Noontime in Yenisehir

by Sevgi Soysal

  Nurten had placed the forks upside down on the table again. Mevhibe Hanım was rearranging them one by one with a grave expression on her face. Olcay entered the room. She breezed by her mother like the wind. Her mother understood that she was heading for the door.

  “Just where do you think you’re going? I didn’t even know you were here.”

  “It’s so hot out, I came back to put on something lighter …”

  “How did your exam go?”

  “See you later.”

  “I asked you a question …”

  “Sheesh, how should I know? They haven’t posted the grades yet …”

  “But certainly you have an idea?”

  “So-so.”

  “What do you mean ‘so-so’?”

  “You’re at it again, asking questions that have no answers.”

  “Where do you think you’re going? Your father and brother are on their way, we’re going to have lunch …”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “No way, I won’t have it.”

  “How so? It’s my mouth, isn’t it?”

  “Now look here, little lady. Then why am I spending a fortune on the help and all this money on food?”

  “So, you can have four meatballs each today. Nothing wrong with that, is there? There’s usually never enough for Doğan anyway. And that way, Nurten Hanım will get to eat her own meatballs too.”

  “You saucy thing you! Nurten is perfectly comfortable here.”

  “C’mon, Mom. You’re not going to try and tell me being a maid is a comfortable job now, are you?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? Do you know what her house is like? It’s got leaks all over the place. The woman’s got sciatica, she’d die if she stayed there all day. At least here she can keep warm.”

  Olcay wants to go to the other side of Mount Qaf

  Annoyed, Olcay grew quiet. She had long ago decided that her mother, like most people around her, was one of those people who would never change and were impossible to talk to. And so Olcay would head straight to her room as soon as she got home, and only leave it to enter their midst at dinnertime. She thought, If only they wouldn’t barge into my room and disturb me like they do … Her mother never tired of opening the door to her room every night, every God given night, and telling her that she’d ruin her eyes from reading so much. Olcay was positively certain that her mother did this for the sole purpose of agitating her. Her mother had always come between her and the things she liked and enjoyed. Between her and love. If it was a book she loved, then between her and the book. Between her and colorful balloons …

  She adored colorful balloons when she was little. Back then, her father had just bought a new car. On Sundays they’d go out to the Atatürk’s Farm, to the Dam, as if it were some mandatory weekly assignment they were obliged to complete. Excruciating, loveless excursions they were. Her mother and father’s relationship made Olcay feel ice cold inside. Not once had she ever witnessed them saying a warm, reckless word to one another, not once had she ever seen her mother kiss her father on the cheek, not once had she ever observed her father giving her mother a slap on the buttocks, not once had she ever seen them engage in a fight that began with rage and culminated in tears, not once had she ever witnessed behavior that might indicate they had sexual relations. Whenever it occurred to her that they must have slept together at some point, as evidenced by the very existence of herself and her brother, she’d feel ice cold inside. She couldn’t imagine those two people being that close, engaged in such a human exchange, and whenever she did try to envision it, she’d stiffen with horror. The thought was akin to the portrait of her long dead grandfather which hung on the wall coming to life, taking Olcay onto his lap and bouncing her on his knee. She’d think of ice-cold hands, dead hands embracing her, and the damp, skeletal legs of a corpse touching her body. Cold and loveless question-and-answer sessions. Conversations and pauses intended only to remind the other of duties and responsibilities. Her parents remained quiet throughout those Sunday excursions. They stood on either side of a silent, loveless wall, exchanging with one another only the most essential information about the side of the wall facing them.

  “Did you get the house keys?”

  “Did you turn off the gas?”

  “Good Lord, close that window, the kid’s all sweaty, she’ll get sick!”

  “Didn’t you bring the kid’s sweater?”

  “This car shakes an awful lot. Olcay never throws up in İsmet Ağabey’s car.”

  “And was it İsmet’s wife who bought him his car, hm?”

  “How many times have I told you not to slam the car door like that!”

  “Look to your right, your right I said. There’s a truck coming!”

  “How many times have I told you not to put those sweaters in the back window!”

  “How long will we be staying? I need to know whether I should bring the sweaters or not.”

  “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  “Kids, you can’t have soda. It’ll make you sick to your stomach.”

  “If you go on whining about wanting a balloon again, I’ll whip the living daylights out of you.”

  Olcay loved balloons. Big, colorful balloons. Whenever she saw a balloon seller holding a bunch of colorful balloons, she felt weightless inside and imagined herself soaring into the sky together with them, up and over that depressing wall of lovelessness. For hours she would beg her mother for a single balloon. “Please, Mommy, buy me a balloon, please, please pretty please, Mommy, buy me a balloon!”

