Children of War

by Ahmet Yorulmaz

  “Let me see you write down a few examples and hear you read them,” said Kemalettin Bey.

  He pronounced some completely new Turkish words, enunciating them slowly as I wrote them down. After I managed to write down the syllables, he asked me to read the words out and was pleasantly surprised to hear the words trip off my tongue. “Hassan, with this new method I’ll be able to teach you more than I expected at the beginning. Come on, let’s get to work!”

  As the weeks passed, my Turkish vocabulary expanded. Being an Istanbulite himself, Kiri Vladimiros oversaw what I had learned after every lesson, asking me to read out what I had written, then listening out to correct any omissions or mistakes. Kemalettin Bey, who monitored my progress by making me repeat the previous week’s lesson, was pleased with how much I had learned. His work was all the more successful due to the additional help of Kiri Vladimiros explaining the meanings of the Turkish words to me in Greek. Really, I had two Turkish teachers – one direct and one indirect. In time, starting off with simple expressions, I was able to construct whole sentences of my own.

  __________

  * In 1919, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Greek forces landed in Izmir encouraged by promises of territorial gain from the western Allies and particularly from British prime minister David Lloyd George.

  10

  Kiri Vladimiros was a person brimming with humanity, of the kind that didn’t stop him criticising his own people when necessary, and didn’t prevent him seeing both the good and the bad in them. After all, he had grown up in the Ottoman capital, where his profession as a printer had encouraged him to read and develop his own judgement. His ideas were shaped by the common decency necessary for communal co-existence. Even now, years later, as I write this and think of the things I’ve seen in some of the people from Central Anatolia who like us have come and settled here, I realise he was a special person who genuinely knew what he was talking about.

  One Saturday evening, as we were eating and drinking around the large table in his house, I asked him, “Have your Greeks always been ruled by our Turks?”

  “That’s a good question, Hassanaki,” mused Kiri Vladimiros. “Until your Turks came this way from Central Asia, the Greeks were spreading their wings unchecked. The people at the top know these things, but not ordinary Greeks – they think it was only the Turks who came from somewhere else and that’s why they attack them.”

  “Really, is it true?”

  “Really, Hassanaki. The Greeks have some crimes to answer for going back to before your ancestors arrived, never mind what they’re doing to you now. Before the Ottomans were even dots on the horizon, my kinsfolk passed through Asia Minor – I mean Anatolia – and to the north of Afghanistan, through Samarkand and Kabul to China. On the way they declared some places Greek states. I know the names are strange to you because you haven’t studied geography, but they’re real. Remind me on Monday and I’ll show them to you on the world atlas at the print house.”

  “It’s unbelievable!”

  “Believe it, my lad! Believe it! My ancestors were the chief conquerors, and not just in Asia and Asia Minor – they spread along the whole of the Mediterranean. They sent in the priests and converted a lot of people to Christianity. I don’t want to confuse you too much with all this, so I’ll just say that they spread across Asia, Africa and the whole of Europe. It carried on until the Europeans got sick of it and stopped us in our tracks. Afterwards, your Turks came from Central Asia and started driving us out, squeezing us into a smaller space. That’s what’s behind this fight now: the Greeks being shrunk into a smaller space after all that expansion. Unfortunately for my people, the Turks were warriors.”

  “I can hardly believe what you’re saying.”

  “In the future, when you’ve had more chance to read and open your eyes, you’ll understand the truth in what I’m saying. Don’t let the murders here frighten you. We’re in the death throes of Greek expansionism. We’ve got the Europeans on one side and your people from Central Asia on the other, taking our swords from us and breaking them in two. If you think about it, you can see that we Greeks have become trading people. When we were forced to slow down on all sides, we turned to trade.”

  “You say, ‘Don’t be afraid,’ but how can I not be afraid? They murdered the two people who were the backbone of our family, they drove us from our land, our home!”

  Kiri Vladimiros took a few more of the stuffed squash flowers that my mother had made for me to bring and placed them on his plate. “These taste so good – good enough to make a man forget to drink his wine.”

