by Loren Edizel
In my young eyes, the aftermath of the Wealth Tax became forever associated with the withdrawal of affection and inspiration from the two women in my life. To this day, when this hereto buried piece of history is resuscitated and aired in newspaper articles or television shows, I experience the same melancholy twinge I used to get watching my once dynamic grandmother sit idly by a window day after day looking old and disconnected, and my mother’s deep personal dissatisfaction manifesting itself as what my dad had nicknamed “Furious Food.” Around that time, he suggested I meet him at work after school so we could eat fragrant kokoreç22 sandwiches from street vendors on the way home before submitting to Mom’s angry cuisine.
We ate and strolled side by side, my dad carrying my school bag through the busy market street in Alsancak, pausing here and there to look at store windows, while we wolfed down our quarter-bread sandwiches. I found out about his childhood during those walks: Mehmet the Great and his curly big moustache, Kirya Paraskevi’s one classroom village school, the vineyards and mountains of his beloved Crete, the terrace on which his dad would stand, legs planted wide, to admire his days’ work down in the vineyards, sipping red wine from a tall glass. “Life,” he said, “is a lot like skipping rope. One handle is your birth, the other your death.” It just made sense to him, the way you keep turning the rope and jumping, the repetition of days and the surprise of each turn, one slow, one fast or wobbly, the part you play in your destiny while it puts a pebble here, a wall there and throws your rhythm out of whack. I don’t know if he meant this image to be soothing, but it had a terrifying effect on me, and I stopped skipping rope thinking of death and birth making everything go round and round.
“If they were to give your vineyards back to you and allowed you to go back and live in Crete, would you, Baba?” I asked one day. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. His face darkened under his frown. “Why should I waste my time thinking about such impractical things?”
21dolmas, pilav, köftes: stuffed grape leaves, rice, turkish meat balls made of lamb
22kokoreç: grilled lamb intestines
Notebook I. The Journal
THERE ARE EVENTS IN OUR LIVES we are sometimes too embarrassed to acknowledge, even to ourselves; I say “we,” assuming it is part of being human, but I ought to take ownership of this particular embarrassment, even as I speak of it to myself.
Nuray has gone away. She quit her job, too. It has been a few years, now. I found out from a mutual friend that she got married soon after she left me, and has a daughter named Mehtap. Plunging the dagger even deeper, this common acquaintance of ours innocently told me she had never seen Nuray so happy before. “I can imagine,” I smiled as we stood chatting on the sidewalk one sunny January morning. There were frozen puddles where the tiles of the uneven pavement had sunk in a little. The weather was penetratingly frigid, and her hurried phrases came out of her mouth wrapped in warm pockets of steamed breath. She kept rearranging her beige handknit scarf as she spoke, tugging it this way and that, fixing the stylish knot covering her neck with gloved fingers that refused to remain still in that cold weather.
“What about you? Are you still working at the zipper factory?”
I nodded, the smile I had put on earlier still frozen on my face. “Yes, I’m still working there. You should come over for tea one afternoon.” I proposed vaguely before saying goodbye and she acquiesced waving those previously frantic fingers.
It is a painful story to tell. Despite my best intentions to avoid it, I can’t help going over it at night when the world becomes still. In fact, I try hard to find ways to distract myself, but it creeps into the current of my thoughts, surreptitiously, on its flow to some innocent destination that doesn’t know her name. Alas, every word I use, every thought or image that crosses my mind knows of her, and there is no escaping this. The other night I tried to find a thing that I imagined completely safe to focus on, so I could finally sleep. Wood, I thought looking at my dresser.… How can the woman be conjured by thinking of it? And yet….
