by Orhan Pamuk
When we went to visit her, my mother would press down on the bell for a very long time and pound on the iron door, until my grandmother would at last open the rusty iron shutters on the second-floor window overlooking the mosque and peer down on us, and because she didn’t trust her eyes—she could no longer see very far—she would ask us to wave at her.
“Come out of the doorway so your grandmother can see you, children,” said my mother. Coming out into the middle of the pavement with us, she waved and cried, “Mother dear, it’s me and the children; it’s us, can you hear us?”
We understood from her sweet smile that she had recognized us. At once she drew back from the window, went into her room, took out the large key she kept under her pillow, and, after wrapping it in newsprint, threw it down. My brother and I pushed and shoved each other, struggling to catch it.
My brother’s arm was still hurting, and that slowed him down, so I got to the key first, and I gave it to my mother. With some effort, my mother managed to unlock the great iron door. The door slowly yielded as the three of us pushed against it, and out from the darkness came that smell I would never come across again: decay, mold, dust, age, and stagnant air. On the coat rack right next to the door—to make the frequent robbers think there was a man in the house—my grandmother had left my grandfather’s felt hat and his fur-collared coat, and in the corner were the boots that always scared me so.
A little later, at the end of two straight flights of wooden stairs, far, far away, standing in a white light, we saw our grandmother. She looked like a ghost, standing perfectly still in the shadows with her cane, lit only by the light filtering through the frosted Art Deco doors.
As she walked up the creaking stairs, my mother said nothing to my grandmother. (Sometimes she would say, “How are you, darling Mother?” or “Mother dear, I’ve missed you; it’s very cold out, dear Mother!”) When I reached the top of the stairs, I kissed my grandmother’s hand, trying not to look at her face, or the huge mole on her wrist. But still we were frightened by the lone tooth in her mouth, her long chin, and the whiskers on her face, so once we were in the room we huddled next to our mother. My grandmother went back to the bed, where she spent most of the day in her long nightgown and her woolen vest, and she smiled at us, giving us a look that said, All right, now entertain me.
“Your stove isn’t working so well, Mother,” said my mother. She took the poker and stirred the coals.
My grandmother waited for a while, and then she said, “Leave the stove alone now. Give me some news. What’s going on in the world?”
“Nothing at all,” said my mother, sitting at our side.
“You have nothing to tell me at all?”
“Nothing at all, Mother dear.”
After a short silence, my grandmother asked, “Haven’t you seen anyone?”
“You know that already, Mother dear.”
“For God’s sake, have you no news?”
There was a silence.
“Grandmother, we had our inoculations at school,” I said.
“Is that so?” said my grandmother, opening up her large blue eyes as if she were surprised. “Did it hurt?”
“My arm still hurts,” said my brother.
“Oh, dear,” said my grandmother with a smile.
There was another long silence. My brother and I got up and looked out the window at the hills in the distance, the mulberry trees, and the empty old chicken coop in the back garden.
“Don’t you have any stories for me at all?” pleaded my grandmother. “You go up to see the mother-in-law. Doesn’t anyone else?”
“Dilruba Hanim came yesterday afternoon,” said my mother. “They played bezique with the children’s grandmother.”
In a rejoicing voice, our grandmother then said what we’d expected: “That’s the palace lady!”
We knew she was talking not about one of the cream-colored palaces we read so much about in fairy tales and newspapers in those years but about Dolmabahçe Palace; it was only much later I realized that my grandmother looked down on Dilruba Hanim—who had come from the last sultan’s harem—because she had been a concubine before marrying a businessman, and that she also looked down on my grandmother for having befriended this woman. Then they moved to another subject that they discussed every time my mother visited: Once a week, my grandmother would go to Beyoğlu to lunch alone at a famous and expensive restaurant called Aptullah Efendi, and afterward she would complain at great length about everything she’d eaten. She opened the third ready-made topic by asking us this question: “Children, does your other grandmother make you eat parsley?”
We answered with one voice, saying what our mother told us to say. “No, Grandmother, she doesn’t.”
As always, our grandmother told us how she’d seen a cat peeing on parsley in a garden, and how it was highly likely that the same parsley had ended up barely washed in some idiot’s food, and how she was still arguing about this with the greengrocers of Şişli and Nişantaşi.
“Mother dear,” said my mother, “the children are getting bored; they want to take a look at the other rooms. I’m going to open up the room next door.”
My grandmother locked all the rooms in the house from the outside, to keep any thief who might enter through a window from reaching any other room in the house. My mother opened up the large cold room that looked out on the avenue with the streetcar line, and for a moment she stood there with us, looking at the armchairs and the divans under their dust covers, the rusty, dusty lamps, trays, and chairs, the bundles of old newspaper; at the worn saddle and the drooping handlebars of the creaky girl’s bicycle listing in the corner. But she did not take anything out of the trunk to show us, as she had done on happier days. (“Your mother used to wear these sandals when she was little, children; look at your aunt’s school uniform, children; would you like to see your mother’s childhood piggy bank, children?”)
