Days of Moonlight

by Loren Edizel

  I have something to tell you, and I don’t know how to do it from far away without the help of my arms to enlace you, and my lips to touch you. It is a difficult thing to share. Please bear with me if I take too many detours, and write senselessly for a while; I need it to find the way. What is difficult to say in words comes from those speechless places we have discovered for having lost our dear ones forever—you your parents and grandmother, me my mother and brother.

  When I tripped and fell and broke my two legs while crossing the street, I attributed it to simple clumsiness in high heels. When they took x-rays and prodded and poked me at the hospital, they discovered that I have some type of bone cancer and this is why both my legs broke when I fell. It is not normal for both legs to break thusly from a simple fall, they said. I didn’t have the heart to tell you when you called the other day and asked me if I could still use my plane ticket later. You sounded so hopeful I just couldn’t bear to cause you such distress over the phone. I have some treatments that will begin soon. They used the word “palliative” and I had to run home and check the dictionary to figure out what that meant exactly. It means that the treatment is not for a cure, but to help with the pain and prolong my life. The origin of the cancer is not in my bones but elsewhere, they suspect in the breast. It has spread now. I never felt a thing. I’m so sorry to share this awful news with you Mehtap. One has too many words or not enough words to talk about one’s own impending finality. It is everyone’s fate and mine’s coming a little sooner than I expected.

  Still, I am not hopeless. I hold on to the belief in a miracle. Why would such a word exist in the world, otherwise? A nun who was at the hospital told me of a place not too far from here where miracles have happened. It is a site of pilgrimage. She told me to pray. Pray for a miracle and for acceptance as well, she said, the ways of the universe are mysterious.

  It would certainly help me feel better if you could come to see me now. Do you think it is possible for you to take some time off and come? I’m sure Patron would understand.

  I kiss your eyes, my dearest.

  Nuray

  Remembering Mehtap

  SHE DREW ME INTO HER STORY unexpectedly that cold February morning, when I found her oversized package stuffed in my mailbox. There were two thick spiral notebooks within, pages filled with tight, studied calligraphy, in blue ink. The last pages of one book had apparently been written with great difficulty, by someone who could hardly hold a pen. The writing was shaky; it bled below and above the lines, and the spaces between words were uneven.

  I have hazy memories of her house in Karataș, the red couch in her living room, a narrow street made of too many stairs one had to climb, the scent of jasmine through her open windows, bright orange pumpkin compotes I was given to eat from a crystal bowl. I must have been four or five, then. The next time I saw her I was already a teenager. She had come to visit us in Montreal during my mother’s illness. The two of them would sit on the balcony of our apartment in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce having tea in small glasses, Mom wrapped in a blanket and Mehtap watching her every move. They would laugh to tears holding their sides, and sometimes they would gaze quietly at the park across the street holding hands. Often, my mother would lean her head on Mehtap’s shoulder on that balcony and fall asleep to her friend’s tender caresses. Mom seemed transformed when Mehtap was around. I can’t quite describe the change except that it was palpable, as if this friendship created a universe around them complete with comets and constellations that shone brighter than the one my father and I inhabited.

  If I felt somewhat envious, I was also grateful for her presence because it meant Mom had company while I went to school and Father to work, and we didn’t need to worry about her being alone if she took a turn for the worse. Mehtap cooked for us, did the laundry and stepped in to mother us all in those few weeks of her stay. We all knew my mother was not going to recover, there was no remedy; we were sobered beyond the point of praying for miracles. Every coming day was going to be worse than the last. At night, no longer required to put on a brave face, I would lay in bed with my eyes open, my heart racing to escape the sharp claws of grief. I’d stare at the ceiling unable to stop imagining the precise moment when my mother, my beautiful mother, still breathing, laughing and living among us would be erased from existence. Would become an image in an album. A barely recollected memory receding in the haze of passing time. The curve of her brow, the precise location of the freckled constellations on the bridge of her nose, the soft pale valley between her left clavicle and neck where I loved to bury my face ever since I’d known myself, and even before, her scent of milk and lavender and cinnamon, the softness of her cheek resting on my forehead. All that. Gone. I knew Mehtap was awake, weeping quietly on the other side of the commode separating our beds, every night. I heard her sniffles. The night before her departure, I couldn’t supress my sobs. She rose from her bed and came to mine. We wept holding each other tight. The next day she left, promising my mother she would return in a few months. We never saw each other again.

