Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  The relief when at last my mother was able to get up again! Her illness had seemed like years and years to us and when she saw our faces and hands and bodies shining from all the soap that had been used on us she commenced to cry, saying we looked too clean. We hastened to assure her it was all a mistake and that left to ourselves it would never have occurred to us to be so clean and she commenced to laugh, the tears still shining in her eyes, and she said that anyway the neighbours had been very kind. We could not answer this – feeling that there were limits to kindness.

  One morning a few months later, when my mother was thoroughly well again, a servant called from my grandmother’s house to say that the old man was dead. This was a great shock for my mother had not heard he was ill. The servant explained that it was a heart attack and that my grandmother was overcome with shock for it was she who had discovered him. My mother was asked to return with the servant but this she refused to do. It was a strange thing for she never spared herself for other people and this reluctance to go to my grandmother’s home was a new thing for her. But perhaps she knew that genuine grief calls for every effort whereas the grief manifest by my grandmother was a purely synthetic thing to impress outsiders.

  Whatever the true refusal of my mother she did not speak about it to us, and later that day, when the curtains were already drawn and the lamps lit, my grandmother arrived. She looked tired and a little frightened, disposed to be short-tempered with my mother. For a long time she ignored her, taking to Mehmet and me, and my mother lay back in her long chair and refused to ask any questions. This attitude piqued my grandmother and when at length she could no longer bear it, she burst out that my mother grew more and more callous and that she had expected her to at least have asked after the state of my grandmother’s nerves – which were, she declared, simply shocking. She conventionally squeezed a few tears from her eyes and lamented her husband but with so little enthusiasm that at last she gave up even trying to deceive herself. She was attempting to whip up a decorous picture of herself, the new widow, weeping for her husband as if her marriage had been a normal friendly, happy one. She said that she intended to spend the night with us for she could not bear to go back to that dreaded house. My mother said nothing. Then my grandmother, all decorousness swept away, said with animation that now she was a very rich woman and that we would all go to live in her house. She said we would never have to worry again about money or anything else and waited for my mother’s comments. She became more and more spry and my mother began to laugh at her but very soon she herself became infected with enthusiasm. There was only one small, rather insignificant fly in the ointment but it was large enough to occasionally dampen happiness. Apparently after the old man’s death the Notary who held his will had been summoned, also the nephew who controlled his various business concerns. The nephew had said to her: ‘Well, Fatma hanım, what are we going to do with you, I wonder?’

  And had added that anyway, this was not the time to discuss these things and that they would inform her later of the terms of the will.

  ‘What do you think he meant by that?’ my grandmother kept asking my mother, but the latter replied that everything would be all right since she had been the old man’s wife and had first rights of the property.

  ‘Are you sure?’ my grandmother wanted to know doubtfully and sunk her chin on her hands and went into a reverie. She got quite peevish because my mother suggested we wait a few months before we moved to her house, so that the neighbours would not be given any opportunity to talk unkindly behind us.

  ‘Neighbours!’ snapped my grandmother and with that one word withered us all.

  After Mehmet and I were sent to bed we heard their argumentative voices rolling back and forth in battle for a long time until finally we went to sleep.

  A few days later my mother accompanied my grandmother to see the Notary and the nephew and we were left in the charge of the widow. I watched them walking down the street, my mother pulling black gloves over her hands, her step firm and confident and my grandmother beside her, very upright and looking anything but a bereaved widow.

  Later that day they returned looking no different perhaps to the uninitiated eye but to Mehmet and me there was a certain grimness to be noted about the mouth and eyes, sufficient reason to keep us angelically quiet and not to ask questions. We heard no mention of going to live in my grandmother’s house and the next day a porter arrived with her remaining furniture from her old home. I was very curious and wondered where it was going to be put. An outsize in china cabinets ousted me from the door and when a console table followed it I retreated into the farthest corner of the salon and thought that if any more furniture came in I should be buried under it. A covered ottoman was carried into my mother’s room, Muazzez’s cradle having to be moved to make room for it. Tin chests arrived and the porters were told to leave them on the landing since there was no room anywhere else. Every available inch of space seemed crowded and our rooms looked terrible, all the spacious gaiety so carefully arranged by my mother fled. Amidst all the confusion she moved tight-lipped and uncompromising yet with a contradictory air of serenity which I had not seen for a long time. I was aching to ask questions but was cowed into silence by my grandmother’s attitude.

  Soon after that the widow moved from the downstairs rooms and went to live farther down the street and my grandmother moved in to take her place. Furniture was rearranged but there was still far too much of it and everywhere looked ugly and overcrowded and the tin chests remained filled and carpets were hung on the walls because there was no room for them on the floors and the rooms took on a dull, darkened look.

  For many days my grandmother was very subdued and quarrelled with my mother on the slightest provocation, reminding her frequently whose money was buying our food and the clothes we were wearing. This was so out of character that we could not but deduce that something very seriously was amiss. And indeed it was!