  Most of the time her mother would turn a deaf ear to her pleas. But sometimes, especially when she was too tired and stressed to put up a fight, she would buy Olcay a balloon, just to shut her up. And it was at such moments that Olcay would commit one of her greatest crimes. She would go out into the street holding the balloon, and quickly hand it over to the first poor child she encountered. This habit of hers drove her mother crazy.

  “Why did you give him your balloon?”

  “So he could fly?”

  “Who?”

  “Him … That kid …”

  “To where, you dimwit?”

  “ …”

  Olcay never answered the question. Because the truth was, she wanted to send those poor kids flying with her balloon, like on the flying carpets in the fairytales her grandmother told her, to the other side of Mount Qaf. The reason why she wanted to send those kids flying over Mount Qaf was simple. When she asked why those kids were poor, she was told that that was just the way the world was. “When I grow up, I’m going to be super rich, and I’m going to put all of those kids in a giant house. That way, they won’t have to curl up and sleep on the sidewalk …” Her mother would respond with something along the likes of, “So it’s up to you now to change the world, is that so, you dimwit?” Olcay would grow furious at these responses, which she could only attribute to her mother’s stinginess. What child could possibly tolerate her mother yanking her away from toy stores, simit-sellers, and ice cream vendors? But whenever she spoke to her mother of the huge, giant house, big enough to take in all the Gypsy kids and the beggars, with a kitchen full of food, the only response she ever got was, “So you’re going to change the world now, are you, you dimwit?” Even in her responses, her mother was stingy.

  Well, if the world really was unchangeable, and if those children really were doomed to a life of begging on rainy sidewalks in this world, then Olcay would tie them to colorful balloons and fly them over Mount Qaf. In the fairytales that her grandmother never wearied of telling her and that Olcay never wearied of listening to, on the other side of Mount Qaf there were princes, and they married poor girls whose hearts’ desires they fulfilled, and everyone lived happily ever after. There, when the poor shepherd answered the king’s three questions correctly, he married the princess. There, when an orphan plopped down on a rock with a weary sigh, crying, a giant with a maw as big as the sky would appear and bestow palaces upon the child. From the stomach of a
fish caught by a poor fisherman in the lake would emerge a wishing ring, and the fairies that came out of the wishing ring would turn the fisherman’s cabin into a chateau. Olcay loved her grandmother, most of all because she told her fairytales about Mount Qaf, where the wall of lovelessness had collapsed. She didn’t condemn all poor children to a life of poverty like her mother did; she turned them into princesses, princes and kings.

  And she loved colorful balloons too. Colorful balloons, which exploded in wondrous beauty, were like the fairytales her grandmother told. Still, perhaps they could carry the children to the other side of Mount Qaf.

  She didn’t tell her mother all this of course. She knew that her mother would say that all of those fairytales were nothing but nonsense and that she would accuse her grandmother of messing with the mind of her daughter, who was already a handful to begin with. She would burst the balloon, just like that. “What a dimwitted, hotheaded kid!” “A kid who’s always looking for something to cry about!” Such certain, unwavering judgments were always being passed about her. Her mother said that she would never get her a balloon again, because she insisted on giving them to others. And so seeing again and again how nearly everything she said only led to critical commentary and unwavering judgments passed against her, Olcay became a silent child. She began spending more time with her grandmother. She had her tell her the same fairytales over and over again, and frequently sobbed in silence. One day, Olcay’s mother saw her struggling to do the namaz prayer on her own. She was furious. Olcay’s mother came from a staunchly secular family that boasted a Republican People’s Party MP. She had been raised to know what was what. But when it came to her daughter, well, she was a different story, and it was all because of that ignorant mother-in-law of hers, messing with the child’s mind. At home this problem was addressed with the utmost sobriety and the grandmother was sent off to live with her daughter. Endowed with a monthly stipend of course. Thus did the kind-hearted princes and the princesses who did not hesitate to marry shepherds disappear from her life. The wall of lovelessness was growing higher. For a while Olcay made do with the prayers she’d learned from her grandmother; but the prayers were in Arabic and so Olcay garbled the sounds, not understanding their meaning. Every night, before she went to sleep, she prayed that her loved ones wouldn’t die, wouldn’t grow ill and wouldn’t become poor. Even for her mother, who refused to buy her a balloon.

