Portrait of a Turkish Family
Page 37
Ateş Orga
Guildford, Surrey, England
16 August 1988
revised 2008–11
1 When, around 1995, Sabiha was given a Turkish copy of Portrait, she reportedly refused to be drawn on either the book or my father: ‘these remarkable ladies from Atatürk’s close circle knew, unlike those reported in the media today, when to talk and what to say’ (Arın Bayraktaroğlu, the book’s Turkish translator, 23 July 2008).
2 Original ending of the first edition.
3 Nâzim Hikmet (1901–63), lines on the back of a photograph, translated Saime Göksu-Timms, 1999.
4 In the event she published just one (remarkable, chilling) story - ‘The Journey’ (Pick of Today’s Short Stories 14, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963, joining a pantheon of writers including Brian Glanville, H. E. Bates, Constantine Fitzgibbon and Mordecai Richler). And one anthology – The House on the Fontanka: Modern Soviet Short Stories (William Kimber, 1970). The latter was dedicated to ‘the two who have most influenced my life, İrfan and Ateş, and to Gloria Slader-Leopold who influenced my youth only a little less’. Angular, elegantly-spoken Gloria Ninette, who’d been to school and through the war with her, and may (once) have harboured feelings for father (she married in 1949), re-entered our lives in the ’60s – disappearing from mine towards the end of 1974.
Postscript
1988, Monday 21 March. Blackrock. A rain-and-sunshine afternoon. There the house stands, 82 St George’s Avenue, atmospheric in its late Georgian lines. New faces live there now, and the once wild garden has been tamed. Searching for anyone who remembers, I get into conversation with a man who points me towards a run-down area, Booterstown Avenue. I find Lillian Higgins, last of the Mooney daughters – the one who’d scalded father into hospital. Ignorant of who I am, she brews a cup of tea and talks, defensively at first, then more freely. She remembers a couple, with a child. Turkish. Nice lady, very protective. But a stern man with broken English, a tough disciplinarian, too tough. A man of good taste. The boy? Yes, quite a rascal, spent his days in their garden up the pear tree at the end talking to Miss Fitzharris and her Rhode Islanders next door at No 80. Never played with other children. In bed by seven. The couple, they used to have their evening meal with a bottle of wine – or was it Martini? There was always a pot of marrow bones on the boil – because marrow and soup, the man said, did you good. Lots of packing cases and strapped trunks, fine books, Oriental carpets … A short name the child had. ‘A – tesh?’ …? Faded eyes stare. The October fire, the fire the whole street knew about, she’d blanked from her consciousness. But not the strangers from across the sea.
2000, June. İstanbul. Metaphorically ‘taking’ father home, crossing the Rumelian lands of his maternal forebears. The jet from Heathrow swings out over the Black Sea before banking to sweep in low over ochrous, pantiled houses and heat-baked concrete strips, then out again, this time across the Marmara, before folding back for the approach to the marble, tubular and stainless steel splendours of Atatürk Airport. A high adrenalin cocktail. Here is a city and its place-names I’ve always known – yet never known. And not seen in over fifty years.
Seventy-two hours, kept company by Emre Aracı,5 stay with me. Past the suspension bridges, past red-roofed Kuleli, the wooded grounds of the old American Robert College for Boys, past the romantic natural marina and landing stage at İstinye, we take the ferry to Sarıyer. The ‘gracious’ rose-scented, magnolia and grapevine paradise of father’s childhood, along with the tumbled-down, weed-choked garden he went back to find as a young officer, is no more, we can only imagine. But the dark, balconied, curvaciously carved, three-storey wooden house that had formerly belonged to Emre’s family still stands, now padlocked and up for sale, in a bad state of repair, a depository for the flotsam and jetsam of the fishing boats tied up nearby, suffocated by take-aways and tenement washing-lines. Sad and forsaken maybe – but it suggests what things must once have been like here.
Next day our journey is different, this time across the ‘Bosphor’ (father’s idiosyncratic spelling), then east along the arid, bumpy road through İzmit to Karamürsel. This is 1999 earthquake country. Everywhere there is devastation – broken houses, cracked walls no more than a brick wide, mound upon mound of rubble, tottering apartment blocks leering like sightless corpses, their windows torn out, their flimsy floors and shells bared to the elements, their distorted fragments of rooms and kitchens pathetic echoes that people had once lived here. Whatever the sense of drugged sleep, of resignation, life continues even so. Old men sit around politicising and smoking, drinking tea from delicate glasses. Tanned, compact, short-cropped, barefoot boys play in the dust. Ramshackle open-front shops lurk beneath tall, uninhabitable buildings. Fruit sellers water their produce. Satellite dishes sprout from unlikely corners. Karamürsel is where aunt Bedia and cousin Oya live. Mehmet’s house. I cannot recall ever having met them – though they assure me I have. We communicate falteringly, silently, a lifetime of different experiences between us. Effectively we’re strangers linked only by name and blood, strangers known to each other only through dated, faded images. Yet they open their house and arms to me. Here are the foods and smells of my childhood. Photographs from when we were young. A shrine to father’s books, still pristine. The telegram I sent in 1970 telling of his death. Carefully pressed memorabilia of other times, another land. We touch, we sense, we drink the moment. The evening bus comes. My aunt gazes after me, matriarchally impassive but her eyes piercing deep, wanting perhaps to see something again of the men into whose family she had married. My cousin busies herself. Her niece and nephew come to say their goodbyes, pictures of eau-de-Cologne grace and discrete modesty. As we pull away I look back, uncaring for time, lingering to remember better this spot where the earth gasps and the sea comes so lazily to kiss.
