Days of Moonlight

by Loren Edizel

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DAYS OF MOONLIGHT

  “Loren Edizel’s fiction speaks through the passage of time itself—the poignancy of what history erases and what only the written word can save. Lovingly written, Days of Moonlight reveals the passionate love and friendship of two women who embody the history and culture of a passing age, and the tender bonds of family and place.

  —CAROLE GIANGRANDE, author of All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

  “This is a little gem of a book, full of all the tales that make us and unmake us—real and imagined ones, past and present ones. I am infatuated with the voice of our protagonist Mehtap, at times poignant, at times funny—it is totally unique and, at the same time, all of us. It is a story about love, the choices we make, and the choices that life makes for us.”

  —CECILIA EKBÄCK, author of Wolf Winter and In the Month of the Midnight Sun

  “From the first page, via two simple bracelets, Loren Edizel’s Days of Moonlight brings the reader to heartbreakingly real crossroads where desire, family secrets, and the legacy of Greco-Turkish conflict all meet—and yet, thanks to the author’s concise images and considered style, the novel also succeeds in reading with the dreamy timelessness we love in the greatest myths and fables. It’s wonderful.”

  —DANIEL PERRY, author of Nobody Looks That Young Here

  “Reading this novel was like sliding into a warm bath. It’s a luminous work, a love story that spans several decades. There is also much wisdom and insight to be found along the way. Reader, you are in for a treat.”

  —MORRIS BERMAN, author of The Reenchantment of the World

  “A beautiful, moving portrayal of the complexities and richness of life, and love gained, lost, and re-found—a poetic novel full of visceral imagery. You can hear the clinking of the tea glasses, taste the salt of the Aegean Sea, and see the red-tiled roofs of Izmir. You will be transported to Crete, Turkey, and Canada where past and present comingle in the sensual and often bittersweet power of memory, and become immersed in the stories of strong women, and the women and men they love.”

  —MELINDA VANDENBELD GILES, author of Clara Awake

  DAYS OF MOONLIGHT

  Copyright © 2018 Loren Edizel

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  Cover artwork: Gerar Edizel, “Steps in Izmir,” 2017, watercolour on paper,

  21 x 20.5 centimetres.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Days of Moonlight is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Edizel, Loren, author

  Days of moonlight / Loren Edizel.

  (Inanna poetry & fiction series)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77133-477-8 (softcover).— ISBN 978-1-77133-478-5 (epub).—

  ISBN 978-1-77133-479-2 (Kindle).— ISBN 978-1-77133-480-8 (pdf)

  I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series

  PS8609.D59D39 2018 C813’.6 C2018-901517-9

  C2018-901518-7

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765

  Email: inanna.publications@inanna.ca Website: www.inanna.ca

  DAYS OF MOONLIGHT

  a novel

  Loren Edizel

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  For Alfredo, Nikola, Maura, and Jacques

  Silence is the language of God, all else is poor translation.

  —Mevlâna Celâlleddin-i Rumî

  Izmir, January 6, 2010

  My dear Mehtap,

  I will be brief. I have two golden bracelets, my inheritance from Crete, which I bequeath to you. If you have daughters, you may give one to each. I haven’t heard from you in very many years. I hope you’re happy and fulfilled.

  These bracelets represent the story of the Labyrinth. For a long time, I thought they represented the Minotaur’s tale. But the labyrinth will do you in long before the Minotaur. This is what I believe now. Hard to say why such savagery is embossed on women’s jewellery. Those involved are long dead, so we shall never know.

  You must come before they are stolen. I hardly ever wore them. No one has ever worn them. They’ve spent their lives in the darkness of tidy drawers, wrapped in cloth.

  In this package are some of my old notebooks. Those I could find to take with me to this wretched place. The others are somewhere in the house … I couldn’t remember where. I’ve asked that they be sent to you when they’re found.

  I hope you’ll remember me with kindness in spite of some things you’ll read here and offer my soul refuge in your generous heart.

  Your loving aunt,

  Mehtap

  Notebook I. The Journal

  I DON’T LIKE THE MEN I DATE, in general. I don’t like the coarseness of their features, the stubble on their faces which most don’t seem to bother with. I want to smell perfume and aftershave. Is that too much to ask? For instance, today, on the ferry, the man the girls from work set me up with. He was taking me to Karşıyaka for tea. The breeze blowing through his white shirt kept bringing acrid odours to my nose. Nice enough man, otherwise. Not much hair on top, and a belly, mind you. The creases in his pants seemed a few weeks old. Works at the post office in Pasaport. The girls tell me I’m too picky, and I’ll never find a husband. They use the expression “you’re going to stay on the shelf,” my expiry date having already passed at twenty-nine. I keep my thoughts to myself, but I feel like telling them, “Why do I need a husband? So he can sentence me to a life of disillusionment like the rest of you?” I mean, when they talk about marriage it never sounds like something you’d want to do. Not one of them talks about how she can’t wait to get in the sack with her husband at night. Why is that? Out of modesty? I doubt it. As for the security of marriage, I think they are all fools to think their puny, bureaucrat husbands are actually offering them “security.” They are working women, aren’t they?

