he wrote me an e-mail to tell me that we had forgotten to list one of the specialties at Moda’s fish restaurant—smoked bonito with sun-dried tomatoes. But more importantly, he added, he hoped that I would indulge him with more stories. I haven’t forgotten this word, indulge.

  I did not see him again for several weeks, during which time we delved deep into a correspondence in writing. “An indulgence,” as he called it once again. This, too, was settled like our first walk, with no pretense at formality, without excuse or apology.

  After the first time, M. would write to me midsentence— “Listen to this,” he began, or, “You’re mistaken.” He wrote as if he were sitting across the table from me and our conversation of the first evening had not ended. This is the person I knew best, this voice who spoke to me across the city, as if he were looking me straight in the eyes.

  But by the time I saw him again, I knew little more about M. than I did during our first walk. It seemed that instead of covering long distances, we were digging deeper with our heels on a dirt track.

  M. had a way of circumventing practicalities. He would write things like, “If it weren’t for the daily tasks that take over my day, I would devote my attention to my new book, my Thracian project, set close to your mother’s beautiful Aldere, which you describe so poetically.” But he did not explain what these “daily tasks” were. Instead, he wrote to say how lucky it was that he had met me now, at a time when he was searching for a guide into the landscapes of Thrace.

  One time he referred to Paris as a “sad and forgiving city” and I did not ask him why he thought this. I felt that this sort of curiosity for facts would betray the rules of our correspondence. This is also why I didn’t refer to anything outside our friendship—all the things I had previously known about him—and M. did not bring them up. I did not mention, either, that I had read his novels.

  As I said, I felt that all the rules of our friendship were settled unspoken, and I realize now that they were peculiarly similar to what I would have wanted them to be had we determined them outright. In my childhood and even later, I had dreamed of having such a friend with whom I could exchange endlessly on strange topics of my choosing, without the worry of stepping into uncomfortable territory.

  At the time, I thought that indulgence was a word from M.’s own vocabulary and way of life, but now I think that perhaps he was naming something he observed in me.

  22.

  My mother grew up in Aldere walking in a forest with Akif amca, Uncle Akif, the next-door neighbor. This was the story she told most often, and she always started it just like this:

  “I grew up walking in a forest with Akif amca.”

  It’s how she wanted me to know her, and she insisted on telling it this way, as if the years had passed and she grew older and taller without stepping out of that forest. On the best days, on the very best I mean, when I forgot about my game because the points piled up effortlessly, she would come to my room and she would have no reason to recount our day, to create it from scratch. Instead, she told me about Aldere. And insofar as memories and stories are interchangeable once enough time has passed, this is the story of my childhood as well.

  At that time, the town’s sugar factory brought Aldere to life in the months when trucks, piled with beets, drove in from all around the region. They would slow down as they entered the curving road, heftily shifting gears by my grandparents’ yellow house at the town’s edge.

  My mother was among the first of the town’s children to follow the trucks all the way to the factory gate, collecting the beets that fell on the road. Some children sold their modest harvest to the factory for a few kuruş—enough for a scoop of ice cream, or, if the truck had taken the curve too fast, spilling beets into the roadside ditch, a hand fan or a pack of cards from my grandfather’s shop. Some children would take the beets home to roast on coals. My mother carried hers to Akif amca’s garden, and balanced them on the mouths of glass bottles. Akif amca would bring out a rifle from the woodshed and watch, nodding his head, as she shot them one by one.

  During its months of activity, when the air was thick with the smell of molasses, the factory hosted concerts, game nights, and lunches for Aldere’s wealthy families. But the season’s crowning event was the Sugar Ball, when the town women were taken by panic, unstitching old taffeta dresses to put together new models from sewing catalogs, in their best imitation of Istanbul’s high society. Invitations to these events—one of which my mother and I found during our last trip to Aldere, still in its handwritten envelope—kindly asked that no children be brought. My mother spent those evenings with Akif amca, even if my grandmother otherwise thought that he was an inappropriate influence.

