by Kulin, Ayse
“Stop! Don’t say another word!” Elsa pulled an envelope out of her handbag, threw it on the table, and pointed at Hanna. “Now you have a copy of the blood test. We have the original. Stay away from us!”
Elsa was walking to the door when Hanna called out after her. “Elsa, you forgot my gift for the baby.”
Elsa spun around. “Go see a doctor, Hanna, before it’s too late. Do it for Rozi.”
Scenes from Sude’s Life
There was nothing special about 1956, the year of Sude’s birth, or so she decided when she was still a little girl. At school, she learned about all the amazing things that had happened in 1932, when her mother was born: the National Wrestling Team won the Balkan Athletics Championships, Miss Turkey was crowned Miss Universe, Turkey joined the League of Nations, the Turkish Language Society was convened, the first official Turkish yacht race was held, and Müfide Kazım became the first female government physician. In the year Sude was born, an earthquake struck Eskişehir. That was about it. No special Turkish achievements to be proud of.
Her mother and Grandpa Gerhard knew all kinds of other things about 1932, things that Sude hadn’t learned in school. For example, it was the year that radio waves from space were first detected, that vitamin B3 was extracted from a lemon, and that a Swiss professor named Malche came to Turkey to reform the universities. Grandpa Gerhard could talk for hours about Malche and his reforms. Sude’s father would joke that Grandpa and Sude’s mother were like walking, talking encyclopedias when it came to the early days of the republic.
If there was one thing that kept Sude from feeling like a boring girl born in boring times, it was her father’s devotion. He hadn’t been able to see Sude until she was three days old, he told her. Still wearing his uniform, he had cradled her in his arms and said, “Everything is about you now. I’m going to work hard and become a success just for you.” Even a newborn knows when she is truly loved.
Naturally, Sude’s early life and outlook were formed in large part by the era in which she lived, and by her parents. Living on a university campus, Sude was sheltered from the wider world but simultaneously exposed to bewildering ideas and student activism. Between the ages of four and fifty-six, she would live through three failed coups, two successful ones, and several “memoranda.” That was what they called a polite coup, one in which the military toppled the government through a tersely worded communique and didn’t even have to get into their tanks. It was a dizzying, restless, and exciting time to be alive, even if Sude didn’t always realize it.
Sude’s first coup was on May 27, 1960. She had been living in Ankara with her family for eight months and was about to turn four. Those were the days when the Menderes government was regularly broadcasting the names of everyone they claimed was joining their grand “National Front” of supporters. Sude’s father, who supported the main opposition party, would curse and switch off the radio every time the propaganda started. But on May 27, he turned up the volume and listened all day long.
At that time, Demir Atalay was one of the engineers employed on a construction project for the newly founded Middle Eastern Technical University (METU). He and his family lived in a two-bedroom state housing unit right on campus. Suzi Atalay was looking after Sude and giving private English lessons to prep school students. A year later, she would join the faculty at METU, first as an English teacher and then as a professor of English literature.
A year and a half after her first coup, Sude was in primary school and was already taking private violin lessons from Mr. Zuckmayer when former prime minister Menderes, his foreign minister, and his economy minister were taken from their prison cells and hanged. Even her dad, who had never liked Menderes, was horrified. The image of Menderes dangling from a rope haunted Sude’s dreams for weeks.
Two years later, in 1963, her father came home one day, shouting, “A coup! There’s been another one!” Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table, grading papers.
“Again?” Suzi asked. “Who did it this time?”
“Who do you think?”
“The military.”
“Ding ding ding! Sude, your mother got the answer to today’s pop quiz.”
“Demir, that’s quite enough out of you. Be quiet while I turn on the radio and find out what happened.”
“Please don’t, Suzi! I’ve already heard more than I can bear. Colonel Talat Aydemir was behind it, but Prime Minister İnönü was too quick for him.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the colonel and his friends are about to enjoy an early retirement.”
“Perhaps we should lead a coup,” Suzi said. “I’m fed up with grading papers.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll only be doing it for another thirty years or so.”
“And they wonder why there are so many demonstrations against capitalist exploitation.”
“We need to cheer your mom up,” Demir said, leaning across the table and kissing Suzi on the lips. “Sude, go get your violin and play us something nice.”
Sude remembered another night when her father had kissed her mother on the lips right at the kitchen table. It was a couple of years ago, her first day of kindergarten.
That evening, her father had come home carrying a bottle of rakı.
“Finally!” he said. “Parliament just agreed to debate the land reform bill. Large land holdings are going to be nationalized and redistributed. Peasants will finally own their family farms.”
“Daddy, are we peasants?” Sude asked.
“No, sweetie, but we are leftists. We believe in social justice and the fair distribution of wealth, and we think people shouldn’t be greedy.”
“Your father’s a dreamer,” Suzi said, but she was smiling.
As it turned out, the land reforms would never be carried out, and Demir’s dream of equality would remain just that.
A year later, in May, not long before Sude got her report card, retired colonel Aydemir and his supporters attempted to stage another coup, even occupying the state radio building and the military academy in Ankara. This time, Prime Minister İnönü had the ringleaders hanged.
