by Defne Suman
Meanwhile, as his stomach was aching at the thought of beginning a new life in an unknown city, my mother, a native, born and bred in Smyrna, was moaning desperately as she twisted in the increasingly violent pangs of my birth. The opium had lost its effect by now. The baby in her belly had turned into an animal with sharp claws, tearing her flesh from inside. She slowly, slowly stood up; like a drunken barrel, she rolled to the door of the glassed-in room where she had been imprisoned for exactly three months, one week and five days, and leaned against it. From the turret, the vibrations of her screams reached the sitting room downstairs, where the Armenian midwife sat with a bag of gold in her hands and a huge weight of responsibility upon her, larger even than herself.
Across from Midwife Meline sat my grandmother in a velvet armchair. Coffee cup in hand, she gestured towards the ceiling with her finely pointed chin.
The time had come.
Thus, full of secrets, my life, which was to span more than a century, began.
The God of Fleeting Moments
The people who gave me the name Scheherazade found me unconscious in a garden smelling of honeysuckle just before dawn one morning. My hair was tangled in the roots of the mulberry tree under which I was lying. My legs were a mass of festering wounds from the flames that had engulfed my skirt, but it was impossible not to notice the serene smile on my face. They assumed I was watching a lovely dream behind my closed eyes. They couldn’t understand how I had got through the locked gate and into the garden.
I remember it all. This was a different September. The acacia trees were in bloom, schools were about to open. I was seventeen. My birthday week had just come to an end. The kite stuck in the mulberry branches – it was red, like everything else that night – was fluttering in the wind blowing from the mountains to the sea. The earth beneath me was soft, moist, inviting. Angel fingers moved over my cheeks. A door slammed somewhere far away. Then I heard the ‘tak’ of a cartridge being loaded. The double-barrelled shotgun would definitely blow my brains out. Let it happen. Everybody was shooting everybody that night. The sea was clogged with bodies, every one of them bloated like balloons.
We had mingled with death too much to be afraid of it in those days.
The surprising thing was life itself. The sight of children in red and green dresses splashing around among the corpses as the ocean currents drew their little bodies downwards. The boys and girls whose hair was floating like seaweed, singing their last breath as they hung onto the chains of the European ships and begged the captains to take them aboard. How they clung to life! I did not have that much strength left in me. I was debilitated, weak, used up, finished.
My ribcage collapsed into the earth. I didn’t even open my mouth.
If I had opened it, no sound would have come out, but I did not yet know this.
Heaven was at the end of the double-barrelled shotgun.
I closed my eyes.
In the distance a child was crying.
Behind my closed eyes I saw a woman. She was standing on the deck of a long, narrow ship. Two thick plaits were wound around her head and a fringe hid her frowning eyebrows. Avinash Pillai was standing directly behind her, his dark arms encircling her waist, pressing her tightly to his chest. The sea was flickering with yellowy-orange flames. The hatless woman, leaning her head on the Indian man’s shoulder, was crying.
The woman’s name was Edith Sofia Lamarck.
She was my mother.
I did not know this at the time. Avinash Pillai told me years later.
Charles Lamarck’s youngest child was born in Bournabat, in a stone mansion with a large, sloping garden full of camellias, bougainvillea and various kinds of roses set in the middle of a vast tract of land. When she was a child, Edith believed that this garden, which on one side was bordered by a poplar forest, was paradise itself. Bournabat was surrounded by mountains which merged with the blue of the sky. Cherry trees and pomegranate trees greeted passers-by.
Little Edith used to lie among the blue, purple and pink hydrangeas that had been planted by her grandfather with his own hands – ‘These are my grandchildren,’ he would say – and watch the clouds. One of those clouds carried Kairos on its back. Kairos was the god of mortal time, time which flew away. He was in love with the Amazon queen Smyrna, who founded the city that took her name. Every day, Kairos travelled across the blue skies on the back of a cloud, greeting the queen’s great-great-grandchildren. Smyrna was as beautiful as she was powerful, and equally just. In archery, she had no superiors. Like other Amazon women, she had cut off her right breast at puberty in order that it not interfere with the drawing of the bowstring. Edith dreamed of her as she rode her horse along the golden shores, her long black hair rippling. If she ever had a daughter, she would name her Smyrna.
