by Orga, Irfan
I followed them and when she was sitting down I took one cold hand in mine and kissed it but she did not pay any attention to the gesture. All the time she persisted in treating me like a stranger. After that first flicker of recognition in her eyes she had withdrawn from me. She felt me watching her and turned her head to me, saying: ‘Once I had a son too who was an airman like you. He broke my heart.’
The calmness of her light voice was terrible.
‘Oh, mother!’ I said, trying not to weep for her and for myself too. ‘Don’t you know me?’ I asked.
It was cruel to go on knocking at memory like that but I could not help myself. She did not answer me, only commenced to hum a little nameless tune, an odd thin sound, and the shivers still spasmodically shook her frail body. I gave her some Turkish Delight and she ate it and then asked, with incredible courtesy, if she could have some more as her friends were too poor to buy any for themselves. I handed her the box but her hands were too unsteady to hold it so that it fell to the grass, spilling its contents and the nurses stooped to pick up the pieces for her.
She turned away pettishly, refusing to speak to me any more, and all the time she trembled. Her body and legs and arms were wasted, only skin and bone remained of her. She persisted in keeping herself turned from me and presently one of the nurses said she would have to be taken back to her room. She was to be put to bed.
She went away with them docilely, never looking to me, never turning her head backwards from the door as she went through, not caring that I stood there looking after her, not knowing who I was.
I stood there for a long time, watching the dragging, bent, trembling figure of my mother and I thought I should not come here again. Silently I said my goodbye to her and then she vanished from my sight. I felt the tears running unchecked down my cheeks.
I wept for myself and for the young lover who had once imprinted herself on the memory, the day she bade my father goodbye in the gracious salon of a long-dead house. I wept for the beauty who had flashed jewels and hospitality, who had brought poetry into a house in a back street of Bayazit. I wept for the pale young girl who had drudged untold hours in an army Depôt, sewing coarse linen for soldiers. I wept for the middle-aged woman of the fugitive, persistent beauty, who had worn a flower in her hair against my return from the aerodrome, who had once sparkled and shone like the noonday sun and who had withered to dust inside the body of this bent, trembling old woman who knew no one. But I wept most of all for my mother.
A light touch on the arm made me turn to see a nurse with a face of great gentleness, of compassion. She said: ‘We have put her to bed now. Would you like to see her room?’
‘No,’ I said; ‘no, thank you. There is no need. I am sure she is very comfortable.’
She did not say anything to this and I asked: ‘Is there a window in the room?’
Her eyes lit with that rare understanding that comes so seldom in the world.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘She likes us to keep it open for her. And we bring her to the garden quite often too. She loves gardens, you know.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and saw the gardens she had made in İstanbul, in Eskişehir, in Kütahya and İzmir and I wondered if loving hands still tended them.
‘She had green fingers,’ I said irrelevantly and the friendly nurse smiled.
‘Well, goodbye, lieutenant,’ she said. ‘Come again, won’t you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I shall not come again. It is better not.’
And suddenly the face of the friendly nurse closed up and grew hard, unable to understand. She said tartly: ‘But you can help her so much, you know.’
I remembered that the doctor had said she would not live for long, that she would never get better and I wondered at the terrible, ruthless sanity of the sane, at the stupidity that asked me to come back and see my mother, to force awareness of myself upon her when she did not want to be reminded, when her son was dead for her because once he had broken her heart. Such pitiless cruelty I had thought was alien to the friendly nurse. But there was no way of explaining to that closed face that there was nothing more to be said between my mother and me, that both of us were gone from each other.
My mother had travelled farther than we who stood here in the sunlight. She had gone to that world of soft illusions where she was always a young girl, the world to which she had tried to escape when her home was burned, when she learned that her husband had died on a faraway road under a blinding sun. She had wanted to go there long ago but always we held her back, called to her to stay with us but now she no longer cared and could not have been persuaded to stay any more.
I turned away from the gardens. The same man still speechified impassionedly, the same young girl haughtily told her parents that she could never marry. All of them living in their illusory world where hurt could not touch them. Their voices followed me to the high, iron gates and the porter opened them for me to pass through. I went out to the quiet, country road.