  After sipping a mouthful of wine, he placed one of the stuffed flowers in his mouth and began to chew.

  “Let me repeat myself to make sure you understand what I’m saying. My people are floundering in the water and as the ripples spread out, they cause the kind of tragedies that happened to you. Just like I said, the Greeks were expanding, and everything was going well. Then along came the newcomers and pushed us out, as far as this island. Now we’re in a battle over the last place we were chased to. Do you see what I mean?”

  We were interrupted by the smiling face of Kiriya Evthimiya, “That’s enough explaining for now, Vladimiros. You’ve talked so much, Hassanaki looks thunderstruck. Talk about something a bit lighter. Try a bit of this chard pie, both of you.”

  11

  My relationship with the glamorous Hüsnüye, the sister-in-law of Blind Rahmi, began on the day my family bought a house in Chania. When we put together the money left from my wages at the print house, the money saved from my street sales and what remained from the things we had brought from the village, we were able to buy the house we had been renting in Veneti Kastana. It was lucky for me that my mother was such an industrious and thrifty person. I was thirteen years old when we were hounded from the village and by the time we bought the house in the city I was twenty-one. These days, I wore a fez on my head. I had to make sure I was smartly dressed and well turned out now I was working for a Christian and responsible for the print house’s external business. I gradually got used to taking extra care over my appearance and eventually took great pleasure in it.

  It was Hüsnüye who gave me the name Aynakis, meaning “little mirror”. The label stuck and became my nickname for ever after. It was a fact that the way I dressed attracted attention from women – both Greeks and Turkish – and I loved it. I had certainly been awoken by seeing my big brother fooling around with the widow Photini next door in our village.

  At that time, up until I got together with Hüsnüye, I was a regular visitor to a Greek woman who received men at her house in the suburbs of Chania. She satisfied my physical needs although I knew that I also longed for something deeper. I knew that sleeping with a woman with no mutual flirtation, no laughing together or kissing was nothing more than a discharge of energy…

  With Hüsnüye, I experienced absolute passion and togetherness. Her brother-in-law worked in Floru’s coffeehouse in Splantzia and despite having perfect eyesight was for some reason called Blind Rahmi. It was another nickname, like Aynakis, and I wasn’t sure if it was because he was unaware what his sister-in-law got up to, or for some other reason. One day, as I was passing in front of Floru’s coffeehouse, I heard his voice call out from the stove at the back of the café.

  “Aynakis! Good day to you!”

  I turned and entered the café. “Hey,” I said, “I guess it’s me you want to talk to, but why are you calling me Aynakis?”

  He leaned over, closer to my ear.

  “That’s what my sister-in-law, Hüsnüye, calls you. I know your name is Hassanakis.”

  “So you mean that I have a name that I don’t know, Aynakis, thanks to your sister-in-law, who I also don’t know?”

  Rahmi smiled. “So it seems! It’s not such a bad name…”

  He explained why he had called me over. His sister-in-law needed some help with an official problem and he wondered if I could sort it out. He seemed to think
I would be able to do it because it was straightforward and, in any case, Vladimiros would be able to give me some advice about it. He described the location of her house so I could go and get some more details. He didn’t neglect to say that I would be paid for my trouble.

  The next morning, as I set off with my daily list of jobs for the print house, I considered whether or not I should go to the house of the renowned, glamorous Hüsnüye at this time of the morning. In the end, I decided to go. It would be a thrill to see a woman famous for her looks dressed in her casual house clothes first thing in the morning. And who knows what might happen, maybe… I woke up from my fantasy and gave myself a good talking to. “Stop it,” I told myself, “People like that have better things to do than hang around for people like you.” Nevertheless, she had found time to give me a special nickname… Surely that meant something?

