Monsieur Hariapulos, that’s more than a “probably”!
Her mother warned, “She better be home by midnight. If she’s not, I swear I’ll never let her play at the taverna again!”
He replied, “Who, your Cinderella? Ha, just like in the fairy tales!”
Which fairy tale has a tragic end?
“The end of my fairy tale was shit!”
For years, my grandma complained bitterly. And for years, I gathered up the pearls she dropped and strung them up. It’s such a shame that I was only able to piece together her story after she died.
Time passed, days at the chocolate factory and nights onstage in Beyoğlu. Each day for my grandma was even better than the one before. One day, after packaging chocolates all day, my grandma left the factory and went home. Her fingertips were covered in silvery flakes from the wrappers. That night, they were going to perform again at the taverna. She set the table, knowing her mother would be home soon, and heated a kettle full of water for washing up. Packaging was sweaty work, and she could tell that she smelled anything but pleasant. She didn’t want to stink up her dress. They’d said to be at the taverna by nine o’clock. My grandma looked at the clock.
As she lay on her deathbed, my grandma slipped into murmured recollections of that night again and again. When our minds, thoughts, and spirit get stuck somewhere, that place never leaves us, and we go back there when death draws near. She didn’t want to leave this world until she’d settled that account. They’d left me as her caretaker in her final days. “You’re a big girl now. Stay here with your grandma.” That’s how my aunt justified it to herself. Her work wasn’t going well. There had been a schism at the newspaper. For the first time in her life, she broke out in hives, all because of stress. In the end, she was going to get fired and be unable to find work. As for my mother, she was dealing with the fallout from her somewhat shady efforts to become a famous dietician. My father? He wasn’t around. They’d separated. There was only me. And sometimes Pembe and Derin. After school they’d stop by the hospital, knock on the door, poke their heads inside, and drift toward the bedside like smoke. Loudly, so that she could hear me, I’d say, “Grandma, these are my friends.” She’d moan in response. By that time, she was practically deaf. She was in another realm, waiting for death, getting closer and closer to the moment when she would settle accounts and make things right. The people at the hospital seemed to sense this, so they released her. “Let her die at home. We can’t do anything else for her.” That day, the day she took her last breath, she was “there,” stuck in that memory she could never forget. She spoke of things she’d never told anyone:
“I stepped out of the bathroom, all freshened up, wearing the silk dress my love had sent me. I was hoping my hair would dry in time. I’d brushed my bangs into a curl so they would dry that way. My mom was supposed to be home at any moment, so I had already started cooking. The radio was on. There was news. The news always bored me. I was just about to turn off the radio when I realized that something important was going on. They reported that Atatürk’s house in Thessaloniki had been bombed. In retaliation, people had started attacking the local Greeks of Istanbul. It was a little after seven o’clock. The announcer said, ‘The first attack was on the Haylayf Café.’ A large mob that had been rioting in Samatya and Kumkapı, looting stores, was now in Beyoğlu. I was just thinking, We better not go out tonight with all the tumult, when I heard the door of the apartment building bang open. A roar of voices filled the street and our building at the same time. Somehow, it was suddenly eight o’clock. When I get scared, I freeze up. Like a rabbit in a spotlight. I thought my mom had come home. She had. But with her was a gang of sinister-looking thugs.
“One of them said, ‘These people are Greeks too. But they hide it. A mother and daughter. At night, the girl goes with the Greeks to the taverna.’
“‘So they’re Greek.’
“‘I swear, we’re not. We’re Turkish. Muslim.’
“‘Don’t bother going upstairs. There’s no one there.’
“‘She’s lying. Her daughter’s up there.’
“‘They told us not to mess with any Muslims.’
“‘She’s lying! They’re not Muslim. They’re Greeks pretending to be Turks.’
“‘I swear. I’m Muslim, lā ʾilāha ʾillā llāh . . .’
“‘So what, she memorized a few words from the Koran.’
