In the Shadow of the Yali

by Suat Dervis

  “Thank you, Ahmet. I can take them off myself.”

  The very idea of Ahmet’s hands on her legs disgusted her. She swiftly pulled off her stockings and tossed them into the corner. Even though this stocking game was a time-honored routine. They would return from a ball or a nightclub, and a yawning Celile would stretch out on their bed. Ahmet would sit cross-legged and shift her long, clean legs until her tiny feet were resting on his knees. And then, he would pull off her stockings, just like her old nurse Nazikter had done, when she was still alive.

  Celile had a morbid fear of touching the floor with her bare feet. Ahmet would remove her shoes or her slippers and toss them into any old corner as soon as he had taken off her stockings. And then he would hop under the covers…And there he’d stay, while Celile spent many a minute begging him to carry her across the floor, or find her slippers for her.

  It was their way of bringing their nights out to a light-hearted end.

  But tonight, Ahmet was jubilant. He had spoken of his venture with Muhsin. He’d arranged a visit with him at his office in two days’ time. And Celile had risen even higher in his estimation due to her haughty refusal to give any value to material things. He slipped her feet into her red-feathered slippers. Off she went into the bathroom. She needed to splash cold water over her fevered brow. Her entire body was on fire.

  She avoided the wardrobe mirror.

  In the mirror above the sink, she was amazed to find her own inversion. Only now did she understand that this woman could be her. She was meeting this woman for the first time.

  Her husband had asked her if she was ill. No wonder.

  Until now Celile had possessed the round, pink face of a well-mannered young girl, lit up at all times by a well-mannered smile. But the face staring back at her from the mirror was the face of a woman. Her cheekbones were more pronounced, her wan cheeks less full, and her eyes, ringed with purple, had a feverish glow. This was the face of a woman who had tasted the pleasures of sin.

  Such pain and torment she could see in this pale face! Could it possibly be hers?

  “Honestly, my little lamb. What’s happened to you?” What had happened to her? Her face was drenched in misery, and her eyes were on fire with joy, while she sank into a peace so deep as to swallow all her sorrow and all her remorse. Slowly it swelled up and overflowed, to wrap itself around her entire being.

  “Are you really that tired?”

  Yes, she was tired, dead tired…She needed to lie down at once. Having fled the old Celile, and the old Ahmet, she needed now to flee this new woman in the mirror. Burrow down between the bed’s cool sheets and forget everything. This wondrous night, and this new hell inside her…

  TWO

  Who was this new woman? And how had she come to take Celile captive? The answers to these questions can be found in her past and in the manner of her upbringing, from the cradle to the moment of her marriage.

  Only by stepping into her shoes and returning to the household where she spent her childhood, to acquaint ourselves with its full cast of characters, can we gain a sense of how she became the person she was. Only by partaking of the rituals and traditions that shaped Celile’s early life can we begin to grasp how this change in her, abrupt as it might be, was nevertheless profound.

  Celile first opened her eyes in a grand vizier’s mansion. Her father—the grandson of this grand vizier—was a diplomat. Her mother was the daughter of Veliddin Pasha, a minister serving under Sultan Abdülhamit.

  Celile had spent no more than four or five years in this mansion, and that was why all she could remember of it was a pink bedstead, its pink netting embroidered with blue birds; a dress of lilac-scented lace; and a sparkling star made of little stones and decorated with lace, nestling in the hair of the woman she knew, despite not remembering her face, to be the most beautiful in the world: her mother.

  This vision, along with those she would come to retain of her father, lived on in her memory, bright, harmonious, and indelible.

  Those were her sweetest, happiest moments—the moments when she happened onto the shadow of this beautiful lilac-scented figure.

  She remembered another moment, too. She is in bed again, crying for her mother. And an old woman leans over her, to say “Your mother’s turned into an angel. She’s flown off to be with the other angels. She’s flown up into the sky.”

