Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

Our next port of call was İnebolu. We stopped about a mile off shore for İnebolu has no harbour. It stood like a picture in its green frame of trees and the high mountain forests behind it. Many rowing-boats were coming out to us and the soft day was still and calm and a brilliant sun shone on the pink-and-white houses of the little town, perhaps giving it a false beauty that would nevertheless sparkle in the memory. The rowing-boats came up to us and we leaned over the rails and watched.

  First came a fussy little Customs boat, flying the Turkish flag, and a man jumped out and ran with remarkable agility up the ladder of our boat. The other rowing-boats carried more passengers for us or had come to collect passengers wishing to disembark. Many of the little boats sold bread and olives and hard-boiled eggs and cream cheese. Their shouts mingled with the talk and laughter of the passengers and struck gaiety from that still summer sea that lay quiet like glass, and far away on the shore we could hear the morning noises of İnebolu.

  Some of the passengers let down large handkerchiefs on strings and bought foodstuffs from the boats. The seller would make a deft package of the handkerchief, the passenger hauling it up and money would be flung down to the grinning boatman. Sometimes arguments would arise, the hoarse, bellowing voice of the boatman swearing by Allah that the price he asked was below the price he himself had paid for whatever it was under dispute.

  We left İnebolu to the cries of the vendors, the ribald songs of the boatmen and gradually the voices grew fainter and our view of pretty İnebolu dimmer until after a while it was just a green blur many miles behind us. Because we had not been ashore we grew sentimental about the town and wondered what had lain behind the pink-and-white façades of the houses, the formal green pattern of trees had concealed what romantic things?

  Now the scenery was sheer beauty. For a long time after İnebolu we hugged the shoreline and the big mountains of Anatolia smiled and frowned upon us according to the changing position of the sun. The mountains were covered with thick foliage and are the natural fortresses of Anatolia against our Black Sea neighbours.

  Sometimes we saw a tiny shore village, a huddle of small mud houses only, and we wondered how they lived there so remote from civilisation of any kind. And sometimes a village clung to the rocky slopes of the mountains and we tried to imagine the rough, primitive life of the inhabitants. Presently the shoreline curved away from us and the following crying seagulls left us and we were out in the open sea again.

  That night the sea was rough and cold and many of us were sick and the journey became a nightmare through the dark, with the hiss of the foaming water in our wake, and torrents of rain drove those of us on deck to seek shelter.

  When we arrived at Samsun the rain had ceased but the weather was still cold, the grey, angry sea still choppy under a leaden sky.

  Samsun is a big city, the most important Turkish city on the Black Sea coast, and it reminded me in a vague sort of way of Kadıköy, on the Asia side of İstanbul. Again our boat stopped a mile or so offshore and motorboats chugged and battled across the huge waves. But they could not reach us and our captain roared through a megaphone, telling them to go back until the sea was calmer.

  Five hours we waited, cold and sick and longing for this nightmare journey to end. Finally the motorboats were able to reach us and they rocked like toys in the grip of the breakers which now and then threatened to entirely submerge them.

  I was one of the first down the swaying, greasy ladder and I jumped dizzily into the motorboat to await the others. The waves tossed us furiously up and down and the horizon reeled and wavered and was sometimes lost from sight altogether. I was sick continuously.

  That night I slept like a log in the narrow bed in the Samsun military hospital and next morning we left there for Tokat, and the end of our journey.

  Buses appeared for us and we piled in anyhow and off we started with a great roar and a cloud of dust. We rushed at a terrifying pace out of the city, the buses swaying and the drivers leaning over the wheels like fanatics in a team of racing cars.

  In the early afternoon we came to a small village and we crowded around the village pump to wash the dust off our faces and to drink avidly from the bitter-tasting water. We sat down to eat the bread and cheese the hospital authorities had given us that morning and the mongrel curs of the village sniffed us curiously and the shy wild children came to stare, their fingers in their mouths, ready to fly at our slightest movement.