“‘Do you know how many Greeks have thrown themselves at my feet and said the Shahada? With men, it’s easy to tell. But if your neighbor says you’re Greek, then you’re Greek.’
“‘Please, don’t bring any harm to my home.’
“‘How about we bring some harm to you, woman?’
“‘She’s got a daughter, I’m telling you. A daughter.’
“‘I spit on you! I thought you were a neighbor, but you’re a lying snake!’
“‘Ha, so you’d spit in my face? That’s how these people are. Take her daughter. She’s all yours. Do whatever you want with her.’”
As she lay on the floor, listening to the cataclysmic conversation going on downstairs, my grandma’s eyes were wide with horror. Regret, what a harsh emotion you are! What a heavy burden to bear! She regretted that she hadn’t run away and hid somewhere, that she was now stuck in a trap. She blamed herself:
“Why did I stay there, stupidly listening to the voices coming from below? It was obvious they were going to hurt me. What was I waiting for? Why didn’t I run away? Why didn’t I try to hide somewhere? After all, I knew how to slip away like a mouse without leaving a trace. In the past I’d climbed out the window to meet up with my love. If I’d thought of escaping, I could’ve easily hidden in a place where that cruel mob never would’ve found me. But that day, at that moment, I froze up. My feet were nailed to the floor. I couldn’t move.”
My grandma was crying as they dragged her into the bathroom. Not just crying, but bawling, like a baby desperately begging for help. The expression on her face must’ve been exactly the same when she was trying to break free of the grip of those men, when she was trying to resist them. Her hands balled into fists, and she was clutching the collar of her blouse so they wouldn’t pull it open, but they tore her clothes from her body. Just like what happened that day, two invisible hands pulled her arms down. She was now defenseless. My grandma was shouting. Young Peri, Perihan, was shouting.
Pleading.
Pleading.
Pleading.
In the end, she fainted, losing consciousness altogether.
“I never gave in,” she said.
The men said, “Yes, you did.”
“I’m not yours.”
The men whispered, “You are ours now.”
“Let me go. I’m begging you, let me go.”
“We won’t, girl. Why should we?”
As one of the men from the mob was pulling up his trousers, he whistled in the direction of the apartment across the street, where another group of men was pillaging, sending them a signal.
“My brother’s going to come. He’s sixteen. It’ll be his first. He was going to go to a brothel, but now we’ve got this. Pure luck.”
My grandma was squeezing her eyes shut, squeezing, squeezing. Her sobbing became a moan of agony.
“Look at her clothes. They tore them to pieces.”
Her mother was showing the traces of the disaster to a neighbor who had come over to offer what consolation she could.
“The poor girl . . . So she’s pregnant, but who’s the father? Which one was it?”
“Ah, Perihan, ah!”
What a calamity for her.
“It was such a calamity for me,” my grandma said.
The curious neighbor was asking questions, questioning, questioning. The neighborhood representative showed up. That was his job.
“Did you go to the police?”
“Even if we found the culprit, what would we do? And it wasn’t just one person! Nearly all of Istanbul is at fault. How could they vandalize the city li
ke that?”
“Are you going to pack up and leave like so many of the other Greeks?”
“We’re not Greek!”
“But they thought you were, and they did the same to you as they did to them.”
“We don’t know any of the people who did it! We didn’t recognize anyone except the ironmonger’s son, who was standing at the door. That’s all he did: hold the door open. Then he came in, took a look around, and left.”
“So you don’t think they’ll come back and do the same thing again?”
“Do you think they would?”
In the depths of my grandma’s mind, a balking at the unknown. The same naive optimism continued:
“The people who did this will think we’ve left, so they won’t come back. No one could do anything worse to us here than what has already happened. We’re not going to leave, because our stories follow us wherever we go and they’ll find us.”
Meaning?
“What if the same happens wherever we go? The people who know about the terrible things that were done to my Perihan, the people who heard about them, will die one day. Everything that happened will just be a rumor, then.”