In the 1890s Pierre Loti called the fortress walls west of the city ‘the most solitary spot in the world where nothing seems to have stirred since the days of the last Byzantine Emperors […] always the same battlements, the same turrets, the same dark hues, laid on by the hand of time, the same regular lines, running straight and dreary, till they are lost on the far horizon … the surrounding country […] studded with clumps of lowering cypresses, as tall as cathedrals, beneath whose shade thousands of Osman sepulchres [lie] crowded together […] so many cemeteries, so many tombs, so many dead.’6 Here Emre and I spend an afternoon, eventually finding what we’ve come for: Merkezefendi, a forgotten expanse of cool stillness and aromatically smoky sun-beamed shadows contrasting the noisy, once Roman, road that separates it from the ramparts. We come across Halide Edib’s grave, neglected and uncelebrated for so famous a mistress of letters. We stumble upon a rusty, long-ruined mausoleum to a Dervish cook. We disbelieve a small, roughly chiselled rock marking the resting place of the painter İbrahim Çallı. Suddenly she’s there. Şevkiye Orga, 1895–18 May 1940.7 The rose-trees father and Mehmet planted have gone, the once shining marble headstone facing the walls is dull, everywhere is a brittle tangle of overgrown weeds and dusty brambles. Tidying what I can, I stoop to her dignity. Then, following her sons before us, ‘with the sun and the kindly rain and the eternal nights to come,’ we leave her to her sleep.
2001, Friday 23 March. Teşikiye, Nişantaşı. Across the park from Harbiye and Notre Dame de Sion … ghosts of marching men … Old Comrades … Ezgi Saydam8 – responsible for intensifying sides of father’s city I might otherwise have viewed differently – from Eyüp to Topkapı, Taksim to Tünel, Çırağan Palas to Ortaköy, Sultan Ahmet to Ayasofya and the ‘Sunken Cistern’, Yeşil Ev to the ‘Pearl of İstanbul’ – has set up a meeting at the Işık Foundation. Sabiha Gökçen, whose burial this day makes national news, comes into the conversation. Someone phones a relative, an old Kuleli soldier, stirring memories. İrfan Orga? Yes … we were cadets together. He went to England … Threw everything away for a foreign woman. A girl from Ireland … Never came back.
Ateş Orga
Ambronay, Rhône
Alps, France
Stambourne, North Essex, England
14 March 2011
5 Composer, conductor, Euro-Ottoman scholar, Anglophile.
6 Aziyadé, translated Marjorie Lawrie, 1927.
7 1895 disputes the beginning of Portrait – but confirms a childhood recollection of father telling me that his mother was in fact only thirteen when he was born.
8 Mezzo-soprano, Austrophile, daughter of the pianist Ergican Saydam (1929– 2009).
Further Reading
İrfan Orga, Turkish Cooking, London, Deutsch Cookery Classics, 1999, Foreword by Jennifer Paterson, Introduction by Ateş Orga
İrfan Orga, The Caravan Moves On, London, Eland Publishing, 2002, Afterword by Ateş Orga
Ateş Orga, ‘Return of the Native’, Cornucopia 22, İstanbul 2000–01
Ateş Orga, ‘İrfan Orga: Flight, Flame, Farewell’, Remarkable Muslims, London, Eland Publishing, 2005
Ateş Orga (ed.), İstanbul: A Collection of the Poetry of Place, London, Eland Publishing, 2002
Ateş Orga, ‘İrfan Orga’s Portrait of a Turkish Family, Genesis of a Literary Masterpiece’, centenary paper, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 19 April 2008, Turkish Area Studies Review, No 12, Autumn 2008
Mehmet at Kuleli
The author in the early 1920s
The author as a military cadet, İstanbul, 1928
Final year cadets, Kuleli: the author standing, right
The author as a fighter pilot
The author and his mother, Şevkiye, in the early 1930s
Bedia and Mehmet with the author’s grandmother, 1939
Şevkiye’s headstone in Merkezefendi
Copyright
First published by Victor Gollancz in 1950
First published by Eland Publishing Limited in 1988,
61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL
This edition first published by Eland Publishing Limited
in association with Galeri Kayseri, Divanyolu 58, İstanbul in 2011
This ebook edition first published by Eland in 2011
All rights reserved © Ateş D’Arcy-Orga, 2011
The right of İrfan Orga to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
Cover Image: Dolmabahçe by Fausto Zonaro (1854–1929)
© The Collection of Mafalda Zonaro
ISBN 978 –1–78060–020–8