Days of Moonlight

by Loren Edizel

  He barely whispered, “No, Auntie. She’s dead.”

  And I couldn’t take it anymore. I started weeping and fumbling in my clutch for a handkerchief. My shoulders were shaking and the boy, whom I could barely see from the curtain of tears, reached and touched my shoulder saying, “I’m sorry Auntie, don’t be so sad. I promise I won’t smoke again. Don’t cry.” All this sympathy made matters worse until I blew my nose and was done with it.

  “Where is your dad, then?”

  “Working,” he said. “He starts in the afternoon and comes home the next morning.”

  “Have you had anything to eat, yet?”

  “I finished the last gevrek on the platter.”

  “Come, you’ll have dinner with me.”

  “My dad says I’m not to follow strangers.”

  “You sit at my doorstep and I’ll bring dinner out to you then. You see me every day and sell me gevreks, I’m not such a stranger, am I?”

  He shrugged and sat on my doorstep. I kept the door open as I walked in, so he wouldn’t feel alone and went straight to the kitchen, put on my apron and fried some eggs with lots of butter, à la Nuray. The boy walked in after a while, leaving the street door open, standing in the hallway observing my house. “Come in and close the door then, get us some plates.” I pointed at the dishes in the cabinet.

  “Where is the other lady who used to live here too?”

  “She got married and had a little girl.”

  “She was nice.”

  I placed the eggs in the plates, cut slices of fresh bread and tomatoes and filled our glasses with lemonade I had made the day before.

  “Sit down and eat. What’s your name?”

  “Emin.”

  He was sponging the soft egg yolk with the bread and eating with his head dangerously close to the plate, smacking his lips. I almost told him to straighten his back, but bit my tongue. There was no need to make him feel smaller, after the cigarette incident. I noticed the shadow over his mouth. I waited until he had cleared his plate and asked, “So, how old are you now? Fourteen?”

  “Something like that,” he nodded.

  “Have you ever gone to school?”

  He clucked his tongue and shook his head backward to mean “no.”

  “Can you read and write?”

  “A bit.”

  “Listen, when you’re done selling your gevreks, you’re welcome to come here and have supper with me. I will teach you to read and write, a little bit every day, if you wish. Then you go home. If you need a bus ticket, I’ll give you that too.”

  “Why?” he asked, suspicious.

  “Because I don’t want you to be selling gevreks when you grow up. I’ve told you this before.” He was watching me without blinking. “Besides, no boy your age should be in the streets smoking cigarettes at this hour. You’re inviting bad things to happen to you, don’t you know?”

  He looked down. “I’ll pass by when I can.”

  I gave him a bus ticket as he was leaving and admonished him to go straight home. He said: “No need to repeat, teyze. I’m not stupid.”

  “Hmm!” I shook my head, “we’ll see about that.”

  He put the empty wooden platter on his head and ran down the stairs, then was gone.

  It got quiet in the house. I had to iron my pants for work the next morning. I hoped the boy would come often, keep me busy, and postpone this feeling of despair that squeezed my chest as twilight fell. I opened the ironing board slowly thinking of my chance encounter with Nuray, remembering what I’d told Aydın in Düsseldorf. “I run into all sorts of people, why not her?” Perhaps I had conjured her with my wish. Or she had pulled me to her, the way the moon pulls our blood every month. Perhaps, I thought, she needed me, and crawled unseen through my dreams to plant this thought of a stroll in Karşıyaka. She cannot stand being far from me any longer. I almost burnt a hole in the trousers thinking about Nuray’s mysterious existence and the ever-growing hope that at the edge of her married life was a narrow bench with my name on it, a place from which I could live vicariously those warm family moments, like a shy relative who comes laden with presents in return for some inclusion, a sense of belonging in those festive weekend rituals. I was beginning to feel happy. Running into them was a hopeful thing and all I needed to do was find the courage to make that phone call, hold it all together as I crossed the threshold into their house, then, keep it together until the end. Smile. Bring the child some treats. Auntie Mehtap. That’s it.