  With my mind lost in all these thoughts, I finally found Hüsnüye’s house and knocked on the door at 9 a.m. An elderly woman opened the door. I told her I had been sent by Blind Rahmi and gave my name. After keeping me waiting on the street so long that I was starting to get irritated, she invited me in and signalled for me to sit down and wait on the bench just by the entrance. I had been sitting there for a while when a woman appeared at the head of the stairway leading to the upper floor. She stopped for a moment and looked down at me. She was a curvaceous woman, but the top and bottom halves of her body tapered to a point so finely as to give the impression of two separate triangles; in the middle, her delicate waist added an alluring elegance to her ample body. She was fair-skinned, had long, raven hair in copious ring curls and wore make-up. She came down the stairs and casually sat down on the other end of the bench. Her eyes were as black as her hair.

  “Hassan Efendi,” she began, “I spoke to my brother-in-law about you three days ago. He told me he saw you yesterday, so I was expecting you today. Did he at least tell you it was me who gave you the name Aynakis?”

  “Yes, he told me to come and see you and he also told me about the name.”

  Her dark eyes were looking straight into mine. “We can have a coffee together, can’t we?”

  Without waiting for my answer, she asked the other woman to make two coffees. Then she began to explain her problem. There had been an inheritance from her father, which had been split equally between her and another daughter, Rahmi’s wife. Regrettably, instead of taking care of their share of the money and making something of it, her sister and brother-in-law had burnt through it in no time, which meant that Rahmi now had to work on a coffee stove. As for her, I don’t know how she managed it, but she didn’t just look after her own share, she used her enterprising female nature to turn it into a good income, enough to stand on her own two feet. Recently, however, a Greek had turned up, claiming to have some papers that showed he was the true owner of a shop that Hüsnüye was renting out. She wanted me to take care of the matter on her behalf until her name was cleared.

  Compared to Mahmut’s lover, Photini, and the woman in the suburbs of Chania who had given me my first experiences, this woman had a different air about her. This was something else. I had a feeling of being pulled towards a precipice by her eyes, a bewildering, intoxicating air of arousal. The excitement of uncertainty. As she sipped coffee and explained the story, she was also slowly moving nearer to me, at times touching or even holding on to my arm as she tried to emphasise a certain point she was making. Something in her manner and the way she spoke filled me with an urge to caress her face and put my arms round her delicate waist.

  I passed on the information she had given me to Kiri Vladimiros to ask for his help in figuring out what I should do. He sat at the table and wrote a petition in the name of Hüsnüye, telling me to take it back to her the next morning to get her seal. Then I was to take it to an official, called Stamatakis, who worked in the local administration, and make sure to pass on his best wishes at the same time. Stamatakis would be able to resolve the matter, but Kiri Vladimiros advised me to take along five oka of the local cheese called malaka that had just been made, together with a demijohn of good wine.

  In the morning, I went back to Hüsnüye’s house to read her the petition and get her seal. I told her the recommended bribes and she agreed to all of them. Afterwards, I headed for the local government offices, where I found Stamatakis straightaway. I whispered into his ear what Vladimiros had told me and his face lit up immediately on hearing the name of his old friend. He read the petition carefully, before saying, “What Kiri Vladimiros has written here is absolutely correct. You can assure him the subject is closed.”

  While sorting this out, to make sure the print house daily affairs didn’t fall behind schedule, I had been dropping into Hüsnüye’s in the morning on my way out after picking up the list of tasks from the office. The next morning, I calculated the cost of the cheese and wine and knocked on her door once again. I reported back on the events of the previous day: that the petition written in her name had been accepted, that the Greek would no longer be able to interfere in the shop and that there was nothing more she needed to worry about on that front. I also told her the costs that had been incurred from the wine, cheese and two porters to carry it all. This morning, the elderly woman wasn’t around and Hüsnüye’s invitation to coffee felt different, somehow more enticing. “Hatice isn’t here,” she began, “You’ll join me for something sweet followed by a coffee made by my own fair hand, won’t you?”

