In the Shadow of the Yali

by Suat Dervis

  In all these months, had he not even seen her?

  Had he not found the time to look at her closely enough, to see what kind of woman she was?

  If Celile was to suffer such an affront for loving him, was it not up to Mushin to defend her, protect her from ugly gossip and restore her to honor by marrying her?

  Why was Muhsin telling her all this?

  Muhsin was telling her all this for her own good. He was telling her all this so that she would know how much he loved her.

  He was telling her all this so that she would have the measure of his love, and always would, even though it would never be possible for them to marry. He wished to clear up the misunderstanding that had grown between them. And this, for Celile, was the most terrifying thing of all.

  Ever confident, Muhsin carried on: “Please, Celile, forgive me. I’m not saying all this to hurt or upset you. I just want you to understand me and see things in their proper light. After your husband…Excuse me. After Ahmet has dragged you, dragged us both, in the dirt…and did so very much to darken our names…how could I take you out in the world to introduce you as my wife? How could I ever introduce you as Celile Demirtaş? If I were a private person of no consequence, then it would be no problem. But I am Muhsin Demirtaş…What would I be in the eyes of all those underlings to whom I entrust my money and my business? They’d laugh at me. Call me a fool. And from the moment they call me a fool, I lose everything I’ve worked for, and everything I hope to achieve. You know all this. In the months we’ve been sharing our lives, you’ve seen with your own eyes where I’m headed. How could I ever give such a weapon to my enemies? Just imagine what they could do to me. What I could lose. Have you ever thought about what I could lose? It’s not money that’s at stake. It’s my good name. And Ahmet, in his fight to destroy our love, has done everything in his power to stain our names, and he’s succeeded. That scoundrel. That disgrace…”

  In a voice she could not keep from sounding sharp, Celile said: “Enough about Ahmet. Ahmet did nothing wrong. The fault was mine!”

  Muhsin felt a raging jealousy rise up inside him.

  “So you still love Ahmet,” he said. “You still love him.”

  Did she still have time for this man? Did she still feel an attachment?

  In a dull voice, Celile said: “I don’t love anyone!”

  She was shocked by her own words. Because they were true. She knew this now. Knew it in her bones.

  Was this man standing before her the man she had once loved so madly, for whom she had sacrificed so much?

  Was it for him she’d abandoned her home and her peaceful life, and cast away her husband, leaving him to fall in dire disgrace? Was it for this man she had done so many mad things?

  Just for this? To hear these words?

  Muhsin, meanwhile, was trying not to give too much importance to words said in anger, even as he felt them hitting against his body like a cold wind. He could see now that anything was possible. But he would not accept that Celile did not love him.

  He could no longer work, no longer live, without her love.

  Yes, he had been careless in his words. He had gone too far.

  Gone to the breaking point.

  Now suddenly he was speaking softly. As if to beg her: “No, Celile. I forbid you from saying you love no one. You love me. Do you think I don’t know how much you’ve loved me all this time? Do you think I don’t know what happiness you’ve brought me? You have no right to say such things to me. Because I love you so much. And so jealously. You love me, Celile. And I love you. We love each other madly. You are my everything. My fortune is your fortune. And nothing will ever change that. You are my partner for life. Please believe that I will give you everything. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  Celile looked at her wrist, as if his words had reminded her of its existence. This bracelet, this precious heirloom. With agitated fingers, she began to play with its clasp. Once she had unfastened it, she took hold of it and began to swing it back and forth.

  “Why do you want to get married? As some sort of guarantee?” Celile too was losing the will to argue. Her anger was sapping away.

  The Muhsin of her dreams was long gone.

  In his place was a man she hardly knew.

  How different he was from the man she had loved. How indifferent she now felt.

  The man she’d once loved had hurt her—hurt her to death, but what she felt for this new man was not love, but something more akin to condescension. Once upon a time she’d looked at all strange men the way she was looking at him now.

  The more he spoke the further away she drifted.

