by Defne Suman
Yes, listen to the drums; they say find a mate who is your equal…
If his grandfather had been in his place, he would probably have spent the next few days in meditation at Smyrna’s Sufi Dervish lodge, but Avinash preferred to spend them holding on to his waterpipe at Hasan’s coffeehouse, the plums and cherries bouncing around in the water, his emotions numbed. Hasan’s hashish was truly healing. While he was sitting on the couch with Pamuk the cat stretched out beside him, hookah tube in hand, Avinash felt light-spirited and clear-headed, the troubles of what his grandfather called his ‘small mind’ diminished. It became difficult to believe that he had woken that morning with a heavy heart. So, this was how it felt when a person freed himself from the vicissitudes of the mind. Light, sweet, carefree… However, when the effects of the hashish faded, the heavy weight in his heart returned in full force.
Then, one night in May when the moon had reached its zenith in the sky, he somehow found himself on Vasili Street. He had gone out with a group of Unionists, first to Café Klonarides, then to Kraemer’s Brewery, then to Aristidis’s Tavern on Great Taverns Street. At the end of this drinking party, he separated from his Unionist friends and decided to get some air by walking along the quay for a while, nothing more; he had absolutely no other intention in mind. Later he would jump in a carriage and return to the Menzilhane Inn in Tilkilik, to his mattress on the floor.
It was a little before midnight and the tram was still running at the quay. Countless gangs of young people were hanging around in front of the cafés. Rather than focusing on the families stuffing themselves with halva and nuts they’d bought from peddlers, Avinash kept noticing the lovers hiding in the many dark corners. The quay – called ke by the local people – was full of couples, from the harbour all the way up to Punta; on the moonlit rocks were the sailors who’d given their lives there, now in the embrace of fiery mermaids; and the gods who’d been seduced by the fairies of Mount Nif were busy clasping them tight. Out in the water he could make out the hem of a beribboned skirt, a cigarette ember, hoarse laughter.
After he’d walked all the way to the wooded dock at the end and reached the cape, he didn’t know what to do. If it had been daytime, the terrace and shallow pools of the Eden Baths would have been packed with people, but at this time of night the facility was deserted. Although the café across the street was open, it was empty. Up ahead, the rowing boats carrying passengers to Agia Triada had quit for the night; tied to the dock with thick ropes, they were rocking gently. Beyond them, a sailing boat with its sails curled high up was at anchor. He turned and, unnecessarily, began to walk towards the station to find a carriage.
He only realized that he’d veered into Vasili Street when he saw Edith’s house from a distance. All the houses were buried in silence under the greenish light of the gas lamps. His feet had acted instinctively and carried him there. With his head as confused as his heart, he continued along the street.
Suddenly he stopped.
From the top balcony of Number 7, which Nikolas Dimos had purposely chosen for its seclusion from prying eyes, a pale yellow light was seeping onto the dark street. He walked towards it as if drawn by a magnet. In his benumbed brain only one thought was blinking like a lighthouse: Lady Edith had lost no time in finding someone to share her bed. She was with another man inside that lavender-scented, white silk mosquito netting – a German officer or one of those Armenian intellectuals whose random conversation at a garden party she had not got enough of. Moaning and groaning, they were making love. Or perhaps it was another dark-skinned, second-class citizen or a dashing young Turk whom she had taken to her bed this time. She obviously had a special interest in exotic men.
While he had avoided making love to the girls of those famous houses, the girls whom his Unionist friends couldn’t stop talking about – ‘You must come with us and taste them, my friend’ – Mademoiselle Edith had been opening up her bed to another man!
All right, then!
Wrapped in the only emotion he could feel in his drunken confusion – anger – he bounded up the marble steps, two, three at a time, and began pounding on the door of the stone building with all his strength. He vowed to break it down if no one answered, but it opened much sooner than he anticipated, before the third blow. Avinash had expected to see one of the servant girls who slept in, either Vasiliki or Stavroula, both of whom used to smile secretly whenever he visited Edith; he planned to smash whichever one it was against the wall like a fly with a single shove and run upstairs to the bedroom where Edith and her paramour were making love. When he saw before him not the maid but Edith herself, his feet got tangled together and he almost rolled down the marble steps into the street.