  Celile remembered gazing up through her tears at the blue birds embroidered into the pink netting.

  “Flown up into the sky!”

  Who had said that to her? Angels were beautiful women with white wings. Celile longed to have wings like those blue birds.

  So that she could fly up to the sky, too, and join her mother.

  And at night, in her dreams, she would dream of the great blue wings that would carry her up through a void of brilliant green. Before seeing her mother…Before her mother faded…Sometimes, on the other side of that void, she could make out a shining star. The star she’d once seen nestled in her mother’s hair. Flapping her wings, she would race towards it. The closer she came, the stronger the scent of lilacs.

  She would wake up to find her face wet and her eyes as moist as the pillow on which her silken golden hair lay spread.

  Celile was in great pain. But no one knew of this. Her passion for the scent of lilacs. For that star…

  It was all she knew, for—after only the briefest glimpse of the intimacy her parents shared, and after such a short time in their company—she’d been raised to believe it would be disrespectful to recall them.

  All she knew was that a very short time after her mother’s death, perhaps even before a year had passed, her father had taken another woman as his wife.

  After he remarried, her mother’s mother had asked her son-in-law to send the child to her. She was so little, after all, and there was always the chance that her stepmother might treat her harshly. Celile’s father, thinking perhaps that a real grandmother was preferable to a stepmother, had not put up much of a protest.

  The huge, wooden, lattice-windowed yalı in which Celile’s grandmother lived was on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus. This was the vast, mysterious realm in which Celile spent the rest of her childhood, silently grieving.

  On the right-hand side of this yalı, there were storks nesting in chimneys no longer in use. All day and all night, the waters of the Bosphorus washed in and out of the boat-house, bringing to the yalı’s great halls and abandoned rooms a litany of moan and groans that followed the same rhythm as a skipping rope.

  The marble stairs leading up from the sea were thick with moss, right up to the first landing. All the way up to the windows that overlooked the sea there were mussels. In the spring and summer, the yalı’s once-formal garden was a wilderness of honeysuckle and rosebushes, acacia and lilac trees, all in competition to offer up to each other the greatest bounty of flowers.

  Across the road was the last wild remnant of the grove that had once covered the entire hillside.

  It was against this backdrop that Celile had spent her unusual childhood. Against this backdrop that she had made her first acquaintance with the world.

  There were a few other characters with whom she and her grandmother shared this stage: Nazikter Kalfa and Nurser Kalfa, the two maidservants; Seyfullah Efendi, formerly the pasha’s butler; and Osman Agha, the old cook.

  Across the way, in the little cottage in the grove, there was also the old gardener with his wife and two daughters. It had been a long time since he’d done any work in the yalı’s garden. For years now he had been going out to work in other people’s gardens and fields. It was because of his long years of service that they’d let him stay on in the cottage. That was the extent of it, though his wife would come over to do their washing now and again, or to give the yalı a spring-clean.

  Celile’s grandmother was from the palace. Her name was Çeşmiahu.

  At the
time Celile knew her, she was still fresh-faced and beautiful. A tall, broad-shouldered, slender-waisted Circassian. Her skin was like ivory. Her heavily lidded almond eyes were a speckled light brown. Her arched eyebrows endowed her with an air of aloofness.

  She dressed with great care, in a manner to be expected of a cloistered woman of her years. First she would tie around her head a headdress fashioned of dark and finely embroidered crepe. Over this she would place a scarf of the finest Bursa silk, wrapping it first around her hair and then around her beautiful long neck.

  In Celile’s eyes, this was a face that never once through the years changed expression. Its gentle lines remained constant. So, too, did the haughty gaze.

  Not even when she was on her deathbed, racked with pain, did her grandmother lift that veil of pride.

  Çeşmiahu Hanım had no way of understanding what others suffered or encountered in their lives.

  Raised in the household of the sultan’s sister, she had been beautiful enough to catch the eye of the sultan himself. It was he who’d had the little girl brought to his own household as a servant. Later on, he’d arranged for his valued minister, Veliddin Pasha, to take her as his wife.

