by Loren Edizel
She shook her head with a frown. This will not do!” Her voice boomed and the clinking of her spoon stopped. “You must love God first, then the beloved father of our republic Mustafa Kemal Paşa,” she raised her hand with reverence toward the framed photograph centred above the blackboard, “then your parents, and then, your grandparents!” Her eyes were on me when she said “grandparents” and I knew that from all those wrong answers, mine was the most offensive. The girl sitting next to me leaned over and whispered in my ear. “What about a brother? Is he before or after grandparents?” I shrugged and whispered back, “I don’t have one.”
Later, in the grey schoolyard where I was wandering forlorn and anxious, clutching the doll, an older boy ran by me and grabbed it out of my hand. I ran after him, but he was too fast. With a smirk, he pitched it high over the wall and out into the street. I cried to the point of losing my breath and collapsing. A young teacher supervising the schoolyard came to ask if I was hurt. I was unable to respond, having lost my breath from all that wailing. I kept pointing at the wall. She didn’t understand anything.
At the end of the day, when my grandmother came to pick me up, her smile shrank and fell when she saw my swollen, tear-drenched face. I rushed her to the other side of the wall to find the doll, but it was too late. She tried to console me saying she would make another one just like it; but I said no. I did not intend to return to this horrible school ever again. She hugged and shushed me and kissed my wet cheeks. “How about you come home with your old granny and see the surprise she has for you at home?”
We walked hand in hand, slowly through the busy market.
“I’m not supposed to love you first,” I burst out.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m supposed to love God, Atatürk, Mother, then Father and you, last. The teacher hates me because I said I loved you first.”
She shrugged, “I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.”
“Anyway, she can’t read my mind.” I let go of her hand and climbed on a low wall separating a garden filled with fragrant roses from the sidewalk and walked on it till the end. Then, I jumped down and started skipping and by the time we got home, I felt better.
She had made a cake for me. It took forever to make cakes in those days. You beat the eggs and sugar with a fork until they were white and smooth and frothy. It hurt her shoulder, so Granny rarely made them. I ate a few pieces of the soft, spongy yellow cake and my mother took out my notebooks and books, laid them out on the kitchen table and got to work. She had to cover them in paper: red for notebooks, blue for books. I had already written a third of the alphabet in a notebook and it looked awful. The page was littered with small greyish holes, mostly around the thinning B, the grotesque G, and some other places from erasing over and over. I wept again when I opened the notebook and saw this mess, anticipating Gülbahar Hanım’s screams over the ting-ting-ting-ing of her spoon, this time, for being inept. My tears softened and curled parts of the notebook, and the grey holes surrounding the B and G grew.
“I need a new notebook!” I wailed. My mother ignored me. I stomped my feet. “I want a new notebook!”
“Settle down or else,” she said, but I was already far gone in my tantrum and couldn’t stop, so I got a spank that left a burning sensation on my right buttock. She had lifted my skirt up before slapping my bottom; she had a way of doing all this at lightning speed. My mind suddenly emptied out in shock. I ran up the stairs and hid under my bed, where she couldn’t reach and wailed some more, until I got hiccups, feeling lonely and unloved. I knew that if I hid there long enough, Granny would make her way up the stairs in her slow, deliberate, huffing and puffing cadence and sit on her bed without even attempting to look for me and say: “Mehtap, are you in the closet?”
And then, “Mehtap, my lovely moonlight, are you in a drawer?”
She would wait a while and try again. “Mehtap, my gold, are you hiding in my denture glass? If you are, better get out now before you end up in my stomach.…” She would hear me giggle and make the sign of the cross, touching forehead, chest and shoulders, her eyes raised to the ceiling and say, “Thank you, Lord, for protecting this naughty child from danger once again.” I would creep out from under the bed. She would continue talking, ignoring my smile. “Good, you washed and dusted the floor again. I hope you didn’t miss any spots. You should act naughtier and get yourself spanked more often. I won’t have to kneel and clean under your bed.…”
She had a way of making me feel stupid and happy at once.
