This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Şebnem İşigüzel
Translation copyright © 2020 by Mark David Wyers
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Ağaçtaki kız by Can Yayınları in Turkey in 2016. Translated from Turkish by Mark David Wyers. First published in English by Amazon Crossing in 2020.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542041461 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542041465 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542041485 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542041481 (paperback)
Cover design by Philip Pascuzzo
First edition
Dedicated to all the children and youth who have lost their lives.
CONTENTS
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
A walnut-shell, elegantly polished, served her for a cradle. Her bed was formed of blue violet-leaves, with a rose-leaf for a counterpane. And here she slept at night.
“Thumbelina,” H. C. Andersen
1
IN YOUR ABSENCE
This is a story of freedom and love. The story of two young people ailing in heart and soul. I was one of them.
That night I climbed with effortless ease the tree where I was going to live. You might say it was a bit of a miracle. When I say “miracle,” I don’t mean that living in a tree is miraculous. I mean how swiftly I clambered up its trunk. It was as if a powerful wind whisked me right to the top, throwing off my pursuers. Indeed, I was being pursued, and I was trying to run away. But from whom? I was going to say that I was fleeing from life itself. But I fear that you would mock me for the little experience I have of life.
I was about to turn eighteen years old. That night when I found myself perched high in the branches of a tree, I had run all the way from Cihangir to Gülhane Park. My backpack, which contained only a few personal belongings, hadn’t slowed me down in the least. Who knows why I even bothered to bring it. In any case, I hadn’t planned on climbing a tree and staying there. It just happened. I was racked by despair, at a loss as to what I should do next. I’m tempted to say that I’d lost my mind, but if that had been the case, I would’ve at least found some solace in madness. And, as you will see, not once did I lose my grip on reality.
People are nothing more than the accumulated stories of others. In particular, the stories of their mothers and fathers. I’m not talking about genetics—this is purely a matter of the spirit. Try with all your might to resist, but in the end, you turn out to be no different from them, in your very essence and being. While my thoughts may be as scattered as my breathing is labored, what I want to tell you is nothing like that. It is a singular whole, complete. Well, in my mind that’s how it is.
Perhaps knowing that I am the girl in the tree will leave you feeling confused. Not a problem. In fact, all the better. You too should be a little confused because that is my constant state of being. Life itself is confused. Even Robert Pattinson, the vampire, said, “I’m definitely very confused.” So be it. I have a poster of him in my room. As I was leaving, we exchanged glances.
He didn’t look at me as if to say, “Wait! Where are you running off to?” To the contrary, he seemed to be saying, “Well, fuck off already!”
This is the story of a seventeen-year-old girl who wound up high in the branches of a tree one night. But there’s more to the story than that. You have to step back if you want to see a picture more clearly. You have to start with the good times. For instance, the night of July 23 in 2011. Actually, that wasn’t the best of nights, as that was when Amy Winehouse died. I had a picture of her troubled, tragic face as the wallpaper on my phone. The background on my laptop was a photo of Robert and Kristen, who became a vampire later on. But don’t try to draw any connections between how I ended up in that tree to vampire lit because there aren’t any. In fact, I’d lost all interest in both Robert and teenage vampire stories. An act of rebellion is what led me to where I am now. Those posters, which needless to say are so out of fashion now, are only there because I didn’t bother to take them down. Vampires don’t rebel, they suck blood.
But Amy is different, and she always will be. That’s because she rebelled and then she died.
I’m here for only one reason, and that is to die before death comes to get me. I may have said this already, but I’m going to say it again for the simple reason that I’m definitely very confused: It’s a miracle that I got all the way up to the top of this towering tree. The trees here have been here for centuries. They say that the park used to be part of the palace grounds. Do you know how smooth the trunks of plane trees are? It was as if my hands and feet stuck right to its beautiful, bare trunk. There’s no other way I could’ve climbed it. I know Gülhane Park well because for years my father worked at the Archaeology Museum, which is right behind it.
I’d taken off my red Toms sneakers at the bottom of the tree, and now they were sitting there like a tiny stain on the grass. There’s this tired old story that they always make us read in our literature classes at school: driven by its love for a rose, a nightingale impales its heart on a thorn of the rosebush and the blood runs down, becoming the deep red found at the base of such thorns. If Amy had heard that story, maybe she would’ve written a song about it because her love always went unrequited and she sang her laments like a nightingale. In the end, however, the pain broke her heart and she died. In a way, she rose up in revolt against life and all the callous ignoramuses around her. Admittedly, that was a pointless comparison. I mean, the one before, the one about the nightingale, the rose and the red Toms shoes. But you see, it’s not easy to write. Thinking is the hardest part of all. Put crudely, I guess what I was really trying to say was this: Lying under the tree, my red canvas shoes looked like two drops of blood that had started seeping into the ground. A stain.
