by Defne Suman
Panagiota sat wrapped in the tulle curtains of the bay window for a while longer, listening as her father’s breathing deepened. The display on the street had frightened her. Was the victory she had finally achieved on the subject of the fair at Agia Triada going to go down the drain at this last minute because of that stupid soldier? In the far distance a train whistle blew. A hamal freight train from Aydin was coming into the station. She stuck her head out the window and looked up at the sky. The moon had travelled towards the bay, turning yellow as it prepared to set. Taking advantage of its dimming light, the stars shone like diamonds over the top of Kadife Castle.
Panagiota raised her chin and sniffed the air. She filled her lungs with the smell of salt and seaweed coming off the bay. It was as if she was drunk on the lovesickness in her heart. Just the thought of a night at Agia Triada was so sweet that she almost wished the night would not come for a long time, so as to prolong the dream. Sitting with her feet tucked under her, she rubbed the white tulle against her face, inhaling the aroma of mastic and lavender and licking the remnants of sugary halva from the corners of her mouth. Her heart was beating to a harmonious rhythm. She wanted to hold this moment in her mind, for there in her mind was a place made beautiful even by the absence of Stavros. Opening her nostrils, she breathed in. The light breeze was carrying the scent of Bournabat’s jasmine flowers.
But, ah, why couldn’t this boy come to her window and play the fiddle or the dulcimer like Minas and Pandelis did? If he did come, would she love him as much? She had never thought about that. Could it be Stavros’s absence that was causing such exhilaration in her heart – like her dreams about the fair? As if she were shooing away a fly, she pushed this thought from her mind. If Stavros were to appear under her window right then, he wouldn’t have to do anything. Not sing or recite a poem. His coming would be enough. When she thought of what she was willing to do to gain his love, she was afraid of her own courage; her cheeks burned like fire.
The stray yellow dog Muhtar was walking slowly towards the grocery shop with a huge bone in his mouth, who knew from where. The cats who saw him interrupted their racing over the rooftops and paid attention. When Muhtar took his place in front of the grocery door and began to chew his bone, everything was silent, even the turtledoves. Panagiota, hanging out of the window, took one last hopeless look at Menekse Street, abandoned even by the moonlight, before tiptoeing back to her bed, where, unlike her father, she drifted into a restless sleep until morning.
The Ghost
It was a very beautiful day when we first heard the voice of the ghost coming from Sumbul’s mouth. Cold but fresh. A perfect day for doing the laundry. The earth in the mansion’s garden was sleeping; the fruit trees had shed their leaves, and their twisting branches were naked, reaching for the sky. It had been exactly three months, three weeks and three days since we’d moved to the Mansion with the Tower.
Aunt Makbule believed that this mansion, given to Hilmi Rahmi as a reward for his success in the war with Greece, was cursed. Considering what happened to us later, she might not have been wrong. Even Sumbul cried when we entered the house and saw the half-finished lacework with the needle still in it. How frightened the woman must have been to leave her needlework like that and run away in such a hurry.
All around us were the burned ruins of the Great Fire. Even Nanny Dilber didn’t go out onto the streets. The ruins were full of crazy people sleeping on the verandas and digging through the possessions of those who had died or run away. The ground was covered with shards of glass, nails, razor-edged pieces of metal. Here and there were piano keys, scorched books, bags of dried figs, bones, teeth…
Not a sound came from the city now. Even the cats were silent.
Before dawn, Nanny Dilber had heaved the trough out in front of the laundry room. On the steps exposed to the sun we were rubbing, scrubbing, rinsing, wringing and hanging out the linen, sheets and cloths that had been soaked in bluing. ‘Before spring come, dis place need hoe to it,’ she said, beating the clothes in the trough with her powerful black arms.
We raised our heads from the trough and looked at the garden. A very thin layer of frost covered the weeds. On windless days the sea also had a thin layer over it in the early morning, like milk, like tulle. The water would be like a lake then. My eyes filled with tears. It was clear that I would never be able to go anywhere now. My mother, my father, everything had vanished. I would be a prisoner in that cursed Mansion with the Tower for the rest of my life.