  Hers was a carefree life, begun in one palace and continued in another. The newlywed arriving in the minister’s mansion might even have been described as spoiled. But then one day, she had noticed that her pasha had not gone into the ministry. And neither had he wished to stay in the mansion. Together they had retreated to the yalı. The house where they had spent no more than a few months in the summer now became their permanent residence.

  Not once had Çeşmiahu Hanım, the former slave girl, asked her pasha for his reasons. But after she heard that the windows of their Nişantaşı mansion had been shattered by an angry mob on the very day of their departure, she too came to understand why Nazmi Bey, her husband’s secretary, had so suddenly found the courage to curse the pasha and the sultan in public.

  For days, even weeks, the captain of the municipal ferry had steered as close as he could to the yalı, and when his passengers began their heckling, he joined in. Death to the despots!

  These were fearful days at the yalı. The pasha forbad any sitting in its sea-facing rooms. For months, these rooms sat empty.

  But the bay could carry a powerful echo. The people’s curses would hit against the hills and return to the garden-facing windows to make them rattle.

  Çeşmiahu Hanım remained as calm as if she had heard and seen nothing. Not a question to the pasha. It was as if she’d not even noticed that one by one the servant girls made known their wish to leave, that her husband’s secretary had continued with his loud cursing, or that her son Hüsameddin’s tutors no longer called at the yalı.

  Her face, a stranger to all expressions of joy or distress, remained calm and impassive throughout.

  Her heavily lidded eyes had always given her an aura of mystery. Now they served to shroud her inner thoughts completely.

  On the thirty-first of March 1909—the day the countercoup in which he was implicated was foiled—Veliddin Pasha suffered a sudden death.

  One might have thought that this bitter blow at least might have imprinted itself on Çeşmiahu Hanım’s face, caused it in some way to collapse. But she had never shed a tear, not even as a child. No one had any way of knowing how deeply this loss had affected her.

  Veliddin Pasha’s death left his widow at the mercy of all life’s hardships. To appreciate what that meant, one needs to be aware of just how distant she’d been from worldly affairs until that moment.

  While still at the palace, where she’d been Çeşmiahu the maidservant, she’d mentioned to her friends that she wanted to leave the palace one day to work in another household. Whereupon her friends had said, “Dear girl, have you gone mad? What would become of you, among those city dwellers? What do you even know about how they run their houses? Don’t you see what a hard time you would have? Haven’t you considered this at all?”

  After they had had their say, Çeşmiahu Hanım had raised her fine eyebrows, thrown back her head, and given them a long look. “I’m not looking for wealth,” she’d said. “Even in the poorest household, they’d still have food. They’d bring in a sheep a day, at least. I wouldn’t be going hungry!”

  This remark alone can give us a sense of how much she knew of city life while at the palace. As Veliddin Pasha’s wife, she’d not had the chance to find out much more.

  She was, after all, a lady from the palace, now with her own mansion, and like all such ladies, she lived like a guest in her own home, pampered and indulged. The secretary, the butler, the cook, the housekeeper—these were the ones who ran Veliddin Pasha’s household.

  But now her pasha was gone, and there was no one to advise this palace lady except his former butler, Seyfullah Efendi.

  That said, the man was in no rush to make the most of this opportunity. Because everyone else had left…Even Fazıl Bey—Celile’s father—who owed his position in the foreign ministry to the pasha, had not paid the pasha’s widow so much as a single visit. Whenever his new wife went to see her mother, Fazıl Bey was quick to express his displeasure in the harshest terms.

  But just as Seyfullah Efendi the butler was preparing to step into this defenseless widow’s life and set himself up as her sole guide and adviser, he was met with a formidable rival.