On the 18th of May of that eventful European year of 1940, my mother died but for me she had been dead this many a day.
I received the telegram the morning they were burying her, when it was too late to go to İstanbul and too late for anything else to be done by me.
Alone of all her family, Mehmet saw her lowered into her grave outside the fortress walls of İstanbul. An İmam read the Koran for her and presently Mehmet was left alone with her for a little while, then he too had gone, leaving her with the sun and the kindly rain and the eternal nights still to come.
Later we erected a tombstone for her and a low stone wall about the narrow grave. We put rose trees at her head and her feet and her name was carved into the shining marble of the stone: ‘Şevkiye Orga,’ we wrote, ‘1895–1940 – Ruhuna Fatiha’ – ‘pray for her’, and the name looked lonely there amongst all the nameless dead about her.
Then we left her alone, a little outside the İstanbul she had loved.
Afterword
‘Other people’s lives are always interesting. The gossip of the village or the gossip of Europe – it does not make much difference’
John Betjeman, reviewing Portrait of a Turkish Family, London
Daily Herald 16 August 1950
‘İrfan’, in Turkish, means knowledge, enlightenment, culture. My father carried his name with head held high. He was a gentle, kind person, a man of wisdom and sensitivity, of psychology and perception, a man of honour. His recipe for life was his mother’s opinion that ‘it is very vulgar to boast’, and his grandmother’s warning that you should ‘never let anyone know when you are desperate. Put your best clothes on and pride on your face and you can get anything in this world […] otherwise you will get nothing but kicks’. ‘A good soldier,’ he says in Portrait, ‘needs no imagination, no feelings of humanity’. Perhaps this, along with a lack of ambition discovered early on, explains why ultimately he had so little taste for soldiering; why, by this definition, he would always have been a bad soldier. He was too much of a dreamer, a questioner, a lover of life’s spirit. Thankfully he had never been put to the test as his father had been at Gallipoli, or his uncle in the deserts of Mesopotamia and Syria.
My father had an enormous regard for justice and fair play. His capacity for love was wonderful to experience, his family feeling all consuming. He was the fortress of our existence. He ran his life (and ours) by simple black-and-white beliefs. To him dignity, truth, loyalty, faithfulness and self-discipline mattered more than anything else. He was a stern taskmaster, a man who had a temper and a cold eye and could, given cause, punish. I knew the sting of his hand. But I knew, too, that he was possessed of infinite, intimate tenderness. He was a good human being.
Portrait is an autobiography of tears and goodbyes. Dedicated to my mother, and at first called On the Shore of the Bosphorus, it was originally much longer and dealt in detail with father’s time as a cadet and junior officer. He also planned a sequel based on his years in England. It was the agent, Curtis Brown, in a letter da
ted 30 August 1949, who suggested its present form, with a narrative confined to childhood and family life in Turkey across the transitional divide between the last sultans and Atatürk. Father agreed; an advance of £75 was offered, and a contract was signed with Victor Gollancz, 25 January 1950. Gollancz published the book on 14 August, price sixteen shillings. It proved such a major critical success that a second printing had to be rushed through within a fortnight. No bookshop in London was without a copy; it dressed most windows. On my sixth birthday that year, 6 November, Macmillan of New York issued it in America. ‘One of the memorable books of 1950’, hailed the New York Herald Tribune.
The story of Portrait is evocative but selective. For some reason it is silent over father’s liaison in Eskişehir, around 1936, with Atatürk’s adopted fighter-pilot daughter, Sabiha Gökçen (1913–2001), who was then at the Air College. Nearly five years younger, Sabiha was a feisty feminist of strong will with whom marriage was apparently discussed.1 It casts no light on why 1 March 1908 (Rumi calendar, corresponding to 14 March Gregorian) is given on some papers as his birthday. Contrary to his opening statement, he frequently had doubt as to exactly when he might have been born. It didn’t trouble him – error, he would say, was something you learnt to live with in old Ottoman Turkey: if you had no papers, it was common practice among officials for an arbitrary date to be fixed, arrived at by matching a mother’s description of circumstances around birth with public events at the time – but it did leave him wondering. He once even raised with me the possibility of 1909. And it reveals nothing about how our family name originated when Atatürk made surnames compulsory in Turkey in 1934. Before then father had always been known as ‘İrfan, the son of Hüsnü [bey] and Şevkiye [hanım] of Bayazit’. ‘Orga’ he would tell us around winter fires, came to him one day by opening a map and sticking a pin in it. That pin came to rest by a river, the Urga, between Nizhniy Novgorod and Kazan on the trail east to the Urals. Wanting a harder-sounding, more Turkishly associative identity, he changed the ‘U’ to an ‘O’ – ‘Orga’. The fantasy of a young bey in Eskişehir finding an identity fired my imagination. But the thought (years subsequently) of the old water-gods returning to haunt him for losing their vowel (Captain ‘Urga’) still sends shivers.
