by Loren Edizel
Maria shook her head no. “I have to tell you…. Something you need to know. I may not have another chance to speak of it.” Mehtap was about to protest and tell her mother that she was to get better and not speak this way, but Maria gestured for her to keep quiet.
“Something your father and I thought we could take to our graves…. But I will not rest easy. Come closer.” Mehtap got close to her mother’s lips to hear, “Tell your father to go get some fresh air now. He needs it.” Mehtap nodded and went to tell him. He looked much older than his forty years with his sunken cheeks and hollowed eyes.
Mehtap approached the bed again. “Mama, you will get better. Please don’t tell me you won’t. I can’t bear it, you hear?”
“We are all going there, my gold, sooner or later, and we will meet on the other side one day in the very distant future, God willing…. I’m grateful I have seen you grow up…. Don’t be sad for me. Take care of your father. He doesn’t talk much, but his despair goes deeper than even he realizes. I can see it in his eyes…. I told your father already, I want to be buried in the Catholic cemetery and please ask the priest to have a mass in my name. Can you do this for me?” She took a deep breath and looked as though she wanted to close her eyes and sleep.
“Shh, Mama, don’t strain yourself now.”
“The bracelets,” she continued after another deep breath, “have been my greatest source of anguish. Your father and I had the same father. Yes. Mehmet the Great was my mother’s secret lover. I wrote to her and she confirmed it. She raised me, all alone, and Mehmet the Great took care of her in secret. They couldn’t have anticipated that your father and I would fall in love one day. My mother should have left the village, I suppose, but she didn’t. Couldn’t. I don’t know…. I never told my mother about Mehmet’s parents. She didn’t know who he really was. We weren’t close, we didn’t talk much. All she wanted was for me to get as far away from the island as I could. She hated everything there. I’m not sure we could have stopped loving each other even if we had known…. I’m sorry darling. Please forgive me so I can die in peace.”
Mehtap realized she had forgotten certain details of her mother’s face many years later, when she became an old woman herself; the shape of her chin or whether she had freckles, but she could never erase from her memory the depth of suffering in her mother’s eyes in that moment. It seemed as though her life had been a struggle that dragged her toward this instant. She could see the traces of nightmares that made her scream in the night, the sudden bursts of melancholia, her irritation, her sad relationship with the kitchen, all of those mysteriously sealed moments of unease she had witnessed as a child. She felt the petrified weight of powerlessness deep in her chest, holding her mother’s soft and still very warm palm between her fingertips. Her own shock sprang less from the realization that she was the product of an incestuous love between brother and sister, than the poignancy and desolation in her mother’s eyes in those final moments.
She leaned over and kissed her burning forehead, “Mama … you couldn’t have raised me better or given me more of your love. Do not fret about this. Leave the sorrows of the old country where they belong. Please do not be so sad.” Tears streamed down her face as she whispered these words, wishing to erase her mother’s sorrow.
Her mother nodded, and closed her eyes. Mehtap was grateful for this respite from seeing those eyes suffused with pain. Mehmet returned from his walk around the block still carrying the smell of chain-smoked cigarettes on his jacket and sat in the chair beside his wife. The death rattle soon followed.
She ran out of the room into the hot sunny afternoon, crossing streets and arriving, breathless, at the Konak peer just in time to see people disembark from the ferry.
Notebook III. Autobiography
I WENT TO SEE NURAY A FEW TIMES a year, once every couple of months after that initial visit. Every time I went, I brought a little something to my namesake Mehtap, a chocolate bar, or coloured pencils, a wind-up toy, whatever I could find. She was fascinated by the latter and had an entire shelf dedicated to them; teeth that clacked, a clown on a bicycle, a hopping bunny, a walking robot…
Nuray and I were never alone again after that first tearful visit. Not in her house. Ekrem would be sitting within earshot, reading his paper in his leather slippers. Mehtap would be either playing or doing homework at the kitchen table. Nuray and I would sit together and talk or knit. I’ve always hated knitting but I suppose she saw this as something to keep our hands occupied during those long silences when we gazed at each other with longing, like lovers at a train station except that neither of us was leaving. We sat, inhabiting islands of excruciating silence, our eyes playing hide and seek, my heart rising within my chest like bread dough, threatening to choke me. I still felt anger that she chose this life over ours; this life in which I was made to sit gingerly and behave like someone else. I understood her choices, but it did not help me better accept them. One such Sunday, as I was leaving, I said just loud enough for everyone to hear, “Nuray, I was wondering if you could pass by my house one of these weekends, for a little while, to help me sew curtains for my living room? You’re so good at sewing … and I’m having such a hard time. The material is too heavy for me to carry all the way here….” I held my breath in case Ekrem could hear the loud thudding of my heart. She raised her eyebrows and the familiar irony appeared on her smiling lips, like the ephemeral warmth of sunshine in an overcast sky and said, “Sure, if Ekrem and Mehtap don’t mind not having me around for an afternoon next Sunday. What do you say, dear?” She often had this saccharine tone with him in my presence as if to purposefully highlight the unenviable position of her unmarried friend who lived alone and needed the support of a happily married couple such as themselves. He shrugged and nodded politely before going back to his paper. Mehtap asked if she could come too. “You’ll get very bored, sweetheart. There are no toys for you to play with….”