  She presented me with the classic offering of Cretan hospitality, marmalade accompanied by a glass of water, then went into the kitchen to prepare the coffee. After a short time, I got up and went towards the kitchen, driven by my desire to hear more of the husky, guttural voice that I found so attractive. I wanted to feel her next to me. I had to know how she felt. There was something about this woman that had turned my head upside down for the last three days, that made me forget the fear and panic all around me and just think about wanting her. The work I had done for her and my payment were a million miles from my thoughts.

  Hearing my timid footsteps behind her, she turned, making me stop in my tracks before I was near enough to touch her. “I would have brought your coffee. You didn’t need to come.”

  Making no attempt to hide my desire, I looked into her eyes, overwhelmed with the feeling of being pulled into the darkness of a bottomless well. “I wanted to get closer to you and hear your voice again.”

  “Hatice could come back at any moment… We’ll be a disgrace!”

  There was something flimsy about her rejection – something that made me doubt its sincerity. The sequence of recent events whirled through my head, starting from giving me, a stranger, a nickname, then telling me all her problems virtually on the doorstep, inviting me inside, and brushing against my hand and arm with every second sentence. And as if that wasn’t enough… Weren’t those sultry looks she gave me? And why send Hatice away on an errand at the very time she knew I was coming… only to threaten me with Hatice to keep me in my place? It made no sense.

  Placing my two hands on her slender waist, I pulled her towards me and planted a lingering kiss on her cheek at the edge of her mouth. She was stunned into silence, and collapsing into the chair next to the table, began to take deep gulps of air. Her face, framed with long curls, had gone bright red and her nostrils widened. She was taller and bigger than me and I wondered how I had managed to spirit my mouth on to hers unless she had instinctively leaned down towards me when she felt my hands on her waist – there was no other explanation for it. Emboldened by her red face and the loosening of her body, this time I kissed her on the lips.

  The kiss gave way to a storm of passion. Our bodies were entwined, and as we lost ourselves in the hungry kisses, I felt her take control of me. Now it was she who was leading the way. It seemed clear that the worry of being discovered by Hatice had been just a yarn. She was doing things to me that I had never experienced or felt when I was with the Greek woman on the outskirts of town. When I could take it no more, she fell back
on to the wicker chair, pulling me down between her open legs. And there, with her cries reverberating around the kitchen walls, the storm abated. As she leaned back on the chair, her smooth lily-white legs wide apart, she tried to cover herself with her hands.

  12

  Taking care of the print house nitty-gritty meant that I got to learn about all shades of Chania life. So when Kiri Vladimiros began to cut down on his alcohol drinking due to his age and the heat, particularly in the summer, I was happy to hang out at the tavernas with others of my age in the week, and sometimes on Saturdays as well after I had taken my leave from Kiri Vladimiros and his wife. The print house was a school to me in many ways: firstly, it introduced me to the more serious world of commerce, very different to the life of a street seller; secondly, it opened my mind; and lastly, it taught me how to behave with different people and get things done. Even better, I was now making a comfortable living. But best of all these positives was meeting the magnificent Hüsnüye.

  Hüsnüye was as warm as she was beautiful. But that was something that only those close to her could have known. The precious secrets of her private world, her sexual warmth and finesse were things that could only be known by the few people like me that she had taken into her arms. People looking at her from the outside remarked on her beauty, while talking maliciously behind her back, but that was it. They knew nothing of her former life in Kumkapı,* the poor district of Chania inhabited by seafarers, of her North African roots, or of her expertise in love; nothing of the exquisite way she prepared a table of meze to accompany drinking, nor how perfect she was as a drinking companion, never losing her impeccable manners.

  Knowing only too well what poverty was, Hüsnüye had skilfully managed to make a living from her portion of the money left to her from her seafaring father’s lifetime of struggle to look after his daughters. Unlike her sister and brother-in-law, she had used her share with the utmost care and protected what she had. I often wondered about her sexual passion and where she had learned her skills. Now and again, when I felt it was appropriate, I asked her, but she couldn’t be made to talk.