In the company of women, everything had a name and would fall to its designated place in the world. When one of the neighbors’ daughters stopped coming over for tea, I heard the aunts say that she was only going through her young girl’s times. The girl’s mother told them that her daughter sat hugging the pillow to make herself disappear, and all the others laughed. I was struck by the accuracy of the description and was surprised at the way the women received the news, as if it were a predictable time in every girl’s life.
Unlike my mother who ignored certain changes until the time I reached middle school, no topic was embarrassing in the company of women. Asuman and Saniye would call attention to my frequent disappearances to the toilet, or my newly silken legs. The first time I revealed my smooth legs in shorts, which my mother had observed without a word, Asuman said nonchalantly that she hoped they were waxed, because I would have no way out once I started shaving.
Women had invisible pantries of wisdom for losing weight, for varicose veins, for reducing cellulite. They were all literate in measurements for cooking—the size of matchboxes, the width of palms. Their recipes called for the thickness of orange peel, the consistency of earlobes, the thinness of sheets. I loved their powers and their control over the world.
One time, when my mother and I were leaving the aunts, a neighbor woman urged us to stay a bit longer, so we could at least eat something. Asuman told her on our behalf that my mother was impatient like that.
“She gets antsy if she stays in one place,” she said. I was pleased that the ways of my mother should have such a simple and undramatic description.
In the company of women, tragedy was soothed, woven into life and routine. It was brought down to earth from its cloud of confusion. Groups of women had a way of kneading the world, firmly and skillfully, the way my grandmother kneaded her dough. She worked the sticky mixture calmly, with the certainty that the dough would eventually yield, just as groups of women could clear up spilled foods and piles of dishes within a matter of minutes, and always with the same repose.
At funerals and at sickbeds, the women busied themselves with cooking and serving tea. They gave out tasks, counted the heads of guests, matched them to the number of plates. They served soup and funeral helva, measuring in equal ladles, as if their careful distribution would smooth out the sorrow.
In the company of women, remembering simply meant listing. During their kitchen conversations, my grandmother and her sisters would suddenly recall a woman called Sıdıka, who had lived downstairs, and they would begin listing all the neighbors who had lived in their building. They remembered all the names for the Kanlıca grocery and its different owners. There was one Ersen Efendi with a stutter, and the task of buying vegetables from him without laughing was among the prized items on their memory list.
They listed their favorite porcelain, crystal, silver, and cloths. They remembered that the organza silk from Cyprus had supplied not just Saniye’s high-waisted skirt, but my grandmother’s shirt and matching purse as well. They listed the ingredients for desserts, the dishes that filled their mother’s tables. They listed the games they played and their variations: marbles could be played with three pieces or five; blindman’s buff with two blindfolds was called “You or Me.” They listed all the films with Türkan Şoray and with Doris Day, the family ties of the characters from the series Roots, the rise and fall of fortunes in Dynasty.
“What was that song . . . ?” one of them said, and they started singing the other songs of that region. My grandmother made sure that no one jumped ahead, from Aegean songs to Anatolian; from their mother’s daily repertoire to the special songs she sang when she was melancholy. There were also the ones their father sang at the dinner table, when they sat silently with their heads down. And in remembering those songs, they sang with their heads down, as if the song could not be separated from its memory.
“What was that saying . . . ?” they would say. “Remember the restaurant . . . ?” The memories contained nothing more than their items.
To be sure, there were hierarchies, and the relationships of the congregation’s individual members were dictated by their ranks. Asuman had never been married, so she could not understand certain things. Saniye, similarly, had not experienced motherhood. But she, unlike my grandmother, had been in love with her husband, and her love grew with each passing year into mythical proportions, giving her superiority over her sisters. Without her late husband to correct the memory, Saniye told an ever-intensifying love story with a taste of real happiness her sisters could not imagine. But during the congregation, these ranks were set aside and the women were united in their ordered and arranged wisdom, just like the perfectly starched and folded linen in their closets.
Even great misfortunes were itemized. Asuman’s list began with the three-wheel bicycle she was never allowed to ride and continued through the ensuing injustices she suffered as a younger sibling. Saniye listed all the times her husband’s ghost appeared to her, starting with the day of his burial, when he was putting on his cuff links in the bedroom. Each subsequent visit was remembered by the ghost’s careful attention to clothing, folding his handkerchiefs, polishing his shoes, or buttoning the same vest he wore on the day of his death in Aldere.
My grandmother had also untangled the torments of her mother-in-law to a list of the hand-me-downs she was forced to wear. The shelves of her grievances were stacked with the Marseille silk bought for her sister-in-law and the dresses she had to wear with the zipper open when she was pregnant with my mother.
Sometimes, cheered on by her sisters—for the congregation of women produced this ebullience—my grandmother told the story of the weeks leading to my parents’ wedding. It was my favorite list, and it was only told in my mother’s absence. My grandmother recounted the trips to the bazaar, the dinners and lunches, the relatives that came from as far away as Antalya.