“If you get cold, come and tell me,” she said, and then she left.
My brother and I ran to the window to look at the mosque and the streetcar in the square. Then we read about old football matches in the newspapers. “I’m bored,” I said. “Do you want to play Tops or Bottoms?”
“The defeated wrestler still wants to fight,” said my brother, without looking up from his newspaper. “I’m reading the paper.”
We’d played again that morning, and my brother had won again.
“Please.”
“I have one condition: If I win, you have to give me two pictures, and if you win, I only give you one.”
“No, one.”
“Then I’m not playing,” said my brother. “As you can see, I’m reading the paper.”
He held the paper just like the English detective in a black-and-white film we’d seen recently at the Angel Theater. After looking out the window a little longer, I agreed to my brother’s conditions. We took our Famous People cards from our pockets and began to play. First I won, but then I lost seventeen more cards.
“When we play this way, I always lose,” I said. “I’m not playing anymore unless we go back to the old rules.”
“Okay,” said my brother, still imitating that detective. “I wanted to read those newspapers anyway.”
For a while I looked out the window. I carefully counted my pictures: I had 121 left. When my father left the day before, I’d had 183! But I didn’t want to think about it. I had agreed to my brother’s conditions.
In the beginning, I’d been winning, but then he started winning again. Hiding his joy, he didn’t smile when he took my cards and added them to his pack.
“If you want, we can play by some other rules,” he said, a while later. “Whoever wins takes one card. If I win, I can choose which card I take from you. Because I don’t have any of some of them, and you never give me those.”
Thinking I would win, I agreed. I don’t know how it happened. Three times in a row I lost my high card to his, and before I knew it I had lost both my Greta Garbos (21) and my only
King Faruk (78). I wanted to take them all back at once, so the game got bigger: This was how a great many other cards I had and he didn’t—Einstein (63), Rumi (3), Sarkis Nazaryan, the founder of Mambo Chewing Gum–Candied Fruit Company (100), and Cleopatra (51)—passed over to him in only two rounds.
I couldn’t even swallow. Because I was afraid I might cry, I ran to the window and looked outside: How beautiful everything had seemed only five minutes earlier—the streetcar approaching the terminus, the apartment buildings visible in the distance through the branches that were losing their leaves, the dog lying on the cobblestones, scratching himself so lazily! If only time had stopped. If only we could go back five squares as we did when we played Horse Race Dice. I was never playing Tops or Bottoms with my brother again.
“Shall we play again?” I said, without taking my forehead off the windowpane.
“I’m not playing,” said my brother. “You’ll only cry.”
“Cevat, I promise. I won’t cry,” I insisted, as I went to his side. “But we have to play the way we did at the beginning, by the old rules.”
“I’m going to read my paper.”
“Okay,” I said. I shuffled my thinner-than-ever stack. “With the old rules. Tops or Bottoms?”
“No crying,” he said. “Okay, high.”
I won and he gave me one of his Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmaks. I wouldn’t take it. “Can you please give me seventy-eight, King Faruk?”
“No,” he said. “That isn’t what we agreed.”
We played two more rounds, and I lost. If only I hadn’t played that third round: When I gave him my 49, Napoleon, my hand was shaking.
“I’m not playing anymore,” said my brother.
I pleaded. We played two more rounds, and instead of giving him the pictures he asked for, I threw all the cards I had left at his head and into the air: the cards I had been collecting for two and a half months, thinking about each and every one of them every single day, hiding them and nervously accumulating them with care—number 28, Mae West, and 82, Jules Verne; 7, Mehmet the Conqueror, and 70, Queen Elizabeth; 41, Celal Salik the columnist, and 42, Voltaire—they went flying through the air to scatter all over the floor.
If only I was in a completely different place, in a completely different life. Before I went back into my grandmother’s room, I crept quietly down the creaky stairs, thinking about a distant relative who had worked in insurance and committed suicide. My father’s mother had told me that suicides stayed in a dark place underground and never went to Heaven. When I’d gone a long way down the stairs, I stopped to stand in the darkness. I turned around and went upstairs and sat on the last step, next to my grandmother’s room.
“I’m not well off like your mother-in-law,” I heard my grandmother say. “You are going to look after your children and wait.”
“But please, Mother dear, I beg you. I want to come back here with the children,” my mother said.
“You can’t live here with two children, not with all this dust and ghosts and thieves,” said my grandmother.
“Mother dear,” said my mother, “don’t you remember how happily we lived here, just the two of us, after my sisters got married and my father passed away?”
“My lovely Mebrure, all you did all day was to leaf through old issues of your father’s Illustrations.”
“If I lit the big stove downstairs, this house would be cosy and warm in the space of two days.”
“I told you not to marry him, didn’t I?” said my grandmother.
“If I bring in a maid, it will only take us two days to get rid of all this dust,” said my mother.
“I’m not letting any of those thieving maids into this house,” said my grandmother. “Anyway, it would take six months to sweep out all this dust and cobwebs. By then your errant husband will be back home again.”
“Is that your last word, Mother dear?” my mother asked.
