Walking on the Ceiling

by Aysegül Savas

  Robert brought my mother presents as well—a dark purple scarf, books, a fountain pen. One time, he gave her a blue bowl painted with birds, and I thought this was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. But it didn’t seem to me that my mother prized these gifts as I did my book of fairies. She often packed them and brought them to my grandmother in Aldere.

  I had once climbed on Robert’s lap with my fairy book when he asked me to show him my favorite pictures. My mother came into the room briefly, then left, and we heard her loudly stacking dishes in the kitchen. I wanted to tell Robert that my mother was not always like this, that he kept missing her moments of light and color just like one would miss the mischievous fairies in the gardens. Robert, as far as I knew, had only once seen her in the green dress, and never with the necklace.

  “Uncle Robert,” I called him—Robert amca—and I made a point of saying it often, enjoying the bond of familiarity I could create with a single word.

  “When is Robert amca coming?”

  “Isn’t Robert amca kind?”

  “Nejla, tell this story to Robert amca as well!”

  I must have been in middle school when my mother said there was no need to call him that.

  “He’s not your uncle,” she said.

  I remember that my mother stacked things away like this, as she did Robert’s presents, her friends, the concerns of her aunts. She put them away and wrote them off, and she ignored that she could hurt others in this way.

  But what I remember now is something else: There was a time when I understood her. I knew that she felt she had no other choice.

  33.

  The symmetrical letter with which I represent M., offering a tip of the hat to the neat symmetries of fiction, is an invention. For each of his readers, his name will recall a different person. Of course, it wouldn’t be too difficult to solve the puzzle of M.’s identity, but I still prefer this single letter, while I list some aspects of our friendship, brief though it may be, separate from whatever his name conjures for others.

  For a long time, I thought of writers as people with a sort of immunity, with the power to shape events in whichever way they wanted. The title of writer was mysterious, even mythical; it was separate from the world.

  And from time to time, I thought of M. in this way as well. Even when he wrote to me, I felt that he was in two places at once, forming daily events into another story, and that whatever path our friendship took, it would inevitably become what M. wanted it to be.

  * * *

  —

  One time, when M. addressed me in an e-mail, “Silent one with her head down,” I wondered immediately whether he was trying out these very words for a character. Another time when we were walking across the Pont de la Tournelle and saw the cathedral in its rising, spreading grandeur, we both paused, and even though I wished for the moment to be shared, I thought that M. was in another place, where he was master, where he alone felt the full weight of the world. But to distinguish myself from all the other readers who surely looked up to him, I did not tell him I had read his novels.

  And there were things I never asked, no matter our peculiar conversations. I would have liked to know what he ate for breakfast; his favorite film or joke; what he was like as a child. But I thought that these were not fitting questions to ask a writer.

  Sometimes during a long walk, when I felt that we saw the city through the same eyes, when our conversation flowed effortlessly and would continue to do so for hours to come, M. would look at his watch and say, “Sadly, it’s time for me to go.”

  This statement never ceased to startle me.

  It was moments like these that made me think that our friendship meant different things to me and M. At least, it was in those moments that I realized M. had other worlds in which he was equally at ease, and to which he was eager to return.

  34.

  My first year at university, I shared a room with a curly-haired girl called Molly. She was from Manchester and she did everything with ease. The best way I can describe it is that she was thoroughly acquainted with herself; fully and without flinching, and she did not resist any part of this self-knowledge.

  In the evenings, while I sat at my desk revising or writing, she lay in bed and moved her legs in the air as if she were cycling.

  Some mornings she said, “I can’t be bothered to go to class, Nunu, so listen extra hard.”

  She commented on the way I dressed, the way I talked, the way I had arranged my side of the room with paper garlands and black-and-white photographs. Her comments sounded as if she knew me thoroughly, too, just as she knew herself, and had seen nothing disturbing. It surprised me to see myself through her eyes.

  “You’re so inventive,” she said. “How’re you so inventive?”

  I told Molly that my mother was this way, even though I didn’t say that her originality was of a different kind.

  In answering Molly’s questions, I created a parallel life that seemed like something from a book or a film. I told her that I had never really known my father. He’d died when I was little, I said, and I could barely remember him.

  I told Molly that my mother had always treated me as an adult and that I had grown up doing things that would have been unusual for other children. (Later, to Luke, I told another story altogether.)

  “How exotic,” Molly said.

  When she talked to her parents on the phone she told them about all the things she had done that week. She mentioned if she’d eaten something delicious and she complained about her assignments.

  “I’m sorry to tell you that your daughter’s an idiot,” she said.

  I would be at my desk, studying.

  “Meanwhile, my brilliant roommate can write an essay with her eyes closed.”

  I turned around and waved my hand as a message for her parents.

  “She says hi,” Molly said. “She also says, ‘I’m so gloomy and mysterious and I’m going to stop reading and go out with Molly tonight.’”