At that time, I was not yet aware just how cursed it was, but…
I was up to my elbows in the lavender-scented water.
‘That’s enough, girl,’ said Nanny Dilber. How high her voice was! Quite comically shrill, coming from such a heavyset woman. ‘You going to tear it. That pillow all clean now. What stain you trying to rub out?’
I gave it to her to rinse in her own basin, got up, went into the laundry room and took another piece of clothing from the pot where the whites were soaking. A gauzy shirt. The light travelled right through it. It was Hilmi Rahmi’s nightshirt. I put my hand over the left side of the chest where the pocket was. A trace of my hand, like a ghost, appeared through the back. Nanny Dilber was standing at the door, watching me, the whites of her eyes shining like flint in the darkness. She had a bucket in her hand and was on her way to the kitchen to fill it with water. I threw the nightshirt back in the pot as if I had touched fire.
‘Must be careful. That in your hand is sensitive garment.’
I nodded. Her kidneys must have been hurting her. It was obvious from the way she walked, waddling, with one hand on her waist. Inside, she must have been thinking, ‘If only Mrs Sumbul would call in a washerwoman from de street...’ If we’d asked her, Sumbul would surely have done so, but we never once raised it. Nanny Dilber wanted Sumbul to understand that without her having to say anything. She also wanted a seamstress, a girl to sew on missing buttons, mend the tears under the armpits of the clothes we put aside while ironing, and repair holes in socks. Ever since we’d moved into a mansion that had been home to a rich family before they’d abandoned it, she’d been set on living as they had. She’d clearly forgotten that just three months ago we’d been living on crooked Bulbul Street in a dark, draughty house that let the moaning wind inside.
Sumbul’s sudden scream rent the silence that had settled on the city, and then passed.
Just before the scream, taking advantage of Nanny Dilber’s absence, I had again pulled Hilmi Rahmi’s nightshirt from the pot. When the scream reached the laundry room, I dropped the shirt right there and raced outside, into the cold, in bare feet and with my legs wet to my knees, and ran across the sleeping earth.
Where was I running? I did not know.
Not to save Sumbul, that was for sure. If they’d come to ransack the house, they were not the ones I was running from. I was running to throw myself into the sea.
It was then that I understood. I had unfinished work to do. I was running away from that deafening scream. I was running to the silent kingdom of seaweed and starfish, a kingdom that was already full of corpses. I would sink along with them. Boys with knives in their hands would jump into the water, as they had that evening. They would tear the necklace from my throat; they would sever my finger at the root in order to pocket the sapphire ring that my dear mama had tremblingly placed on it as we held each other for the last time on that railway track.
I had made my decision long ago.
It was as if I had been waiting for a scream.
I was running to the sea.
Sumbul and I crashed into each other, chest to chest, on the white-gravelled road on the other side of the mansion. She was wearing a thin, pale blue nightgown that revealed her fleshy, ivory-white arms and the shape of her mature, full breasts with their nipples half exposed. Instead of her usual scent of cinnamon and honeysuckle, she had taken on a sharp animal smell. Her curly blonde hair fell over her shoulders as if she’d just got out of bed. Her eyes were so huge
, it was as if half her face was a pool of green light. I immediately turned my face away, not from her nakedness, but from some secret fragility.
She fell into my arms, sobbing, as if I’d been running towards her, as if I’d been running to save her. What would such heroism have had to do with me?
‘It was good you were there that morning, Scheherazade. If you hadn’t been, I would have lost my mind, by God,’ she used to say later, unaware of the irony of her words.
She was shaking all over. I held her plump shoulders and led her away from the laundry room to a far corner of the garden, over by the marble stairway. I didn’t want Nanny Dilber to see us walking arm in arm like that. Her green winter cloak was hanging behind the door inside. I grabbed it, wrapped it around her shoulders and sat down beside her. Broken light from the bay was shining right in our eyes and the steps were slightly warm from the winter sun. Sumbul was sobbing; a sound like a ferryboat’s foghorn was coming from her stomach, and she was panting.