Sometimes she would run down to the far end of the garden where it opened onto the forest and bury her face in the rosemary and wild thyme that the washerwoman Sidika had planted, inhaling the aromatic herbs until she sneezed. The garden was full of fruit trees and vines. After he’d turned his business over to his son, Edith’s grandfather, Louis Lamarck, had become very interested in vineyards; he devoted every minute of his retirement years to growing grapes. Swings hung from the iron poles of the vineyard, their ropes plaited like the hawsers of the ships in the harbour. Edith’s father and their butler, Mustafa, had made them in the carpentry shop. When Edith swung high enough, she would snatch at a cluster of her grandfather’s grapes and, despite her mother having forbidden it, would pop the warm and dusty yellow Muscat grapes, drunk with their own sugar, into her mouth unwashed.
The mulberry tree was right in front of Edith’s bedroom and left its fruit on her balcony. She used to nourish silkworms in tiny nests of mulberry leaves beside her bed. Her nanny from Bursa had taught her how to sing lullabies to the caterpillars. The nanny insisted that the silkworms only understood Greek, so Edith sang Greek songs to the silkworms every night. And every morning she would raise the leaves and peep in with curiosity and fear. In midsummer the Greek servants would spread a blanket under the huge tree and ask little Edith to lean over the balcony and shake the branches with her slender arms. The white, honey-filled mulberries would patter down onto the blanket with a sound like summer rain.
One day she discovered that the unripe figs she’d picked left a white liquid on her hand, as white as the milk that came from the teats of Grisha, the cat who’d had kittens in the garden. Sidika explained that the milk was the fig’s blood. The fig needed it to grow, so that it could swell up like a breast. Sidika was a refugee from Crete. She had blonde, almost white hair and blue eyes, and she was tall and slender. She spoke a dialect of Greek that no one except her husband Mustafa understood, not even her sons. Sidika would give Edith cinnamon buns and herbal pies when she ran away from her mother’s guests and hid in the hut at the edge of the garden.
Because Edith was so much younger than her siblings, she grew up separately from them. She was a child who knew how to play by herself. Her sister, Anna, and brothers, Charles Junior and Jean-Pierre, were away at school in France for eight months of the year. During those months, Edith was the only child in the huge mansion. It wasn’t that she didn’t have friends. On the contrary, Bournabat was a child’s paradise in those years. In the tangerine-scented sunset, the children would have bicycle races on the road and play hide-and-seek and marbles; they waited for the halva seller more eagerly than they did for their fathers disembarking the evening train. Kosta, the halva seller, who lived in the small village at the centre of Bournabat, came past the Lamarck mansion every evening and would give the children candy floss. To the ladies who’d had their lounge chairs brought out front and were stretched out upon them, drinking coffee, he would offer cones of nuts, Turkish delight, and sugar lumps.
Edith’s best friend was Edward Thomas-Cook, the neighbours’ son. Together they would scramble over the iron garden gates and search the huge mansions for ghosts. On endlessly long summer afternoons they would fin
d a shady spot and act out scenes from the books they were reading. Edward had a large family and was often forgotten among his two elder brothers and his ailing younger sister. Their house was always full of relatives and guests, all of whom Edward addressed as ‘auntie’ or ‘uncle’. Edward wasn’t like other boys. For example, he would rather read books with Edith than join the football team. As well as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Treasure Island, he had also read Edith’s favourite book, Little Women. At Edith’s insistence, he had even cut off her two long plaits with his own hands so that she would resemble the book’s heroine, Jo, whom Edith adored.