Sude’s parents spent that whole summer arguing about the European Economic Community. It was one of their rare disagreements. Demir opposed Turkey joining the EEC, but Suzi insisted that a prosperous, democratic future could only be achieved through closer integration with Europe. When the Ankara Agreement was signed in 1963, Sude didn’t know whether to celebrate with her mother or comfort her father.
Coca-Cola entered the Turkish market shortly afterward. Local gazoz producers across Anatolia sent delegations to Ankara to lobby for their sweet, fizzy beverages, and Demir joined the calls for a nationwide boycott by banning Coke from his house. But there was no turning back the onslaught of American culture and products, which brought with them the first anti-American demonstrations. Refrigerators across the land would be ruled by Coca-Cola from then on.
Sude was nine years old when the right-wing Justice Party won 52 percent of the national vote on a platform of fighting communism. The election results were met with dismay by her parents, who believed that the real threat to Turkey’s future was the stealthy but steady effort to roll back Atatürk’s secular, modernizing reforms.
Political differences were temporarily put aside when an earthquake killed 3,162 people in Varto in August of 1966. Sude threw herself into the relief fund campaign and was a little resentful when her father couldn’t make a big enough donation to win her the title of “top fund-raiser.”
The rest of the 1960s were marked by protests and violence. Young revolutionaries demonstrated against the visits of the US Sixth Fleet in Istanbul and İzmir, labor strikes were never-ending, and nationalists firebombed cinemas, teahouses, and restaurants popular with leftists.
The nation was restless. Its people were poor. Its people were angry.
Sude was dealing with her own issues, chief among them the eruption of pimples, the attentions of boys with cracking voices, and the exte
nt of her popularity with a gaggle of giggling girls.
She was twelve when her mother scolded her for coming home late from a New Year’s party. Sude cried, slammed her bedroom door, and refused to talk to her parents or even Meral the cleaning lady when she got up the next morning. With the logic of a twelve-year-old, she believed that a good, long silent treatment would force her mother to relent and allow her to attend a birthday party that coming weekend. If she couldn’t go to that party, her life would be over!
She was on her way home that week when she noticed a police car at the campus gate, then barricades—the roads were cut off! Apparently, when American ambassador Komer had visited the campus earlier that day, students had overturned his car and set it on fire.
When Sude was finally allowed to go home, she found a bunch of men, some of them in uniform and some in suits, ransacking her house. Books had been swept off the shelves; drawers had been emptied. They were putting some of her family’s things in a big bag. Meral was trying desperately to clean up.
One of the men picked up her violin, turned it upside down, and held it up to his ear, shaking it to see if anything was hidden inside.
Sude rushed up to him. “Leave my violin alone, please. It’s a very delicate instrument!”
“Who plays this? You?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Learn to sew. Learn to cook.”
“I know how to make spaghetti,” Sude said.
When the men were gone, Sude went to the window and watched for her parents. It got late, and still they didn’t come. Meral finished cleaning up, then brought Sude some tea and cake.
“Listen, child, it’s already late, and they’ll be wondering about me at home,” Meral said. “Maybe you should come with me?”
“You can go home,” Sude said, “but I’m waiting here for my mom and dad.”
Meral left. Sude stayed by the window, regretting how she’d treated her mother and father. About an hour later, her father’s assistant came to the house with a note in her mother’s handwriting.
Sude,
Don’t worry. Your father and I are fine. We’re helping with an investigation and will be home soon. Spend tonight at Hülya’s and call your grandparents as soon as you get this note. Ask your grandma Bedia to come and stay with you until we can return home. See you soon. Your father sends his love, too.
Mom
Sude raced to the phone. She’d have preferred to call Grandma Elsa, but she and Grandpa Gerhard were in Frankfurt for the winter, and even when they did come to Turkey, they spent most of their time at their summer house in Side. Praying that Grandpa Nazmi would answer the phone, not Grandma Bedia, Sude gave the operator their long-distance number in Istanbul. Then she called her classmate and neighbor, Hülya, and told her what had happened. The operator still hadn’t called back with a connection to Istanbul when Hülya’s mother arrived. Vicdan Hanım reluctantly agreed to wait.
Once she’d finished a slice of cake, though, Hülya’s mom said, “Come on, Sude. This is taking forever. Go and get your toothbrush, your nightgown, and your stuff for school tomorrow.”
“But if the operator does put the call through and I’m not here to answer, Grandma will be so worried.”
“You can call again from our house.”
Sude packed her things, but just as they were leaving, the phone rang. Sude was helpless to answer the flood of questions from Grandma Bedia. All she knew was what was written in the note. Yes, she said, the ambassador’s car was set on fire, the campus was crawling with police, and her parents were supposed to come home soon.
Her grandfather must have snatched the phone. “We’re leaving tonight, and we’ll be there tomorrow. You can tell us everything then,” he said.