  On again we started, refreshed after our food and the rest and once again ready to brave the perils of the eccentric bus. For hours we ran by the banks of a cool, brown river and the fir forests ran steeply up on either side of us. Occasionally we would meet a cowherd leading his cows to his village and always he would look curiously at us, dour and dark-skinned with sullen eyes. The cows would bellow fearfully at the frightful apparition of the snorting bus.

  Evening fell tender and green and presently the moon rose behind the hills, climbing steadily up the sky, high and silver and remote, and shadows stole out on the silvered roads and the fir-forests were bathed in radiance. We arrived at Amasya, that old, historical city famous for its luscious apples that have a smell like no other apples in all the world and are red and shining and delicate to the taste. The apple-orchards began about an hour before we reached the city itself and the moon shone tenderly on the young curled fronds of the blossom. We might have been on an enchanted road, so fairylike it was, so unreal with the never-ending foam of pink beauty. We reached the big rock fortress and the slender charm of minarets came into view. We halted by the wooden bridge on the Yeşilırmak – a river which flows through the centre of the city. Once again we went to the military hospital, where we were fed and given beds for the night. Our number however very seriously disorganised their resources and very nearly their hospitality.

  We left Amasya the following morning and still the apple-orchards continued with us for some time. When they abruptly ended we were in a wilderness of dusty road again, flat, uninteresting, desolate meadows on either side of us.

  ‘Tokat soon,’ shouted our driver encouragingly and I, who was nearest the apology of a door, leaned out and saw the grey stone of a fortress appearing over the tops of some trees.

  Over a bridge that forded a shallow river we ran and now houses began to appear, little houses set in wild gardens. The road had narrowed and the dust rose from it like a cloud, invading the bus and covering us with a film of white. We turned into the main street, a few straggling houses marking its beginning, and small shops came into view. Children and dogs lurked in the street and our klaxon made a great noise as we tore past with no regard for life, human or otherwise, and the dogs yelped in terror. On to a newly built stone road we ran and we saw a big dark huddle of buildings on a hill. It was the military school, and we had reached our journey’s end at last. We sighed at the unrelieved bleakness and thought of Kuleli fronting the Bosphor.

  CHAPTER 22

  Return to İstanbul

  I hated the fifteen months I spent in Tokat. I had stifled under a sense of frustration and had missed the sight and sound of the sea from Kuleli’s wide windows. I had fretted in the stony, bleak mountains of Tokat and many times longed for the bustle and splendour and the squalid romance of old İstanbul and the splash of shadow caused by a sudden, unexpected tree in a lonely corner of the city. I had hated the dust and bareness of Tokat, had missed the green of trees and the cool, sweet look of grass. I had starved for all these things, yet had never fully realised it until that morning we were told we were being sent back to Kuleli again, three months sooner than anticipated.

  The same old weary buses came to take us to Samsun, where we would board the boat for home, but twenty miles or so before we reached Samsun they broke down, one after the other, and we had no alternative but to walk the distance to Samsun.

  We started off well enough through the clear night and at first we walked swiftly, then slower and slower as the night wore by. Before many miles had been covered we were footsore and w
eary and our throats ached with thirst. We became almost stupid with tiredness and began to see before us the vague shapes of appartements or mosques – rather like the sort of mirage a traveller may see in the desert. Always the vague, indistinct shapes were a little ahead of us and never could we catch up with them. Sometimes they disappeared altogether and we marched along, sleeping as we marched, and all our uneasy dreams were coloured by the sight of brown, tumbling rivers and we clearly heard the sound of their rushing, soft waters. All the time our parched mouths burned like fires and we leaned against each other dazedly, trying to snatch sleep, not knowing even whether we were walking in the right direction.

  Sometimes one of us would shout: ‘Samsun! Samsun!’

