by Loren Edizel
Mehmet got his job as a carpenter’s apprentice in Halil’s atelier at the far end of the market street, not far from the French school for boys called Saint Joseph. He learned how to use hammers and planes, and various saws and dovetails under the close supervision of his master. Orders were brisk; the city was being rebuilt and there was no better time than this to be a carpenter, the boss confided to his helpers. There were two other Cretans working at the shop, both having arrived at different times of the population exchange process. They commiserated about their circumstances and the ache of being torn from their homes. They hummed Cretan songs while they worked and soon enough they all discovered to their great pleasure that there were plenty of people in Izmir who spoke Greek. Some had arrived from Crete, others from Salonika, the local Levantines and remaining Rums, some other islanders.… Finding this community in exile gave them enough encouragement to envision an adequate life in the first few months of their stay. Mehmet was relieved to have a roof over their head, and a job, all thanks to Kirya Inez whom Maria believed to be an angel sent to them by the spirit of Mehmet’s mother.
Not everyone who was forced to leave Crete ended up in Izmir. Some went to Bodrum, Ayvalık, and other less fortunate ones were directed to more remote regions of the Mediterranean coast that were swampy and malaria-infested. Mehmet got word that some of his family perished from malaria soon after they arrived there. Remembering the particular aunt and uncle who had fed and clothed him when his father died triggered an avalanche of tears. Although he did not realize it at the time, to this sadness was mixed the grief of having irretrievably lost his childhood, his sense of belonging to a particular world with its own textures and colours that would never again be reproduced in his life except for fleeting approximations. He wept in Maria’s arms up in the bedroom on the second floor of Kirya Inez’s house, seated on a small worn sofa on the creaking floor of the cumba surrounded by windows, which had become their universe, their small island in this half-perished city haunted by missing houses and lives. Maria whose lovely soft cheeks smelled of plums held him close, and caressed his head murmuring love words that took him back to their afternoons in the caves. The more he sighed and inhaled the smell of her, the calmer he became, entering once again the cool grottos that hid them from the world, that universe of their own creation made of hasty unbuttonings and slow caresses in the damp earthy shade.
Life continued its steady uneventful course until one day upon his return from work, Mehmet found Maria with swollen eyes, sitting with Inez in the kitchen, having tea. She wouldn’t tell him what was wrong. She just kept staring at her glass of tea, and shaking her head to suppress sobs. Inez found an excuse that took her away from the kitchen, leaving them alone. After much begging and cajoling, Mehmet managed to understand that someone on the street had heard her speak Greek with a vegetable vendor and followed her home, calling her an infidel, a dirty Rum, and other words she couldn’t bring herself to repeat while he spat on the street to show his disgust.
“I was a putana’s bastard, over there. An infidel, here. I thought he was going to kill me.” Copious tears followed, with some trumpeting sounds from her nose blown energetically.
“Get dressed” Mehmet ordered, “We’re going out.”
“No!” Maria exclaimed, her reddened eyes wide open. “I’m never going out again.”
“Get dressed. You’ll take me to the place where you saw him. I’ll make him swallow his damn tongue if I get my hands on him, I swear.” His wavy brown hair was standing on end around his reddened forehead looking like a halo, making her fear for his life.
“Shh, calm down,” she scolded. “What will I do if they kill you or put you in jail?”
He would not be dissuaded. Maria put on her coat and they started retracing her steps in the cold, darkening streets, the smoke of burning coal from chimneys filling their nostrils. Vegetable vendors were covering the produce on their carts with large tarps before slowly pushing them through the narrow streets to disappear from view. Storeowners were pulling down the creaking rusty metal blinds for the night. Stray cats with full bellies who had skulked about butcher shops and fishmongers all day could be seen stealthily retreating from the main avenue toward smaller darker streets. Dogs’ barks were coming in saccades from a distance to echo upon darkening walls, increasing Maria’s sense of desolation.
“He started following me somewhere here, in front of Ali’s shop” she said. “See? There’s no one in the street anymore; let’s go back.”
Mehmet was still seething inside, wanting to harm. He walked into a side street, looking up and down the houses.
“We should learn Turkish,” she whispered and pulled his arm, “I’m tired, I want to go home.”
The year was 1928. All around the city, on walls, were glued off-white posters advertising the stern dictum in black ink: “Citizen, speak Turkish!” Inez who spoke broken Turkish herself, started teaching her protégées whatever she could. The end of the year came with a new alphabet law, making the Latin script official. Efforts deployed by the government to make the transition successful were monumental. Newspapers had to change from the Arabic script to the Latin one within three months, creating a flurry of feverish activity in print shops and newspaper offices across the country. Aside from prohibitive measures put in place to ensure adoption of this new alphabet, a number of national schools had opened across the city to teach the population how to read and write Turkish with these new letters. Mehmet, Maria, and their Cretan friends enrolled in order to learn the Latin alphabet hoping to advance their command of Turkish, as well. They would come home late in the evening with their notebooks and chewed pencils, writing and erasing with greater assiduity than they had ever shown as pupils in Paraskevi’s class.