“I’ll bring my doll,” she replied and her mother nodded, “We’ll see…”
I ran down the stairs and into the street unable to contain my joy. She was not going to bring her daughter, I could tell from the look she gave me. She was going to get off the Mithat Paşa streetcar, like she used to so long ago, giving the conductor a good view of her curvy haunches as she swayed them down the steps and I would be standing there on the sidewalk, waiting for her, imagining long passionate kisses in my darkened bedroom, fumbling with buttons, hooks and other hurdles. I imagined not making it to that moment from a faint heart, from the constant weakness perfusing my thighs for an entire week. How slowly it passed. How thrilling to suffer the wait….
She called me at work on Wednesday to remind me to buy the fabric for the curtains. Her husband and daughter were going to come and pick her up from my house in the evening. “We will have to sew some curtains after all,” she laughed in her usual neighing way, and I imagined that mass of black curls corking around the neck as she giggled into the phone.
“But I don’t want to sew!” I exclaimed in exasperation.
“What do you propose, then?”
“I’ll have to sew them before you come. What else?” I said after a long silence.
That left me three days to buy heavy curtain fabric I did not need, figure out how to use my grandmother’s sewing machine which I had not touched in decades and make a convincing effort at sewing drapes worthy of a living room. She found the plan very amusing.
“Don’t sew the whole set. Leave some for another Sunday, so I can come back to finish them.”
She was about to pee herself from laughing, she said, catching her breath between guffaws and a snort, and slammed down the phone presumably to run to the toilet.
The next day after work I rushed to Saim Bey’s fabric store in Kemeraltı to buy curtains. He kept asking me about my furniture, the colour of my living room walls, what kind of effect I was looking for and all I wanted to say was “I don’t care! Just
give me something. Anything.” The material was costly. I resigned myself to actually changing the drapes of my living room. I didn’t have the money for all those metres of material with glossy boughs in the colour of pomegranates; I didn’t even know if this fit with the room or the furniture. A sense of despair was quickly replacing my initial excitement. Saim Bey proposed I pay in instalments, and I walked away carrying an enormous and heavy package that would become my new curtains.
Sitting in my extra bedroom with the material unfolded, and my grandmother’s old sewing machine uncovered, I wanted to hurt myself for coming up with such an asinine plan. After some time pacing up and down I measured the windows to at least cut the fabric, and make some sort of hem and I figured if the room looked busy enough, it would convince her husband that some work had gone on before his arrival.
Nuray was apparently finding all this very amusing. She called me at work on Friday to find out how the curtain project was going. “It’s a mess. I’m losing my mind!” I shouted into the phone.
“Why are you getting so worked up about this?” she chuckled. “You’re blowing this thing out of proportion! What does he care about a boring sewing date on a Sunday afternoon?”
“He’s not stupid.”
“Stop exaggerating.”
“What would you like me to prepare for you?”
Fried eggs, lots of butter it was. The sunrays filtering through the rustling leaves of the plane tree outside my bedroom window were casting elongated shadows on the walls and bed sheets, occasionally reflecting the amorphous grey silhouette of a branch going this way and that in sloppy zigzags over her profile or my arm, lighting up the curve of her upper lip, darkening the side of her long pale neck momentarily and moving away as if to highlight the drunkenness of the moment, as if to reproach, to show how blind we had been, how forgetful. The early afternoon was cool on our bodies, aching goose bumps rising to meet warm palms and lips. My left hand found the twin dimples in the small of her back, and rested there, as we lay face to face, and I daydreamed of Bedouins in the desert, imagining the moment they reached an oasis, crouching to wet their dusty lips with a handful of precious water. That afternoon was my handful of water.
“Do you remember the fairy tale you told me a while ago, here, one Sunday morning? It was a day like this.”
“What fairy tale?”
“The monster in the labyrinth in Crete. Your bracelets. Tell it to me again. It was such a horribly sad story.”
“Why do you want to hear a sad story?” I moved the curls away from her eyes.
She shrugged slightly, offering a melancholy little smile. “I don’t know…. Maybe because I’m so happy right now. And life can be so sad…. Do you still keep them in that drawer?” She pointed at my dresser.
I nodded. “I’ve been thinking of giving them to your daughter when she grows up. Or if you have another daughter someday, they can each get one.”
“I still think about that story, you know. The part when they enter the cave, and all the children soon to be eaten alive are cowering behind the brave prince, and it stinks in there making them want to vomit. The Minotaur opens his eyes…. It’s so terrifying. Sometimes I dream of it. I’m one of them and I know I should be silent but I can’t help screaming in terror. The monster wakes up because of me. Then I realize it is my eye that has opened and I’m inside the monster, looking at the shiny sword that will sever my head. Ekrem wakes up from my screams. I cannot tell him. Whenever he asks, I make something up.”
