Serenade for Nadia

by Zülfü Livaneli

  On the plane, as I looked out the window at the Aegean coast in the light of the setting sun, my spirits began to lift.

  It always makes me happy to go to the Aegean coast, the world of olives, basil, and wine. The atmosphere enchants me the moment I step off the plane: the warmth of the air, the smell of the sea, and the scent of the wild thyme from the mountains.

  I waited with the German and English tourists in the baggage claim area, and then bargained with a taxi driver while they filed onto their tour buses. I opened the window as we drove along the coast and breathed in the clean air. We reached the crest of the hill and suddenly the town of Bodrum was spread out before us, the medieval castle on the water illuminated by spotlights, and the moonlight reflected on the bay.

  My parents lived in a mid-priced compound. My father had joined a co-op and paid installments for years out of his modest salary. Then, finally, they became the owners of a badly designed and cheaply built apartment. The walls were damp, the wiring and the plumbing were faulty, the windows were badly fit, and the doors were cracked, but the view from the balcony made it all seem worth it. Over time, as they repaired and remodeled and put in air-conditioning, theirs and the surrounding buildings became covered with purple, pink, red, and yellow bougainvillea, and in the end, they had a small but comfortable apartment in a compound that had taken on a delightful Aegean atmosphere.

  In summer the compound was full and the beach was crowded with families. There were people coming and going all the time, and in the evening everyone sat on their balconies to eat and drink and enjoy the view. In winter, though, there were only a handful of retired couples like my parents.

  As the taxi entered the compound, I realized how much I had missed this place. Memories of the summers of my youth came flooding back. The smell of food that drifted from the houses at dusk, the nights of guitar music around fires on the beach, swimming in the glittering phosphorescence of the dark sea, early loves and the thrill of kissing in secluded corners. Ah, how good and easy life seemed then.

  My mother gave a shriek of delight when she saw me, and my father came shuffling out when he heard her. They both embraced me and fawned over me, and I felt a deep happiness at being greeted with such genuine delight by people who I knew loved me unconditionally—a rare pleasure in such a hostile world.

  We spent the evening talking and eating fragrant tangerines that had just been picked. I told them as much as I could about what had happened, but they weren’t demanding any explanations or chiding me for disgracing them in the eyes of their neighbors.

  Many Turkish parents would have created a drama and condemned their daughter regardless of whether or not she was guilty. In some families, particularly in Eastern Turkey, disgraced daughters were condemned to death by family councils. If I’d come from a family like this, they would have given me a rope to hang myself with, thrown me in front of a tractor to make it look like an accident, or taken me to a remote field where I would be shot and buried.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of local Seville oranges and local jams, cheeses, and olives, we got into my father’s sturdy old Opel and went to the Yalıkavak market. The weather was almost spring-like, and such a contrast to the numbing cold I’d experienced in Germany just yesterday. Aloe and broom were blooming along the side of the road and the hills were green, though they’d be burnt brown by the sun by the beginning of summer.

  Going to the weekly local markets in different villages was a favorite pastime for people who lived on the Bodrum Peninsula. On Tuesdays it was Bodrum Center, on Wednesdays it was Gündoğan, and on Thursdays it was Yalıkavak. There were seemingly endless stalls selling fruit, vegetables, cheese, olives, jam, yoghurt, and cream. There were also stalls selling beautifully worked, hand-woven cloth from Buldan and Milas. American interior designers often brought this cloth to New York to sell it for fifty times what they’d bought it for here.

  Recently a lot of Europeans, mostly British, had bought houses in the area, and sometimes as many as half the people shopping in the markets were foreigners.

  We’d finished our shopping and were drinking tea under the wisteria vines at my father’s favorite café when my phone rang. It was someone from the university saying that a package had arrived for me from America and asking what they should do with it. I asked them to send it on to my mother’s address. Then I walked a few steps away and called Ahmet.

  “How’s Kerem doing?”

  “He’s doing fine, but this isn’t easy for me.”

  “I’m not asking about you, I’m asking about my son.”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Is he going to school?”

  “Yes, I’m bringing him there and picking him up because we haven’t worked out the school bus yet.”

  I was glad he had to go through even part of what I’d had to go through for so long. I was also enjoying my newly discovered power to intimidate him.

  “I’ll phone this evening and speak to Kerem.”

  I drank in the midday sun for a while and then went into the fabric market. I still had some clothes at home from the previous summer, but I bought four T-shirts, jeans, and a couple of pairs of shorts from the stalls that sold counterfeit brand-name clothes. In Europe I couldn’t even have bought a vest for what I paid.

  Then, when I rejoined my parents at the café, my mother said, “What a wonderful coincidence, the whole family is getting together. It couldn’t have been better had we planned it.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Your brother and his family are coming tomorrow. They’re staying for the weekend.”