Asuman remembered the engagement dinner, listing the dishes, as if they were proof of real happiness. Saniye said that the songs that night were unforgettable, naming the solos and the duets, remembering, finally, the French song my parents sang together. At the end of the song, my father had brought out the gold necklace with the tiny stones—the same one that pulled my mother from shadows to light during my childhood—and put it around my mother’s neck himself.
When the world was listed item by item, one-time events became routines, a story of the way things had always been. This, too, was the pleasure of the inventory, the shortest memories drawn out to stand in for the regularity of everyday lives.
28.
(What Luke didn’t say, whenever he pointed out that everyone had a story to tell, was that it is a privilege to have a story, to know your own narrative as surely as you know your name.)
29.
It must have been in February when I met M. for the second time, because he wrote that we should go on a walk to see the Judas trees before they flowered. Then, we could enjoy the early blooms even more, later. It was just like him, this peculiar suggestion. His appreciation of unblossomed beauty.
We decided to meet in the afternoon, at the Luxembourg metro exit. I record it here as a moment of change in our correspondence: the practicality, the switch to clocks and meeting spots.
M. was waiting across the street from the metro. When he saw me, he took out his hand from his coat pocket and held it up for a moment. When I crossed the street, he leaned forward slightly, and said, “Hello again.”
He appeared like a stranger, older and more stunted than the voice I had grown used to in those weeks—the one who wrote with gentle authority.
We walked into the gardens, following the outer path along the gates. I had forgotten that M. was very tall, despite his stoop. He dug his hands heavily into his pockets, as if to lower himself.
We walked in silence for a while, he on the right and I on the left. I asked him how he had been since I last saw him, realizing immediately how
strange it was to ask this. We’d been writing to each other up until our meeting. Just the evening before, M. had told me about his readings on the Bronze Age. It was a period that fascinated him and he talked about it not as a faraway past, but as if it were still unraveling.
He looked at me without responding, then he stepped in front of me abruptly, moving to my left side.
“Better this way,” he said. I thought that he might hear better with his right ear, but I did not ask. Several times during those weeks of our correspondence, M. had commented on his age. He said that he was perhaps too old to remember correctly when I questioned some detail about Istanbul (he remembered there were blue mosaics at the Kadıköy ferry port; I asked if he wasn’t thinking of the Beşiktaş port instead), or he said in response to a story I recounted that, at my age, he certainly did not see the world with such precision. I accepted his comments in silence, feeling benevolent, with the illusory superiority endowed by my youth.
Later, I learned that there was nothing wrong with M.’s hearing but that he simply felt more comfortable walking on the left. So let me add this detail as well, to the blurry portrait of my friend, tall and stooped, with a scar on his forehead, walking at my left side.
We walked on in almost complete silence. There were many things I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t know how to start a conversation with this person walking by my side. It was as if between our arms stood an invisible wall and I had to climb over it to be able to talk to the other M. I was waiting for a sign from him, hoping he would continue one of our written conversations of the previous weeks. Anything that might consolidate the distance between the two M.’s. But M.—the one walking by my side—did not make any effort to overcome this wall. I wonder whether he felt a similar estrangement, or if he was simply observing my different states.
When I try to remember him, I sometimes have this same feeling of exhaustion, of someone behind a wall whose entirety is hidden from me, but appears in patches. It tires me to try to bring these patches together and after a while I release them from my mind’s weakening grip and let them float back to their separate corners: the tall man, the writer, the hesitant hand appearing from the pocket, the wandering, distant stare.
* * *
—
When we had walked the entire course of the garden gates, arriving back at the metro stop, M. suddenly broke the silence, pointing at the Judas tree ahead of us with its barren branches.
“Your mother’s trees,” he said.
I was a bit surprised by this reference, as if a stranger had eavesdropped on a private conversation.
“Oh, right,” I said.
“I was struck by your description,” M. continued, “and by all your memories of your mother. And I was very touched that you shared them with me.
“What a special bond,” he said. “The two of you had your own world. I’ve never known a relationship like yours. And I’m so sad I didn’t know you in Istanbul, so I could have included your city in my books.”
We had reached the gate and I pointed across the street to the bistro with the red awning.
“Time for lunch,” I said, and M. laughed with delight.
30.
All this, as I said, is in the past. These days it seems naïve, if not misguided, to retreat from the real city. And it’s hard to talk about Istanbul without mentioning the fate that has befallen it.
Those who continue to talk of Istanbul’s beauty are certainly far away from it. Inside the city, first and foremost, there is that constant hum. And the crowds. So much loneliness in the midst of so many people.
Istanbul presses down on us, heavier each day. It’s becoming harder to ignore it, even if I sometimes feel that I’m as much a stranger here as I was in Paris.
