Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  ‘Oh, everything is very well there,’ said my mother rather hurriedly but going red and white by turns, with such rapidity that my grandmother must have wondered what on earth was wrong with her.

  Mehmet strolled over to my grandmother and with three-years-old unconcern, lisped: ‘Sarıyer,’ and I was terrified that he would remember something of this morning’s conversation, some isolated word perhaps, that would tell my grandmother everything. Perhaps I looked anxious for she suddenly said to me: ‘What is wrong?’

  And I sulkily replied that nothing was wrong and Mehmet, with infinite baby cunning and perhaps scenting that something out of the ordinary was in the wind, plucked at her sleeve, reiterating insistently: ‘Mehmet cried! Mehmet cried!’

  And when she would not take any notice of him, for she did not know the dangerous thing he was trying to tell her, he pulled at her skirt in a gust of temper.

  ‘Cried!’ he said to her but she freed herself from his grasp and my mother’s arrival with coffee distracted everyone’s attention.

  My grandmother drank her coffee as if it were poison and kept making obscure references to Sarıyer and Uncle Ahmet, until I thought my mother would faint with the effort to suppress the truth. Once she almost gave herself away for she indiscreetly mentioned that she was thinking of going to the War Office to see if they could give any news of my father. Naturally, my grandmother pounced on this, demanding to know who had been putting such ideas into my mother’s head. The latter replied rather vaguely that nobody had said anything, that she had just thought of the idea herself. My grandmother looked at her fixedly.

  ‘Şevkiye,’ she accused, ‘you are keeping something from me.’

  Her perception seemed to us uncanny and even though my mother protested that she had nothing to keep back from anyone, still she warned me with her eyes to take Mehmet to a corner where we could play and from where he would not be likely to give away any secrets. For he was determined to attract my grandmother’s attention and would not leave her side and, when she was leaving, beamed proudly at her, saying very distinctly: ‘Dead! Dead!’

  But my grandmother, strangely enough, had no idea of the frightful thing he meant and my mother interrupted Mehmet’s words so smoothly that their gruesomeness was unnoticed.

  But perhaps she remembered their message later for we did not see her for a few days and then, when she did come, there was such a wailing and a gnashing of teeth as there never has been in the world before. Her visit did not start like that, of course. In fact it started remarkably normally, with my grandmother sweeping in to demand coffee, very controlled even though a little red about the eyes. My mother just looked at her incredulously for a moment or two, then said: ‘You have been to Sarıyer.’

  And then everything happened at once. My grandmother’s face crumpled and she began to cry, but not silently as Hasan had done, but noisily and desperately as though a great well was suddenly finding release. Her tears and her ugly, working face frightened me and I held tightly to my mother’s hand, for never had the world seemed so full of tears as latterly. These last weeks had been steeped in tears. The world had become a grim place where people lost their homes and died in unknown places, where women struggled and grew irritable and wept, wept, wept. The appalling sorrows of the moment weighed me down and I started to cry too. When peace had been more or less restored, by the application of sharp words from my mother and still sharper slaps, Mehmet and I were sent to our corner and commanded to play! As if we could play when the pandemonium of my grandmother’s tears filled the room! She wept unceasingly, as though she shed tears not only for her own son that day but for all humanity. After a long time she stopped and my mother pressed cognac on her, forcing her to drink it. There was little affection in my mother’s attitude towards her, for these two were never to know affection. Yet that day they clung very closely, each depending upon the other for strength to bear these blows from life.

  At last my grandmother said: ‘My son is dead and my daughter Ayşe is dead and I have nobody left in the world.’

  ‘Ayşe?’ asked my mother, in a disbelieving voice and perhaps feeling affronted that my grandmother had regarded her as nobody.

  But my grandmother could not answer. She only rocked her body to and fro in an extremity of grief for her eldest born, who was dead. She was almost incoherent with her great grief, Aunt Ayşe’s death appearing a mere incidental in the face of this larger, more suffocating grief.