  Before that time, I remember Mom’s frequent phone calls to Turkey; father frowning over exorbitant bills, Mom on the defensive. There was also the doll. When I was about to start elementary school, I got a wrapped package. In it was my own doll, wearing a black plaited uniform with a white collar, and a tiny brown school bag complete with a miniature notebook, pencil and eraser inside it. She had sewn her a Turkish school uniform. I remember being overcome with admiration observing the intricate and painstaking work this woman had undertaken to make her look like a pupil so I would take heart on my first day of school.

  These memories swept over the days that followed the arrival of the notebooks and the news of her death. I dreamt of my mother, of Mehtap and my father frequently, the words in the journals taking me back to the half-forgotten days of early childhood.

  The summer following Mehtap’s death, I travelled back to Izmir, took walks in her neighbourhood around Asansör, going up and down the steep stairs of the old narrow streets. I stood in front of her house with my pocket camera looking at the ornate corners of the cumba surrounded by glass windows, where I imagined she may have had her morning tea in a fine porcelain teacup, alone, staring into space. It was an old Smyrnian Greek house the likes of which have rapidly disappeared in favour of boxy apartment buildings all over the city. The house had already been sold by the estate. I took a picture knowing that next time I travelled back to Izmir I would find no trace of it. I could already visualize a concrete building with multiple flats whose wide open windows would spew loud commercials and soap operas, à la Turca music, and the sputtering of water faucets, mothers calling children to the table for lunch or having loud conversations on their cell phones. I put my camera away to protect the ghostly stillness it had just captured and climbed down the stairs to take a cab.

  After returning to my life in Toronto, Mehtap and her journals receded in my mind for some time until I got a call: a few more journals and notebooks had been found stashed among some clothes, while emptying the house.

  They arrived in a box about eight weeks after the call. These notebooks were smaller, thicker. Some of the pages contained multiple succinct entries, almost telegraphic, with dates. She had captured more than a decade, between 1958 and 1972 in the yellowed pages of these notebooks. Many of the entries were too hermetic to understand. One said, “Streetcar to Alsancak. Accident on the road. 45 minutes waiting in the heat. Her smile.” One looked like a shopping list. I shuffled a few pages forward. “The mere sight of him.… Yet he is much too vain. Endlessly talks about beautiful women as if to remind me I’m not one of them.” Then, “Nuray said today: ‘I’m stuck. You take me for granted while you pine for him. Whenever he asks for you, you run. But he doesn’t love you. I do!’”

  I felt nauseous with unease as I turned the pages in which glimpses of private desires and deep secrets coexisted with the banalities of life. She was twenty-nine years
old at the start of all these books and an old woman by the end. They contained things about my mother’s life I could not have imagined. Things I wasn’t prepared to consider. It would take a few readings.

  I never got her bracelets. Someone, somewhere in Turkey is probably wearing them in the naïve way people flaunt stolen jewellery, ignorant of their origins and carefully kept secrets.

  No matter. Mehtap’s journals and the oblique light they cast on my mother’s life are what I was meant to keep. If the lost bracelets from Crete were Mehtap’s unwanted treasure, hidden among lavender-scented underwear and rarely worn, her words, like adumbrated foliage on a moonlit night glimmered here and there to reveal disquieting shadows, tremulous patterns unseen in the glare of daylight, and the occasional opalescent bloom of a jasmine so delicate and humble and ephemeral.

  Toronto, June 15, 2014

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many wonderful people have believed in this book, starting with my family. Alfredo, Nikola, Maura and Jacques, you’ve all read a draft or two, encouraged me, given me space. I am so grateful for your love. Gerar, my dear brother, no one could have imagined that street, that house, the way you did. Thank you for making it come alive for the book cover. Hanna Edizel, for working on ideas for pictures and visual concepts with me. Morris Berman, when you said you loved the book, I felt I could, too. Hale Tenger and Kristin Micaleff-Botros, you took the time to give it a close and loving read, with invaluable feedback. Cecilia Ekbäck, Carole Giangrande, Dan Perry, Melinda Vandenbeld Giles, writer friends and peers, so generous with your time and words. I’m indebted to your kindness.

  Luciana Ricciutelli, my dear editor, thank you for being the passionate feminist voice that you are, and for bringing diversity and change to Canadian publishing with your choices of books and authors. I am grateful for your encouragement.

  Photo: Edwin Gailits

  Loren Edizel was born in Izmir, Turkey, and has lived in Canada most of her life. She is the author of three novels, Adrift (2011) (long-listed for the ReLit Awards), The Ghosts of Smyrna (2013), and a collection of short stories, Confessions: A Book of Tales (2014). The Ghosts of Smyrna was also published in Turkish, in Turkey, in 2017. Her short fiction has appeared in journals in both Canada and in Turkey. She lives in Toronto with her family.