  His name was Mardirosyan Efendi—Veliddin Pasha’s moneychanger. He had been the first visitor to the yalı. Even before the funeral, when the house was receiving no visitors, he was there at the door, sending word up to the women’s quarters that the lady was not to worry, for he would be stepping in to arrange his benefactor’s funeral.

  Çeşmiahu Hanım was deeply grateful for this Armenian moneychanger’s assistance with these arrangements—her son-in-law having offered no help at all. From that moment on, she trusted the moneychanger absolutely, and so it was that she placed the entire fortune left to her by Veliddin Pasha into this old moneychanger’s hands, and so it continued, passing through his hands until all was spent.

  To prevent the children of his former wives from opening claims against his estate, Veliddin Pasha had put everything into his wife’s name while he was still alive.

  In effect this amounted to the vast mansion in Nişantaşı, the forty-room yalı on the Bosphorus, a few bonds, a bit of hard cash, and Çeşmiahu Hanım’s jewelry.

  For Veliddin Pasha had been a man of extravagant tastes; never expecting that the bribes and gratuities might cease to flow in, he had not been one to rest before he’d spent everything he had on hand.

  In the years before the First World War, he had made do with his moneychanger’s bonds. A few of the most valuable items of jewelry had underwritten these. No doubt his wife’s most precious pieces—the single-gem rings and earrings.

  The lady went along with whatever the old moneychanger suggested. To mistrust him would have been vulgar, after all. He’d been the pasha’s only friend.

  And now he was the only visitor to the yalı.

  He was a pink-faced man with bushy white eyebrows and a droopy moustache to match. His hands were plump and white, even ladylike, and adorned by an enormous emerald ring. And whenever he came to the yalı, he treated business almost as an afterthought.

  He would make it seem as if his main purpose were to share reminiscences about the pasha.

  On hearing he had arrived, the lady would don her heavy white Baghdad coat and wrap her white veil a bit more tightly around her neck. Then she would proceed to the salon to receive him.

  Mardirosyan Efendi would place his hand over his heart and bow most respectfully before they both sat down.

  In the half light of that lattice-windowed room, Nazikter Kalfa would serve them coffee on golden saucers.

  Whereafter the old moneychanger would launch into a story about Veliddin Pasha.

  The palace lady would sit th
ere listening, her expression never changing. Though she gave nothing away, Mardirosyan Efendi was a clever man. He knew full well that she warmed to his tales.

  Yes, it was true: our palace lady had full confidence in Mardirosyan Efendi.

  Not only had he taken charge of the pasha’s funeral; he had been the one to arrange for the sepulchre that marked his final resting place in the family plot in Rumelihisarı.

  Now had he undertaken to oversee the education of the palace lady’s only son, on whom she doted.

  He would discuss Hüsameddin’s future as if he were his own son. He was adamant that he should receive the sort of education that a boy of his class deserved. Once he had graduated from Galatasaray Lycée, he would have to go to France. Whenever the school bills arrived, the old moneychanger would pay them out of his own pocket without disturbing the lady. In time, he would ask for her permission to sell off a few railroad bonds, or some such, to settle the matter in installments.

  Or he would do so without letting her know. Even so, it would be in the knowledge that the lady, if consulted, would have agreed forthwith.

  All these were services for which the lady, who knew nothing of the outside world, would remain thankful for many years to come.

  Without a doubt, the greatest blow in the palace lady’s life was to lose her son in the First World War. He’d been sent to Çanakkale as a reserve officer, and was never to return. They’d not even recovered his body. Either he had perished on enemy ground or he’d been left in too many pieces for anyone to make an identification.

  On the day she discovered that her son was dead, this elderly Circassian lady exhibited none of the behaviors one might expect of a grieving mother. She did not shout. She did not cry. She asked no one how she was going to live. Told no one that he was her son, her everything, the child she had brought into the world. She did not extol his virtues. She asked no one to understand what it meant for a mother to lose a son.

  But it was on that day that her proud shoulders suddenly sagged, and her neat and shiny chestnut hair turned white.