It was during one such evening that Maria rushed from the table where she was struggling with homework to the washroom where she remained locked up for some time. Inez who was ironing clothes in the small adjacent room, knew. She called out to her as she was leaving the bathroom looking blanched and shaky.
“What’s wrong Maria?”
“I don’t know … I vomited yesterday, too.”
“I’ll take you to my iatros.20 He delivered my baby.”
13“parakaló, kiryo Memetis”: “please, Mr. Memetis”
14kopelitsa: young woman
15putana: whore
16“Kalimera, papoulis”: Good morning, grandpa”
17hodja: educator, wise religious man
18poyraz: wind
19Rum: Anatolian Greeks
20iatros: physician
Notebook III. Autobiography
FROM MY MOTHER’S STORIES, I retained the hodja’s rooster on the boat taking them to Izmir, her nuptials at sea, and the man who insulted her on the street for speaking Greek. She used to tell these frequently. And although I knew them by heart, I tried to imagine, with each repetition, a slightly different scenario, to be able to appropriate her events, and make them come alive for myself. Once in a while an unexpected element would rise to the surface of that sea of memories she carried within, something she had never told me before, and she would just let it float there, among her well-rehearsed repertoire, without any apparent need to integrate it, the way a seahorse may suddenly appear in the path of a determined swimmer.
One such detail was the story of the golden bracelets from Crete. Both my parents had their mothers’ jewellery sewn into cloth belts for their voyage to Turkey—their only fortune. The story that I knew well was that once her pregnancy was confirmed, my mother unstitched them and sold a few of those bracelets to buy baby clothes, furniture, and a fancy baby carriage imported from Germany the likes of which very few mothers owned in Izmir due to its exorbitant price. It had an ivory-coloured leather body with a shiny chrome structure and springs to gently rock the baby during long walks. “Only the best for my daughter,” she would smile and say.
While she
was removing the many bracelets from the belts, my mother noticed that two of those were identical. She thought it curious that two unrelated women would have the exact same bracelet. However, she reasoned, both women were from the same village in Crete and it was likely that the same jeweller sold these bracelets that ended up on their respective mothers’ forearms. The bracelets were each an inch wide, and felt heavy in the palm. They were the loveliest pieces of handcrafted jewellery she had ever seen. She decided to never sell them, saving them for me, instead.
On her deathbed, she told me more about them. A secret she wouldn’t take to her grave.
Notebook II. The Cretans
THE GIRL WAS BORN IN 1929, on the second floor of Inez’s house, after much pushing, screaming, and sweating on Maria’s part, while Mehmet was relegated to pacing around the living room downstairs for the seemingly endless hours it took the child to arrive. For all the commotion she caused, the girl appeared scrawny, with a head full of straight brown hair pasted to her forehead, swollen eyelids and rosy thighs that were sagging from lack of fat. When Mehmet held her awkwardly in his arms, an inexplicably pleasant ache spread in his chest gazing at her small defenceless frame, a hand the size of a walnut around his finger and the gradually reddening forehead as her toothless mouth began to wail. He sat next to Maria on the bed and observed his wife’s face, swollen and tired from all the effort, and somewhat sad too, he imagined, now that the movements inside her belly had stopped and she had lost what must have felt like a permanent entanglement of two souls in one large body. She was left with only the large body now and the baby was latching on to the nipple with blind and relentless hunger. Mehmet was not entirely sure if the sadness was indeed Maria’s or his, feeling left out of this tangible new bond, a mere spectator and secretly resentful.
Sensing his sudden change of mood, Maria looked at him. “What name shall we give her?”
“You’ll decide in the end, anyway, like you always do,” he grinned. “How about your mother’s name?”
“I want a Turkish name. She will be everything she is expected to be.”
“How?”
“I mean that she will grow up feeling Turkish, speaking Turkish, and no one will ever think otherwise. I think her name should start with an M,” she ventured, “like yours and mine.”
“Like Minotaur? She’s about to rip your breast out.” It wasn’t a smile that accompanied this statement, but an imperceptible jerking of a jaw muscle, like a cramp.
“You don’t care!” she pouted, turning her attention back to the nursing baby in her arms.
“Like Mehtap,” he replied quickly. “Moonlight. Remember the olive grove? The moon that hung in the sky like a ripe melon. The night you rushed to me like a river, and carried me off like a drowning man.” He stopped, surprised by his poetic formulation. “Scariest moment of my life. After this one…” he smiled. “Do you like it?”
For the next couple of years, the baby had an evil eye pendant permanently attached to her clothes with a tiny golden diaper pin and a golden Maşallah in Arabic script hanging right next to it. Those who dared say she was beautiful had to pretend to spit as is the custom, and those more cautious said she was indeed an ugly baby so as not to awaken evil eyes.