  Her late husband had exacted his revenge on her. He had cut her completely from his will, leaving her penniless. All his property and ready monies had gone to his nephew – today to be found in America, the old house in Bayazit closed and shuttered. The house where we were living was left to my mother, for her lifetime or for as long as she cared to live there – afterwards reverting to his nephew. He had not even stipulated the use of one room for my grandmother, ignoring her existence as completely as if she had never been his wife.

  All of this I learned from my mother when I was older, when we had lived in that house for many years. My grandmother always remained with us, but never docilely. She never mentioned the old man’s name but took to talking about my grandfather, as if the past year of marriage was only a dream. She became suddenly very religious but remained autocratic to the end of her days, for that trait in her would never die until she did.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ninety-Nine Kuruş in Exchange for a Hero

  With my grandmother’s arrival at our house, life became easier for me, since she began to look after Muazzez whenever my mother was out. But the cramped, communal life of a small house did not suit her temper however, and she was more than ever uncertain and hard to please these days. She objected to Mehmet and me playing in the salon, regardless of the fact that there was no other place for us. So we took to accompanying my mother to the marketplace, in order to let my grandmother have the house to herself. We depended upon her too to get any food, for my mother had long since exhausted her own meagre supply of money.

  My grandmother kept all her money and valuables in a large tin chest in her bedroom, the keys of which she always carried with her. This habit annoyed my mother and she ached to be independent. My grandmother continuously grumbled about expenses but would not forego her wine for dinner. In her especially bad times she would tell us that my father still owed her money from the sale of the business – which was totally untrue, since she had never been left any ready money by my grandfather. We ate poor-quality food and this, she complained, upset her stom
ach. She insisted on snowy table-linen, despite the fact that soap was expensive and hard to obtain, and would not countenance the same tablecloth on two occasions. She sometimes bought little luxury foods and then said that we ate too much. She never forgot she had been a lady and would sit idle in the salon, whilst my mother toiled in the kitchen, cooking the choice dishes she still demanded. Muazzez was the only one of us she seemed to like and she spent a great deal of her time petting and spoiling her, and then complained to my mother that the child was unmanageable. News reached us that Orhan Bey, the husband of Madame Müjğan, had been killed, and the names of other men and boys they had known also died from the lips, for one did not like to talk too much about the peaceful dead.

  One morning my mother excitedly returned from the market with news that a unit had returned from the Dardanelles to Yeşilköy and that perhaps my father was with them.

  This caused a great deal of speculation amongst us but finally my grandmother declared it to be nonsense, since if my father had got as near to home as Yeşilköy, he would somehow or other have sent a message to us. But my mother was not to be so easily turned from the scent. The sons and husbands of other old neighbours had come back to Yeşilköy – why not my father? So one early morning she set off for Yeşilköy, taking me with her for company. We took the train from Sirkeci station and I was very thrilled, for it was the first time I had ever been on a train. Despite my mother’s warnings, I could not sit still but had to thoroughly inspect knobs and handles and the tattered upholstery of the seats and, a dozen times or more, poked my head out of the window to watch the exciting country flying past us. I was in a seventh heaven of delight, for riding in this train was far more fun even than it had been to ride behind Murat in the old days. I suppose I was not especially curious about meeting my father, being too thrilled with the noise the train was making and the shrill, almost continuous sound of the whistle. I was very disappointed when we at last reached our destination, and as my mother hurried me along the platform I kept looking regretfully back to the great, dark monster which had transported us here.

  My mother enquired from the station-master how far it was to the Military Camp and he looked doubtfully at her thin, ladylike shoes and replied that it was a long walk. His tone implied doubt that she would ever make it but he directed her the road to follow. We set out along the bare winter road, but that day there seemed to be just the littlest hint of spring in the air, but long before we reached the camp our pace slackened. Many times we halted to get our breaths back and to ease our aching feet, for the road was bad and our footwear light. At length we came to the top of the last hill and there, at our feet, lay the camp with its camouflaged tents.

  Excitement lent new wings to my mother and in any case it was far easier to descend the hill than it had been to ascend it. We met only a peasant, with his mule, on the way down and everywhere was very still with that stillness especial to the country, only the caw-cawing of the crows to now and then disturb it. When at last we reached the camp we were breathless, and when an officer, in a very ragged uniform, came forward to ask our business, my mother had considerable difficulty in answering him at all. She explained however why she had come and he looked vague for a moment or two, as though the name of my father perhaps struck a chord somewhere in his memory. With very great courtesy he begged my mother to wait a little whilst he made enquiries. He walked away from us and when I turned to say something to my mother, I was amazed to see that her eyes were filled with tears. A few spilled down her face and she said: ‘Poor man! He looks so tired and shabby and did you notice that he had his arm and his shoulder bandaged? That means he has been wounded and should be in hospital and not walking about this camp – ’

  And I had a horrible moment of remembering the first words of the song they had sung when they took my father to the War.

  ‘Ey, gaziler …’, they had sung (‘oh, wounded ones …’), and my heart began to beat unevenly, for fear my mother should remember too, or read the words in my eyes.