Had a thief or a bandit got into the mansion? Would those crazy-headed people digging through the rubble from the fires dare to come and loot a great colonel’s house? I glanced at the garden gate; the lock was securely in place. In the kitchen, Gulfidan was humming a folksong; over in the flower garden the gardener and Hilmi Rahmi’s orderly, Selim, were sitting on the ground smoking cigarettes. Everything was as normal. Maybe she’d just had a nightmare.
While I was thinking of what I could do to calm her – should I boil up some chamomile tea or light the water heater and splash water over her head? – the atmosphere suddenly changed. An indescribable current of emotion passed between us. Sounds and colours took on new shapes, as if we had dived into the depths of the sea. When I turned and looked, Sumbul’s face had become that of a stranger. Her cheeks were sunken, her chin distorted, and an angry shadow had fallen over her usual gentle expression. Narrowing her eyes, she examined me from head to toe. The animal smell that I’d noticed earlier had become sharper and her lips were protruding.
‘There are things I need to tell you.’
My hands went to my mouth in fear. I had forgotten that I was unable to speak. The voice was not Sumbul’s voice. The eyes were not Sumbul’s eyes. It was then that I understood: the woman sitting beside me was not Sumbul. I wanted to jump up and run away and hide, but I stayed there as if nailed to the spot, on the warmish marble steps.
‘There are things I need to tell you.’
She was speaking in French.
I shook her shoulders. I shook her to make her come to herself. What kind of voice was that? What kind of look in her eyes? Where had the French come from? Her cloak had slid from her shoulders, her blue nightgown was open to her stomach, exposing her nipples, which looked like ripe grapes on a vine. I was filled with anger. Forget the nipples; if she had fallen down the marble stairs at that moment, hit her head and died, I wouldn’t have cared. I couldn’t bear hearing that voice. I was violently shaking the woman who had taken me under her wing. I was intentionally hurting the one who had protected, supported and nourished me; I was treating her as if she were a doll stuffed with straw. I was struggling to silence that voice forever as if my life depended on it.
I don’t know how long this scene lasted. Her breathing eventually slowed, the gentle light in her eyes that I was accustomed to returned, and I stopped.
‘There is a ghost in this house, Scheherazade,’ she whispered.
She had reverted to Turkish. She turned and looked into my face to see if I’d understood. She was unaware that she was naked from the waist up. I straightened her blue nightgown, settled it on her shoulders and covered her with the cloak that had fallen to the ground. The gardener and the orderly, Selim, seeing us in that state must have run off to the back garden. We were alone on the mansion steps.
‘She spoke to me a while ago. The ghost. She was looking for someone; that’s what she said. Now she’s found the one she was looking for.’
She looked pleadingly into my eyes.
I heated the bath water, took off her clothes and washed her all over with hot water and foaming, fresh-smelling soap. I boiled hibiscus flowers and washed her hair with them, and I massaged sesame oil infused with rose petals into her skin until it turned pink from the rubbing of the bath glove. I did whatever I could to make whatever was haunting her spirit come out of her flesh.
I was unsuccessful, however.
Much later, in the abundance of time which my seemingly never-ending lifespan afforded me, I did some research and learned that the dead who have not been able to complete their business in this world before passing to the other side – or, more correctly, in order that they can pass over to the other side – will ‘invade’ a highly sensitive individual. In the mansion’s magnificent library there were many books on the subject of mediums, as there were on every subject. I read that some mediums can assist souls who have become stuck between two worlds to complete their earthly affairs, and I also read that some souls use people like Sumbul as a channel for their unfinished business on earth. At that time we did not know this, of course. If we treated Sumbul as if she was crazy, it was out of ignorance. May God forgive us.