  But eventually my mother extracted the whole story. It ran something like this. My grandmother had left our house dissatisfied with my mother’s explanation of Hasan’s visit. She had brooded over it all day, finally recollecting Mehmet’s abortive attempts to tell her something – something she became sure which was connected with Sarıyer. After a sleepless night she had arisen the next morning, determined to go to Sarıyer immediately. She had informed her astonished husband of this, taken a maid as chaperone – for whereas she might visit us unescorted, to journey alone as far as Sarıyer was quite another matter – and had feverishly hurried to the boat.

  Upon arrival at Sarıyer she had been met by red-eyed servants, the sight of whom had further increased her alarm, and they had told her that Aunt Ayşe had died early that morning. My grandmother bore up reasonably well under this news and thought her deep, urgent sense of premonition had come from this. She had liked Aunt Ayşe but after all she was only a daughter-in-law, and the women of old Turkey did not attach a great deal of importance to such a relationship. Nobody, at that time, mentioned my uncle, and as a consequence, not knowing of the greater shock that lay before her, my grandmother, although feeling sorrow at Aunt Ayşe’s untimely death, nevertheless was able competently to take charge of the situation. My aunt had died as the result of a violent haemorrhage, which a doctor, had he been available, would have been unable to check.

  All this was explained to her by the doctor who had been afterwards called by the terrified servants and who had waited in the house for my grandmother’s arrival. He had been startled to hear that no message had been received by her from Sarıyer and that her presence here now was pure chance, due to her alarming premonition that something had been wrong. They had sat and talked in the silent, sun-drenched salon that looked out over the gardens of Sarıyer, now at their most beautiful. The salon had affected my grandmother unbearably for it looked so ready for occupation, as though it awaited the step of its mistress. Great jars of white lilac, gathered by Aunt Ayşe the day before, stood about on little tables, overpowering the still room with its cloying, sweet perfume.

  Later in the morning a notary arrived, to explain that Sarıyer and all its land and farms now reverted back to Aunt Ayşe’s family, to a brother who was a cavalry officer away at the War. He had patiently explained to my grandmother’s misunderstanding face that Aunt Ayşe had died intestate and after Uncle Ahmet, therefore according to law the property would go to any members remaining from her family. This was the first intimation my grandmother had received that her beloved son was dead and she had promptly fainted. But when she had been revived, although still stunned by the terrible news, she had been able to arrange about the burial of my aunt, dismiss servants, all of them bewildered and wondering where to go for they had preferred the servitude of Sarıyer to the doubtful freedom of being alone. She had arranged that all the furniture should be shrouded and had finally, that same afternoon, seen Aunt Ayşe lowered into her lonely grave – for burial is swift in Turkey, the summer climate being unkind to the newly dead. Then she had bade farewell to Sarıyer, lovely under the June sun, empty now and tenantless with only the fading memory of our laughter to echo now and then in ghostly fashion. And my grandmother had returned to İstanbul, seeing no beauty now in the lovely, sweeping lines of the Bosphor’s shores, anxious only to come to my mother to cry her heart out. So she sat in her chair all through the day and rocked herself to and fro, and when the great tide of grief was exhausted the sun was far down the sky, the first evening yoğurtçu coming
up the street. My grandmother moved her stiffened, weary body and prepared to go to her home. Her face was grey and brittle-looking and I do not think that anything else in life ever hurt her again as much as this, the loss of her favourite, her best beloved.

  CHAPTER 12

  Disillusionment of an Autocrat

  Death.

  The world seemed suddenly full of the word and the noise of women weeping. All down the street news had begun to arrive of sons and brothers and fathers who had been killed at the front. There were no heated arguments now with the street sellers. The women wearily bought what they could afford, the young boys went off to join their fathers in the fighting and the street was given over to the dribbling babies and the dogs and the ever-ravenous cats. Each waking day brought fresh news from the front, of the appalling casualties we were suffering, and the Red Crescent trains came faster and thicker than ever, bringing the wounded and dying to İstanbul. There was not a woman in the little street but had someone at the front, even the widow downstairs, whose only son was away. Food was scarcer than ever, even if one had the money to buy it, and the Bourse Noir flourished unchecked and people dropped in the streets for lack of nourishment. My grandmother had been in the habit of sending storable foods to us but she too stopped this practice. My mother would make soups for us from a handful of lentils or dried peas, or serve plain, boiled haricot beans, conserving such precious items as rice and flour or olive oil for the leaner times just around the corner. Still she spent weary hours at the baker’s, sometimes returning with bread, more often empty-handed. And we were always hungry, always longing for fresh, crusty slices of the bread we could not get.