Father set foot in Liverpool on 16 July 1942, following a two-and-a-half month land and sea voyage via the Levantine coast of Syria and Palestine, the Suez Canal (stopping off at the Valley of the Kings in May), South Africa and Lisbon. For the Southern Cross-Polaris leg, Durban to Liverpool – commanding twenty junior Turkish officers about to complete their training with the Royal Air Force (their passenger list names, matched with photographs and Ottoman-scripted comments, still traceable in a pocket-book he kept at the time) – he travelled First Class on the Reina del Pacifico en route from Bombay, then requisitioned as a troop-ship. The voyage through shark-infested waters was a dangerous one. Steaming the same course off equatorial West Africa two months later, the Laconia sunk in 61 minutes, torpedoed by a German U-Boat. In England, following a stay at The Grand in Torquay (August– September), he occupied an office at the Turkish Embassy in London (at the Ambassador’s residence, Portland Place), and flew Spitfires courtesy of the RAF. Home was a room at 29 Inverness Terrace (‘Mr John’s’ as it was always known in our family).
He met my mother, Margaret(e) Mary, sometime that year or the next. A highly-strung lapsed-Catholic with a weakness for (numerologically influenced) name changing, eventually to smoke, drink and will herself to death (13 October 1974), she was then, pictures show, a slight young woman of haughty, irregular beauty. Follower of Saladin. Defender of Parnell. Admirer of Pushkin, Rilke, Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene. Only daughter of Henry James Wright, landed gentleman ‘racehorse breeder’ of ‘independent means’, deceased (who’d relocated to the Wood Green area of London sometime in the early 30s, a consequence, so the story went, of having one rash day gambled away his Irish home and land). As a girl, she’d tell me in King’s English tones, she’d been sent to the iconically towered convent of Our Lady of Sion in Bayswater, before going on to finishing school in Paris (she spoke good French). Emphatic of her Norman-Irish aristocracy (claiming descent from Wicklow D’Arcy stock), she worked for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) and at the time of meeting father was already married, her civil wedding to one Leonard Sidney Gainsboro, printer by trade and a driver with 24 Royal Engineers, having been solemnised at Westminster Register Office on 8 July 1942, her 23rd birthday. Giving her address as Flat 603, Duncan House, Dolphin Square, Pimlico, she subsequently had a room at ‘Mr John’s’, and then (April 1944) at 1 Brondesbury Road, Kilburn. Later she and father went to Coombe Lane, Merton (178a), he commuting daily from Raynes Park to Waterloo, London terminus of the Southern Railway. Leafy Surrey suburbia …
For some time father’s risqué affair was kept secret. Unsurprisingly: he must have been aware that for a serving officer to live with, never mind marry, a foreigner was to break Turkish law. At any rate, he was still in service at the time of my birth in 1944, and on his return to Turkey from Liverpool the following July he remained so, being posted to Diyarbakır (travelling overland through Palestine, arriving via Gaziantep in the south-east of Turkey, close to the Syrian border, 8 August 1945). He always told me he felt this posting to have been a first sign of official awareness and reaction: Diyarbakır on the Tigris was in the east of Turkey, a hot, inhospitable place of sand and drought and scorpions (snakes, too, his phobia) – not somewhere to send a successful staff officer just back from a politically sensitive posting in wartime London.
