Walking on the Ceiling

by Aysegül Savas

  We had a long discussion about bird nests, their miraculous, compact structure, and the disappointment of seeing them come apart in mud and twigs. M. told me about a collection of birds’ eggs he had as a child, listing the colors one by one, each a shade darker than the other: wet sand, cherry bark, evening blue, he wrote, and I marveled at his precision. I was happy that I was the recipient of this list, as if it were a poem. In return, I told him about my mother’s photographs of the doorstep in Aldere, taken in varying lights, always with the broomstick against the wall. I described all the different hours of the town, which, in my telling, became more mythical still than my mother’s Aldere: the misty, cold mornings, bright afternoons, woodsmoke dusks. This was how we stepped from one topic to the next, in our particular logic, without attachment to the cumbersome rationality at ground level.

  M. reported on the Judas tree in his apartment building’s courtyard, documenting its bare branches and anticipating its earliest buds. One time, he wrote that Judas trees always reminded him of Istanbul.

  I told him that my mother had loved these trees, and that she and I used to go to the Adile Sultan Pavilion once every year for lunch to see them.

  I had written to M. about my mother’s passing, and he accepted the information without comment, which I interpreted as gentleness. As I said, it seemed that he already knew certain things, and I was relieved that I did not have to explain any further. But I also worried that he noticed things about me, in moments when I let my guard down.

  “You haven’t told me what you ate on these lunches at the Adile Sultan Pavilion,” M. wrote back. I remember his impatience, his eagerness for such details.

  I told him pureed fava beans, artichokes, white asparagus from İzmir, roasted lamb with thyme.

  And then there were our Sunday fish lunches, I said. Those were a world to themselves.

  24.

  After we moved to the new apartment, my mother and I would walk along the water to Yeniköy on Sundays to have fish at Aleko’s. I can’t remember how this became a tradition but it must have started as one of my mother’s celebrations following a long silence—those days when I collected many points in my game—after which my mother would appear at my door as if nothing had happened.

  “Nunito? What are you doing here all by yourself?”

  With these final, decisive points added to my score, I would look up casually from my newspaper city and shrug.

  “I hope you haven’t forgotten that tomorrow is the day for our walk,” she said. In this story we silently agreed on, I was the one who kept forgetting, who demanded solitude.

  * * *

  —

  Once we reached the boardwalk, which stretched for miles ahead, my mother walked faster, and I thought that she might even start running, as if she wanted to dive right into the heart of the Bosphorus. My hand in my mother’s, I felt that we were seeing through a single pair of eyes, noticing the same beautiful sights, looking forward to landmarks as we walked: the three old houses on a canal in Arnavutköy, like three wizened sisters; the lines of fishermen in Bebek with their buckets of fluttering fish; the looming Rumeli fortress on the hills. Every time we approached the fortress, my mother asked me who had built it, and I quickly answered, “Mehmed the Second, 1452!”

  At the threshold of each neighborhood, I announced the destination ahead, like a tour guide: “We have arrived in Emirgan. Next stop, İstinye!” Sometimes, I listed the neighborhoods of the Bosphorus in rapid succession, like reciting a nursery rhyme, taking pleasure in the names: “Ortaköy, Kuruçeşme, Arnavutköy, Bebek, Rumeli Hisarı, Baltalimanı, Emirgan, İstinye, Yeniköy, Tarabya, Kireçburnu, Büyükdere, Sarıyer.” (When I lived in Paris, I repeated the stations on the metro Line 4 to myself—Saint-Placide, Saint-Sulpice, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Odéon, Saint-Michel—with the same satisfaction.)

  On some walks, my mother said, “Nunito, let’s see if you can list them backwards,” and I was filled with excitement. (I always gained a few points if she offered me this challenge.) I started slowly, this time using mental pictures, retracing my path from the hills of Sarıyer, past the mansions of Büyükdere to the steep and narrow road in Kireçburnu leading up from the boardwalk, which reminded me, with its overgrown garden gates, of Aldere. Walking past this road, I had the disorienting feeling that if I were to follow it, I would find my grandparents in the garden, polishing rifles or sweeping the doorstep.

  Sometimes, we sat on a bench in front of the İstinye state hospital, listening to the echoes of hammers ringing from the shipyard. This tiny bay, cupping the blue-green water and crowded with lumber, ropes, and cranes, was proof for me of Istanbul’s arrogant beauty. I thought that if the city could spare such a bay to a chaotic shipyard, it must have many more beautiful sights. At such moments, Istanbul split into the city I could see and a hidden city reserved for other people.

  When we arrived in Yeniköy, my mother walked with her head down, past İskele Restaurant and the young waiter Yaşar waiting at the door. We had stopped going to İskele when they served us bad fish two weeks in a row, but my mother continued to feel guilty when she walked past the waiters, whom she knew by name. We hurried down the leafy road to our destination. In this last stretch of our walk, I let myself complain once.

  “Nejla!” I said, dragging my feet and whining that I was tired, only to hear my mother’s praise, which won me ten points, and made me champion so early in the day. There weren’t many other occasions when this could happen:

  “Nunito,” my mother said, “you walked like a real explorer.”