Between our beds was a night table that held her denture cup and rosary, the framed portraits of her daughter and her husband. She would blow a kiss to both after praying with her rosary beads every night. I loved the sound of her snoring because it reassured me she was fine and alive and I was safe in the world.
There was no getting used to Gülbahar Hanım’s wrath, however. Gülbahar, the elusive spring rose. The flower that was supposed to adorn this mass of thorns had evidently never bloomed. And like all names that mean something, this one was beyond immense disappointment. It was a crime.
In her class, we sat row after row, with our tightly wound braids in white ribbons, our black uniforms and white socks, our gums missing a few teeth and our sharpened pencils. Our main subject was obedience. I had heard a few parents saying, “Eti senin, kemiği benim” to Gülbahar Hanım, “The flesh is yours, the bone is mine.” My parents thankfully did not understand this idiom, because it appeared that Gülbahar Hanım was taking it to heart. If she called a boy a “Donkey, son of a donkey,” he had to reply “Yes, Gülbahar Hanım,” and look at his feet. If she hollered, “I will break your legs if you get the multiplication table wrong,” I replied, “Yes, Gülbahar Hanım,” and tried to hide the fact that my teeth were chattering from fear as I started reciting two times two. “Yes” became a dreadful word, but it was very useful considering that it protected against having your head slammed on the blackboard, or your legs, palms and fingers whacked with a metal ruler.
Next door was Nergiz Hanım’s class. We heard laughter and melodious children’s songs seeping through the peeling walls while we sweated in our seats. It was like being lost at sea in the night and hearing mermaids. Then the metallic sound of a spoon hitting the small tea glass would awaken us to Gülbahar Hanım’s shrill voice asking us to open our notebooks and pay attention.
Nergiz is another spring flower; the fragrant narcissus. Elegant, delicate, dressed in bright fashionable dresses with matching hats and high heels, Nergiz Hanım would make her rushed entrance into the schoolyard just in time for the national anthem which was hollered off-key by hundreds of children for the benefit of the entire neighbourhood. She had shiny black hair in tidy curls under small hats. Her wide mouth and almond eyes over high cheekbones made us think of movie stars whose smiles were perpetual. Hers shone when she sang, or said serious things, or even when she scolded her pupils. She never told them whom to love first. Everyone in school was in love with Nergiz Hanım, whose fiancé was a pilot; he had flown one of the dozen bomber airplanes the Ottoman army owned during World War I. Once in a while he would wait for her outside the schoolyard, smoking a cigarette in his striped uniform and cap. He was quite older, but very slim, blond and dashing. We would rush to the windows to spy on them. They never touched in public. He would flick his cigarette as soon as she appeared and greet her with a boyish, somewhat naughty smile, lifting his cap ever so slightly and she would respond with that lusty red-lipped smile we knew well, and they would quickly walk away, side by side, still not touching until they disappeared around the corner.
We wondered where they went and, most importantly, whether they kissed. Mustafa, the bright-eyed boy in my class who was beaten almost daily by Gülbahar Hanım for not doing enough mandatory things and having too much fun, decided to follow them, to elucidate the mystery of Nergiz and her pilot. He did not have anything very interesting to report the next day w
hen we all swarmed him to get details. They had gone to a house, she had removed the key from her purse, opened the door, and they had both disappeared inside. Someone asked if he had spied through a window. He said no, he didn’t want to get caught.
Tahsin, another boy who liked to spy on girls when they undressed in the locker room before gym class, offered to do this for us and asked Mustafa to show him the house. He was a show off; his father was a locally known politician and Gülbahar adored him. If he made a mistake, she would say, “Don’t be nervous son, take your time,” and if he still didn’t get it right, she would make him sit down, encouraging him to review the subject at home and to give her regards to Muhsin Bey, his father. There were no beatings for him, and he was clearly not genetically related to donkeys like the rest of us. So when Tahsin did his spy work and returned to school saying that they had actually kissed in the living room in a really disgusting way and appeared to be living together without being married, no one believed him.
