by Suat Dervis
Her pillow absorbed her tears, and dried them. Not even Nazikter and Nurser, the two maidservants who had grown old at her side, ever once saw her cry.
It was as if fate itself had turned against this helpless creature. For it was only a few days after her only son’s death that her only daughter followed suit.
She had been expecting her second child. It had been a mistake to tell her of her brother’s death. She developed a fever that had led in turn to a premature birth before she herself perished.
Two cruel blows, one after the other.
In the days that followed, the Circassian lady grew painfully thin. Now there were deep creases on either side of her mouth, and another between her eyebrows. But those eyebrows still arched upwards, preserving her old haughty air, and her eyes remained impenetrable, ironclad in their determination to keep her proud, courageous soul beyond reach.
Grieving and defenseless she might be, but the slave girl who had become the pasha’s wife still held her head high.
Patience and endurance, these were the principles that governed her soul. Never did she waver. And neither did she consider herself defeated by fortune’s mystifying reversals. No complaint passed her lips. She may have sometimes asked herself: “Why was I taken from the mountains of Circassia? Why did they steal me? Why did they shut me up in palaces and marry me off to pashas, putting me at the mercy of others—of strangers?”
It was a year after the death of her mother and uncle that Celile came to live in the yalı.
And there is no doubt that her arrival brought her grandmother comfort and new purpose. Nevertheless, she did not see this as a reason to spoil the girl.
She had, after all, been solemn and serious with her own children. No matter how they might have wished it, this palace lady had rarely taken them on her lap or kissed them after their baby days were over, and she treated her daughter’s child with the same reserve.
From the day she lost her husband until the day she died—and Celile was a grown woman by then—Çeşmiahu Hanım never once complained about her circumstances.
The only ones with any notion of how the household supported itself were Mardirosyan, the moneychanger, and Seyfullah Efendi, the former butler.
Of these two Mardirosyan Efendi was the more knowledgeable. He was the one who knew all the fine print—how Veliddin Pasha had sold his jewels for a song, and how those precious stones taken from a palace lady’s brooch might find their way into a necklace gifted to a third-rate Austrian artiste much loved by the new day’s ministers and war profiteers.
It wasn’t just the palace lady’s private affairs that he handled. He kept a close eye on the entire estate.
He was consequently aware of the various ruses that had been set into motion during the mortgaging and—later—the sale of the Nişantaşı mansion at less than its value.
Throughout the war years, he had stood by the old woman. Throughout the armistice years, too, and into the early years of the republic, he had remained at her side.
The yalı was full of such beautiful things—çeşm-i bülbül vases of blown glass, the finest embroideries, and calligraphic panels. Knowing how much such items were valued by foreign buyers, it was for Mardirosyan Efendi a matter of conscience to help out his old patron’s favorite wife.
In truth, the old moneychanger’s regard for the palace lady was entirely genuine. He would never have put himself forward as her friend just to get these precious things for next to nothing and sell them on at an exorbitant profit. Had he not come to her aid, extending a helping hand, she would have been lost, entirely lost. Was it wrong for a person offering such a service to profit from it?
Mardirosyan Efendi was fond of philosophizing. “It’s human nature,” he would reason. “Profit is what drives us all. Without the promise of profit, no one would lift a finger. No one would extend a helping hand. Think of altruism as bread pudding. Compassion is the syrup, and profit the cream!”
His own children had emigrated to France after the armistice. He’d lost his wife many years before that. He’d shut his little shop in the bazaar. But he still lived in his villa in Bağlarbaşı. He’d taken in a poor relation and her husband so that they could look after him. He was getting on in years by now. His business was failing. But he continued to stand by the pasha’s widow, managing her dwindling fortune until there was nothing left.
As she was dying, Çeşmiahu Hanım said many prayers for Mardirosyan Efendi, beseeching Allah to bring him to the true faith before he died.
And when Çeşmiahu Hanım closed her eyes for the last time, the old moneychanger was truly bereft. Here was a man who had lost his wife, his friends, his children, and his livelihood. His bond with the old lady had been important to him. To visit her yalı, to manage her affairs—it returned him to days when he had been Mardirosyan the Moneychanger. So long as the lady lived, he had felt himself an active and useful member of society.
He did have a few other customers among the old ministerial families, but none as dear to him as this palace lady.
To visit that yalı now and again, to sit down on a gilded sofa, to spring to his feet to perform a sweeping bow, to seat himself again only to jump up five minutes later to ask after his lady’s health while performing another sweeping bow, to drink coffee served on golden saucers by a refined Circassian maid and to reminisce about the old days—days that hardly anyone remembered…
How much sweeter to visit Çeşmiahu Hanım than to deal with these unreadable businessmen of the new order. It took him back to his prime, to his golden days as moneychanger to the Ottoman grandees.
When the palace lady had first fallen ill, it was the old moneychanger who’d sent the city’s best doctors to the yalı and kept her supplied with medicines.
On the day of her funeral, when he followed her coffin alongside a handful of other residents of her quiet Bosphorus village—attracting looks with his loud sobs—he might have been taken for a close relation.