  * * *

  —

  Although we switched from İskele Restaurant to Aleko’s when I was ten or eleven, I always thought of it as the “new” restaurant and never took a liking to the fawning owner, Selim Bey, who called me princess and extended his clammy hand for me to climb the single step at the entrance. He led us past the corridor of glass refrigerators displaying the smiling heads of the day’s catch and up the stairs to the terrace, where we sat at the back table overlooking the sea.

  My mother asked Selim Bey for his recommendations, maneuvering his suggestions and ending with a plea to prepare whatever was freshest.

  Selim Bey invariably answered that everything was fresh, and added, pouting, that he would not think to serve us anything else. Then he proposed a simple grilled bluefish, along with something fried, to taste, and a bit of stewed mullet as well.

  “Is it the season for bluefish?” my mother worried. “Wouldn’t mullet be too dry?”

  My favorite was fried istavrit, which we ate only once or twice in early autumn. I associated the short season with the fish’s tiny, glimmering body, which, I imagined, usually managed to escape even the most cunning fishing nets. On these long-awaited istavrit lunches, my mother told Selim Bey that we would skip appetizers and just eat fish.

  Otherwise, we started with dishes chosen from the colorful tray brought to our table. My mother pointed at the aubergine salad and the white beans. She picked the feta (“Do you still get your cheese from Kardeşler?”). She might reluctantly accept the melon plate as well, even though she liked to say that melons no longer tasted as they did in her childhood.

  Once our food arrived, my mother began her quiz. She tested me on the different names for bluefish, from smallest to largest (çinekop, sarıkanat, lüfer . . . ) or asked me why there was no bonito in the Bosphorus during bluefish season. Remembering the grinning mouths in the glass fridge, I replied that the bluefish’s tiny sawlike teeth would rip the bonito to smithereens.

  After lunch, while my mother drank her coffee and smoked, we sat in silence, listening to the lapping of the water beneath us and the solemn call of foghorns from the ferry traveling past Yeniköy to the mouth of the Bosphorus, where the strait opened up to the sea and our prized Sunday fish swam into the nets of fishermen.

  Some afternoons, if there was a table of men sitting
on the terrace, my mother did not drink her coffee but asked immediately for the check (which Selim Bey presented with a stooping bow and a fan of wet towels). Once or twice, these men had raised their glasses to my mother and even sent a platter of fruit to our table, which my mother refused with a hurried smile. On those days, our lunch ended abruptly, and my mother would put my coat on me, even though I was capable of such a simple task. She insisted on pulling the zipper all the way to my neck and would yank at the sleeves without purpose, as if trying to bundle me away.

  Afterwards, standing by the water, we would decide what to do next. My mother said that it was still so early, and suggested visiting her aunts, knowing well that I would rather not. I didn’t mind visiting them; I might even have enjoyed it, but my mother wouldn’t be the same around them and our shared day would be over. Sometimes she offered me a story to ease the disappointment of returning home.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time Akif amca went to Paris?”

  But even if we didn’t return just then, I knew that our outing would inevitably end and we would have to return to our regular lives, where points accumulated so slowly.

  25.

  Something else I told M. during that time, those weeks that were suspended from earthly logic, was that I was writing a novel about Akif amca. I was surprised that the idea for the novel came to me so easily. I told him that I was tracing the course of Akif amca’s life from Istanbul to Paris and from there back to Aldere, using his poems and the fragments from his journals.

  It’s true that Akif amca had written some poems, in a journal he kept when he was young. My mother had found the journal on our last trip to Aldere to clean out my grandparents’ house, inside a box that also contained photographs, invitations, and a telephone book. She kept Akif amca’s journal by her bedside in Istanbul, even though I don’t remember her reading it. I had brought it with me to Paris, not because I was hoping to discover something in its pages—that is the stuff of novels—but to retain something of my mother’s world.

  “How fortunate that we ran into each other at such a time, both of us assembling our Thracian projects,” M. wrote. He was neither incredulous nor dismissive and I was surprised to read that he thought of our meeting as a chance encounter.

  He asked me to tell him more about my novel, if I didn’t mind.

  “I know how frail these ideas can be, how the landscape you are cautiously approaching can disappear behind shadows with a single false step.”

  I was grateful to him for including me so swiftly into his community of writers, and all the sensitivities of his profession of which I was mostly unaware.

  I told M. that my novel was, like his own book, a reconstruction of a vanished world. Even if the statement was new to me, I can’t say that it was a lie. What I would have liked to say was that I could write this novel with M. as my audience. That would have been the truth.

  Perhaps I told him I was writing a novel about Akif amca out of pride, to make something more of my days, which by then were shaped largely around our conversations.

  Every morning, I left my studio for the Saint-Quentin covered market, for a walk down to the river, or to the Passage Brady with its wealth of spice shops. I wrote to M. about these places as if they were part of my own routine, as if I had lived this way even before I met him—“This morning as I was headed to the Italian stall at the market . . .”; “I stopped by the flower shop and the owner was as grumpy as ever.”

  M. told me that the simplest routines of my day were poetic. And with his observation, I tried to add more poetry to my days.