  When I called, weeks later, the conversation kept sputtering at the brink of premature conclusion, like those motorized dinghies whose pulled string fails to rev the engine, yet lasted too long. I was not myself in it. I couldn’t find the doorway. There were too many “So, how are you and what have you been up to?”—a ludicrous effort to make everything seem unruffled as if we truly were some distant friends from work who had run into each other on the street and made an un-meant promise to call sometime, until my jaw, locked up in a fake smile, made my face hurt and I decided to say goodbye, feeling exposed for having mistaken her obviously fake invitation for an earnest one.

  She said, “Mehtap, I meant it…”

  “You meant what?”

  “That I want you to come over and be part of our lives.”

  “It will be awkward. Thank you, but I don’t think I can.”

  “If I can invite you, surely you can come too,” she replied with irritation.

  “There is no comparison between your invitation and my acceptance, Nuray. You slammed the door on me, and left me without news for years; erased me from your life entirely. Got married, had a child, for goodness sake and not even a call…. You knew where to find me. Why didn’t you? Then, we run into each other and you give me that ‘come see us sometime’ bullshit. You compare that silly invitation to my picking up the phone, swallowing my pride and fear, and speaking nonsense for almost an hour now, in the hope of … so you can tell me that my acceptance equals your invitation? How dare you?”

  I slammed the phone down so hard the table shook. Finally, I was slamming something. I was out of breath, my chest heaving up and down. The phone rang. I let it. I counted twelve rings. The ringing of a phone you purposely fail to pick up is shriller, more accusatory, and the silences in between are louder and angrier than the ring itself. Five minutes or so later, it started ringing again. I picked up and listened. She was weeping. I decided to visit the following weekend.

  The doorbell. Ding dong. The threshold. Smiles. The little girl in a pink summer dress and white sandals. The gaunt man who bent his head not to hit the doorway. Nuray, all black curls and red lipstick and hips and voluptuousness in a brown summer dress, like some chocolate cake, like some soft, sweet edible thing that feels moist and spongy to the palate. How I missed her beauty. We hugged and it lasted too long perhaps. I was not going to worry about the gaunt man. His name was Ekrem. He helped his wife bring the cookies and tea cups to the coffee table while we chatted about this and that. The daughter was following him around the whole time, holding on to his leg. “So how did you two meet?” I asked once she had poured the tea into the delicate cups and they both sat down. My voice was sweet like sticky candy in my mouth. I wasn’t good at faking admiration. When he smiled, I caught a glimmer of irony, something mysteriously clever in his eyes and thought I understood her attraction to him.

  “I’ll let Nuray tell you. She’s so much better at it.”

  Ekrem finished his tea in one gulp to be done with it. It was clear the afternoon tea ritual had been imposed on him and he had been told to behave for the sake of the spinster friend. He rose from the sofa saying he was taking Mehtap for her afternoon walk. As soon as they left, we sat down and Nuray reached over to hold my hand from her armchair. We sat holding hands quietly as the apartment took on a strange aspect and the surrounding objects became unfamiliar. I shuddered. This was the sp
ace she lived in day after day while I sat in the sunlit extension of my house in Karataş. That was the buffet in which she kept her dishes, and the corridor leading to the bedrooms that echoed with her footsteps. There was the picture of her and her brother that used to decorate my bookcase, on the coffee table. A rhododendron in a copper pot. Hand-woven Bergama carpets. I looked at her hand as if some explanation would be released from it into my aching chest. I tried to occupy my mind with the ferry schedule for my return, so I wouldn’t weep, not there.

  “I’m sorry,” she said caressing my arm gently. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Yes…. Me too. All this time, I went over everything, in detail, trying to find out what it was that I had done to make you leave.”

  “I got restless.”