  “Where are they going to stay, with you?”

  “They never stay with us, they always stay at the army resort.”

  There was a five-star military resort with its own hotel, restaurant, and beach on one of Bodrum’s most beautiful bays.

  I wasn’t crazy about them coming, but there was nothing I could do.

  I fell asleep that afternoon caressed by the breeze that drifted in through the window, gently stirring the curtains. There was no sound but that of the waves washing onto the beach, and if my mother hadn’t come to wake me, I might have slept through till morning. But my mother didn’t want me to miss the five o’clock tea she’d prepared, a generous spread with hot bread, cheese, and jam.

  “But I’ll put on weight!” I exclaimed.

  “No you won’t,” she said. “Tomorrow you’ll start going for walks and nothing will happen. You’re young, you’ll burn it off.”

  I wanted to talk to my mother about her mother, but I wanted to talk to her alone. I was reluctant to bring up the subject in front of my father because he’d made it clear he didn’t want to talk about his mother and her past. As in so many families, an unspoken agreement had been reached to keep the tragedies of the past from the younger generations. With us, the family history would begin anew. We were like children who were forbidden to play in the back garden because it was full of scorpions and snakes and dangerous wells.

  I found the chance to talk to my mother after my father went to bed. We were sitting on the balcony, wearing light jackets because the evening was cool. The moon was nearly full, and its light was reflected in a silvery path across the bay.

  “Mother, what was my grandmother’s name?”

  “Ayşe, of course!”

  “No, what was her real name?”

  She paused and remained silent for a while.

  “I know all about the Tatar Legions, what happened to my grandmother, the sealed railway cars, Kizilçakçak Lake. Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “Where did you hear about this?”

  “My brother told me.”

  “He shouldn’t have.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no point in reopening old wounds.”

  “But maybe my grandparents would want us to know thei
r stories.”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” she said, but she sounded more ashamed than adamant.

  “How do you know?”

  “If they’d wanted you to know they would have told you. They didn’t even tell us.”

  “You never talked about it?”

  “We talked about it once. My mother sat me down one day and told me everything. She got me to write down the names of our ancestors, her mother and father who were shot, and her two brothers who jumped into the River Drau.”

  She paused, as if she were waiting for me to ask something. Then she continued.

  “My grandfather’s name was Seyit, and my grandmother’s, Ayşe. The Russians shot them. Her brothers’ names were Ömer and Kurban. They committed suicide by jumping into the River Drau. After she had got me to write these names, she said, ‘Have someone read the Mevlit for the souls of the departed, give alms to the poor. They were all very good people.’ She herself was illiterate. That’s why I wrote everything down.”

  “They were all Turks and Muslim, weren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “How could this happen? How could the Turkish government send these people to their deaths?”

  “That’s something we can’t know. They must have had their reasons.”

  “Wasn’t my grandmother angry about this?”

  “No, she accepted her fate. But she did weep when she told me to write down her parents’ and brothers’ names. She recited the opening verses of the Quran for each of them.”

  “Didn’t your father ever say anything about what happened?”

  “He never talked about those things. He didn’t talk much about anything. But my mother told me he used to have nightmares.”

  “But it was terribly heroic of him to jump into the lake and rescue her.”

  “Yes.”

  She smiled.

  “People will do anything for love. He loved her deeply to the moment of his death. You could see it in the way he looked at her as he held her hand in his last moments.”

  “Did he call her by her real name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what was it?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “No.”

  “You know that my mother gave you your name, don’t you?”

  “So her real name was Maya?”

  “She wanted her real name to live on in you.”

  Maya. The name that had been kept secret for a lifetime. Ever since I was a child, I’d wondered why I’d been given such an unusual name. I did like my name. It had a musical ring, but it was very uncommon.

  Three women who’d had to take new names.

  Maya had become Ayşe, Mari had become Semahat, and Nadia had become Deborah.

  These three women hadn’t been allowed to use the names they’d been given at birth.

  Nadia was the least fortunate of them. Maya and Mari had at least married men who loved them, had lived to see their children and grandchildren grow up, and in the end had finally been able to tell their stories.

  My maternal grandmother was the most fortunate. She’d lost her family and had to live under an assumed name, but she hadn’t had to change her religion or ethnic identity.

  Nadia’s story had been buried with her in the dark waters of the Black Sea, but I would raise it and tell the whole world. I felt that this was my sacred duty.

  My mother and I sat in silence on the balcony, watching the shimmering lights of the Greek island of Kos. But even this beautiful scene gave me cause to feel deep sadness. There, just across the way, was land held by another state, a state with which our state had been in conflict for generations. There had been half a dozen wars between these states and their predecessor states, millions had been killed, villages, towns, and cities had been burned, millions on both sides had been uprooted and forced to migrate to unfamiliar lands, all in the name of the artificial constructs of sovereignty and nationality.