Notebook II. The Cretans
MARIA CONSIDERED HER DAYS at Inez’s narrow store, now renamed “Mehtap Tuhafiye,” on a street adjacent to the market, the best in her life. She dressed with care every morning, put on silk stockings, removed her curlers and styled her hair, wore high heels, makeup, and a hat, and off she went after kissing Mehtap goodbye. She enjoyed the sound of her heels clicking on the pavement, and the smell of the sea enveloping the city just before it awoke to the bustle of streetcars and vendors. Early in the morning she would roll up the metal blinds, turn on the lights, buy her glass of tea from the tea boy who showed up at the same time everyday with his swinging tray filled with dozens of trembling and clinking tea glasses, and get to work. She liked to start by repairing stockings. Then she dusted the shelves and placed the new merchandise, waiting for the women to start coming in. Some were returning from the nearby church, from morning mass and stopped by to pick up whatever was being repaired, some buttons, or try a new bra. There was always an excuse that made certain women stop and say hello, have a chat over tea, and move along. If one’s husband got a promotion at the bank, or her mother-in-law gave her a hard time, or so-and-so got a new fur, Maria knew all the details before anyone else. She gossiped without malice, passing innocuous information back and forth. The heavier subjects of daughters getting pregnant out of wedlock, men cheating on their wives, money troubles that were discussed in her store in confidence did not make the rounds. She remembered her own suffering as a child in Crete and stopped short of repeating such tales.
Her own mother’s absence in her life grew as time passed. She tried to chase away the painful thought that she would never be able to see her again and sometimes, despite the vivid memories of rejection and ridicule suffered as a child, she let herself sink into the deep, soft mud of regret for having followed Mehmet to Izmir. Maria’s mother descended from a once-wealthy Genoese family that had settled on the island a few centuries before; they were seafaring merchants who purchased a title of nobility and were once part of the ruling class. Her mother grew up in a mansion where servants did everything for her. When her father died, the remaining wealth slowly eroded and things were sold piece by piece, including the lovely mansion, until she suffered the misfortune of an accidental pregnancy. There was no money to send her abroad to carry the baby to term away from wagging tongues, there was no groom for a rushed wedding, and Maria’s mother had to endure the now brazen scorn of townsfolk who, until then, had merely whispered their disapproval of the rich family fallen from grace.
Thinking back to her childhood days in Crete, Maria came to the realization that she had not loved her mother as a child but had instead felt deep resentment for having brought her to the world under such circumstances, and for doing little to protect her from its harm. Eighteen years with a woman who looked harsh and acted broken with those uncombed, frizzled blonde strands of hair trying to escape from the tight kerchief. A woman with a hardened look in her eyes, who imposed on her child an oppressively silent life allowing no questions, providing no answers; a gloomy shadow who went through daily chores with absurd tenacity. There were no affectionate gestures; on the contrary, whenever she spoke to Maria her voice resounded with exasperation, as if unbearably painful efforts had to be summoned from her depths for the task. Maria did not miss her mother as such, but since having a child of her own, she couldn’t help but wonder if the relationship could have been improved, begun even, and the silence ended. Without Inez’s timely intervention, she could have very well been a bitter and despairing mother herself, treating her own child like an affliction. This thought took substantial form and glued itself to the recesses of her mind so that she never acknowledged it in words while it informed her deeds. She put all her youthful energy into looking like the women who came into her shop, practiced Turkish words in front of the mirror at home so as to sound local and not shame her daughter in public. At home, she spoke Turkish to Mehtap while she continued to speak Greek with Inez and Mehmet. She forbade the use of Greek on the street so that whenever they would be out as a family and someone ventured to say something, she would turn and whisper, “Shh, not in Greek, they’ll hear us.” Mehtap, who grew up hearing this admonishment, became terrified of this unwanted language that was better left at home. It was her mother tongue and was spoken with ease within the confines of Inez’s house, but she was not allowed to speak it, nor was she allowed to acknowledge what her father or Inez had told her, even though she understood perfectly well.