  HE WAS TALKING TO ME about his wife today, how she gives him a hard time and is always nagging. He rolled his eyes and stretched the vowels in “always” when he said it. His mistress, for whom he has set up an apartment in a small cul-de-sac at the other end of the city, also complains. Do you love your wife, or your mistress? I asked. My wife has morphed into my mother. My mistress is delightful, but her whining is beginning to make things less so. If she morphs into my wife, I’m done. She is gorgeous though, in an addictive sort of way. She has cost me a furnished apartment already and if I give her jewellery, she whines a little less. I’m an idiot he said, laughing. I’m a damned idiot. I waited for him to stop and asked: What was it about your wife that made you want to marry her in the first place? She was handsome,
and distinguished. My parents approved. She wouldn’t give me the time of day when I was courting her. I found that intriguing. After I married her, she continued to give me a hard time. But I no longer find it intriguing. His wide-mouthed laughter made him snort. As for her distinguished airs, well, on closer observation, I would define them as bourgeois arrogance. Underneath it all, she has a coarse and petty heart, you know what I mean? You’re not like the women I know, he said. I can tell you anything, and I feel free. So I told him he was bourgeois and arrogant himself. Underneath his lordly pretensions he was rather coarse, too. See? he exclaimed. I’m your boss and you’re not one bit afraid of me. I cannot live without your truth! Shall we now write that letter to the pompous fool in Belgium, the one who is charging me a fortune for the equipment I need? You know the routine, anyway. I’ll sign when you’re done. And upon these words, he went back to his office and closed the door.

  TODAY, ON THE STREETCAR, on my way home after work, I was watching the girls from a nearby high school who boarded in a noisy, giggly group; their skirts considerably shorter than the prescribed rules, their pigtails limp and their faces littered with pimples. They seemed so fresh and vivid compared to everyone else. Compared to me. We all sat there, working women, working men, with our grey faces, the dust of our boring lives muting even the most colourful purse or dress, staring in envy. What are these girls’ ambitions? I imagine they must have so many, nowadays. What were mine?

  WHERE IS THE ELECTRIC FAN when I need it? It must be in the attic and I don’t want to go crouching in the dust and cobwebs to find it. The summer heat is making the asphalt on the street soft. Even the gevrek1 boy with the large pan on his head is fanning himself with a newspaper going up the stairs. He isn’t shouting “Gevrek!” with his usual gusto either. He must be twelve, thirteen. Out so early in the morning, carrying hundreds of gevreks on his head, on a Sunday. He looked up as he passed the house. He knows I’m sitting in the cumba2 having my tea. I buy half a dozen every Sunday to help him finish his job faster. Problem is I eat all of them, too. Well, I’ll go call him. He looks so desperate in this heat.

  I’m back, having bought a dozen oven-warm gevreks. I shall not eat them, this time. I’ll bring them to His summer house in Çeşme, along with the box of baklava. It’s tradition. Every summer, the first Sunday of July, he invites me to his summer house so I can swim and enjoy the beach as his guest, with his family. He has three daughters. His wife, of course. Me. The servants. And the gardener. More like a summer palace, surrounded by palm trees, pines, and dozens of fragrant oleanders in bloom buzzing madly with concealed cicadas. This is what usually happens: he sends the chauffeur to pick me up at my house. The stout man is clad in a black suit with tie and comes out of the car to open my door, dabbing a damp white handkerchief on his ever-expanding forehead to stop the flow of sweat. I call him Fehmi Bey. He calls me Mehtap Hanım. As soon as we settle in the car, I say, “Fehmi Bey, aren’t you going to take off that black jacket? It must be so uncomfortable in this sweltering heat. I cannot bear to see you like this.” He chuckles and removes his jacket. The back of his short-sleeved white shirt is soaked.

  “Thank you Mehtap Hanım,” he says. “Patron (this is how we all call Him) would get mad if he knew. He wants me in the suit at all times. I’ll stop the car and put it back on before we arrive.”

  I reply, “Patron should try to spend five minutes in a black suit, in this boiling car, himself.”

  Fehmi Bey chuckles, “Mehtap Hanım, we should not criticize Patron. Thanks to him I have raised my children. May the grace of God be with him.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Fehmi Bey,” I retort, “but somebody has to bring him to his senses.”

  On the way to Çeşme, with all four windows rolled down and hot air rushing through the vehicle to flatten itself on my damp face like an invisible iron, we continue chatting. He likes to talk politics. Rather, how the government is corrupt and fails us all. On this subject, he is voluble, and the conversation takes us to Kennedy Meydanı. He does honk irritably a few times on the way and digresses from politics to interject, “Who is giving these donkeys drivers’ licences, I want to know!” He never curses in my presence, of course, but by the end of this ride, I’m assured we have donkeys in parliament, on the roads, in high and low places. Tragically, the list includes the sons of these various donkeys waiting patiently in their mothers’ wombs to burst forth and unleash their ignorance onto the wondrous landscape of Turkey. We are passing Narlıdere with its endless citrus groves on both sides of the road now. Perhaps driving all day will turn the most cheerful person into a pessimist.