I wanted to tell her the other story. The secret one I avoided. Or tried to. There is no avoiding a thought like this one. The harder you try, the deeper it gets; like water harnessed by a dam. Life is everything else that happens downstream. But thought … who can trace the process that moves stuff through all that tangle of nerves and grey matter? Anyway, I wanted and didn’t want to tell her. Primarily because if I told her, it would no longer be a secret. And it had to be a secret, because I was ashamed of it. I had done nothing to earn this shame; still it was mine to carry, in silence—that dark murky vat where secrets pool unheard, where they transcend life spans, centuries, where my mother thought she could hide her own burden until it leaked through her lips, having moved through the chest cavity, up her oesophagus to be released in that final rusty chime of words that strained her dehydrated vocal chords. An otherworldly tinkle … I could say rattle, but she doesn’t deserve that. I remember her voice coming to my ears like the tintinnabulation of small bells, in the old days when she was young and so beautiful. Did she tell me this to unburden herself or to warn me; the way her own mother ought to have warned her about her own secrets and didn’t?
I did not tell Nuray about the bracelets that afternoon. I came very close to it. Among these pages which I may yet decide to burn I bury my secrets. We got out of bed and I put the tea kettle on. She sat at my grandmother’s sewing machine and started that infernal noise. We took a break to have tea with biscuits. She tossed her curls around laughing, “I can’t believe you paid all that money for the curtains. I think I will have to come back a few Sundays to finish them. You know why? Because I want to make a valance. It will really enhance your living room. Off-white, I’m thinking. Pomegranate will be too loud. You don’t want to make a statement, just add a touch of elegance. You know what I mean?” She kept talking about the shape of the valance she had in mind, wondering out loud how much more material it would require as she munched on her biscuits and made slurping sounds sipping her hot tea from the glass after putting four sugar cubes in it. Four! For an instant, half listening to her prattle, I was transported to an earlier time, when this used to happen, and we went to bed with the assurance we would wake up together. I didn’t listen, then. I complained about her splashing, not to mention her awful dietary habits while she lamented my poor taste in clothes and lack of spontaneity. Were we happy then? Or does happiness come from remembering such banalities through the frame of absence. Sort of like her valance that was supposed to lift my living room décor from its staid existence to a higher plane of elegance. I said to her: “I have missed this so…. Your talking to me and chewing and sewing while I listen and watch your bouncing curls, the shape of your lovely nose in profile. Is it like this with Ekrem too?”
It was an innocuous question that sort of burst out of me, but she took offence. “Why do you have to drag him into every conversation? When I’m here, I’m here. Forget about him, okay?” A pout formed on her cushioned lips and she began the infernal noise once again, shutting me out. I was about to defend my innocence, but decided against it, letting her believe I was making covertly jealous allusions. Perhaps I was too. Jealousy is an aphrodisiac, whoever denies it is a fool.
Eventually, the doorbell rang. The sun was setting over the bay and I offered her husband and daughter some tea in the darkening living room. Ekrem declined politely and we made small talk standing in the living room. The child wanted to go pee. She ran up the few steps toward the bathroom, on her way peeking into the sewing room where the bundles of fabric were laid out on a table. The empty tea glasses and plates with crumbs sat among scissors and pins. All was in perfect disorder. We heard the toilet flush. Mehtap ran out. Her mother asked if she had washed her hands; she was made to run back in and turn on the tap. Soon, they left.
When she came back the following Sunday, I found a way of asking her some of the questions that had been obsessing me since I ran into her again. How did it feel to make love with her husband? I wanted to know this, since she was the one who always insisted she didn’t enjoy sex with men, yet she was living with one. We were sewing together, and I mentioned in passing that I had had an affair with a man, without divulging his identity. She became inquisitive, wanting to know when, how and why. I told her it had happened when I went to Germany on a business trip; someone I met there; my friend’s acquaintance.
“Was he handsome?” she asked with apparent disbelief.
I n
odded, feeling smug.
“No way!” she smiled, her lips curved up on one side. That was the tell-tale sign that she found the situation ironic.
“I still hear from him. He wishes I could spend more time with him….”
“Then why don’t you?”
“He’s married. In Germany.”
“And if he weren’t?”
“Well, he is.”
“What was his name?”
“Why do you care?”
“Just tell me!”
“Hans,” I lied.
“Well,” she pressed, looking impatient, “was he blond, grey, brown-eyed, blue-eyed, tall? Go on, describe him to me.”
“You know, it really bugs me that you never ask the important questions when I tell you something. Who cares what he looked like? You’ll never meet him!”
“I want to visualize. Why do you get mad? Okay, so tell me what my questions should be, then. God, you’re so annoying!” She pouted, waving her arm as if to chase a fly.
“How was he in bed? Did I like it? Did I fall in love? Why did I do it?” “Fine, answer your own questions then,” She pouted, looking pointedly bored.
“Not if you’re not interested!”
“Pass me the pins. You’ll have to hold the fabric while I use the sewing machine. It’s too heavy.”
I gathered up the fabric and sat beside her while she slipped part of the curtain under the needle. She had a few pins sticking out of her mouth.
“You’ll swallow one, and we’ll have to go to the hospital.”