In spite of his drunken state, he noticed that underneath the beige cloak which she had quickly taken from the hanger behind the door and thrown over her shoulders, Edith had nothing on except a white nightgown with thin straps. Her hair hung in ringlets from her shoulders to the base of her spine, and the shadows on her face danced in the light of the lantern she had grabbed from the top of the stairs. She was so beautiful. Anger swelled like a red wave inside him.
Edith reached out and took Avinash, who was swaying in the doorway, by the arm. Without saying a word, she led him to the sitting room, where a fire was still burning in the fireplace, sat him down on the divan with a sheepskin coverlet and told the servant girl, who’d been woken by the noise, to prepare tea.
On that moonlit May night in Edith’s sitting room in front of the fireplace, Avinash understood two things clearly.
First, for the rest of his life he would never give up on Edith. He would do whatever was necessary to keep her in his life; he was prepared to play by her rules. If she didn’t want to get married, they would not get married; if she wanted to move to another country, he would go with her. Knowing full well that his family in Bombay would grieve deeply, he was prepared to accept a childless life with Edith. (Avinash assumed that a woman who was averse to marriage would have no interest in motherhood.) Secondly, as long as he loved Edith, he would always feel this jealousy, like poison in his blood, and he would never be free from the feeling that there was something missing in their relationship.
There was no other man in Edith’s bed and there never had been. That night while they were making love, more with nostalgia and love than with passion, Avinash realized that this woman who had refused to be his wife would remain faithful to him all her life. His main rival was not a German officer, an Armenian intellectual or a dashing young Turk, but her desire for solitude.
*
Avinash came to himself when he felt Edith’s hand on his cheek. Shaking off all those memories that were pressing on his head, he stood up. It was almost seven thirty. This was no time to be raking over the past. If Edith wasn’t coming, he would have to go to the Thomas-Cook’s New Year’s Eve ball by himself. But to his great surprise, Edith had already put her shoes on and was standing waiting for him with a sweet smile on her face.
Christo held the door as they went out into the night. It was so cold, it was as if the starlight was ice striking the earth. Fireworks were already being set off at the quay to celebrate the new year. The Milky Way and myriad other stars were scattered in all their glory across the moonless sky, winking at the people below. Edith hugged her fur coat around her, took Avinash’s arm and leaned her body against his. Her turbaned head was lowered meekly. Not a leaf moved, causing a strange tranquillity to spread across the city that even the exploding fireworks couldn’t disturb. Colourful klobos balloons hung in the sky. Soon the bell of the Anglican church would begin to ring out its greeting to the new year.
Without speaking at all, Avinash and Edith walked along the cobbled street that led from Vasili Street to the station square, like an old married couple who had run out of words.
Suicide
It was I who found Sumbul swinging from the end of the silk sash she had tied around her neck. She had hanged herself from one of the beams in the tower. Her blo
nde head had fallen on her chest at a strange angle, like the recently executed Smyrna assassins whose photographs had been all over the newspapers. Her naked white body swayed in the air, keeping time with the breeze blowing through the room. Her white feet were hitting against each other. Dust danced joyfully in a ray of sunshine streaming through the barred window, as if challenging death’s dominion.
‘By God! Where did she find that sash?’
Thus moaned Hilmi Rahmi a short while later as he knelt among the pile of thick books that Sumbul had knocked over with one kick of her foot in the tower in which he had locked her.
He was right to be confused. The two of us had cleared the room together before he shut her up there. We had collected anything she might use to harm herself or us, should she fall for the ghost’s tricks: knives, cutting utensils, rope; we didn’t even leave a matchstick in the tower. He had nailed boards over the tops of the water tanks with little brass faucets at their base so that she couldn’t plunge her head into them. He had even taken away her silk scarves so that she couldn’t tie three together and hang herself. For the same reason, Sumbul slept in her pink bed on a mattress with no sheets. At evening time it was I who went up to the tower with a long taper to light the lamp hanging from the ceiling, set high so that Sumbul could not reach it. Actually, by piling books one on top of the other she could have reached it. Unlike the nerve doctor, I did not think the poor wretch had any intention of burning down the house.