  (It pains me a little to remember this now, I can’t say why, but I had bought a bowl for the studio. A deep, dark blue bowl that I filled with fruits. A poetic sight, perhaps only so that I could write about it to M.)

  In the afternoons, I chose specific destinations from Akif amca’s journals—the old crystal factory on the rue de Paradis, the calm and leafy stretch of péniches on the canal Saint-Martin, the cave behind the waterfall at Parc des Buttes-Chaumont—always with a vague idea that these places might eventually fit into my imagined novel. And always, I came home to write to M. about my discoveries.

  * * *

  —

  Akif amca’s journal contained travel notes, lines copied from books, and several poems. The poems were full of nostalgia for Istanbul. I found them amateurish and even didactic whenever they listed historical facts about the city, but I liked them precisely for this reason—for their naïve eagerness. But I didn’t share my observations with M. I pretended that Akif amca had been a great poet, and that I now had the responsibility of bringing his work to light.

  I told him about a poem whose title, “The Invention of Midnight,” intrigued me. It was a mysterious title, M. agreed, and said it was a shame his Turkish was not good enough to read poetry. He was always apologizing, I remember, but this only added to his gentle authority.

  “I’m sorry for my clumsy curiosity,” he wrote. “But I would be grateful if you translated this poem.”

  The poem itself did not live up to its title and I never translated it. It was not about a fantastical night as its name suggested, but about the literal setting of the Turkish Republic’s public clocks, with the switch to the Western calendar.

  But with time, the title of the poem became a code word for us, entirely different from the poem itself, and we would say the word midnight always with a shared understanding.

  This is what I mean when I say that I was not lying. It seemed that with M. as my audience, an entire landscape of words and images emerged harmoniously, with its own particular meaning.

  26.

  When strangers asked us about my father, my mother told them he had been a poet. I pretended not to listen so she wouldn’t be embarrassed.

  “And your husband, what did he do?”

  “He was a poet.”

  She said it without flinching.

  It was the simplest story to tell about my father, and as I grew up I began to yearn for this poet with his vivid imagination. Even if all that remained of him were the two slim collections he’d written long before, which I never read. Even if, for as long as I can remember, he had no way of expressing himself, except for those moments of clarity when he came to my room and spelled my name.

  “N, U, R, U, N, I, S, A.”

  He looked at me as if the whole world was united within a single web. As if he finally understood something.

  “I gave you this name,” he told me. “It’s a present.”

  Some nights, he could not spell correctly and I had to help him with the letters.

  * * *

  —

  The momentary silence that followed my mother’s words, when she told strangers the simple story of my father, was our own secret—our shame.

  27.

  My mother had heard the myth told in school that girls became boys and boys became girls when they walked under a rainbow. On their drives to Istanbul through miles of sunflower fields, when the sky revealed its arch, my mother pleaded with her father to go faster, imagining all that she would do once she crossed to the other side. She could be just like Akif amca, the way he could take his walking stick and leave, without having to account for his departure.

  My mother insisted on this story of wanting to be a man. It would make me sad to hear it, but I didn’t tell her. Every time she repeated the story of the rainbow, I thought she was telling me that she and I were very different, but I can’t say whether she did this out of cruelty or protection.

  “You had a good time, didn’t you, Nunu?” she asked after visits to the aunts, which was more a statement than a question. It was proof that I, unlike my mother, had the strange ability of enjoying the company of women.

  One afternoon when we were going home, I told her about a recipe I had learned from Asuman’s neighbor, who’d come over for tea and brought a cake. I explained how
the swirl of color in the cake’s center was achieved.

  “I’ll make it for you,” I said.

  “Oh, Nunu,” my mother said. “I can’t believe you fill your mind with all of this.”

  Around other women, my mother became a different person. When the aunts came over, she seemed to make an effort to look disheveled. She would wear a purple shirt blotched with bleach, an oversized skirt. She let her long hair fall in strands from the nest she had gathered on her head. I sometimes wondered whether my mother might need my help, in some way. Some guidance.

  “Nejla, let’s both wear green,” I would say before the aunts came, going to her room to find her long, flowing dress—the one that suddenly changed her. (And if ever she put on the gold necklace as well, with the tiny stones, I wouldn’t even need to collect points.)

  But my mother would give me that look, as if trying to determine who I was. And then, she would look her wildest for our visitors. It was as if she wanted all of us to declare that she was mad and leave her alone.

  When the aunts sat in the kitchen with her, she smoked one cigarette after the other while she cooked.

  “Really, Nejla,” the aunts said each time, “really now, what an example for Nunu.”

  My mother let the ash collect at the tip of the cigarette, threatening to fall into the food. But no matter how hard she tried, I could still see the act—her faint smile beneath her stubbornness, with the cigarette hanging from her mouth as if she were a cowboy.

  * * *

  —

  During Bayram holidays, when my grandmother came from Aldere and joined the aunts—her sisters—for conversations around the kitchen table, I pretended to be bored so my mother wouldn’t feel left out. But I loved these spontaneous congregations that revealed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge in otherwise regular women.