Maria who had spent her childhood roaming freely, untouched by the drudgery of housework, had to quickly learn how to care for her child. The never-ending piles of diapers to wash and boil and wash again, her chapped bleeding hands from so much washing and hanging in the cold winter days; the baby who needed nursing, the engorged breasts, and the sense of being constantly attached to another being so entirely dependent on her all contrived to change her outlook on life. She found herself disheartened as she went through the motions of her days. There were mornings when she woke up to a wet pillow, having wept in her sleep. Mehmet observed the sadness that had come over their lives; his wife’s red eyes and uncombed hair, her recoiling from him toward the edge of the bed at night, the lack of appetite and curiosity. She wouldn’t go near the baby carriage she had chosen with such great excitement. He felt lost in his new life. One night when he tried to caress her in the hopes of rekindling the passion that was so bafflingly lost between them, she removed his hand from her rump and without turning to face him declared that she never wanted “to do it” again.
“What’s happened to you?” He was leaning on his elbow, waiting for an answer.
Her body started shaking with hidden sobs; she put her pillow over her head to muffle the sounds, and drew her knees close to her chest.
“You’re going to drown us in your tears, woman. Stop it. Say something….”
“I … cannot … tell you.” She managed to say, taking deep breaths between the sobs.
“Is it the baby?”
“I don’t want it….” Her sobs had turned to wails.
He turned her forcefully towards him. “Shh … you don’t mean that. It’s a sin.”
“I’m her slave. She is constantly in need of something. Stuck here…. You go to work every day. You have your friends. You go for drinks. You come back home and you find your supper on the table, the child in bed. If she cries, I run. If she throws up in the middle of the night, do you clean it? Look at my hands! They’re bleeding. I don’t have any friends. I can’t speak the language properly. Every time I open my mouth I’m afraid someone will call me an infidel. I hate this place. I hate being a mother; I should have never gotten on that cursed boat.” She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her nightgown, turning her back to him once more, hiding her head under the pillow.
“Go to sleep, Mehmet. Leave me alone.” She hugged the pillow tighter over her face.
“Shh, let go of the pillow. You’ll smother yourself.”
He managed to pry her away from the pillow she was squeezing to her face and held her in his arms until she fell asleep. He spent the night thinking about her words. The next morning, he took extra care not to awaken baby and mother, tiptoed out of the room and had tea with Inez in the kitchen. They whispered for a long time over their lukewarm glasses of untouched tea.
Notebook III. Autobiography
INEZ RAISED ME. While my mother took care of her haberdashery, she took care of me. A woman came to wash clothes once a week and an old man brought goat’s milk every morning for me to drink. She taught me songs in Italian and Greek, and took me for very long walks on the quay on cloudless afternoons. We threw pebbles into the sea; she was the one who taught me how to skip stones on water. Bought me vanilla ice cream in the summers and roasted chestnuts in winter, kissed my knees when I fell and made me dresses and bonnets with her sewing machine. It was black and shiny, with golden vines encircling it. I used to turn the handle for her while she guided the cloth with her expert hands as the needle hurried in and out on a straight or curved line. Sometimes I turned it very fast, sometimes I stopped abruptly to see how she’d react. She never got mad. She’d simply laugh and caress my cheek.
When the time came for me to go to school, Inez woke me up with a surprise. She was holding a handmade cloth doll with painted eyes and long eyelashes, a button nose, and a small red pout. Her hair was made of yellow yarn, braided on both sides of her face. She wore a black school uniform with a plaited skirt and a white collar; an exact replica of mine waiting to be worn at the foot of the bed. She said, “She’ll be going to school, too, just like you. See?” They dressed me up and took me to an immense concrete building filled with noise. Children in uniforms were running and shrieking in the schoolyard. A tall man with crane legs and curly white hair greeted us at the door and bent all the way down to face me. He said a few words of welcome, asked for my name which I could not remember from terror. He patted my head.
“The school principal,” my grandmother whispered as we walked on to find my classroom. I was squeezing the doll into my cramping belly.
The classroom was filled with children, lots of them, maybe fifty. The teacher, G
ülbahar Hanım, was a stern-looking and tall woman with pockmarked cheeks, whose brown dress with small buttons going up to her chin had chalk stains all across her bottom. She wore black stockings and flat shoes that squeaked whenever she walked up and down the isles. Her dark eyebrows were thick and knit together on the bridge of her aquiline nose. Long, grey-streaked hair was tightly rolled into a bun close to her nape. She had a small samovar on the coal stove in the corner of the room and served herself fragrant tea in a tiny glass. She gently lowered two cubes of sugar, one by one, with her miniature teaspoon and then vigorously stirred it, making frantic “ting ting ting” sounds in the quiet and stuffy room. While stirring, she asked us one by one whom we loved most in the world. It was an easy question, everyone shouted their answers. Some said, “My mother” others said, “My parents.” Caught in the excitement, I exclaimed, “My Granny!”