One morning, following a parent-teacher meeting attended by her mother the day before, Gülbahar Hanım called out her name in class. Mehtap rose ready to solve the math problem on the blackboard.
“Mehtap, what is your mother’s native tongue?”
Mehtap’s eyes darted to the closed door and the windows in panic while she said almost inaudibly, “Turkish.”
“How can she be Turkish yet speak it so badly? Where is your family from?”
Mehtap cleared her throat, tears stinging her eyes, “From Crete, my teacher.”
Gülbahar Hanım turned around to face the class and snickered. The class, as if on cue, followed suit. Mehtap stood in this ever expanding moment of shame, her hands grasping the sides of the wooden desk, tears streaming down her face until Gülbahar Hanım asked her to be seated with a dismissive gesture. The girl sitting next to her gently held her hand and whispered as soon as the teacher’s attention had returned to the blackboard, “I’ll always be your friend.”
It mortified Mehtap even more to hear this declaration, as if she had been afflicted with some awful, contagious disease and her best friend had to sacrifice her own interest to prove her love. “I don’t even want your friendship. I hate this class,” she replied sullenly looking down at her lap until the shrill ring of the recess bell. She gathered her books, put them into her school bag, and left the school.
Inez who was cooking in the steamy kitchen, her attention taken by the pots boiling on the stove, was startled to hear Mehtap’s voice behind her. She turned around to find the girl standing there, her shoulders jerking up and down with the force of her sobs.
There were a few trips to the principal’s office. Maria went in her Sunday best, accompanied by Inez whose indignation seemed to add a few inches to her height. Mehtap was taken along. She walked beside them, unable to fight a sense of profound dread making her feel faint and sweaty as they approached the schoolyard.
In the first meeting, Inez had impressed the principal with her invented connections. She knew people in high places, army officials, and would not mind passing the story of the incident along for the betterment of our Republic, she said, nodding her head. The principal was entirely committed to the betterment of the Republic himself, he assured her. There was only one other class where a spot was available and that was Nergiz Hanım’s. She was one of the young teachers, the principal added, anxious to resolve the issue, and a very enthusiastic one. Inez and Mehtap looked at each other. The n
ext day Mehtap was a pupil in Nergiz Hanım’s class.
Notebook III. Autobiography
AS I SAT NEXT TO A BOY whose name I did not know, in this new class that had an entirely different smell and appearance, I kept thinking of the other side of the wall and my familiar classmates waiting for Gülbahar Hanım’s humourless early morning entrance with various stomach aches and hidden sweats under their starched white collars. There was a sweet citrus smell coming from the coal stove in Nergiz Hanım’s class, where a white enamel bowl with a blue rim held fresh orange peels. On the wall were drawings: houses with purple roofs and red walls, birds with green beaks and orange eyes. I wanted to cry remembering the time I had made a picture of spring. There were multicoloured kites in the sky attached to children with strings, all of them smiling on the ground, a round brown mountain in the distance, and a house that had a neon green roof and aquamarine walls, a single window and a red door. It was one of those rare art classes we had, pure indulgence, probably due to the teacher having run out of math problems and grammar to drill into us.
I had smiled as Gülbahar Hanım approached my desk and hovered above me while I put the finishing touches. She told me to rise and go to the window. She followed me there. “Look around,” she ordered.
“Any houses with green roofs?”
I nodded once backwards, meaning no.
“What colour are they?”
“Red.” I didn’t think they were; the tiles had more of a peachy-orange hue, but I knew the answer was “red.”
“And the walls?”
“Whitish.”
“Any green tree trunks?”
“No.”
“So what are you supposed to do now?”
“Do it again with the proper colours.”
“You’ll sit through recess, since the next class is math.”