My great-grandmother was right. We shouldn’t be surprised to find that the history of the country is based on hearsay; a sense of shame is passed from mob to mob, never apologized for, never accepted. So go on—write history however you want to believe it happened.
My grandma’s mother wasn’t able to bind her wounds. She was like a peacock of disaster, dragging her tail. The neighbor talked about the news she’d heard:
“Efrosa was locked under the stairs by her father. But she watched through the keyhole what was happening to the other women in her family, and she lost her mind. Those bastards did unspeakable things. They even threw Efrosa’s mother out the window.”
Screw your humanity!
It turned out that the woman we’d run into at the hairdresser’s didn’t use a cane because she was as old as the world but because she was thrown two stories down and broke nearly every bone in her body. She’d been using a cane ever since she was thirty-eight years old.
Efrosa was saved. But she’d seen more than she could bear.
“Niko killed himself too.”
“Why did Niko kill himself?”
Hidden in the neighbor’s silence was this answer:
“Either the mob hung him or he hung himself because what he’d seen was too much for him.”
The peacock went on dragging her tail behind her, and the neighbor went on explaining:
“They threw Monsieur Yorgo into a huge cauldron and boiled the poor man. As soon as he arrived in Athens, they had to amputate his foot. Everything of value he had was thrown into the street. You wouldn’t have believed your eyes: Pianos, armchairs, tables, silks, shoes. You sighed to yourself, looking around at all that finery underfoot. Even in a war you wouldn’t see such barbarity, such savagery. Shattered mirrors, broken display cases. Young women were leaning out the windows as far as they could, crying out for help. But no one helped them. The doors of apartments and shops had all been broken down. Curtains billowed out of the windows like the sails of ships setting out for some unknown sea. I’ve never heard or seen such a rape of property and life. Maybe the only time there was so much destruction was when the Ottomans were taking Istanbul. The English didn’t even go so far. It’s a shame. A sin.”
Such a shame. Such a sin.
Beautiful Perihan wasn’t able to get an abortion, nor could she get herself to miscarry.
“Let’s tell the neighbors that we were saved from the catastrophe. Can’t we?”
That’s what my great-grandmother told my grandma. And she heeded her words.
But what happened to the baby?
What happened?
One night, the baby suddenly came into the world. My great-grandmother delivered the baby. In the bathroom, nonetheless. Squatting over the toilet. The newborn splashed into the toilet bowl up to its waist. Into that filth. My great-grandmother angrily pulled the baby out with one hand, saying, “Bismillah.” She clapped her other hand over the baby’s mouth. Then she dropped the now-dead baby into a pillowcase, which she buried in a deep pit she’d dug in the backyard. The next day she had to shoo away the neighborhood’s stray dogs, as they were digging at the spot. She had buried Perihan’s baby so deep, however, that no one could’ve gotten it out.
Do you understand now why my grandma traded away her house and land?
“Why was my baby in the lap of that whore with the epitaph over her grave? Maybe he cried and cried, and unable to turn him away, that Byzantine whore took him into her arms. Maybe she even suckled him, who knows. We can’t know anything about what happens in the realm of the dead.”
Quietly, I stepped outside. I needed some fresh air. It was March. The year, 2013. My grandma was on her deathbed. I’d helped her drink a little water before going out, because for years she’d told me that people on the cusp of death are always thirsty and that the devil perches behind them, whispering, “Give me your faith and I’ll give you some water.”
I remember walking down the street, feeling distraught. The same street those thugs had walked down on September 6, 1955. The homes were different. Gone were the scattered wooden houses with pots of geraniums in front of the windows and fragrant backyards filled with wisteria and roses. In their place were apartment buildings with exteriors covered in tiles. But the street was the same. Nothing had changed. Those mobs had trod on the same soil. I turned off Kumrulu Street, which is steep but rather short, and ducked into the garden of Cihangir Mosque. The garden has benches and ancient trees, like the ones in which I live in Gülhane Park. You can sit at the foot of the wall of the mosque and face the sea. As I looked at the view, I took a few deep breaths. I was the only person there. It was a cold and gloomy day, the skies threatening rain. I shivered. Just then, something happened that changed the very essence of my life, but believe me when I say that I have no idea how I will explain that to you.