There was a bookcase in my room, she had brought it when she moved and took it with her as she departed. A bookcase made by some uncle or friend of her mother’s, I don’t quite remember. It had ornate trimmings with hand-carved roses at the top of the bookcase and was riddled with tiny holes borne by woodworms. She had few books, mostly comprised of translated romance novels or such. On the shelves she had arranged picture frames of her mother and her brother who had passed away very young. She asked me to place my books there as well. Once or twice, we made love leaning on it, making the frames collapse. I have learned, thanks to Nuray, that there exists no such thing as an innocent word. They are, all of them, guilty of presenting us the world in the particular way we attempt to shun it.
One day she came and told me something I had missed at work. It had been going on for some time, by then. My boss had been lusting after her; that, I knew from the way his eyes would latch onto her rear end whenever she came to talk to me at the office. Apparently he made his moves one day when she was at work after hours, and she had an affair with him, all the while knowing my feelings for him. He left his mistress Gönül as a result, and almost sent his fashion-obsessed wife packing. That was the extent of his infatuation. She didn’t like men, she had said; she only enjoyed their attention. This man’s must have been especially important to her, I later surmised, because he stood in the way of our relationship. Why did she feel the need to punish me so?
And, why had I been so oblivious?
I called her a traitor and a tramp. She packed her suitcase and slammed the door. A week or so later her cousin with the Impala came to take her furniture and the rest of her things. He wouldn’t talk to me about her, only confirming she was fine. As he left, he shook my hand, eyes fixed on the concrete tiles of the pavement as if to conceal some embarrassment, “Nuray has always had a fiery temper. But she isn’t too proud to admit when she is wrong, either. We need to be patient with her.”
He must have imagined we had a jealous tiff over a man—which we did, but not as he imagined—or some friction over living arrangements. No one knew we were lovers. How could they?
I’ve been going over the past in my mind, trying to find the clues I had missed. Perhaps it started the day she said not to wait for her because she was doing overtime and came back home long after I had washed the dishes and put away her supper. Why did I not look out the window that night to see if someone had driven her home? And why did she buy me the gold necklace with the letter “M” a few weeks before her confession? She knew she was leaving me. Did she enjoy his kisses and caresses? How did it feel? Was he a gentle lover? Was she lying to me when she had assured me she preferred women?
Hell is the place, much like a theatre, where those betrayed are made to watch the scenes of their betrayal re-enacted ad nauseam with minute variations. Sometimes the lines change, or the décor, or the gestures. I don’t know about betrayers; I have never had that experience. She got married, had a child by my name; never once called, wrote or even passed by to see how I was doing after she left. While she did all those things, I was sitting in the cumba, a frozen version of myself, wondering what I could have done differently. If I had told her I didn’t love Patron, would she have still seduced him? She destroyed me for not loving her enough in theory. If he had loved me, would I have left her? Patron could have never loved me. Therefore, I would have never left her. I gave her an insane answer to a stupid question that has become the cause of my deepest regret. I remember asking my father about Crete, and whether he would return if they gave him his vineyards back. He never bothered to answer. It was a waste of time. Why could I not see that?
There is another hell hotel at which I am a permanent resident. In this particular place I’m the only one I know or see, or speak to. I’m provided with many tools of torture with which to hurt myself, on condition of being absolutely silent about it. No one knows, or will ever know, I loved a wom
an, gazed at her, was aroused by her while I was deeply, desperately infatuated by a man.
I used to worship the man. I did everything I could so he could deliver his damn order of zippers that made him rich. I got my bonus. Then, he wanted to tell me about his mystery lover. I didn’t know yet that his mystery lover was Nuray. He would ask me to field calls from Gönül, “Aydın Bey is busy with a client. May I take a message?” or “Aydın Bey is on a trip with his family. Is there a message?” She would slam the phone down. The woman called me a liar and a harlot one day, screaming into my ear. I put the receiver beside the typewriter while she spewed her poison and continued typing my letter feeling smug. Finally, the unreturned calls ceased. Then his wife started calling; to check up on him I suppose. Perhaps he had started being careless with Nuray. “So where is he again?” She would question irritably. “He said he’d be at the office.” I found excuses, dutiful as ever. I knew another conquest had replaced Gönül, but I figured she was a woman from some strip joint he frequented. I was his confidante. “She’s got black hair,” he said once, “opulent and so soft. Sometimes, I keep running my fingers through it while she talks and talks. That is all I want to do. The hair alone makes me swoon.” I despised every minute of his heart-to-hearts with me. My fault alone. Not his. What man speaks so openly to a woman about the mysteries of his heart? What Turkish man? There is no one like me in his world, man or woman. No one. Should I derive some satisfaction from this? If only I could escape this tyranny they both exercise over me.