  And our tired eyes would come apart and because of the intensity of our desires for a moment, we would indeed see the morning silhouette of Samsun lying before us – even though it was still night. But the illusion would fade and the lights we had thought we had seen became the lights of the hot, glittering stars.

  Once we passed the first of the derelict buses lying at the side of the road and we shouted to the sleeping driver, asking where were the rest of the students, and he told us drowsily that, like us, they were walking to Samsun. We envied them the start they had had in front of us.

  ‘How much farther?’ we asked.

  And the driver replied: ‘Another ten miles.’

  Our spirits and our bodies groaned against this. We thought of the hard stretch of road that still lay before us and the boat that would take us to İstanbul and we wondered how we would ever have the strength to reach that waiting boat in time.

  ‘Water,’ we asked him. ‘Do you know where we can find water?’

  And the driver already half asleep again told us that a little stream ran down from the mountains, just a bit off the road in front of us. And the coolness and the freshness of his words made us mad to find that water. On we went, looking everywhere for the little stream that ran from the mountains, and we tortured ourselves with the sweet sound it would make in our ears, of the coldness of the water against our lips. But we never found that little stream and either the driver had lied or our stupid, sleep-laden bodies had missed it. And we wept on each other’s shoulders for the little stream that we had lost and we said that if only we could get a drink of water we should be all right. We said we could walk to İstanbul – if only we had a drop of water.

  By dawn we had reached the suburbs of Samsun and we went into the gardens of a cool, grey mosque and water gushed from a fountain. We were gasping with thirst and our swollen tongues had made a little hillock in our mouths and we flung ourselves on the fountain and the icy water trickled into my mouth and over my face and hair and I felt faint with relief. We drank until we could drink no more, until the water ran down our chins and we were tired of it.

  On we stumbled to Samsun, this time complaining that our feet hurt for we had had no time to notice the aching of our feet whilst the greater need for water held us.

  Kuleli lay coolly under the painted sky and many students stood on the steps but we were too far away to see them clearly for our boat swung a course in the middle of the Bosphor. Long-distance boats did not stop at so insignificant a boat-station as Çengelköy so that it was necessary for us to go to Galata docks in order to board another, smaller boat to take us back to Kuleli.

  It was good to see old friends again, to see Mehmet waiting to greet me – a tall, brown Mehmet suddenly grown good-looking.

  We went home together. I was very excited as we walked towards Bayazit and landmarks stood out all the more clearly because one had been absent for more than a year.

  After the bare aridity of Tokat, the trees of İstanbul looked green as they had never done before. The colourful flowers in the quiet old gardens made a splash of cool beauty.

  The little house behind whose crumbling walls my family sheltered looked smaller than ever and more dingy than I had remembered, but the windows stood wide to the summer air and the soft sound of singing floated out to us. We looked at each other, Mehmet and I, and smiled in that rare moment of understanding, for it was my mother’s voice that sang for us that morning. And we peeped in through the downstairs window and saw her at her eternal tracing of designs, her figure bent over the sloping board, her face tranquil as though some intricate piece of work had come right for her. She was unaware of us for we peeped slyly, being wishful to surprise her, then Mehmet pulled the old-fashioned bell-rope and the creaking, heavy footsteps of my grandmother were heard on the stairs.

  She opened the door a fraction, a milk-pot in her hands, not immediately comprehending that two tall grandsons awaited entry.

  ‘I thought it was sütçü,’ she grumbled to Mehmet, then took in me standing there beside him and awareness leaped into her old eyes and the milk-pot went rattling to the floor and she held out her arms to me.

  She called my name in a happy shout that shook the street and the foundations of the old house and it brought my mother from the workroom, joy and disbelief struggling for supremacy in her face.

  They folded me to them, these two, and the familiar, childhood smell of eau-de-Cologne tickled my nostrils. It was then that I really knew I was home again.