Edith had another friend besides Edward: her father, Charles Lamarck. Monsieur Lamarck was actually old enough to be her grandfather. Perhaps for this reason, their relationship was based on mutual tenderness and understanding. And perhaps also because of this, her father spoiled her unnecessarily, as was frequently pointed out by Edith’s mother, Juliette. As the time of the evening train’s arrival neared, Edith would sit on the edge of the ornamental rock pool with her little white hand up to its wrist in water lilies and goldfish, keeping her eyes on the garden gate as she waited. Juliette would pass through the garden on her way to one of the neighbours’ for tea, and without slowing the steps of her dainty feet wrapped in satin slippers, would say, ‘Darling Edith, please wash and tidy yourself before I return. I have spoken to Nanny. She is preparing your dress with the blue ribbons. We have a guest for dinner and I would like everyone’s face to have a smile upon it.’
Words streamed out of Juliette’s mouth at a running pace. As she paused to catch her breath, her blue-green eyes would linger on Edith’s face for a moment, awaiting acknowledgement, and then she would avert her gaze as if she had seen something quite different. Her daughter’s black eyes must have triggered some dark insecurity in Juliette’s soul, for when looking at her daughter, a deep crease would appear between her eyebrows. When the same crease appeared on Edith’s brow before she turned twelve years old, the mother was more upset than the daughter.
During those years, she would complain to guests who came to tea, ‘Do you see, Madame Levon, Edith has wrinkles already. At her age! I tell her to rub her face with rose oil every night, as a precaution, but she pays no attention.’ As if by repeating the complaint continuously, the irritating crease would go away.
Every evening, Monsieur Lamarck would take his dreamy daughter, waiting for him beside the rock pool, in his arms and pet her, calling her his ‘miniature’. Edith was really quite small. Her features were perfect, as if carved with a fine blade; her face was like a water droplet. She remained the smallest child in her class until she took a step into adolescence. Her teeth were perfectly aligned, like pomegranate seeds, and there was a gap between the front two, which made her completely adorable and which also, according to Sidika the washerwoman, protected her from the evil eye. That gap was Edith’s good fortune. In the evenings, after a tiring day at his chandlery business, a single glance into his little daughter’s coal-black eyes and thick lashes was all it took to fill Monsieur Lamarck with joy. Father and daughter would walk arm in arm around the vast garden looking at spiders which had made webs among Grandfather Lamarck’s dusty vines. They would speak of the stars rising behind Mount Nif and of the moon painting the violets silver.
Charles Lamarck had countless theories regarding space and time. For example, that the universe might be shaped like a horseshoe. If this were so, if one stood at one end of the horseshoe and took a photograph of the other end, one might see Caesar making love to Cleopatra or Marie Antoinette’s milky-white neck hanging from the guillotine. Just as Edith couldn’t figure out how the moon could show only one face to the world, she didn’t understand the horseshoe, but the possibility of taking photographs of the heroines whose stories she adored appealed to her. Most of all, she loved the way her father decorated his theory of the universe with her favourite historical figures.
Monsieur Lamarck indulged his daughter, spoiling her with wooden music boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl, emerald-encrusted combs, dolls from Paris with real hair. On her tenth birthday he gave Edith a white pony brought from London, and on her thirteenth a shiny black Arabian thoroughbred. Father and daughter would mount their horses and ride to the district’s summer palaces, to Narlikoy and Kokluca, sometimes catching their breath at one of the outdoor cafés. Once they roasted a lamb and distributed the meat to a tribe of nomads who had set up their tents there and to locals who had gathered for a picnic.
With father and daughter being so close, Monsieur Lamarck’s sudden death shook no one as much as it shook Edith. On a summer’s day so hot that time itself seemed to slow down, the poor fellow’s heart just stopped as he was eating his lunch all alone in Kraemer’s restaurant. Charles Lamarck breathed his last right there. His head fell into his rare, bloody steak and his salad bowl was overturned by The Charterhouse of Parma, which he always carried in his inside pocket and which had been lying open on the table at the time.
In the year following this sudden death, the intimacy between father and daughter – which she had not been pleased about when her husband was alive and well – came to Juliette Lamarck’s aid. Edith left school before her final year and was not seen in public for the whole summer. Now she was wandering around, all skin and bone, with a pale face and dark circles under her eyes. She never set foot outside the house. With a skilful twisting of words, Juliette connected all this to a deep depression brought on by the loss of her father.