  During the mornings I would be left alone with Mehmet and Muazzez. Mehmet was docile enough but Muazzez used to drive me into a frenzy of exasperation and fear for she would cry so lustily that she became quite purple in the face with rage. She cried if I rocked the cradle, she cried if I did not, her eyes tearless and her screams shrill and unceasing. My mother would leave a bottle of milk for her, wrapped in a piece of material to keep it warm, and this I would thrust exasperatedly at her, trying to quiet her but it had no effect. One morning she was so terrible that by the time my mother returned, I was in tears myself. I told her what was wrong and she lifted the now docile Muazzez, dandling her and calling me over to look at the pretty thing.

  ‘I hate her!’ I burst out passionately, stubbing my toe against the foot of the cradle, and the moment she heard my voice Muazzez, the little tyrant, commenced to wail loudly again.

  My mother was upset by my truculent attitude and, perhaps as some sort of reward, sent Mehmet and me into the street to play, telling us not to move from the front door. But when my grandmother, later in the day, came down the street she was so scandalised to see us playing like street urchins, to quote her, that she was quite cool with my mother for the rest of the time and accused her of bringing us up very badly.

  She was in a gloomy mood that day, complaining that she could not remain long with us as the old man was not too well and had, latterly, taken to demanding her at all impossible hours of the day and night and had renewed his command that she should no longer visit us. She watched my mother’s efforts to make clothes for us on the sewing-machine and interfered so much that she quite upset my mother, who in the end was unable to do anything more so long as my grandmother remained.

  That evening she made an odd sort of dummy for Muazzez. It was made of muslin and filled with cleaned sultanas and she told me to, in future, stick it into her mouth when she commenced to cry and I was alone with her. She also taught me an old Turkish nursery rhyme, which she not only forced me to sing to her but called up the widow to listen to my voice. I was sure the rhyme would be worse than useless to quiet Muazzez but my mother, lamenting for İnci, looked so sad that I promised her I would try. This was the song: –

  ‘Dan dini dan dini dastana,

  Danalar girmiş bostana

  Kov bostancı danayı,

  Yemesin lahanyı …’

  which defies translation but means something to the effect that the little water-buffalo are in the garden and an injunction to the gardener to push them out before they eat all the cabbages! The soft, soothing words brought back memories of İnci crooning it over Mehmet’s cradle. So far as I could remember, the soporific effect on Mehmet had been remarkable and I hoped it would be as successful with my sister. I had the opportunity of judging this the next day and was so relieved when it actually worked that I did not know whether to laugh or cry and was afraid of doing either for fear I should reawaken the sleeping angel. So the daily round continued, with my grandmother continuing to supply money and my mother growing accustomed to marketing. My father seemed to have dropped entirely from our minds, so little was his name mentioned, and if my grandmother were to say his name it hit the senses like a little shock – as though she spoke of someone a long time dead. He had become a dim, far figure, not easily remembered and so sentimentalised by my grandmother that it was not easy to recognise my flesh-and-blood father from the over-drawn, romantic figure she painted.