  Akif amca had moved to Aldere when my mother was born, to work as a manager at the factory. He never attended the town’s events, and after a few years, he was no longer invited. Besides, the townspeople grew suspicious of this man with a foreigner’s manners, whose voice became louder with the glasses of raki he drank while sitting in his garden, when he began to tell his visitors, or whoever happened to be passing by, his outrageous stories. The neighbors smiled politely at the mention of places he claimed to know intimately—Rome, London, Madrid, Paris. Older boys on their way home from school shouted out in a mock drunken singsong when they passed the overgrown garden, “I’m walking down the Shanzelizeee!”

  More suspicious still was Akif amca’s houseful of books and papers, unlike the neat homes of Aldere’s elite, which were crystalled and porcelained by the factories of Europe—Limoges, Prague, Meissen. These place-names were not floating like Akif amca’s fantastic stories, but were stamped on sugar bowls, coffee trays, and thumb-sized villager girls carrying milk pails. They filled the households indisputably with European respectability.

  My mother’s stories of the walks started with the sound of her parents’ exit from the wrought-iron gate, braided with roses. She would jump over the wall to Akif amca’s garden and wait for him to fetch his walking stick from the shed. Badem, the English setter, would already be at the gate, and the three of them set off for the forest in the last and golden light.

  Instead of taking the main road, they walked along the creek and crossed the stone bridge, where, according to town legend, a traveler had once stood at sunset, watching the water dappled in burning colors, and had given Aldere its poetic name, “Crimson creek.” (I knew all the landmarks along this walk and looked out for them in my mother’s stories.)

  When they passed the sunflower fields, Akif amca stopped to cut a flower with his penknife, and they picked the seeds from its wide, black tray. My mother always offered some to Badem, who sniffed politely, before running ahead.

  Once inside the forest, Akif amca began his list. Chestnut, linden, pine, beech. Poppy, wood rose, dandelion. As he named the forest—for my mother an entire world—shapes emerged distinctly from the pointing tip of Akif amca’s stick. Stems were thick and thin, weedy, milky, hollow. Bark was smooth, rough, or mossy. Leaves were round, leaves were sharp. They floated or fluttered, they fell spinning to the ground.

  * * *

  —

  I spent every summer of my childhood at my grandparents’ yellow house in Aldere. In the afternoons, I lay under the mulberry tree, looking at the stone house across the low wall that separated my grandmother’s rose garden from a forest of weeds and glass bottles.

  I had been inside Akif amca’s house only once, one hot afternoon when my mother came to take me back to Istanbul. I remember the smell of old skin and cologne, and the eyes that watched me from the sofa.

  My mother had asked me to kiss the old man’s hand and present him with a box of candied chestnuts. After lunch—he insisted that we stay, and my
mother, despite my silent pleas, accepted—he disappeared to the bedroom and came back with a box of objects. To my dismay, the box contained nothing but a rusty penknife, a walking stick, and some photographs.

  When we were leaving, the old man told me that I had my mother’s eyes.

  I was used to being told that I had my father’s eyes. Relatives said it with pity or fright, as if seeing a ghost.

  “Look at those eyes,” they said. “Just like her father’s.”

  But Akif amca spoke with an authority that upset me, as if he were stealing what was rightfully mine—this link to my father.

  “You have your mother’s eyes,” he said. “And are you stubborn like her as well?”

  * * *

  —

  In my childhood, Aldere was already past the days of the factory’s Sugar Balls and taffeta dresses. The modest flavor of European civilization had dispersed like mist. Later, when the factory shut down for good and the houses were abandoned, I examined the black-and-white photographs of Aldere’s golden age. In their shadows, I identified the vanished town I had glimpsed as a child—its tables set in crystal, its modest fur coats, its hats and walking sticks, its wrought-iron gate, and its curving road that led past the lethargic summer afternoons of my childhood to another, brighter town, its creek dappled crimson at sunset.

  23.

  Those first weeks, when I wrote to M. often and with enthusiasm, I went on many walks around the city, to make up for everything I had not seen when I arrived. I would come back to the studio with a list of things I wanted to tell him. To be sure, this was a short period, those few weeks of writing, but I remember it as a season of its own.

  Just as he talked about the dishes in Moda’s fish restaurant, M. wrote to me about the smallest details as if they were what occupied his mind above all else.