After seeing my shoes so far down below me, I felt certain that no one would find me so long as they didn’t look up. And even if they saw the shoes, it would never occur to anyone that whoever had left them behind would now be nestled in the upper branches of the tree, hurled up there by the violence of life. The world below, the streets and sidewalks, struck me as being particularly dangerous once I found myself high up in the tree, and the thought of getting lost down there filled me with fear. If I’d stayed down below, I would’ve struggled to stay alive, and in the process I might have lost all sense of humanity.
I thought about how practica
lly difficult it was going to be to live in the tree. I wondered how I’d come up with the idea. Books, perhaps? If I’d found a deserted island, would I have chosen to live out my life there? Or spend the rest of my days in the belly of a whale, like a prophet? No, I’d grown out of my copycat days long before. So why had I clambered up a tree like a cat fleeing for its life, a snarling dog nipping at its heels? Never mind that. The important thing is that I was able to climb it, all because my friends died. But I can’t tell you about what happened. Not yet. After all, I don’t know what kind of person you are. On that note, I once saw a tweet that I liked:
“Maybe you’re one of those people who have a prickly pine cone for a heart.”
I don’t want to cry now. When I think of my friends, I break down in tears.
Let me tell you about something else: No one can climb a tree in a blink of an eye. But ever since Amy Winehouse died four summers ago, I’ve been learning how to slackline, which may have helped me in my miraculous ascent. While you’ve most likely heard of Amy Winehouse, I’m not so sure you know much about slackline, so let me briefly describe it. Slackline involves tying a strap between two trees a little ways off the ground and then balancing on it, not unlike a tightrope walker. I first saw it on YouTube. My father, who is adept at making such contraptions because of the work he does as an archaeologist, helped me put together my first setup with some ratchets and a strap we picked up in Karaköy. I started practicing, rain and shine, and I signed up for a mountain-climbing class as well, which required that we do slackline as preparation. You might be thinking, “Well then why are you talking about miracles? You were better trained than anyone else to climb up it.” That’s a logical point. But still, climbing a tree, and a very tall one at that, poses its own unique challenges, and even if I had gone through some training, it couldn’t have prepared me for shimmying up a tree trunk like a sheer cliff without a rope, carabiners, or spikes. Also, I’d had to quit the mountain-climbing club because it turned out to be far beyond my “modest means,” as they say. Those were the days my family plunged from being middle class to hitting rock bottom. You have to admit that to a certain extent, happiness is related to whether or not you have any money. We were a bit better off the summer that Amy Winehouse died; at the very least, we were able to pay our bills. If we’d known that we were heading for darker days and that our last free and easy summer was slipping away, we would’ve enjoyed it as best we could.
An Amy Winehouse concert was scheduled for early that summer in Istanbul, and I already had my ticket. Truth be told, my aunt, who was a journalist at the time—or to put it another way, she was still allowed to practice journalism in those days—had said to me, “I’ll find you a ticket.” Things were always like that. We sponged our way through the world of the arts and culture. Sometimes she’d send me along with a photographer. Handing me a flash card for his camera, he’d gesture toward me and say, “She’s my intern,” and even though I looked rather young, they’d let me into the events. Because they were good people. Because good people worked in the industry. Because even the name of the publishing company was good: Pozitive. Mehmet Ağabey worked there. He laughed and smiled as innocently as a child, and when he laughed, his eyes lit up. He ended up dying too. But it was cancer that got him.
“Living in this damn country is enough to give you cancer.”
That’s what my aunt said at his funeral.
Suffering is like a jammed lock that gives you no end of trouble. But when you do finally get it to click open and for the briefest of moments you feel a sense of relief, suddenly you fall to pieces, just like me. Not to ramble on like some geezer, but the fact of the matter is that I was raised by one—my grandma, to be precise—so sometimes I do tend to babble. The others my age, like my best friend Pembe, would put things differently, using a younger idiom. They wouldn’t even use the word “idiom” in the first place. Only a geezer like me would say such a thing. Oh, Pembe!
“Pembe . . . What a lovely name.” If you ask me, Pembe—meaning “pink”—isn’t really so special. But everyone said it was a fine name. Our teachers from France called her “Mademoiselle Rose.”
She liked it, so we called her Rose too. We were the only ones who knew why her name was Pembe.