“Mebrure, my lovely girl, if you came here with your two children what would we live on, the four of us?”
“Mother dear, how many times have I asked you—pleaded with you—to sell the lots in Bebek before they’re expropriated?”
“I’m not going to the deeds office to give those dirty men my signature and my picture.”
“Mother dear, please don’t say this: My older sister and I brought a notary right to your door,” said my mother, raising her voice.
“I’ve never trusted that notary,” said my grandmother. “You can see from his face that he’s a swindler. Maybe he isn’t even a notary. And don’t shout at me like that.”
“All right, then, Mother dear, I won’t!” said my mother. She called into the room for us. “Children, children, come on now, gather up your things; we’re leaving.”
“Slow down!” said my grandmother. “We haven’t even said two words.”
“You don’t want us, Mother dear,” my mother whispered.
“Take this, let the children have some Turkish delight.”
“They shouldn’t eat it before lunch,” said my mother, and as she left the room she passed behind me to enter the room opposite. “Who threw these pictures all over the floor? Pick them up at once. And you help him,” she said to my brother.
As we silently gathered the pictures, my mother lifted the lids of the old trunks and looked at the dresses from her childhood, her ballet costumes, the boxes. The dust underneath the black skeleton of the pedal sewing machine filled my nostrils, making my eyes water, filling my nose.
As we washed our hands in the little lavatory, my grandmother pleaded in a soft voice. “Mebrure dear, you take this teapot; you love it so much, you have a right to,” she said. “My grandfather brought it for my dear mother when he was the governor of Damascus. It came all the way from China. Please take it.”
“Mother dear, from now on I don’t want anything from you,” my mother said. “And put that into your cupboard or you’ll break it. Come, children, kiss your grandmother’s hand.”
“My little Mebrure, my lovely daughter, please don’t be angry at your poor mother,” said my grandmother, as she let us kiss her hand. “Please don’t leave me here without any visitors, without anyone.”
We raced down the stairs, and when the three of us had pushed open the heavy metal door, we were greeted by brilliant sunlight as we breathed in the clean air.
“Shut the door firmly behind you!” cried my grandmother. “Mebrure, you’ll come to see me again this week, won’t you?”
As we walked hand in hand with my mother, no one spoke. We listened in silence as the other passengers coughed and waited for the streetcar to leave. When finally we began to move, my brother and I moved to the next row, saying we wanted to watch the conductor, and began to play Tops or Bottoms. First I lost some cards, then I won a few back. When I upped the ante, he happily agreed, and I quickly began to lose again. When we had reached the Osmanbey stop, my brother said, “In exchange for all the pictures you have left, here is this Fifteen you want so much.”
I played and lost. Without letting him see, I removed two cards from the stack before handing it to my brother. I went to the back row to sit with my mother. I wasn’t crying. I looked sadly out the window as the streetcar moaned and slowly gathered speed, and I watched them pass us by, all those people and places that are gone forever: the little sewing shops, the bakeries, the pudding shops with their awnings, the Tan cinema where we saw those films about ancient Rome, the children standing along the wall next to the front selling used comics, the barber with the sharp scissors who scared me so, and the half-naked neighborhood madman, always standing in the barbershop door.
We got off at Harbiye. As we walked toward home, my brother’s satisfied silence was driving me mad. I took out the Lindbergh, which I’d hidden in my pocket.
This was his first sight of it. “Ninety-one: Lindbergh!” he read in admiration. “With the plane he flew across the Atlantic! Where did you find this?”
“I didn’t have my injection yesterday,” I said.
“I went home early, and I saw Daddy before he left. Daddy bought it for me.”
“Then half is mine,” he said. “In fact, when we played that last game, the deal was you’d give me all the pictures you had left.” He tried to grab the picture from my hand, but he couldn’t manage it. He caught my wrist, and he twisted it so badly that I kicked his leg. We laid into each other.
“Stop!” said my mother. “Stop! We’re in the middle of the street!”
We stopped. A man in a suit and a woman wearing a hat passed us. I felt ashamed for having fought in the street. My brother took two steps and fell to the ground. “It hurts so much,” he said, holding his leg.
“Stand up,” whispered my mother. “Come on now, stand up. Everyone’s watching.”
My brother stood up and began to hop down the road like a wounded soldier in a film. I was afraid he was really hurt, but I was still glad to see him that way. After we had walked for some time in silence, he said, “Just you see what happens when we get home. Mummy, Ali didn’t have his injection yesterday.”
“I did too, Mummy!”
“Be quiet!” my mother shouted.
We were now just across from our house. We waited for the streetcar coming up from Maçka to pass before we crossed the street. After it came a truck, a clattering Beşiktas bus spewing great clouds of exhaust, and, in the opposite direction, a light violet De Soto. That was when I saw my uncle looking down at the street from the window. He didn’t see me; he was staring at the passing cars. For a long time, I watched him.
The road had long since cleared. I turned to my mother, wondering why she had not yet taken our hands and crossed us over to the other side, and saw that she was silently crying.