I don’t have a thick black mane. My hair is thin, brown, and straight, with an oily disposition unless I wash it often. Why couldn’t I have hair to make him swoon? I wanted those cheekbones, that rump, those equestrian ankles, and that cold, calculating heart. Why did she make me repeat, “I’m yours, I’m yours” when I climaxed? Callous. Bitch.
THERE IS STILL THE RIDDLE of her daughter’s name. Mehtap. She must be uttering it constantly, every day, torturing herself, wanting to get to me. Why has she thrown us down this path strewn with broken pieces of us, the irreparably divided reflections we have become?
THE LONG CORRIDOR THAT LEADS to what used to be her small office at work: In measured strides to steady my pounding heart, I walk those fifty steps every day, like a pilgrim who has memorized the path to a miraculous spring that will not cure her, for no other reason except to feel the returning ache of anticipation as I approach the doorway with its crusty bits of old ivory paint and peek in to find some other smoke-shrouded female face sipping tea and pounding the keys of the large electric typewriter in the weakened hazy sunlight that has seeped through the dusty blinds, fallen on the maroon tea glass for a lacklustre lick before skimming over a plump wrist choked by the leather strap of a watch, to disappear into the half open drawer of the grey file cabinet across the room. I walk the fifty steps back to my office thinking of the light in our hotel room in Moda after we first made love, the golden bracelets shining in the morning light on our wrists, her spilling bosom in the gaze of the tramway conductor and her hand on my hip, on the roundness I never knew contained so much pleasure for me. I sit back at my desk. Patron will call me shortly to take notes in my steno pad. He, too, has also been abruptly abandoned by Nuray, although it has been long enough now that he has returned to his steady old diet of Gönül and his wife. He still hasn’t admitted to me that Nuray was his lover; perhaps she’s asked him never to tell—as if I wouldn’t find out. We don’t talk about her resignation, or the nights he slept on the couch in his office after she left him, not wanting to see his wife or anyone else. He knew we were housemates, but he never asked what happened, where she went. I never asked him either.
And so it is. I write letters to prospective zipper buyers, take notes, water the plants, inspect the factory, meet with union representatives, meet with the engineers, inspect the kitchen, listen to complaints, take notes, meet with lawyers, take more notes. Aydın has deferred almost all this work to me while he travels to Europe to meet customers, attend conferences, and so on. He brings me back silk scarves, Mont Blanc pens—so I could take more notes, I suppose—chocolates, and once a bottle of perfume identical to the one he got his wife, and also Gönül; I know because I had to wrap them for him. It was Fleurs de Rocaille by Caron. Whether he is at home, or with his mistress, or at work with me, Patron is surrounded by the very same flowery fragrance of Fleurs de Rocaille. Was it on purpose? Was it due to laziness? “Give me three of those.” I imagine him gesturing at the saleslady at the airport duty-free shop and winking at her with that naughty flirtatious look.
He has asked me to call him Aydın. “Enough with Patron this and Patron that,” he said when I woke him up one morning as he lay on the leather couch in his office fully clothed, soon after Nuray left us both. “Call me Aydın, except in front of all the others and my wife. They won’t understand. Simply Aydın. Can you?”