  “I thought you were punishing me for saying I would leave you if Aydın loved me back. After that you went and had an affair with him. It was to spite me, wasn’t it? To show me you could seduce him. To show me he would never love me back. It was ruthless, what you did. I don’t even know why I’m here now. I should have just walked on. If I didn’t call out your name, would you have walked on, pretending not to recognize me?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve missed you, Mehtap. You’ll never know how much.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “He is a good man.”

  “Is the child his?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “I don’t know. It seems you married Ekrem months after you broke it off with Aydın … and me. And had the child soon after.”

  “Ekrem and I liked each other as soon as we met. He may not look like much, but he is very smart and gentle. There was no point in waiting. It isn’t like we were young. We both wanted a family. Aydın never mattered.” She seemed to want to continue, from the rhythm of her last sentence, but stopped abruptly and looked at me.

  “I don’t want to talk about this. I want to be happy to have you here, in flesh and blood, right here in front of me. I imagined this for such a long time. Could we not…?”

  “Do you still splash around the bathtub, like you used to?”

  She corked her head around and emitted her familiar neigh, somewhat tentatively. “Yes. I’m teaching my daughter to do the same.”

  I imagined Nuray and Mehtap in the bathtub singing marches and splashing.

  “So where did you meet him?”

  “Remember my cousin who used to pick us up when we went dancing?”

  “The one with the Impala.”

  “That one. He and Ekrem are friends. One day the three of us went out. And…” she shrugged.

  I was curious about so many things. I wanted to ask how it was for her to be with him, why this man in particular and what about me? I hoped that eventually I would figure these things out, if I visited once in a while and became more involved in her life.

  “Let me show you the place!” She stood up and smiled, pretending to be the consummate housewife.

  We walked from room to room. Little Mehtap’s room had a small balcony with flowers hanging from the railing. Purple pansies. She had a flowery bedspread too. Curtains in the same fabric. “I made them all myself.” She said. “New sewing machine. If you need anything, I’ll make it for you…”

  “I see you have become very tidy.” I shook my head in disbelief.

  “You haven’t seen my closets.” The curls moved about and the red lips parted letting out unrestricted melodies,, her enormous laughter making me want to float in the air. The coils of hair bounced around her face momentarily, her neck swayed and she giggled; it was done within seconds, and I was once again love-struck, despairing.

  “Nuray, your laughter is life to me.”

  Tears were running down my cheeks, my hands rushing to stop the flow. She hugged me close, then gently led me to the living room and sat me down. I felt it was time for me to leave. I gathered my composure and said goodbye. As I walked down her street toward the quay, I looked up once and saw her silhouette at the window, watching me.

  HEART-WRENCHING GOODBYES are the price one pays for a long life. They are all gone now, my loved ones: my grandmother Inez, my father, my mother, magnificent Nuray, and beloved Aydın. I have survived all of that grief, that immense liquid wave of aching that nearly drowns life out, then withdraws, leaving the whimpering body intact, relieved, guilty to be alive, hungering for three square meals during wakes and funerals, wolfing down the mourners’ helva, easy prey to laughter, levity and the intoxicating scent of a neighbouring jasmine that comes to taunt nostrils here in the small rectangular space of this glass-covered cumba, as I write and write senselessly at a table which is even older than I, its wood borne with perfectly circular holes, side by side in telegraphic precision, by tiny worms who can trace their ancestry before the great fire of Izmir, maybe even from the time the tree was cut down a century ago, gnawing while Inez changed her daughter’s diapers on it, leaving minuscule piles of dust beside their tunnels; those nests which entombed them. It is so. I am no different than the worm still struggling in the wood of this table. We both want to leave something of ourselves behind, to leave something that will continue or perhaps to simply be in action when death finally pounces on us.