  The street too had grown used to us and had even begun to nod to my mother. Sometimes they would beg her to do some little thing for them, perhaps decipher a letter from a Government office, reply to one or merely how to write a letter to their loved ones. Whatever it was they asked her, she did with unfailing good humour and tact. She became so well known for this latter characteristic that in the end Bekçi Baba would ask her to impart the bad news that he had no heart to face. He had had so much bad news since the war had started that the imparting of it should have inured him to the grief of the women, but he was old and tenderhearted and tears struck deep into his heart, and he never delivered a War Office message without inextricably entangling himself in the toils of the recipient’s woe. So he ranged himself alongside my mother, often asking her advice before presenting himself before a fateful door. She became greatly loved in the street. In time, as I grew older, I saw the women of that street showering kisses over her hands, whilst they called from their hearts, ‘Melek!’ (angel). If she suspected that a family was hungry she would take something to them, presenting it in such a way that offence could not be taken. She was generally the first to be found at the bedside of the sick or dying and received many last-minute instructions or confessions. She poured out whatever tenderness she had on the poor and many died with her name on their lips. The halt and maimed who returned from the front aroused her especial pity and she was never too tired to answer their appeals to her. I suppose that against the general social standards prevailing in our street we were comparatively wealthy. The women automatically called her ‘hanım efendi’ – a title, in old Turkey, used only for the better classes. They would ask her opinion on everything to do with their family life, feeling no embarrassment in acquainting her with the more intimate details.

  As that year drew to a close she worried incessantly over my schooling, for I was almost seven and entirely ignorant. She had taught me the alphabet and kept my Turkish pure but she knew only the barest rudiments of arithmetic and a little polite French, which could not equip me for the battle of life. Most of the district schools were closed through lack of teaching staff and were being used by the Red Crescent as military hospitals for the emergency treatment of casualties. So when my mother had taught me the little she knew herself, I languished both mentally and physically, and learned instead how to peel potatoes and rock my sister to sleep.

  Winter began early and coal was scarce, of poor quality and very dear. My grandmother provided us with a winter’s supply which we supplemented with logs of firewood and huddled over the little stove in the salon – cold because of the lack of proper food and because of the poor quality of the wool with which our jerseys had been knitted.

  There was much sickness in the street and death weeded out the old and the infirm and the very young. My mother was kept busy going from one house to another giving advice or consolation or merely holding the hand of
the one who was left. Then came a time when she herself fell sick and the fever came back to her and she cried out in her delirium, but this time there was no fashionable physician to visit her many times in a day, for almost all the doctors had gone to the War and the few who remained were too busy to visit badly paying patients in poor districts.

  But the street surged in to help her. Thin old women looking like crows in their black clothes, black çarşafs tightly binding their foreheads, would sit beside her bed and give her sips of water or rub her forehead with eau-de-Cologne to cool the surface blood and so help reduce the fever. Loving and dirty hands washed and dressed and fed us children and laid us in our beds at night then went back to the more serious business of tending my mother. Curious groping fingers sought for lice in our heads and drew back disappointed because none were to be found. They rocked Muazzez all day long and sang ‘Dini’ to her when they wanted her to sleep, and she would lie regarding them with alert, bright eyes and was never known to cry in their presence. Other thin black crows would do the washing on the gloomy landing, silently and grimly, and I was so afraid of them that I used to creep past them and sit perched in my corner seat, longing for my mother to be well again. When my grandmother called they would try to ingratiate themselves into her favour – reporting the progress or lack of progress, as the case might be, of the patient, recite a long, interminable list of what they had done, bow deeply and wait for further instructions. She was terribly, embarrassingly autocratic with them, treating them as her servants, but it was not she who kept them loyal to our house. They loved my mother and this was their only way of repaying her kindnesses to themselves.

  Day and night the house was filled with them and they were roughly kind to Mehmet and me and spent the money my grandmother gave them as honestly as she would have spent it herself. Their own children were blissfully permitted to go about the day long in dirt but poor Mehmet and I were unmercifully scrubbed twenty times or more in a day for they felt that super cleanliness must be one of the peculiar attributes of the upper classes. They expended more time and energy over us than İnci had ever done. They would remove their shoes before entering the bedrooms or the sitting-room, exclaiming over the softness of the carpets against their bare feet. They would examine all my mother’s table-and bed-linen with rough red hands – gloat over the silver and polish it until the old treasures were in danger of snapping under their hurrying fingers. Inquisitive hands pried everywhere. Nothing was safe from them. Curtains were touched joyously and held against the cheek, china examined to see how fine and delicate it was, and then in the midst of their wanderings through the three rooms in search of more treasures to gloat over they would espy Mehmet and me and they would sweep delightedly down on us, gathering us against their withered bosoms and proceed to take the skin off us once more with yet another washing.