  Stefan Zweig had hoped that the invention of the airplane would bring an end to wars because their very nature transcended borders. But he lived to see the airplane used as an instrument of destruction that obliterated the cities of Europe.

  CHAPTER 21

  Even though it was a holiday resort, the military facilities in Bodrum were just as spotless and regimented as the command headquarters in Istanbul. My parents and Necdet and his wife, Oya, were sitting in the restaurant by the seaside.

  “I had a meeting in Bodrum,” my brother said, “and I decided to bring Oya so we could have a little break together. What wonderful weather.”

  “It’s not always like this,” my father said, “but this year for some reason we haven’t had a winter, it’s been like spring.”

  White-coated waiters were bringing the meticulously prepared seafood. Prawns had been arranged on top of a lettuce leaf elaborately dressed with mayonnaise. The plate was so decorative that I was almost afraid to touch it.

  As we ate, we looked out across the shimmering water at Bodrum Castle and made the usual small talk. Then, as we were drinking coffee, my brother suggested that he and I go for a walk together.

  When I was growing up, I saw my brother as an authority figure. He was considerably older than me, and he looked and behaved like my father. We never laughed and played together, never shared a secret world as some siblings do. He was always distant and somewhat severe. I never doubted that he loved me, but he never showed his affection and expected me to treat him as a respected elder.

  When I reached adulthood, I slowly stopped accepting his authority without question. I would argue with him and challenge his opinions. I tried to establish a relationship in which our different strengths balanced each other and we could be equals. But he was never able to accept this, and over time our relationship became increasingly strained. Now, we no longer had any common ground at all. We had almost nothing left to say to each other.

  As we walked along the shore we both felt ill at ease, like two strangers who didn’t know how to begin a conversation.

  “Do our parents know?” he asked.

  “Do they know what?”

  “About what happened at the university?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They trust me and knew that what had been said about me couldn’t be true.”

  “They weren’t angry at all?”

  “Why would they be angry? It’s not my fault if people tell lies about me.”

  “Well, do they know you were fired?”

  “I haven’t told them yet. I said I’d taken an unpaid leave, but I’m planning to tell them tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Maya!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I warned you. I told you to stay out of it.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “But you wouldn’t listen to me, you had to dig yourself in deeper. What happened to you, the article in the paper and you getting fired, didn’t just happen out of the blue.”

  “You mean these things happened because I was looking into the Struma.”

  “You’d better believe it. There’s more to the story than meets the eye, and governments will go to great lengths to protect themselves.”

  “But the governments of Britain, Russia, Turkey, Germany, and Romania all share responsibility for what happened to the Struma.”

  “Yes, and none of them want to accept responsibility.”

  “The Germans are the only ones who’ve acknowledged responsibility, but the others are equally guilty.”

  “Look, Maya, you’re my sister and I’ll do everything I can to protect you. But I beg you not to take this any further. You can’t fight the state.”

  “The state is an artificial construct that only keeps its authority because no one challenges it.”

  “You sound like an anarch
ist. Nothing would function without government. Even the most primitive societies have some form of government.”

  “But I have the right to express my ideas.”

  “These are undeveloped ideas, utopian ideals like those of Bakunin and Kropotkin. Look at how well this camp is run, how smoothly everything works. The only reason is respect for authority. Take that away and it would fall apart.”

  “I don’t object to order, I just object to it being arbitrarily imposed by whoever manages to seize power. I believe in true democracy, in cooperation and reconciliation.”

  “Did you learn all of this from that communist Jew?”

  “Which communist Jew?”

  “Wagner!”

  I laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Wagner is neither a communist nor a Jew. So much for the quality of the intelligence your agency gathers.”

  “Of course I know he’s not a Jew, but all those professors were either communists or Jews.

  “He was married to a Jew, was that his crime?”

  “You have no idea of the threat that Israel poses to our country, its connections with the Kurdish groups in Northern Iraq. You have no idea of what Zionism really represents.”

  “Look, neither Max nor his wife were Zionists, not that I think it matters whether they were or not. They just had to get out of Germany because the government arbitrarily decided to start killing Jews. Was our maternal grandmother Jewish?”

  “No, what has that to do with it?”

  “Well, was she a communist?”

  “No!”

  “She was a Muslim Turkish girl, wasn’t she? Her family was Muslim and Turkish too.”

  “Yes, I’m the one who told you the story.”

  “Well, didn’t our government knowingly send her people to their deaths?”

  He didn’t have an answer for that.

  My parents and Oya were sitting at the table, happily eating their fruit, and glancing over at us once in a while.