“Oh, she was a lady through and through,” he kept saying. “Who could ever match her courage, her fortitude, her grace and refinement?”
Seyfullah Efendi, the pasha’s old butler, was a short man with a permanent scowl. He spoke to no one. Since the pasha’s demise, he had spent his days in his bedroom in the yalı’s male quarters, emerging only in the evening to visit the village coffeehouse. He was either Bosnian or Albanian. He had come to the yalı at a very young age. From that moment on, he had been sheltered from all the changes in the outside world. With the exception of the war years, he had never left the yalı. He’d been injured while serving in the Mesopotamian campaign, returning to the yalı with a right arm that was shorter than his left arm and a right leg that was shorter than his left leg, and from that day on, he’d never ventured beyond the village.
He’d continued to receive his salary for a short while following the pasha’s death. By then he counted himself almost as a member of the family, so he’d stopped the payments.
For what was the point? He was the one who managed the household accounts, after all. He could draw on that money for whatever his heart desired, and pad every bill, pocketing the difference.
It was a noble sacrifice to stay on as the loyal family retainer.
Why bother, then, with a salary? He had the pasha’s entire fortune at his fingertips.
What’s more, he could present himself as a well-meaning retainer who just couldn’t manage the accounts. As a servant receiving a salary, he would have been identified in due course as a luxury the household could no longer afford, and been asked to leave, like so many others.
And what then?
What sort of life could a man with his disabilities expect in the outside world?
The yalı was the world he knew. He’d grown accustomed to the solitude it afforded. The noise and commotion of the world outside repelled him. His only experience of it had been a painful
and terrifying undertaking whose details now escaped him. It had left him without the slightest desire to move outside his small orbit ever again.
In the coffeehouse he frequented every evening, he was counted as one of the most respected elders in this quiet Bosphorus village.
It was as if he had been there forever. Almost no one could remember if he’d been a relation of the pasha’s or a former servant.
He was known by his calm demeanor, his habitual silence, his fondness for the narghile, and his preferred tobacco.
On the rare occasions when the conversation turned to the war years, he would allude to all the great politicians of the day, from Prince Bismarck to the Emperor Wilhelm, choosing his words in a way as to suggest he’d known them personally. For hadn’t he followed all those discussions about Maeterlinck and the Vienna Congress in the men’s quarters of the great pasha’s mansion?
No one was particularly interested in knowing what had been said; they were simply impressed that the old butler had once known such august figures.
They would listen to him with reverence on those rare occasions when he aired deep thoughts that no one, not even he, understood.
But his chief activity was to shut himself up in his room all day long, overseeing the household accounts, with only the occasional trip to present a bill to the palace lady, who never once requested one.
The palace lady never listened to a word he said. She would simply ask, “How much do you need this time?” And then she would call for the old moneychanger to come at once.
Seyfullah Efendi spent most of his time sitting in his room doing nothing. Where did his thoughts take him? No one knew. No one could say if there had ever been a woman in his life, either. He never spent a night away from the yalı. Not a hint of a family, a private life, a liaison, or a close tie. He was like a ghost. His one aim in life was to procure for himself the biggest possible share of Veliddin Pasha’s fortune.
And so he did. After Çeşmiahu Hanım died, and the yalı was sold to cover her debts, the pasha’s old butler bought himself a little shop just opposite the ferry station and turned it into a grocery.
There were still two people left in the yalı: Nurser and Nazikter, the lady’s two maidservants. Nurser had married and gone on to have children and grandchildren. But after the marriage became too difficult, she had returned to the yalı and the palace lady.
Nazikter, on the other hand, was the same age as the palace lady. When Celile’s mother had married Fazıl Bey, Nazikter had been sent along with her as part of the dowry. From the time Celile was being nursed, she’d begun caring for her. When, a year after Celile’s mother’s death, her father had remarried, Nazikter had come along with Celile to the yalı. Nazikter was an old woman with a thin, pale face and a young body. She had never married, and Celile had satisfied her maternal instinct; she had loved her as dearly and loyally as a mother, devoting herself to the girl until her dying day.
These two Circassian women, who had spent their lives trailing after the palace lady like shadows, were as calm and quiet as their mistress.
They wandered the house like shades, shrouding their doors with silence and whispering to each other as if they were afraid of waking each other up.
The yalı’s most withdrawn person, though, was Osman Agha, the cook. He was from Bolu, and a cook of the highest order. When the pasha fell from grace, he’d judged himself too old to find another position and so had not sought one.
And no one could find the courage to ask him to leave.
And so there he’d stayed, in that enormous kitchen from which he had expelled so many apprentices over the years, surrounded by his arsenal of copper urns, vats, and saucepans.
Until the day she died, Çeşmiahu Hanım believed that he had continued to receive a salary.
But he did not fare as well as Seyfullah, the old butler, during those last years. Every now and again, Seyfullah would credit him with a portion of what he thought the old man might need.
Osman Agha had no interest in money. He had no interest in anything whatsoever. For years he had been living alone in that blackened kitchen that called to mind a chemist’s laboratory or a magician’s lair, surrounded by cobwebs and his untouched vats and pans.