‘Where is Edith? Ah, ma chérie, Charles’s death affected her greatly. Don’t even ask… She had to abandon school because of her health. When the doctor said that the heat here was not good for her, what could I do? I sent her to the thermal baths at Baden-Baden. She was there all summer. Now she must rest. That is the reason she has not been seen in society. Naturally, this cruel turn of events has shaken us all, but one must return to one’s life, must one not? My sons, bless them, immediately took over the work. Dear Anna is expecting another enfant – yes, don’t even ask! Twins this time! Mon Dieu! They’ve moved into a house like a small castle in Boudja. Did I tell you already? My son-in-law is such a gentleman. British aristocracy, you know. Oh, yes, you have met him. Of course. Ah, oui. You asked about Edith, yes… My dear, this little daughter of mine is a bit over-sensitive. And of course she and her father were very attached to each other. There is nothing to be done. I spoke to that famous nerve doctor who resides at the Huck Hotel. He says to leave her alone. He came from Vienna to write his memoirs here. I met him at a reception given by the Thomas-Cooks recently. And do you know what he said…’
Eventually, even Juliette herself came to believe what she was saying. It is possible that she was actually telling these stories in order to convince herself and not her friends. And there was a kernel of truth in there. For sure, Charles had died at exactly the right time. If Juliette had planned it, she couldn’t have organized it better. If her husband had lived, he would not have acted with reason; with his soft heart he would have revealed Edith’s shame to society and that would have been a disaster. Juliette had saved not only her daughter’s name and honour but that of the whole family. She had kept them all from being disgraced. Certainly, Edith would soon recover from her depression and make a successful marriage. As soon as the neighbours’ son Edward completed his education in New York, those two should waste no time in becoming engaged.
Let’s leave her making such plans.
*
One winter’s morning, just when Juliette believed she had destiny under her control, out of nowhere a lawyer from Athens arrived carrying a leather briefcase from which he extracted a document and delivered a blow to the precarious balance between mother and daughter, turning it upside down.
Before the Leather Briefcase
Edith was reading the newspaper when her mother entered the dining room in her swirling pearl-coloured dressing gown.
It was one of those rare days in Bournabat when the sun was nowhere to be seen. The
sky had darkened and forbidding rumbles could be heard from the hills. The wind was equally angry, taking its fury out on the thin, bare branches of the apricot and sour-cherry trees in front of the window.
In defiance of the storm outside, the Lamarck dining room smelled of toasted bread and wood smoke. Butler Mustafa had lit the yellow enamel stove in the corner after morning prayers and one of the maids had placed a record on the gramophone – a Mendelssohn sonata for violin and piano. Juliette required that music be playing in the house when she woke. She had no patience left for the silence which had been mandated following her husband’s death. She had purchased gramophones for each of the downstairs rooms as well as one for her bedroom.
Edith’s gaze, lifted from her newspaper, slipped by her mother in the doorway and focused on the oil portrait of her father hanging on the wall. Her father used to say that introverted people were most at peace in wintertime. Just as the shape of a tree became apparent once the leaves, blossom and fruit had fallen, so could the depths of a person’s soul be revealed in winter’s silence. What a shame that winter was so short in this city whose residents lived their lives outdoors or in front of open windows. She remembered with nostalgia the long, howling, winter nights at the convent school in Paris, when the girls would sit together around the huge fireplace in the library, reading books. The convent school was no more than a dream now. The classmates alongside whom she had sat, all in a row, leaning on their elbows, had graduated last spring. She had not been among them.
Sighing, she again buried her head in the newspaper. It reported that the Comédie Française would be performing in Smyrna. The Consul had spoken in person to Jules Claretie, the director of the world’s oldest and greatest theatre company, and had obtained a promise that they would stage a production at the Sporting Club the following year. La Réforme newspaper had made this a headline story to emphasize the pre-eminence of French culture among the elite of the city.