When the ghost first appeared, the sky above Smyrna was so jam-packed with souls that they greatly outnumbered those of us on earth. When Avinash visited years later, he told me that in the September of 1922 Smyrna’s dead numbered approximately one hundred thousand. One hundred thousand souls hovering above the city. The bottom of the sea had been their grave and some of them did not even realize that they had died. They wandered crazily among the ruins. Before they could rest in peace, they had accounts to settle, secrets to reveal and treasures to hide; there were also children who’d been left in enemy hands. All of them were struggling to find someone sensitive like Sumbul whom they could use as a channel in order to return to earth to complete their half-finished business.
When the ghost had command of Sumbul, she spoke perfect French. Not only I but everyone in the house heard that oriental-accented French. When the nerve doctor that Hilmi Rahmi brought all the way from Vienna to Smyrna learned that Sumbul had taken lessons from a private woman teacher in Plovdiv, where she was born and raised, he decided that her warbling perfect French like a nightingale was nothing but a minor detail. Wait a minute – what exactly did he say? That when a patient lost their healthy brain function, languages they had learned previously might come to the surface, like subconscious memories. For example, a senile, elderly person might begin to speak the language of the country in which they had lived as a child.
When I heard this, I bit my tongue. Hilmi Rahmi, in his sadness at being told of this new proof that his wife had gone crazy, was pacing up and down in the library where he had welcomed the doctor with a mint liqueur, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
There were questions in my mind. If I could have spoken, I would have asked the nerve doctor if the lady teacher in Plovdiv could have taught Sumbul to speak in that lilting Levantine French spoken only by the Catholics who lived in Smyrna and by no one else in the whole world. The worst part of being mute is not being able to get answers to the questions that are making your brain itch. It’s like reaching out to kiss someone’s lips and their lips not responding. However, whatever the cost, it was absolutely imperative that I did not attract the attention of the nerve doctor. He kept asking Hilmi Rahmi questions about me, as if it was because of the mystery surrounding me, rather than Sumbul’s situation, that he had been called to Smyrna.
Had the little lady been mute since birth or was it some sudden shock that had made her lose her ability to speak? Did she have trouble hearing? Had her tongue been cut or otherwise injured? Was her ability to comprehend intact? Did Hilmi Rahmi know what her native language was? When he realized that I understood the French they were speaking, he became even more interested and wanted to know at what age I had learned this language. He found it extremely interesting that I was able to learn a language without a brain function for speakin
g.
If I could have spoken, I would have reminded him that babies begin to understand a language long before they say their first words. However, at that time, people whose only crime was that their names were foreign – people who often couldn’t even speak the language whence that name originated – were being forced from the homes they had lived in for two thousand years, from their villages, their animals, the graves of their ancestors, and exiled from the country. I again bit my normal, healthy tongue and remained silent.
The ghost kept telling the same story. Since the emphases and pauses delivered in its shrill voice never changed, after a while when Sumbul began to speak French it came to seem as if someone was turning the handle on the gramophone.
‘Le jour où la fille est descendue du bateau, il y avait tant de monde au port que des mats on ne voyait même pas le bleu de la mer.’ The day the girl disembarked from the ship, the harbour was so crowded that one could not see the blue of the sea for the masts of so many sailing boats. Those coming into port kept complaining that from the deck one could see nothing but sailing boat masts and ferryboat funnels. What a shame to have to grope one’s way like a blind person when arriving at such a beautiful city. Quel dommage!
Nanny Dilber would ask, ‘What she saying, Scheherazade, my little lamb? For God sake, speak to us. Why she going so crazy?’
I would open my hands wide. How should I know?
Maybe if we had alerted Hilmi Rahmi in time, he would not have been so terrified when he saw how his sweet, sociable wife had transformed into an angry-faced Levantine woman, and maybe he wouldn’t have taken such a cruel step as to lock her up in the tower.
We did not think of it.
Months passed.
When it got to the point where Sumbul began speaking in the voice of the ghost while in the presence of Hilmi Rahmi’s guests, the issue became serious. At that time there were a lot of comings and goings in the house. Hilmi Rahmi would meet with various men in the library. The shutters would be closed and there’d be much whispering and rustling of paper. They would argue for hours on end; perhaps they were making secret plans.