  The more he spoke the more she felt the distance between them growing, until he was as far away as the entire world had been before they met. The more he spoke the more Celile withdrew into the fortress inside her.

  But her misery had not abated. Her anger still burned.

  Muhsin was still speaking, as if he wished to lose her forever. “Do you really think you need a marriage to safeguard your future?”

  Celile could feel her heart on fire. She could feel its heat rising.

  She longed for the night, the wind, the sea.

  She longed to be free of this man.

  Slowly, very slowly, she turned away from Muhsin to face the sea.

  “Celile, tell me. Do you really need a piece of paper to prove I love you? Isn’t there another way for me to show you that you’re every bit as important to me as you would be as a wife? What if I made arrangements to ensure that you’re provided for after my death? A checkbook is a greater guarantee, I’d say, than a marriage certificate. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll put two hundred thousand liras into a bank account, in your name.”

  Celile said nothing.

  She was leaning out of the window, swinging the bracelet as she gazed into the night.

  She let it go. The precious bracelet caught the light from the chandelier behind them as it fell like a star through the night.

  A tiny splash as it hit the surface.

  “Did something just fall into the sea?” Muhsin asked.

  She turned calmly to face him.

  “Yes. The bracelet you just gave me!”

  Oh, what a terrifying creature this woman was.

  “But it’s an heirloom!” he murmured, struggling to conceal his panic.

  He did not know what else to say.

  He fell silent. He’d lost the courage to speak.

  Celile too was silent, as she gazed into the dark waters. With unseeing eyes, she stared into the dark night.

  All her life, she’d been walking through the world with those same unseeing eyes.

  That world now seemed as dark and shapeless as eternal night.

  She might as well have been blind.

  What was she going to do now? What could she do?

  Was she to accept this man’s insults? Was she going to let this man think so ill of her, when all his accusations were baseless?

  Must she accept his accusations? Accept her assigned role—the disgraced and dishonorable woman with a dirty past—and agree to live like a dormouse, forever out of sight, forgoing marriage so as to save Muhsin’s honor (!) and good name?

  No insult could be as grievous as this.

  To save herself from Muhsin’s contempt, she would need to save herself from Muhsin himself.

  To stay with him would be to accept his calumnies.

  As she stared into the dark night, she contemplated her dark and fearful future.

  If she left him, she’d have no one to protect her.

  She’d been taught no useful skills. Her refined upbringing had ensured that.

  She’d always followed the paths set out by others. Never taking the initiative. Always watching from the sidelines.

  Watching from the sidelines! She wanted to l
augh.

  How could she have seen anything from the sidelines when she was blind?

  She wanted to leave this place, run as far away as she could.

  But where could she go?

  She had not the faintest idea where to go.

  Or how to get there.

  Was she to suffer the fate of all those who could not stand alone in life? Had she no choice but to accept the insults of her protector?

  There was only one way to save herself from his insults, and that was to leave him.

  But how would Celile save herself thereafter?

  She kept looking at the sea. She wanted to see it.

  She wanted to cry at her predicament and laugh at her inability to do anything about it.

  She had never felt so ashamed.

  She didn’t move. She couldn’t. She might have turned around and cried “You lowly scoundrel!” But she couldn’t.

  Was there no way to escape?

  What disrespect! How degrading! What an affront!

  “Celile…You do understand why I’ve said all this, and that I’ve said it with the best intentions?”

  He pulled her towards him. Pulled her close.

  “I didn’t want to do you harm, or upset you. I want things between us to be clear. All I want is to bring this misunderstanding to an end.”

  But there was nothing between them, nothing left.

  How strange that she was still here. How strange, her surroundings. How lovely the murmurings of the sea.

  For a moment, she marveled at how cool the sea was, and how dark.

  For a moment, she contemplated death.

  Death as she had seen it at her grandmother’s bedside.

  No sooner had that memory come to her than she shrank away from it.