I told him I would try. He added, “I’m the one who should be calling you Patron. You’ve been practically running this place all by yourself. And better than I ever have. You should be the general manager.” He said this, but never changed my title or my salary. He simply let me run the place disguised as his personal secretary. I still bought and wrapped his wife’s and mistress’ presents, called the gardener every spring for his roses in Çeşme, fielded both women’s phone calls to him, and bought plane tickets for Gönül to meet him in various European cities: Vienna, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Cologne. She had done very well for herself, I thought. I couldn’t bring myself to say, “Listen, I’m doing all this for you. Why can’t I go on a trip too, once in a while, see the world a little?”
I practiced at home in front of the mirror. I was confident and assertive. I demanded. I folded my arms with feet slightly apart as I waited for his reply, sort of like Yul Brynner in Anna and the King. I put on lipstick and mascara. Tried again. Finally, I worked up the courage to have this conversation with him as I rode the bus to the office one day. There was a fair in Germany. I’d found it among the brochures we regularly got. I would say: “You remember how you once told me I ran this place so well? I have done some research and found a fair that we could participate in; I have already written to them. This time, I would really like to be the one going, if you agree. There is a friend I would like to see also, while I’m there. Can we do this?” I repeated this a dozen times until I stepped into his office. Nice and clear, I said to myself, be nice, be clear. Start with. “Aydın….”
He was shaven and wore a white shirt. This meant he was in good spirits and felt in control that day. When he felt in control, he acted generous. It was a good prospect.
“Aydın, merhaba!” I started with a sunny smile. The lipstick was there and the Farah Diba hairdo I had paid for dearly the day before. I practically slept sitting down all night not to mess the upward bun. “Are you having a good morning?” I asked him cheerfully.
“Yes, I am. What’s the occasion? You’re all made up.”
“Nothing special. Just felt like it. Listen, I have a great plan….”
Half an hour later I was calling the travel agent to book my ticket and his. Yes, his. He said he would attend the first couple of days of the fair and then return while I went on to visit my friend. I was disappointed to have him tag along at first. He wasn’t in my plan. I reminded him that there wouldn’t be anyone to mind the factory. He said there was always Head Engineer Niyazi, and he couldn’t do too much damage in a couple of days. He assured me he’d carry back all the samples and things from the kiosk so I wouldn’t have to bother with them at the end of the fair. That was a good thought. Slowly, I began to imagine having supper with him, going out perhaps; just the two of us in another location that held no reminders of Nuray.
I WENT SHOPPING FOR CLOTHES yesterday. The visa has taken a long time. I had to fill out so many different forms at the German Consulate. Aydın had no problems. As a wealthy businessman who owns a factory in Turkey there is little fear he will disappea
r underground and remain there illegally, I suppose. I wrote to Kerime to advise her of my arrival. She will meet me at the train station after the fair. I chose a few bright coloured dresses, remembering Nuray’s complaints that I always went for drab colours and shapeless pants. I packed the corset to slim my waist and push up my bosom. Leaving in three weeks!
Notebook II. The Cretans
NEITHER MEHMET NOR MARIA ever returned to Crete for a visit. They were afraid of travelling and remained profoundly suspicious of Greek and Turkish border officials. In the late fifties, when trips to Greece became possible for Turkish citizens, the couple categorically rejected the notion from fear that something would go awry between the countries during their visit and prevent their return to Turkey. Disputes between the two neighbours always seemed one island away. They imagined being stuck in Crete with nothing but a suitcase, having no friends, no acquaintances to take care of them, strangers to their birthplace or adrift in the Mediterranean, unclaimed by either country. “Worse than strangers,” Mehmet would insist, with that particular shade of bitterness that infects the memories of those who have suffered profound injustices in their youth. He never spoke of enemies; he seemed to have none. Although he knew himself to be Greek and Turkish, he could acknowledge neither fully in his mind and he felt like a mongrel that had been groomed to pass for an acceptable breed, thus living his days with an omnipresent sense of dread which, like a gas leak, permeated his universe, emanating a deep suspicion of ideas, governments, convictions, and neighbours. Obsessed by the thought of toeing the line at all times, Mehmet would become taciturn, self-effaced among friends.