  On the first school holiday, her parents invited me to visit them in Manchester.

  “They want to meet my Turkish friend,” Molly said. “Please, please come and make me happy.”

  I slept in Molly’s bed and Molly slept on a mattress on the floor. At night, she told me about all the things she wanted to do, not discriminating between her future and her plans for the following day. I remember that she wanted to go to the Galápagos Islands, and she said “Galápagos” as if she alone knew its meaning.

  Molly’s father drove us around the city and took us to the docks where Molly asked him in a playful, whiny voice for honey-roasted almonds. We each got a cone and Molly walked between me and her father, taking both our arms.

  On the last day of our visit I offered to make dinner. Molly’s mother said they all loved Turkish food. I remember the feeling it gave me to hear their opinions in plural, that familiar “we,” all of them converging around the things they loved.

  I called the aunts to ask for a recipe. It was something simple—white bean stew with rice—and I explained to my hosts that this was “a family dinner,” the type of thing we would have on a weekday. I was aware of the image they might have, of a loud and crowded Mediterranean family gathered around a steaming pot. The type of family where sorrow is less sorrowful because it mingles with merriness and plentitude, turns into comedy. It was with such a picture of my imaginary family that I told my hosts that my great-aunts would faint if they saw this dinner I had made, which was nothing more than peasant fare.

  “Your family is just the best,” Molly said.

  “What a treat,” Molly’s mother said when we sat down.

  She told me I was always welcome in their home. She repeated that it was a treat to have me there.

  Molly said, “Why couldn’t you guys raise me a bit more like Nunu? See how well she turned out?”

  I repeated
Molly’s sentences in my head, making jokes, narrating events, saying things in her carefree way. I imagined talking this way to my mother when I returned for the summer holiday. I had never been cheerful around her or delighted her the way Molly did her parents. I remember thinking—I had been away from Istanbul for several months then, and it is easy to forget the texture of a relationship—that I would go back and take charge, with these new cheerful ways.

  From the time we were roommates until my mother’s death, Molly wanted to visit me in Istanbul. I always said we should plan this trip and that it would be fun. But each time I went back, I found an excuse to delay her trip. Perhaps I was afraid that Molly would see something else when she finally met my mother; that I would be found out.

  35.

  On the days leading up to our walks, M. did not write to me, except for an e-mail to confirm our meeting time and place; this was a different language than the one we otherwise used. Perhaps he wanted to keep our two conversations separate or he was simply waiting to talk to me in person and would use the saved time for his own work. He never hinted that he did not have time to write to me, nor that he was much busier than I was. But this was all evident from the specific days and hours he suggested for our walks (never on Tuesdays or Thursdays, always in the late afternoon).

  And perhaps I preferred our written friendship to our walks, because of its abundance of conversation and its directness. “Listen to this—”

  But even though I preferred writing to him, I glowed when I walked with M.

  So much of the texture of a relationship disappears when shaped into stories—all the feeling residing beneath the spoken words. (When we first moved from Moda to the new apartment, I would climb up to my mother’s bed in the afternoons when she lay looking at the ceiling. After a while, I would lift my hand and put it on her shoulder. My mother didn’t move, and she didn’t say anything. I extended my arm across her chest, until I reached her opposite shoulder. I tried not to hold too tight, not to tire her. My mother kept still but I could almost hear her silent acknowledgment.

  But sometimes, sometimes, she moved her leg to my side, all the while looking at the ceiling, her knee barely grazing mine.)

  This period when I was friends with M. was not just made up of our words. There was a particularity to it, something that will, with time, disappear, unless I record, as truthfully as I can, what I remember.

  * * *

  —

  There was a single mirror in my studio, a small, cracked one above the sink, and I would stand in front of it for a long time before leaving the house to meet M. Since arriving in Paris, my hair, which had been short and boyish all my life, had grown to the sides of my chin, swallowing my face. I looked pale, I thought, and my eyes protruded with a relentless darkness. Some find this an attractive quality about me. Luke called it enigmatic. And while I did not object, I felt foreign to the compliment, if that’s what it was. I thought that it was a way of saying something else. But whenever I met M. for a walk, I felt my features softening to regular proportions, becoming acceptable, even pleasant.

  And something else: the more beautiful I felt, the older M. became. I felt radiant, even while I cast my eyes down on the ground. And as I glowed, M. aged. The word that comes to me now to describe him is stammering. When we met at our spot, M. would have a look of panic on his face and I thought that he might stumble as he took out his hand from his pocket and lifted it to greet me. And then we started walking and I looked down at the ground, feeling shy and nervous next to this man who appeared like a stranger each time, and feeling beautiful nevertheless.

  But something usually happened to smooth out his hesitation. For example, M. might tell me a fact about Istanbul I had never known. Or he would draw out a particular detail from an anecdote I wrote to him and say that I should include it in my novel. Or he would simply look at his watch and say that he had to get going. Whatever it was, I would suddenly see M. with his full name, the name of the author, and he would no longer be the stammering man next to whom I walked with glowing confidence.