  Those Sunday outings continued, with never a balloon, not one soda, not a single ice cream. Whenever Olcay went out into the yard, she always dreamed of making it over the wall of lovelessness. In her relationships with other children she was the compromiser. She did her best to be loved. And she was always the one to grin and bear it, so that they would let her play. The children caught on immediately. They taunted her, their natural reaction against the weak. They took her ball away from her, and then wouldn’t let her play. She wasn’t good at any games because she’d been raised in an overly protective environment in which the thought of her perspiring, and thus triggering a series of illnesses, caused enormous concern. She was weak and constantly ill. She grew tired quickly. It was impossible for her to keep up with the other children who, for their part, had no scruples about taking her ball and did not like her. Sometimes, when the injustice of it all became too unbearable, she complained to her mother and got her ball back. And then the children got their revenge by not speaking to her. When that happened, she would beg them to make up with her. But they wouldn’t. Once they were finally convinced that they’d made her beg enough, they’d tell her, “Go get us some gum, and then we can make up.” And so, unbeknownst to her mother, she bought them gum. She wasn’t rich like they thought. Her mother gave her very little spending money. A few times, in order to buy the affection of the other children, she stole money from her mother’s purse. Once her mother caught her. The woman was utterly shocked, completely horrified. The idea that someone who belonged to a family such as hers, that the grandchild of Doğan Bey … could commit robbery! Olcay was a disgrace to the entire family. It was for this reason that Olcay’s mother got her father to hit her for the very first time. It was a cold, traitorous punishment, like an execution deemed imperative. Olcay was locked up in a dark room where she was made to wait until she got her punishment. No one asked her why she had attempted to steal the money. And if they had, she wouldn’t have been able to answer. After that incident, it became more difficult for her to buy gum and for her to buy the other children’s affection. It cost her, a lot. And the children meted out their own punishment. They frightened her when she went out into the yard. They threw clawing cats at her. And Olcay would scream and scream at the top of her lungs. She was a timid child. She had terrifying nightmares. Again and again djinns, hellhounds, giants and demons would emerge from the shapes of the curtains and attack her. She also grew frightened of going out into the yard. Beneath her bed hid a coven of evil spirits. When it was time to go to sleep, instead of walking to her bed she leapt into it from as far away as possible.

  Fear wound around her like a coil. And that coil of fear became her sole refuge inside the darkness of the wall of lovelessness. She locked herself up in her room and surrendered herself to painful, terrifying thoughts for hours on end. Inside that coil of fear, she sought something to hold onto. That’s how she started reading. She read anything and everything she could get her hands on. Reading released her, if only temporarily, from the suffocating nightmares. The world she read about in the books and magazines was so much merrier than the terrifying dreams in which she lived. At first, no one paid any attention to her reading. But then when her eyesight began to deteriorate while she was still just in middle school, her mother decided to put her foot down and take control of the situation. Her mother’s attempted obstructions, however, only served to fuel Olcay’s curiosity. One time, her mother sold all of her books to a junk dealer. For a week Olcay hardly ate a bite and she spoke to no one. Then she started locking herself up in the bathroom in order to read books she’d gotten from her friends. Her mother grew concerned. Her father on the other hand couldn’t have cared less. He had work to do, papers and expert witness reports to write. He had no time to deal with an unsound daughter. Finally, Olcay was taken to a psychiatrist. The doctor took Olcay’s mother aside and told her that her daughter’s mental health was in shambles, that it was imperative she start developing healthy relationships with her peers. Mevhibe Hanım grew frightened. She recalled her brother Mahmut. Her father had loved Mahmut more than any of his other children. Mahmut was always at the top of his class. Their father used to say, “I’m going to send the boy to Switzerland to study.” Like his father, Mahmut too would become a member of parliament or, even better, prime minister. And so her father, that incredibly stingy man, went so far as to hire a private language tutor for the boy. Then, upon hitting puberty, Mahmut suddenly grew strange. He stopped speaking to anyone. One day, the evlatlık of the house let out a piercing scream, sending the family scrambling. (This story was actually a family secret kept from Mevhibe even. Mevhibe heard about the incident much later on from her aunt.) Mahmut had first raped the girl, and then attempted to choke her to death. A robust girl with arms grown strong from beating so many rugs and washing so much laundry, she managed to grab the boy’s leg and pull him to the ground. Having lost his grip, Mahmut proceeded to chase after the girl in a state of frenzy, half-naked, his hair and face a mess, emitting horrific screams. The boy’s father and the two guests who happened to be over that night were barely able to restrain him. Later, the boy was taken to somewhere in Europe, and finally, having exhausted all other solutions, he was locked up in an insane asylum. The diagnosis: early dementia. And the girl? How was Mevhibe Hanım supposed to know what happened to the girl? This story had been kept secret, insofar as possible, not only from Mevhibe Hanım, but from all other family members and friends as well. All good, upstanding families have their secrets. Mevhibe Hanım, upon learning about this incident long after the fact, was unable to overcome
her horror. And so, her fear that her own daughter might someday suffer a similar illness trumped her stinginess, and she enrolled her daughter in the prestigious Istanbul American School for Girls.