  I ask him about his wife, to change the subject. “How is your Hanım doing?”

  “Don’t ask…” he starts. This is the overture for a long lament on Hanım’s sciatic nerve which capriciously enough acts up whenever he is tied up with Patron on road trips. “I come home after a week of non-stop driving,” he says, “to find piles of laundry to be ironed, dust bunnies everywhere, the children running amok instead of doing homework. Hanım, in her nightie and curlers, having tea. Mehtap Hanım, you tell me now, if your sciatic nerve were so raw that you couldn’t do anything around the house and had to sit in your nightgown all day, why would you have curlers on? Forgive me. I don’t mean any disrespect, and don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for her; she is a good mother, a kindly soul, and all that, but some things I just don’t get.” He takes out his limp handkerchief and dabs the top of his bald head, then smiles as he looks at me through the rearview mirror.

  I smile back, “She probably wanted to look pretty for you.”

  “Mehtap Hanım, may God forgive me for saying this. The first time she came to bed with those things on, in the dark, my heart stopped. She looked like an extraterrestrial in drag. If she wanted to look beautiful for me, she would remove them when I was around. But no! She wants to look nice for the neighbours and grocers.”

  I can’t stop a guffaw. He grins at first, and soon enough we are laughing together, wiping our eyes. I see the road sign for Kilizman. “Fehmi Bey, would you stop here for a moment, please? I need to stretch my legs, a little,” I say.

  If I told him I wanted to buy ayran3 for us, he would rush out and buy it himself. There is just no drink in the world that equals the delicious, fresh taste of the ayran made in Kilizman. And I’ll tell you what I love, precisely: getting out of that stifling car and into the dusty road, bright yellow light squeezing into every crevice of that noon hour filled with the gentle noises of the small town going about its business. With baked muscular shoulders and kerchiefs on their heads, the young men walk here and there in hurried steps carrying things, whistling and talking to each other over a medley of noises coming from the blacksmith’s and the garage farther away, the bakery, and the traffic. Old men in grey pants sit with caps on their heads in the shade of a luscious plane tree, next to rusty, wet, tin cans fragrant with basil, worry beads sliding between their fingers, gazing at everything with the detached curiosity of the elderly. Waves rolling and crashing behind the houses, and dusty bare feet moving on sidewalks, zzzing-zing-zings of an electric saw cutting slabs of marble for tombstones. Fresh ayran is handed to me in a tall cold glass. I tilt it into my mouth. The tart, salty liquid flows down my throat, making everything cool inside me, making everything in that moment, happy. Fehmi Bey realizes what I’m doing and waddles to my side in his sweat-stained pants, wanting to pay. I have already settled the bill, however, and he drinks the ayran handed to him in a few gulps. He goes, “Ahhhh!” after he’s done and smiles with two wedges of white on each side of his mouth.

  When we get back in the car, he turns on the radio. “Surfin’ USA” is playing. He changes it to some jazz, momentarily, introduced as “Take Five” then settles on Zeki Müren singing “Yıldızların Altında.”4 We listen to his melodious tremolos all the way to Zeytinalanı. “My heart is drunk under the stars, ah how sweet it is making love under the stars,” h
e goes and we slightly move our heads from side to side with the melody—on one side the crashing frothy waves, on the other, fields dotted with small houses and olive groves. “Mehtap Hanım,” he smiles, “this is your song.” He means because of my name, moonlight. I nod with a smile and keep looking out the window at the world speeding by. In three quarters of an hour we will be in Çeşme. I don’t want to arrive, really.

  When we get there Patron’s wife will come to the car, alone, and embrace me with mechanical air kisses, rattling on niceties all the way into the house, dispersing Chanel 5 into the atmosphere. He will be nowhere in sight, as usual. Taking a nap, I bet, in his shorts, in a chaise-lounge under the parasol in the garden. “Just in time for a swim!” she’ll say with enough high-pitched drama to remind me she once studied to be a soprano (a second-rate one, no doubt), and then send me upstairs to the guest room to change into my swimsuit. I’m glad he is sleeping, so I don’t have to worry about the whiteness of my thighs or the size of them since I have not really succeeded in sticking to the punishing grapefruit diet I found in a magazine last week in preparation for this day.

  In any case, away we go, with our straw hats and towels to the white beach surrounded by blue skies and emerald water. She looks a bit crusty, the boss’s wife, from staying in the sun too much, but I have to admit she is attractive, with those large Audrey Hepburn glasses and fake blondness with black roots showing. I feel white and shy and totally out of place until we get in the sea and the freshness hits my chest to bring out a breathless sigh. After the initial shock subsides, the Aegean Sea, turquoise and limpid, enveloping my limbs feels like a gigantic womb. I think, as we swim side by side moving our legs and arms in unison like synchronized frogs, of the sea as the mother of the first creatures who crawled out of it and somehow, eventually became me and Patron’s operatic wife. She is still wearing her glasses and is careful to keep her teased puffy hair out of the water. We talk about this and that, mostly office news and her daughters. Despite swimming side by side, the formality of our conversation makes me feel subservient and tight inside; a sentiment I will not shake off until I leave their house.