  “What a helpless, passive creature I am!” she thought. She lacked the will to die, just as she lacked the will to live.

  “Celile, I beg of you. Speak to me. You’re not angry with me anymore, are you? You’ve understood me, I hope?”

  What could she say to him?

  Was she going to say “I’ve understood, and I hate you!”? Then what would she do?

  Would she leave?

  Where would she go?

  She bowed her head, and in the faintest of whispers she said, “I’ve understood.”

  Hearing these words, Muhsin’s heart began to sing.

  In joyous thanks, he bent down to kiss the nape of her neck. Again and again, he kissed her, until taking her by both arms, he turned her towards him.

  “If you understand me, if you understand how I feel about you and how things are, then that must mean you’ve forgiven me. Understanding is forgiving, is it not?”

  His hands were on her shoulders now. He drew her trembling body close.

  And Celile, who felt such shame to be so close, hid her face.

  She hid her face by letting her head fall against his chest.

  “And if you’ve forgiven me,” said Muhsin, “that must mean you love me?

  “To forgive is to love,” he continued. “And now that you love me, you also know how much I love you, and how very deeply, and on what terms. So why are you so sad?”

  As she felt herself grow smaller, knowing she would never find a way to escape from his embrace, she thought back to that other night—the night her life had changed course.

  Throwing back her head, she looked straight into his eyes. In a voice as hard and cold as steel, she said: “I’m sad because I’m so close to you, and yet so far away.”

  TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My first thanks must go to Liz Behmoaras and her groundbreaking biography, Suat Derviş: Efsane Bir Kadın ve Dönemi (Suat Derviş: A Legendary Woman and Her Time), which is, alas, available only in Turkish. I would also like to thank Fatmagül Berktay, Günseli Sönmez İşçi, and indeed all the scholars who contributed to Yıldızları Seyreden Kadın—Suat Derviş Edebiyatı (The Woman Who Gazed at the Stars: The Works of Suat Derviş). It is thanks to this collection and the symposium from which it derived that Suat Derviş has been restored to her proper place in Turkish letters.

  Finally, I would also like to thank my publisher, Judith Gurewich, for bringing Suat Derviş to my attention. As a child in 1960s Istanbul, I was taken by my parents to many of the bars, hotels, and patisseries that were Suat’s favorite haunts in those years, without ever suspecting that the woman at the next table might come back to enchant me more than half a century later.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  In 1953, at the urging of her older sister, Suat Derviş left Istanbul for Paris. The years of poverty and persecution had worn her down. She deserved some peace. And Hamiyet, her sister, had a small allowance from her Danish husband. They could live on that. Having found themselves a room in a transient hotel in the tenth arrondissement, Suat and Hamiyet sought the help of a comrade who had left Istanbul before them, but to no avail. Someone had circulated false rumors. The old comrade would not say what they were. The word went out. One by one, the doors slammed shut.

  In desperation, Suat wrote to her old friend Nâzım Hikmet, who was famous throughout the world by now. Banned in his own country but still secretly and passionately cherished, he was living in exile in Moscow.

  In harrowing terms, she told Nâzım of her plight. Her sister’s allowance barely covered the first half of every month. In the second half, the two women went hungry. Suat begged Nâzım to put her in touch with his friends in the French Communist Party. There is no record of his having done so, but it was not long afterward that Suat Derviş was taken up by Maurice Thorez, general secretary of the French Communist Party, and his wife, Jeannette Vermeersch. Before long, she had met everyone worth knowing in the upper echelons of the French Left.

  Introduced as the wife of the incarcerated general secretary of the Turkish Communist Party, Suat was quick to alert her new acquaintances to her other identities. The appropriate introductions followed. And before long, Suat had an agreement with Les Editeurs français réunis to translate her two most recent novels into French.