  I dreamt of my old teacher Gülbahar Hanım the other night. She was still skinny, tall and sour-faced, towering over me with her metal rod, ready to hit my hands. She didn’t know that I had x-ray vision and could see her skeleton underneath her strict high-collared dress that smelled of naphthalene. I could see all her bones, one by one, and her wrist was broken. I exclaimed, “My teacher, your wrist is broken. Is that why you want to break mine?” And I awoke, feeling my nightgown wet around my abdomen, and the wetness was on my bed too. Did I pee from fear? Did my decrepit bladder find a cause in my agitated mind? They tell me I should go to a hospice; that I’m too ill to live here alone. They’ll have to carry me out, I say. They’ll have to come and scoop me from the floor and even then, perhaps I will still have enough rage to kick away their compassionate arms.

  I have lived a life of secrecy, called it a modest life and it has been, in outward appearance, a most unremarkable one. Those few who knew me well have died and those who surround me now see a solitary old maid, a stubborn lady who will not give up her small corner of independence, her familiar objects. I still wear the same navy blue pants and black blouses, although more and more I wander around the house in my nightgown and hardly go out. I’ve given up dyeing my hair. I can’t lift my arms up to apply the colour. The vegetable man does not come around with his cart anymore. Vegetables are in the supermarket. Emin, the gevrek boy has grown up and left. After that first night, he came back regularly and I taught him what little I know. I bought him the book My Sweet Orange Tree from a store on Mithat Paşa and every time he came over after that, we read it together. I would ask him to read to me, mostly, while I sewed buttons or washed dishes. I pretended to be busy at something, to encourage him to read out loud. I didn’t know what the book was about when I bought it, but upon reading the story of Zeze, the young boy from the slums of Rio, I realized I could not have chosen a better one for Emin who would occasionally stop reading and pretend to have to go to the bathroom to hide his budding tears from me. He eventually graduated as an electrician from a trade school which he attended at night after he was finished selling his gevreks. One day he came to my door, dressed in clean pants and a white shirt, shaven and cologned, carrying a box of lokums.25 He had gotten a job. He kissed the top of my hand and pressed it to his forehead. Dear Emin. Every Sugar Holiday, without fail, he came to visit with a box of fruit jellies and only stopped coming after he got married and had children. Perhaps he moved elsewhere.

  23dolmuş: shared taxi

  24“Iyi akşamlar hanım teyze”: “Good evening, madame auntie”

  25lokums: Turkish delight

  Notebook II. The Cretans

  MARIA LAY IN THE HOSPIT
AL BED in Konak, her face ashen, her fingers curled around softened palms on top of the thin grey hospital blanket. She had been hospitalized a few days before and her condition was deteriorating. Mehmet sat on the chair next to her bedside, his calloused hands clasped together on the blanket within touching distance of his wife’s curled fist. There were large sweat stains underneath his armpits, hot July breezes blowing into the room from the open hospital window, bringing in the sounds of digging, shouting and honking from the busy street. Outside the room, in the hallway he could see the black-and-white photograph of a pretty nurse in a white cap, one finger pressed over her mouth to instruct silence. Mehtap walked to the open window, wanting to be doing something, to be engaged in actions that would help her mother regain her health, and found herself staring blankly at a pigeon perched on the sill, his head turning sideways to look back at her. They had been waiting for hours, obsessively watching the IV drip, ready to rush for the nurse the moment a bubble should form in the transparent tube between Maria’s arm and the pouch hung on the pole. It hadn’t happened. Father and daughter sat watching the pouch empty drop by drop, caressing her hands and arms, placing cold compresses on her burning forehead. Maria slept mostly, with the effect of the drugs entering her bloodstream, occasionally opening her eyes and moaning. She motioned for Mehmet to come nearer and he immediately complied, bending his head close to her mouth as she whispered something into his ear. He nodded and said, “Don’t worry, my dove. It will be as you say. You just get better, please,” in Greek and turned to Mehtap nodding his head for her to approach her mother. She got closer and held her mother’s hand. Maria almost smiled, “Your hands are so cool, hrisomou. It feels nice.” Mehtap swallowed the sob that was rising in her chest and smiled back. “Do you want another compress?”