  All the while they extravagantly praised my looks and my height in the way of families, I was noticing little things I should never have noticed a year ago. I noticed that this day my mother’s black hair no longer curled, that it hung lankly, heavily streaked with grey. I noticed the dull look in her eyes and that they now and then slid away disconcertingly from the person to whom she was talking. It was as though only part of her was aware of the things going on about her. Perhaps it was for the first time in my life I wondered what her life had been in all the years we had been away from her. I wondered if she had forgotten the quiet young man who had been my father and the gay, pretty young woman who had been herself in my childhood, with her fashionable silk dresses. I thought of the young wife who had sat in my grandmother’s salon and sipped coffee with the neighbours, never raising her voice above a whisper, never putting forward an opinion for fear she should be frowned upon. I looked at the changed face and wondered about her. The fastidious young woman she had been would never have permitted her hair to lose its lustre, its springy curl, or her figure to thicken – albeit it was ever so faintly perceptible.

  I suppose the years of grinding poverty had taken their toll and even though nowadays money appeared to be no longer a problem, yet she looked as if she dared not sit back, dared not relax lest poverty come leaping back through the window again.

  She looked so tired and worn that summer morning despite the seeming tranquillity of her face, the smile which had momentarily lightened her eyes when first she saw us. Her smiles were so brief that I could not help wondering whether half the time she were aware of her children or not. I looked back down the years to the day she had heard of my father’s death. I remembered the night our house burned, the fever that had held her captive for weeks, and I thought that had she not had my grandmother with her through those weary days she could not have kept her sanity. My grandmother was so essentially sane that her mere presence was a sort of ledge for my mother to rest upon.

  Few of us know the dreams or the longings of our own, and that long-ago morning when Mehmet and I stood together in the little house that has now gone taking our secrets with it, I was unaware of the dark menace the future held.

  Muazzez was on holiday too, her long-legged, thirteen-year-old self as delicious, as refreshing as iced water on a hot day. She brought a note of youthful innocence into the house and seemed very close to my grandmother.

  I remember one day when the sunlight poured into the salon, when the piled-up flowers were touched to brief glory, when my mother, looking unexpectedly like a young girl again, confessed to her longing to possess a garden once more. I remember wishing that I could satisfy that longing, that I had finished with schooling and the indignity of having to accept pocket money from her.

&nbs
p; One afternoon I planned to see Suna, who did not know that I was back again in İstanbul and who probably would not have cared had she known. I walked to the street where she lived and hesitated for a few moments at the corner. I looked down its empty, sun-drenched length and toyed with the unsubtle idea of passing her house, on the chance that she might be at the salon windows. They were big houses in that street, big and grey and ugly, and since the war had housed many families.

  I changed my mind and turned back to walk to Galata Bridge. I mingled with the hurrying crowds, the pedlars and the noisy trams, and I thought that when I reached the bridge I would turn my back on all of them and watch the busy boats on the Bosphor, which I had missed for so long. But I did not get that far after all, for halfway there standing together on a quiet corner stood a young officer and a girl in a gay red dress. And something about the stand of that girl held my feet sentinel for it was Suna who stood there, looking so intimately into the white face of a new lieutenant.

  They were unaware of me and somehow or other I did not want to go to Galata to see the boats after all.

  I retraced my steps towards home.

  CHAPTER 23

  The New Officer

  My last year in Kuleli came eventually, bringing with it the dreaded final examinations which would decide whether we became officers or not.

  We studied as we had never studied in our lives before. Most of us even gave up going home for occasional weekends and a few of us bought supplies of candles for use at nights in the dormitory – when the electricity was cut off. We sat up through the nights poring over our much-battered textbooks and examining each other in whispers for fear of disturbing the fitful sleepers. We grew thin and white and even in our troubled dreams saw examination papers, written in a language we did not know. And too we saw ourselves as failures, condemned to be Sergeants for the rest of our lives at the mercy of our friends and enemies who had gone on to become Staff Officers, and would come awake sweating with horror, relieved to discover after all that it was only a dream.