  The first, now entitled Le Prisonnier d’Ankara, came out in early 1957. The second—the book in your hand—was published later the same year. Published in Turkey under a title that translates as “Like Mad,” it, too, carried a new title, Les Ombres du Yali (In the Shadows of the Yalı). Both received admiring reviews from important critics. Both were billed as her own translations. But they were not. At least, this is what Suat is on record as saying almost twenty years after the fact.

  “In Paris,” she recalled, “I wrote these novels again [in Turkish] without looking at the originals. And then my sister Hamiyet translated them into French” (quoted in Behmoaras, Suat Derviş, 249).

  When I first undertook to translate this extraordinary book, I had yet to know about the circumstances under which it had traveled into its first foreign language. I had only the books to go by: the breathy and occasionally baggy Turkish text, first published as a newspaper serial in 1944—and the French text, which is elegantly clipped and a third of the length. I might have chosen to translate from the French and not the Turkish, had it not been for the fact that the French text puts the two male rivals at the center of the story, making them a bit more European in their dealings, and leaving out their ferocious wrangling as they seek to rob each other of their honor. Though we hear a great deal of our heroine’s exotic childhood in the shadowy yalı, we hear little of her adulterous desire. She remains an asset to be fought over, until suddenly, and in my view implausibly, she becomes her own woman, refusing the abortion that her lover has tried to force on her, and leaving him with her head high, knowing that she is perfectly capable of working for a living, even though she has no friends, no family, and no skills. Just the baby in her womb and the white dress on her back.

  I have spent many hours wondering what went on in that hote
l room in the tenth arrondissement, as Suat and her sister worked together to tailor these two novels to French taste, or what they thought French taste to be. The Second Sex had been on the bookshelves for eight years by then. The novel in your hands, published in Turkish just a few years before that, is a gothic enactment of ideas that Simone de Beauvoir had yet to put into words. But by the mid-1950s, everyone in the French literary Left would have been familiar with the claim that one was not born, but made, a woman, and not the subject of desire, but its object. But here are these two sisters, as desperate for food as they are desperate to please the general secretary of the French Communist Party. Did they refashion their story because they feared he might be a puritan, or even worse, a prude? Or is this what they thought all women had to do when writing for a mixed audience?

  We who work between languages know how tempting it can be to slip in a change here and there, to make a text more palatable for its intended readers. Most of us know it to be a dangerous and even dishonorable habit. With this in mind, I have chosen to preserve the gothic excesses of the Turkish text, honoring its aura of shocking gossip, and letting the more puzzling aspects of indigenous sexual mores speak for themselves. But I have intervened in an editorial capacity, correcting the sorts of mistakes that come with a mad rush for a deadline, excising repetitions, and editing down some of the longer analyses of emotions and their various admixtures. These can be instructive in Turkish, a language that embraces ambivalence and thus allows emotions to exist in contradictory groupings, but in English they can read like recipes for a hellish stew.

  I remain in awe of all writers who can translate themselves. For they are free to do as they like. While I am free only to wonder what I myself might have done, had I been living hand-to-mouth in Paris in 1957 and hoping to make a place for myself among the aristocrats of the French Left, while knowing, as only a foreigner can, that their patience is limited.

  SUAT DERVIŞ (Istanbul, 1905–1972) is one of Turkey’s leading female authors. She was educated in Germany, where she wrote articles for newspapers and journals. After the rise of fascism, she returned to Turkey in 1932. She became renowned for her novels, which were serialized in Turkish newspapers and often centered around the tragic lives of lost, lonely, and struggling people in urban Turkey. In 1941 she began publishing Yeni Edebiyat (“New Literature”), a biweekly magazine on art and literature. A dedicated socialist, she was placed under house arrest for her book Why Do I Admire Soviet Russia. After her release, and a change of government in Turkey, she fled to France, where she lived in voluntary exile from 1953 to 1963. With the publication of The Prisoner of Ankara in 1957, she became the first female Turkish author to publish a novel in Europe. The novel received critical acclaim from Le Monde and the literary periodical Les Lettres Françaises, and was published in Turkish eleven years later.