But I know that the city is saying something and that its message is growing louder. I don’t doubt that its meaning will soon become clear, whether I listen to it or not.
It’s a futile exercise, this inventory I’m making of a vanished friendship. It’s a way to pass the short time before something else takes over.
31.
After M. and I left the gardens, we had lunch at Au Petit Suisse across the street. It’s the bistro with the narrow terrace, some steps away from the more popular café, all in lime green, on one corner of the Place Edmond-Rostand.
I can still picture it perfectly, and I feel a pang to think that life can be continuing there as always, sunlight filtering in streams in the early afternoon, the regulars taking their tables without giving any notice, tourists lingering outside, reading the cluttered menu.
M. and I took the back table. After this first lunch, we went there several times and always sat in the same corner. We called this place “our bistro.” The one on Saint-Michel, where we had a drink on our first walk, was “the night café.” We called the Luxembourg metro exit “the spot.”
“Let’s meet tomorrow, at the spot,” we would say, or, “How about a drink at the night café?”
Let me put down a few more things, in case I forget to mention them later. There was “Sir Winston,” the old waiter at our bistro, who brought us two pieces of chocolate each with our coffees. “The philosopher” was the sulky waiter who served the tables outside. We referred to anyone with spiritual inclinations as “crystal hunters.” Those who approached life with the insincere compassion of self-help books we called “dictators.” I don’t remember which one of us came up with this title or why—I don’t think I would have told M. about Luke. But I told him that my mother had always been suspicious of such “dictators” as well.
“I wish I could have known this brilliant woman,” M. said.
I’ve already mentioned that “The Invention of Midnight” was one of our codes, and there were others like it, such as “Apollodorus,” which was shorthand for forgotten writers, but also for the rapid passing of time. The name came from a few lines I read in Akif amca’s journal by a Greek poet, Apollodorus, from whose work only two lines of poetry survived. (Who at such a time / has come to the edge of the doorway?) In the journal, Akif amca had written that these lines were like “pillars excavated in the desert.”
“The Apollodoruses of the world,” we might have said, or “in the tyrannical reign of Apollodorus,” by which we would have meant that life was too short.
I’m aware that our lexicon sounds bizarre when listed like this, and that it is slowly losing its meaning. I cannot say what would be lost with its disappearance, but these are some of the facts of our friendship.
* * *
—
During our first lunch at the bistro, I sat facing the gardens, upon M.’s suggestion. He suggested it without ceremony, pointing at the chair.
“You sit here,” he said.
He examined the menu the moment we sat down, looking up and down the pages quickly, then set it aside. He listed the dishes we should share, more as a statement of fact than to ask for confirmation. We had endive with scallops, terrine, marinated sardines, and also beet salad with goat cheese, upon Sir Winston’s recommendation.
I remember that M. spoke French clumsily, making many mistakes, but without apology. Waiters never reverted to English with him, as they sometimes did with me, even though my French was probably better, certainly more correct, from my studies at university. But especially in M.’s presence, I spoke slowly, carefully picking every word.
When our food arrived (“Bring everything at once,” M. told Sir Winston, “we like eating in the Mediterranean style”), M. ate with appetite and without fussing. He dipped his bread in mustard and swept the contents of his plate—cheese, salad, fish, meat—on top of it. His manner when he ate was different from the thoughtful, quiet way he wrote, and also from his reserve in person. I often had the feeling that if I focused hard enough, I would be able to see him clearly. And I should say that with some effort, I would have seen myself clearly.
During my frien
dship with M., I began to remember something about myself I had been looking away from. A wordless, soundless knowledge. I realized that I could look at it directly and it would have a surprising shape, neither ugly nor shameful.
But this was only a glimpse. I told myself I would allow it to emerge, when the time was right. But that is no different from keeping it at bay.
32.
Some years after my father’s death, when I was nine or ten, I was given a book about fairies by my mother’s Welsh friend, Robert, a soft-spoken photographer who came to Istanbul every year. I wanted to become friends with Robert, quickly and irreversibly. I wanted to list him among members of my family.
This book was my prized possession and it contained photographs of flower fairies in English gardens. My delight with the book, apart from the fact that Robert had given it to me, was simple: the photographs were undeniable proof of an existence that otherwise escaped our limited gaze. I examined them again and again, the tiny creatures whose frail bodies of half-light were not unlike the flower petals around which they hovered. My favorite photograph, which I had looked at so many times that the book’s spine obediently opened itself to that page, was a black-and-white one of a fairy child around my age wearing a white skirt. At the moment the picture was taken, she had ducked her head behind the speckled bell of a foxglove. The photo made it clear to me why I had never seen these shy and darting creatures myself. In the background, the tenants of the estate—a couple in hats, tall and thin—were walking down the garden path without the slightest awareness of the magic unraveling in the distance.
Walking on the Ceiling Page 6