‘By God! Where did she find that sash?’
Straining my ears, I listened carefully to the tone of his voice for any indication that he was suspicious of me. There was none. Compared with us women, men can be as naive as lambs sometimes. That being said, all the atrocities I have endured in my life have been instigated by men. How is it that men can be as innocent as children when it comes to women’s tricks, yet be responsible for all the violence in the world?
‘We must have neglected to check the pocket of her dressing gown.’
I looked up at the scrap of cloth still knotted around the beam from after we’d cut the silk sash and taken her dead body in our arms. How had such a delicate thing taken the soul of a fleshy woman like Sumbul? I found it hard to believe. A person is so fragile, death so easy.
Not everybody’s heart was as pure as Hilmi Rahmi’s, of course. Even before Sumbul’s funeral, gossip about me was spreading. The trouble-making whispers of the crowds who filled the mansion rose up to the tower where I had hidden myself. Yes, it was true, Sumbul’s husband and I made love every night. At my current advanced age, there is no reason to hide how I anticipated with all my heart those nights when my lover’s fine long fingers moved over my flesh, when repressed human emotions were poured into my body and his soul whispered into my ear.
While we made love, an aromatic cloud of roses and incense hung over us, the unique chemistry of our mingled sweat. Buried in silence, our words, our moans, our screams exploded within us like fireworks. Hilmi Rahmi was not able to restrain himself at his climax; as his tobacco-scented head lay on my neck, he would whisper words of love into my ear from his raki-sweet lips. Whether for me, for Sumbul or for some other woman, I never knew, but hearing those words was even more beautiful to me than the river of lust hidden deep in my body that I had never known before.
This is not to say, however, as certain sharp-tongued people claimed, that it was I who was responsible for the death of Sumbul, whom I loved like an older sister.
On the morning that I found her dead body hanging from the ceiling, my face in the mirror had been pale and thin, my eyes disproportionally large and bright, with purple circles beneath them. My body was still tingling delightfully from the raptures of the night before. I spread my hair, which reached to the base of my spine, like a black curtain over my face and smelled it. I sighed at the memory of Hilmi Rahmi’s three-day beard tickling my neck. I couldn’t stay still. Excitement and pleasure erased guilt and shame, and I felt an uneasy happiness. Was this what they called love?
While I was preparing Sumbul’s breakfast tray of honey, clotted cream and olives marinated in grape vinegar, I kept forgetting things and went back and forth to the pantry six times.
It was such a strange feeling. I even thought that my excitement might make sad Sumbul happy. I had forgotten that the man into whose arms I slipped secretly every night was her husband. If I ever happened to run into Hilmi Rahmi by chance in the daytime, he was always the distant, frowning, handsome colonel, an entirely different person to the one whose long fingers touched my deepest parts and who breathed into my ear at dawn, ‘You are the only one, my most treasured, my sole reality.’
I was drowning in the whirlpool of a familiar duplicity and I wanted Sumbul to feel it with me, to rejoice with me in the wonderful emotions that were filling my heart and soul. The thrills would be amplified when shared with someone else; they would intensify when I repeated the story so that I would experience them not only when I was in the arms of the man I loved but also in the presence of everyone to whom I’d told my love story. For the first time since that horrible September night, I felt a crazy desire to speak.
At the risk of spilling the tea on the tray, I climbed the stairs to the tower two at a time. Outside, sparrows were chirping as they picked at the fruit on the heavily laden branches of the mulberry tree in front of the window, singing together with their tiny, honeyed beaks. Downstairs, someone – probably Hilmi Rahmi; who else would it have been? – had put a record left by the former owners of the mansion on the gramophone. An American song about having fun that I had known in my old life was playing.