Too old to serve in the world war, Osman Agha had enjoyed a long life. He was the only one in the household who was older than Celile’s grandmother, and still physically strong. But his mind had begun to go. He spent his winters dozing in front of the kitchen stove and his summers dozing at the kitchen door. It had been years since he’d cooked.
No one knew this, though. Not even the man himself. The cooking for the rest of the household was done in the unlovely kitchen in the women’s quarters. His food would be brought across and placed at his feet, on a tray. On the rare occasions when cooking happened in his own kitchen, he would pull from his memory the name of a former apprentice and begin to fault and curse him.
This, then, was the household Celile and her nurse Nazikter Kalfa joined a year after her father took a new wife and left to take up a post at the embassy in Berlin.
Celile spent the rest of her childhood here, and a good part of her youth.
This decaying yalı, quietly collapsing into the sands of time.
There was no one for her to play with, no one remotely her age. She grew up in solitude.
The old yalı was like a coffin. Termites were eating away the wood. The wind would blow off the tiles and the rain would seep in, stripping away the plaster and leaving the lathing bare, until all that was left of this magnificent coffin were the bare bones of a magnificent past—a skeleton stripped of its flesh. Meanwhile, the patient waters of the Bosphorus continued with their long war of attrition against the yalı’s foundations.
Its days were over, and now, like all the great yalı along the Bosphorus, it was collapsing into the sea.
But in Celile’s childish eyes, everything looked new and beautiful and worthy of her full attention.
This girl, who could remember no other home, attended to this magnificent forty-room yalı with the passion that only a child can possess. She spent her days exploring her enchanted domain—its halls and its corridors, its private rooms and its salons, its pantries and its storerooms, its attics and the closets beneath its stairs.
She was not bothered by her solitude or the yalı’s mighty silence. No one had taught her fear. Because she did not speak to other children her age, and because her elders had never taught her anything, she knew nothing. Nothing except this somber, silent yalı where she spent all her waking hours, wandering from chamber to chamber, opening every closed door, dancing across floors where no one had trod for years on end, stopping only to look more closely at the pictures on the walls.
The yalı was big and Celile was little. But she longed to know its every detail.
Each time she opened a door to a new room, she would take days and days to examine its every detail, until she knew that room by heart.
If she was taken by the colors of a Sevres vase she’d discovered in one of these rooms, or a painting, she would return again and again to study its contours. If she went into a room to find a tiger skin placed in front of a sofa, she would wish for nothing more than to go back one more time to look into its eyes.
She wandered through this yalı like a cat. No one stopped her. No one found her explorations and discoveries odd.
The yalı was hers, and so too was the garden, where she raced among the hedges, which seemed as high to this small girl as cypresses. The arbors, with their white and yellow roses and their peeling green fences—they were hers. So too was the stable with its white and navy gravel and its rotting landau, which looked like nothing so much as a dead animal. The landau, too—it was hers and hers alone.
Everything was hers, and she wandered this vast domain in solitude, never speaking of her infatuations and excitements, telling no one of her f
eelings, chasing cats, watching anthills, breathing in the dank and dusty air of the yalı’s most forsaken, weather-beaten extremities.
Yes, this yalı was a veritable paradise. And this paradise—with its red, yellow, green, and blue crystal doorknobs, its grand reception rooms decked with Venetian mirrors, its sparkling chandeliers, its gilded moldings, its curving banisters, its red velvet cordons, its double staircase leading up from the front door that no one ever used—with its silence broken only by the cracking and crunching of old furniture, and its wooden frame leaking like a tap—with its bugs, its fading gilded chairs and sofas, its rotting satin curtains, its precious çeşm-i bülbül vases, its priceless carpets that in the light seeping through drawn curtains looked like springtime gardens—this paradise was her world.
She loved looking at the opposite shore, and the blue waters of the Bosphorus, only rarely becalmed, almost always racing in one direction or the other.
She loved standing at the door of the black kitchen, watching the cook among his great vats and strange copper tools.
He would speak to himself, this cook, and scold the ghosts of his old apprentices.
In the little cottage in the grove, there was the gardener, who had two daughters.
One was still very small, but the other was exactly Celile’s age. She was the one who told Celile that the cook had been conversing with the fairies ever since he’d poured dishwashing water into the roots of his fig tree, and that it was these fairies he spoke to in his kitchen. She wanted Celile to fear him.
But the cook’s conversations with fairies did not frighten Celile so much as fascinate her: she could spend hours watching him.
Perhaps if she’d had permission to spend more time with the gardener’s daughter, she might have been persuaded to find the fear in her heart. But she was not allowed to speak to this girl, lest she learn her coarse ways and ugly words.
Celile may have had the run of the yalı and the garden and the grove, but she was, without doubt and without her full knowledge, under constant surveillance. This was not so strict as to impede her innocent wanderings through the yalı. But whenever she spoke to the gardener’s daughter or strayed too close to the sea, she would feel the shadow of Nazikter, her nurse, and then her wrinkled, veiny hand in hers.