By the time Sude finished school the next day, her grandparents had arrived in Ankara. Her grandmother talked nonstop, grumbling about how many times she’d warned Demir and Suzi to stay out of politics. But Grandma Bedia’s food tasted better than anything Sude’s mother or Meral ever made. Sude gobbled down plate after plate of stuffed grape leaves, baked pastries, and stuffed zucchini. Meral scowled and dusted, upset at having been ejected from the kitchen.
Three days later, Sude’s mother and father got home just as everyone was sitting down to dinner. Bedia Hanım kept asking why it had taken four days for the police to question them, but all they would say was that they’d had to wait their turn. The students had all been interrogated first.
From then on, Sude lived with the anxiety that her parents wouldn’t come home one day. She followed current events, not because she was interested in politics, but because she worried they would get swept up in another disturbance. The “Bloody Sunday” attack by right-wing militants on left-wingers demonstrating against “imperialism and exploitation” left two dead and hundreds injured. It happened in Istanbul, but it could just as easily have been Ankara. And Sude knew that hers wasn’t any ordinary family. Her parents were left-wing intellectuals at a time when leftists were being interrogated, arrested, and shot.
In a drastic measure aimed at putting an end to the widespread boycotts and sit-ins, Middle East Technical University was closed indefinitely in 1971.
That was when Suzi and Demir decided that their daughter was no longer safe in their home. Even though it meant repeating a year of school, Sude was sent to Istanbul. She started boarding at Robert College, which had just merged with the American College for Girls.
Sude missed her parents, of course, but she didn’t miss the drawn-out political discussions around the dinner table. So removed was she from current events that the “coup by memorandum” on March 12, 1971, completely passed her by. Eager perhaps not to become the second executed prime minister in Turkish history, Demirel obligingly resigned and was replaced by a nonpartisan interim government headed by a member of the main opposition party.
On a day in early May, her mother answered the phone in tears when Sude called.
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
“It’s Deniz Gezmiş. They hanged him this morning. Along with Yusuf and Hüseyin. How could they? They were still so young.”
“Were they your students or something?”
“Does it matter? What kind of question is that?”
“You’re acting like you knew them. That’s all I meant.”
“Sude! They were fighting for justice. Perhaps they made some mistakes, but they didn’t deserve to die!”
After she hung up, Suzi turned to Demir and said, “How can Sude be so insensitive? Where did we go wrong?”
“My father was a cloth merchant who wasn’t interested in anything but the bottom line. In the same way I reacted to him, Sude might be reacting to us. You know she hates politics.”
“Oh, Demir, do you think she could become right-wing just to spite us?”
“No, never. She’ll probably just be apolitical, at least until she comes into her own.”
Sude had no interest in either CHP leader Ecevit’s famous slogan, “Soil belongs to whoever tills it, and water belongs to whoever uses it,” or the founding of Erbakan’s ultraconservative National Salvation Party. Those were the boring things her parents always discussed at the dinner table. She was so removed from the political pulse of her country that she didn’t even realize how religious extremism for political gain was sowing the seeds of anti-Semitism.
The one political event about which Sude expressed any opinion was the reception given to Beautiful Istanbul, one of the sculptures erected in Istanbul to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Turkish republic. The conservative partner in the coalition government condemned the stone figure of a reclining nude as a disgraceful attack on Turkish motherhood. It was soon removed from the square in Karaköy. Sude snickered and said, “They’re such silly prudes.”
That same year, again in the name of public morality, the conservatives managed to block three major tourism projects.
Sude spent her free time making décor in the theater club, listening to the recitals of the jazz club, playing violin in the classical music club, and falling in love in the debate club. The young man who had caught her eye was a year ahead of her and a great debater. There was so much to love about life at Robert College.
When the entire family gathered at Grandpa Gerhard and Grandma Elsa’s summer house that year, everyone commented on how sweet and happy Sude had become.
The house in Side was on a small promontory jutting into the Mediterranean Sea. Several other retired German professors had also bought houses there. The site of an ancient port, Side was a paradise of blue seas, sandy beaches, and Greco-Roman ruins. Some of the Germans chose to live there year-round, but Gerhard and Elsa would arrive at the beginning of June and leave at the end of October. The house had plenty of room for children and grandchildren, and a spacious garden with a long wooden table. There, in the shade of pomegranate and fig trees, the family would have leisurely meals, watch the sunset, and enjoy impromptu concerts organized by Hirsch. Hirsch and his fellow musicians were known simply as “The Players.” Occasionally, some locals would drift in to listen, and The Players would intersperse their Schubert and Mozart with lively village tunes.
In July of 1972, The Players were awaiting the arrival of their venerable violin player, Professor Zuckmayer, when the news came that he had passed away. Sude burst into tears when she learned that her teacher had died. When Gerhard and Hirsch decided to set out that night for Ankara so they could attend the funeral, Sude insisted on going with them.
As Hirsch was pulling out of the driveway in his pale-green Murat, with Gerhard in the passenger seat and Sude in back, Suzi ran after them with a pillow in one hand and a bowl of water in the other. She handed the pillow to Sude and urged her to get some sleep on the way. She poured the water onto the ground as they drove away.