Looking back now at my century-long life, I understand this: since he had put this happy American tune on the gramophone the morning I found Sumbul hanging in the tower, Hilmi Rahmi must have been feeling as exuberant as I was. Maybe he too felt the need to speak, to explain, to swim in the pleasure of words. Perhaps he was murmuring the words of the song with a joy that overflowed from his chest or tapping his fingers in time to the music on the wooden table in the dining room.
I was looking at Sumbul’s sweet white body swinging in the empty air.
Nanny Dilber said later that she heard me screaming. I do not remember. I only remember the music that had drifted out through the dining room window, into the garden, up two floors, through the branches of the mulberry tree and into the tower where we were. That’s all. And the sun with its merciless beauty playing games with her hair that had fallen into her face, and her pure white breasts with their erect pink nipples pointing to the sky, defying death. The pale hairs on the poor woman’s arms and stomach were standing on end, as if she were frightened by her own demise.
One morning after the funeral, when I was sure that every last visitor was gone, I came down to the kitchen from the tower where I had been silently hiding myself. It was getting light outside, but the mansion had not yet awoken. Sumbul’s absence was everywhere. Wherever I looked, there was a jar her hand had touched, a stain she had given orders to be wiped clean. The laughter she hadn’t been able to hold in while listening to Gypsy Yasemin’s naughty jokes echoed from the tiles.
Hilmi Rahmi and I came face to face at the door to the pantry. He was wearing a beige linen suit I guessed he’d also worn the day before. It was wrinkled. His grey hair had gone completely white. His beard, which he’d not shaved in days, had grown and had also turned white. His cheeks were sunken, his skin was the colour of olives. The hazel eyes which I was accustomed to seeing shining like flint in the darkness had faded.
My God! Could a person age so much in a week?
Both my hands were full of coffee beans I had taken to grind. I did not know what to do. He, too, was surprised. He rubbed at his beard. He looked extremely miserable. He moved to the side so that I could pass but did not leave the kitchen. It seemed strange to see the great Hilmi Rahmi in the kitchen.
I ground the coffee beans, lit the stove, brewed the coffee, filled our cups. He motioned to the garden with his head. The garden of t
he Mansion with the Tower was very pleasant on summer mornings in the early hours before the fiery heat took hold. We walked towards the arbour, he in front, me behind, carrying a silver tray. The red earth was soft under our feet. Mulberries had fallen to the ground and bees were hovering over them, moving from one to the next. As the breeze blew, the scent of the lavender that Sumbul had planted alongside the road rose fresh and cool.
I brushed the fallen leaves off the cushions of the decorative wrought-iron chairs under the arbour and we sat down across from each other. My nose filled with the smell of salt and seaweed, and the pain of all the people I had lost became a burning lump in my throat. I brought the cup to my lips. The ferry for Karsiyaka was lazily sounding its whistle. Was today Sunday? Because the bells had been silenced on the same date as I had, I could not know. I had a vision of the ferry as it used to be, when Karsiyaka was known as Kordelio and its ferry overflowed with engaged couples, officers, groups of young people showing off.
Hilmi Rahmi had drunk his coffee in one gulp and was smoking a cigarette. Thinking my eyes were glistening because of the smoke, he switched the cigarette to his other hand and held it near his cheekbone so that the smoke was carried away on the breeze. He was muttering as if talking to himself.
‘The first time I saw Sumbul, all I could see of her was her hands, nothing more. She was selecting potatoes at the market in Konya, and the hands peeping out of her purple robe were like doves. It was those nervous white hands that I went to ask for, taking the muhtar with me. When the robe came off, a young blonde girl appeared. Her eyes were as clear as the waters of Lake Aci. I snatched her up and came straight to Smyrna. Her relatives were so wretchedly poor, they were ready to get rid of her yesterday, but Sumbul was apprehensive. She had only ever known Plovdiv and the road to Konya. Even so, she grew to love Smyrna very much. When I took her to the hotels on the quay for a beer, she’d sit shyly in a corner. She wanted me to shield her, didn’t want to be seen by people passing by. Gradually she got used to it and began to remember how to laugh again. But then came the children, war, separation, the fire… And then this… this disaster. Oh my God.’