  36.

  When I was in middle school, the aunts began hosting a weekly Sufi meeting held in Saniye’s apartment, where neighbors gathered to listen to an elderly woman they called Sultan, as if calling her by any other, worldlier name would be a slight to her wisdom. It would have been easier for me to glimpse Sultan’s wisdom had she worn a veil, carried rosary beads, or even acted in the ways of the spiritually endowed, closing her eyes or rocking in her chair. Instead, she wore plain shirts and trousers and draped a cotton cloth loosely around her head before the gatherings, devoid of ritual. But she had a shock of silver hair and bright green eyes and it was said that she had received the blessing of the Baghdadi Sheikh Abdülkadir Geylani in a dream.

  I once asked the aunts exactly what had happened in Sultan’s dream and Asuman said, without providing me with any more clarity, that Geylani had given Sultan his hand, touching not just her heart but her soul. Such dreams, Asuman told me, were the bridge between two separate worlds and aligned them on a single path, so that from then on, the soul would walk in both places at once.

  “Our Sultan is very special,” Saniye added. “She can explain things to you that your mother can’t talk about.”

  But the Sufi meetings were not very different from the tea parties my grandmother used to host for the wives of Aldere. The neighborhood women competed to feed Sultan with pound cakes, cookies, stuffed grape leaves, and cheese pastries. While they waited for her arrival, they swapped recipes, careful not to give away the key ingredients of Sultan’s favorite dishes.

  The gatherings were called “conversations” and I sensed that this title, like Sultan’s dream, bridged two separate worlds, and referred to a conversation with invisible beings.

  The conversations began with the telling of dreams. Regular participants knew how to interpret them in the Sufi manner. Even I knew that dreaming of physical touch meant the transfer of knowledge, or that water signified purity. Some participants inserted telltale symbols of wisdom into their dreams—peacocks, doves, roses—in order to gain Sultan’s favor. Others were so keen to read the dreams as a set of clues that could unlock the doors to enlightenment that they attributed spiritual significance to the most mundane objects. Second-rate newspapers, which I read with interest whenever we visited the aunts, were full of such lists, supplying religious interpretations for cars, textiles, and animals, as well as common household goods, such as sieves, tablecloths, or toothpaste. Some of these objects had obvious meanings—cars signified journeys, of course—but others were more ambiguous, like toothpaste, which meant somehow that the dreamer would not find support from their closest of kin.

  But Sultan would shake her head at these precise interpretations and remind her group that dreams were not meant as entertainment. She said that we must listen to them with our innermost heart, which knew no lies.

  When she said this, I had the uneasy feeling that something was eluding me, something I would hear if only I could be honest with myself. If I were brave.

  * * *

  —

  My mother did not stay in the room for too long during the meetings. She would go to the kitchen to make tea, or sit at the window, smoking and watching the plaza. When she left the room, I felt guilty for listening with interest and followed her to the kitchen shortly afterwards.

  “What happened?” she asked. “I thought you were enjoying yourself.”

  I shrugged, pretending to be bored.

  We often left before the meetings ended, waving goodbye to the aunts from the door. To my embarrassment, Sultan would pause the conversation and say that she hoped to see us more often. My mother thanked her and said something appropriate, like, “God willing,” surprising me with her etiquette.

  After we left the building and were walking across the plaza, she said, “That was enough nonsense to last us a year.”

  But we
would be back at the gathering the following week, and I would sit at the front and then my mother would leave and go to the kitchen after some time.

  Perhaps she wanted me to be surrounded by all those cheerful women, dissecting the invisible world and putting it back together without a care.

  37.

  But that’s not all. There were things my mother cherished, without excuse. She listed the actors and titles of Western movies she watched with Akif amca on Sundays. The Lonesome Trail, The Far Country, Many Rivers to Cross. She listed these names in the same, absent way that she smoked cigarettes with her distant stare, as if she were treading the frontiers of those faraway lands.

  From these titles, I glimpsed a bright and vast world, with borders neatly separating the good from the evil. The movies’ solitary heroes—in Stranger on Horseback, Buchanan Rides Alone—had nothing but their inner strength to overcome their tasks.

  My mother remembered Akif amca’s favorite film and actor (Man of the West and Gary Cooper), as well as the scenes he loved most, when the heroes emerged, triumphant, from their troubles. Once or twice, when they left the cinema, my mother had objected to the impossibility of the plots, and the films’ glorious endings. But Akif amca told her, with certainty, that life progressed in such surprising leaps and that what she witnessed in these films was indeed the way of the world.

  My mother repeated his words to me whenever the two of us watched a Western, on weekend afternoons when we didn’t leave the apartment.

  “That’s the way of the world, Nunu. That’s what Akif amca said.”

  Certainly, she could not have believed this, but I think she wanted me to hear these words as well, in case I made better use of them.