When Pembe’s mother went into labor, it was their housekeeper who took her to the hospital and looked after her for two whole days, all because that’s how long it took for her closest relatives to show up, including her husband. You see, Pembe’s father, who was known in the tabloids as a bit of a player before he got married, was off scuba diving at the time. After she gave birth, Pembe’s mother said to him over the phone, “Mehmet Bey, it’s another girl.” I guess she addressed her husband as “Bey” because he was eighteen years her senior. Mehmet Bey couldn’t hide his displeasure when he found out that he was now the father of yet another daughter. He said that he didn’t want his wife, who had graduated from the Austrian High School and worked for a while as a flight attendant, to have more children because, in his words, he loved her so much and three children was more than enough. At the same time, however, he said with male douchebag finesse that before all was said and done, he’d need to have a son. She asked him, “So, what do you think we should name her?” By asking that question, she was trying to win his forgiveness for having given birth to another girl. Curtly he replied, “Whatever you want.” Afterward, she was so upset that her milk dried up. Day and night she murmured, “What are we going to name this child? What on earth are we going to name her?” The housekeeper, whose name was Pembe, settled the matter once and for all:
“Names don’t get worn out, now do they? Name her Pembe. She’ll be my namesake.”
And so that’s how Pembe’s mother got revenge on her husband for breaking her heart. By way of explanation, she said, “If it hadn’t been for Pembe Hanım, I would’ve had to give birth at home, and both my daughter and I probably would have died. I forever owe her a debt of gratitude.” That’s how Pembe got her name and that’s what it has been ever since.
But then there was the matter of her husband’s wealthy family. “You mustn’t,” they said, “sully our family heritage like this. We will not tolerate our grandchild being given such a lowborn name.” This all happened in 1998, meaning that this particular father, who above all wanted a son after having sired two daughters, is alive and kicking. And when I say “father,” allow me to refine the term by saying that this jackass of a womanizer broke a pool cue over his girlfriend’s head at the turn of the previous decade. This is a man who was once a confirmed bachelor, as modern as the Mercedes he drove. He pestered his wife, hoping to break her determination, by saying, “At the very least, we should give her a middle name as an alternative.”
“How about Rosy Pembe?” his wife offered. “Or Pembe Pink?”
Pembe had told us the story of how she got her name one day after school as we dug into a basket of fried potato wedges at the Star Beerhall in Beyoğlu. At first she chuckled from time to time, but by the end of the tale, tears were pouring down her cheeks. That was the first time we’d ever seen our Pembe—our Rose—break down like that.
The world is made up of stories. If it wasn’t, life would be insufferable. Who knows why I was drawn to Pembe’s story or why I felt a need to share it with you. Perhaps it dovetailed with something inside of me? Dovetail . . . That word is an heirloom passed down to me by my grandma. Maybe it rings hollow, signifying nothing. Pembe’s story, I mean. The story of Amy Winehouse’s life is nothing like that. It filled to overflowing—and I’m sure that by now you’ve picked up on the irony of her last name. I was counting down the days to when I would watch her onstage and take in that story with my own ears. As usual, the ticket had been arranged through Freebie Flights. (It sounds forced when I say that, doesn’t it? “Freebie Flights.” But it rolled right off the tongues of my best friends Derin and Pembe.) Before coming to Istanbul, Amy was going to perform in Belgrade. She stepped onto the stage there and looked at the au
dience as if she’d recently risen from her grave. After that night, the rest of her tour was canceled. I wasn’t one of those people who cursed her name for canceling her other shows. Quite the opposite. I was angry at the people who’d let her go onstage in that condition. Sure, I’m wise beyond my years. People call that “maturity.” But I swear, it’s not. It’s anything but maturity. A mature girl my age would not find herself perched high up in one of Gülhane Park’s stately plane trees in the middle of the night. No, she would settle her accounts with life while her feet were planted firmly on the ground.
For now, I’m not thinking about what I’ll do next. Still, I feel like I’ve promised you something. Everything I’ve been through has happened because of my nature, because of my sense of responsibility. My mother would disagree, saying that if I were more responsible, I wouldn’t have lost my scholarship. In her mind, responsibility meant working like a mule and studying harder. Slaving like a damn mule . . .
I was a student at the Hunchback of Notre Dame High School. That’s what I called the place. And that’s part of the reason why I lost my scholarship. You see, one day my thoughts were wandering and I wrote the name of the school on one of my homework assignments like that: the Hunchback of Notre Dame High School. With a guffaw that was reminiscent of a braying mule, Pembe said, “Well, just be glad you didn’t write what I call it: Our Virgin Merry Cunt High School.”
What do you expect from a ninth grader? Sharp, witty, highbrow humor? Not going to happen. Pembe and Derin were laughing. I was sitting there in silence. My grandma could swear up a storm, so I was used to it even if I didn’t indulge much in profanity myself. The sole reason I chose the two foulest-mouthed girls at school to be my friends was because I trusted them in the same way that I trusted my grandma.
On the very first day of class, Pembe’s and Derin’s paths crossed when they got into trouble for swearing. They were both being punished in front of the headmaster’s office, and from that day on they were inseparable.
The Girl in the Tree Page 1