I was deeply moved by what my grandma had told me. At that moment I saw my aunt dash across the mosque courtyard, which was odd because usually at that hour she’d be at the office of the newspaper and wouldn’t leave until the print run for the provinces was ready. But there she was, heading toward her home in a hurry. The courtyard of the mosque has two gates that connect the two main streets of the neighborhood. If you go down Cihangir Street to Özoğul Road and pass through the gate, you’ll come out on the other side at the midpoint of Kumrulu Street, near the imam’s place. The mosque and small adjoining cemetery will be on your left. There’s a small garden beside the mosque, the farthest point of which offers the view I mentioned. You access the garden through a small iron gate. So that’s where I was sitting, looking out over the city, which was blanketed in darkness even though it was the middle of the day. My aunt quickly went out the gate that leads to Kumrulu Street and disappeared from sight.
For a moment I turned back to the view. But a very brief moment.
That’s when it happened. That thing I don’t know how to describe. Sensing that someone was coming, I turned around. My grandma was coming toward me, wearing her coat. I was surprised that she’d been able to get out of bed, sick as she was. My jaw hung open, and I may have stammered. One word fell from my lips: “Grandma?” It was all I could manage to say. Just as she’d put on her ash-gray jacket, she’d put on her short boots that zip up the side. I could see that she was wearing her day clothes. What I mean by that is she hadn’t just put on her jacket over her nightgown but had somehow found the strength to get dressed, even though when I’d left, she’d been muttering deliriously to herself. She was even wearing her skin-tone stockings. Needless to say, I was surprised: “Grandma, what are you doing out here?”
She acted as though she hadn’t heard my question and sat down beside me. The branches over our heads were late to bud and hadn’t yet sprouted any leaves. A few crows landed on the iron railing in front of us and then flew off
.
“Why did you go out?” she asked. “Why did you come here?”
It had been a long time since she’d been able to formulate a question. She was being kept alive with IV drips, which my mother refreshed when they ran out. She’d whispered her biggest secret just when I thought she’d slipped into a coma. Sometimes my aunt fed her spoonfuls of sugar water to bolster her strength. “She’s going to leave us early,” my aunt said. “She’s only seventy-six.”
Now my grandma seemed perfectly fine. As if the woman sitting beside me wasn’t the woman who was lying on her deathbed.
“I was saddened by what you told me,” I said.
“Don’t be. That’s how life goes.”
“Did you see my aunt?” I asked. Then I added, “Surely you must have.” In terms of the physical world and logic, that had to be the case. There’s no denying that there was fear, doubt, and uneasiness in my voice. Needless to say, I was in a state of shock.
“No,” she replied. “I didn’t see her.”
“But she just went by. If you came through the gate on the Kumrulu side . . .”
“That’s the way I came.”
“Then you must’ve seen her.”
“I didn’t.”
We fell silent for a moment.
Getting to her feet, she said, “I’d better get going.” She leaned down and kissed me on the cheeks.
“I came to see you. To tell you to not be sad.” She was cupping my chin in her palm. Her hand was so cold. Then she turned around and pensively glanced at the view. She looked like she was about to say something, but then changed her mind. I watched her as she hobbled out of the small garden of that mosque that had been built for the prince who’d died of a broken heart. With her low boots she loved so much, her ash-gray jacket, and tasseled wool scarf thrown over her shoulders, she looked just like Marianne Faithfull in that film where she played a grandma who masturbates men through a glory hole in a bar so she can make enough money to save her grandson’s life.
She was leaving this world.
“Goodbye, cats. I’m going to miss you very much. I’m going to miss you the most of all because your wickedness never brought me any harm. If only I’d come into the world as one of you—I wouldn’t have suffered so much. Or I could’ve forgotten it all and not cared. Bye-bye, kitties, don’t forget me.”
The Girl in the Tree Page 18