Whether father resigned or was dismissed from the Air Force is debatable. He always maintained the former; using both words, the Turkish authorities couldn’t quite decide. He himself used to say he’d been offered a deal: either renounce his child and wife and keep his commission, or get out. From things said, I believe he must have left around early 1947. In concern for my mother he was then no longer flying. And the term of fifteen years service contracted for by his mother had by this time been fully honoured. We followed him to Turkey, making the journey by train to Sirkeci through France, Italy and Greece. We lived at 40 Savaş Sokak in the Şişli district of İstanbul. My mother, it appears, was well liked by Mehmet and our Greek neighbours, but was mistrusted by Bedia who for some reason, I gathered later, saw her as a loose woman unfit for her brother-in-law.
By the end of 1947 father, now a civilian traffic officer with British European Airways in Ankara, found himself in an impossible situation. Friends warned of impending arrest. He contemplated escape through Iraq and Syria, helped by Kurds and Armenians he’d befriended in Diyarbakır. The idea proved impractical. Somehow he managed to secure a passport, in the name of ‘Mehmet İrfan Orga’ with his occupation given as ‘employee’. On 19 December the British Embassy issued him with a ‘short visit’ one-month visa. He left İstanbul on the 22nd.
‘I thought of my mother lying outside the fortress walls, of my father and my grandfather. Yes, I remember you and you and you. Dead images clothed in flesh and blood who have walked across the pages of this narrative for your brief moment; your terrible silence mocks the puny, noisy wisdom of the living. You keep your own counsel. Beside you the figures of me; of Mehmet – busy in a ship’s hospital, intent and confident; of Muazzez, who stands before me now with her family, an older, harder Muazzez – we dim to nothingness. We are the restless living, our names are not hallowed by nostalgia. When I think of you who are gone, long-dead dreams rise up again to catch me by the throat […] All the graceful life you represented comes back in full measure to haunt this jaundiced eye, to torture this foolish heart for the things that might have been had Time stood still. The long line of the Bosphor I see too in the mind’s eye that discerns everything so clearly […] and Kuleli lying under the quiet sky and far away there is a square white house that will for me burn eternally to a disinterested heaven […] “Goodbye,” we shout. “Goodbye … ”’ 2
He landed
at Northolt the following day. On the 25th, Christmas Day, at ten-past-four in the afternoon, my mother sent a telegram from Beyoğlu: ‘Arriving Saturday Meet Air Offices Victoria Love Margaret’. On the 27th, a high moon on the rise, we were reunited.
My parents wore rings (I still have them) engraved in the Turkish style, ‘22/7/943’, the day the Americans captured Palermo. It was a date sporadically acknowledged as marking their ‘wedding’, notably in 1968, the occasion, they said (mother in sour mood), of their Silver Anniversary. I never gave it a second thought. Then one summer evening at Tunbridge Wells station after a wine-drenched dinner at the Royal Wells Inn, shortly before father’s death, mother confessed. She’d had an earlier husband. I failed to grasp, or wanted to resist, the implications. In 1943 she and father weren’t married at all. Likewise through my (illegitimate) birth, notwithstanding having by then changed her surname from ‘Margaret Veronica [sic] Gainsboro’ to ‘Margaret Veronica Orga’ (London Gazette, 28 April 1944). And for several years after. (Was this the ‘loose woman’ scenario that had made Bedia so uneasy?) Alea iacta est. What a gloria d’amour that Thursday must have been. Their first meeting? She (father would habitually remind us) turning right at the corner from Inverness Place to Terrace, Bayswater-land, profile hesitating, gazing coolly, palely heart-stopping. Eleven years younger. Gelsene dedi bana, Kalsana dedi bana, Gülsene dedi bana, Ölsene dedi bana. Geldim, Kaldım, Güldüm Öldüm – ‘Come she said to me, Stay she said to me, Smile she said to me, Die she said to me. I came, I stayed, I smiled, I died.’3 Feelings declared? A decision to commit and face consequences? But not marriage. This, records show, only took place in 1948, at Paddington Register Office, Friday 9 January – two days after her decree absolute from Leonard (citing father as corespondent). She loved ‘more than anything else in the world’. He ‘beloved darling […] without whom this life would be meaningless and empty’.