  Presently two soldiers came towards us and I held my breath expectantly as my mother gave a little gasp.

  ‘Can it be your father?’ she said in an unsteady sort of voice and I started to run towards the soldiers, but she called me back.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘They are neither of them your father.’

  And she sat down again to wait until they came up to us and there was a dull, flat expression on her face that heightened the cheekbones and broadened the nostrils.

  As the soldiers came abreast of us we saw that they were officers although their uniforms too were so shabby that, but for the insignia of rank on their shoulders, we could not have distinguished them from the soldiers.

  ‘Ali Bey!’ she cried to one of the officers and he saluted her, going red with some sort of emotion that I should never know, and I looked at him curiously, wondering who he might be and how my mother knew him.

  She asked eagerly for news of my father and he looked uncertainly at her as though perhaps weighing up her capabilities for shock, then he said slowly: ‘We left him to his God a long time ago – ’ and paused wondering what else there was to say to her.

  Although her face was whiter than I had ever seen it in my life, she said with swift impatience: ‘Yes? Go on! I want to know whatever it is you have to tell me.’

  Then the man called Ali, who was a captain, plunged into conversation to tell her this story.

  On the march to the Dardanelles my father had suffered badly from foot trouble. He had to march day and night, night and day, and his feet began to swell and in the end they had had to cut his torn boots off him. The two feet were found to be badly infected right up to the ankles and soaked in fresh, bright blood. He had been left by the roadside, as was the custom, and they had called back down the lines that a wounded man lay under a tree. And eventually this message would reach the end of the marching lines where a horse-drawn cart lumbered for the express purpose of picking up the sick and wounded. But if the cart was already full to overflowing with all the other sick soldiers who had dropped out on the way? Ah well – in that case a man just lay by the side of the road under the blazing sun and waited for the next lot of marching soldiers to take up the same old cry, that a man lay wounded under the trees by the side of an alien road. Down, down the weary lines the cry would go, but perhaps by the time the sick-cart reached the spot a man would be dead and there was not much point in carrying a dead man – when there were so many living who still might be saved. But of course, Captain Ali hastened to assure my mother my father was picked up and taken to a base hospital – where he died.

  As he told her all these unsavoury things, his pale face flickered and his eyes were loath to meet hers – for how could he tell this white, courageous woman that neither he nor anyone else knew where her husband had died? But she persisted in subjecting herself to this useless agony, demanding the name of the hospital – as if the young captain could have told her, even supposing he knew. He was infinitely patient, holding himself stiffly to attention, assuring her that everything that could have been done had been done. And in the end she had to be contented, for there was nothing else he could tell her. So she thanked him and he saluted her, as one brave soldier to another, and she took my hand and we began the long trudge back to the station.

  She did not speak to me at all but walked as if mechanically propelled, never slackening or altering her pace, although my small legs were breaking under me. I begged her to sit down, to let me rest, crying in my tiredness and with cold, for the day had become overcast and all signs of spring had left the air. I tottered beside her and plucked at her skirt and she looked at me, as if she did not recognise me, as if I had brought her back from some far place, and I cried all the more bitterly in this new loneliness. Then I saw expression creep into her dead eyes and she caught me to her and sat down with me in a ditch.

  ‘Poor tired boy!’ she said over and over again, as though she knew no other words or as though this re
petition would still remembrance of something else, something that lurked in the foreground of the mind and would not be pushed back, back with all those other memories that could not be looked upon because they were still too new.

  She put her arms around me and repeated her meaningless refrain and frightened me unendurably, for her arms held no security and her voice no comfort and I did not know if she were speaking to me or to some image of my father, whom she held in her empty, rocking arms.

  Back home, the wind of discontent blew coldly through the house. My mother became almost unapproachable and hard as we had never known her before. My grandmother forgot her grumblings and walked silently before such coldness and insensibility. Back to those days flies memory to feel again the soft breath of fear on the cheeks, to feel the slow ice around the heart and the feathery, barely perceptible insecurity that crept up on a child. I would catch sight of my mother, sitting idly at her work in the kitchen, or looking steadily at some half-finished piece of sewing in her hands, her face expressing surprise that she should be holding anything, for she could not remember having picked it up. In her eyes would wander a gentle vagueness, its harsh shadow flitting now and then across her face, darkening sanity – although a child’s mind did not put it like that. A child was conscious only of strangeness, and she would not emerge from her dreams of the past, even though her children pulled at her arms and their cries beat on her brain. She shut herself away from them all and sat silent for long stretches and became strange and odd and absentminded. And fear flourished in the little house, in the unreasoning, illogical way fear will. Whatever she did, she did with the heartless precision of the automatic and was never heard to mention my father or wonder about the future. My grandmother would try to rouse her out of this lethargic state, suggesting with intentional brutality that she should go to the War Office and find out what she could about my father. At these times my mother would look with her vague look at my grandmother, and one could feel the difficulties she was having in focusing her attention on what had been said to her. Then she would turn her head away and say fretfully that she did not want to discuss the matter and my grandmother would retire, defeated, helpless in the face of such implacability.