Pembe said, “Okay, but what kind of name is ‘Derin’? In the sense of ‘deep,’ right? So what’s so deep about you?”
“My intellect.”
“You sure about that? Try this: Take the last letter of ‘intellect’ and use it to start a word that rhymes with ‘swat.’ That’ll give you the answer you’re looking for.”
“Ahahahaaaa.”
As they stood there in front of the headmaster’s office balanced on one leg—what a ridiculous form of punishment!—whispering to each other, Pembe found her soul mate. She’d gone through life trying to find ways to exact revenge on the universe for the name she’d been given, and now she was one step closer to achieving that goal.
The two of them posted a video of themselves on YouTube that, from beginning to end, showed them bantering back and forth with the vilest swear words they could dredge up from the depths of their minds. Actually, “showed” may not actually be the best word, as they were wearing paper bags over their heads in the clip. They even managed to make a bit of money when a shampoo ad was cut into the video, which also included Derin’s explanation of how she got her name.
It all starts with Derin’s family living in a basement apartment in ritzy Nişantaşı as the caretakers of the apartment building. Fade in music now, as this cheesy number is Derin’s go-to story. You know how it is: there’s always a tenant who takes it upon themselves to look after such caretakers and their children. This particular tenant, a lonely woman living in apartment 9 who didn’t have children of her own, helped Derin and her siblings with their homework, took them to the doctor when they got sick, and gave them presents on the holidays. She was the one who named Derin when she was born. Since the woman had helped them out so much, the family couldn’t bring themselves to object when she came up with the “perfect” name for their newborn baby. When Derin’s father went to get his daughter’s birth certificate, he slipped in an additional name. “Let me see that document,” the woman from apartment 9 snapped when he came home with the paperwork. As soon as she saw what was written there, she exclaimed, “Get rid of that name! I told you what you should call her.” Being told to bow down to someone else’s wishes is a guaranteed recipe for exasperation, and revolt is the natural response. So, all because of that woman, they moved out of the apartment building. Sometimes kindness can bring about more harm than the most malevolent acts. That’s a good demonstration of how, at heart, goodwill can be the greatest of evils. As they were moving out, the woman cried out after them, “Ingrates! As if I didn’t give you everything you wanted!” Most likely she was sick in the head.
“Well, there you have it. The road to hell is paved with good deeds and names.” That’s how Pembe responded between hiccups as she stabbed a potato wedge into the glob of mayonnaise at the bottom of the basket.
After that, Derin’s father was hired on as a janitor at the school, and when she passed the entrance exam, the board of trustees awarded her a scholarship. Once in a while he’d call out to her at school, using the name he’d given her: “Emine, Emine! Hey, Emine!” But his efforts were in vain. Thanks to her high-society appellation, Derin was able to hide the fact that she was in fact the daughter of the janitor.
Derin said, “Don’t be fooled into thinking that the school is all about generosity and being good-hearted.” We were still at the Star Beerhall; the waiter brought out a second plate of potato wedges, and we had moved on to our third round of beers. The mugs were so heavy that our hands trembled when we picked them up. Pembe and I glanced up when Derin said, “You know why they let me stay? Because my father has got dirt on someone there. A real sex scandal.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. But it must be a big deal because I’m on a full scholarship and they’ll let me keep studying no matter how many classes I fail.”
We didn’t fit in at the school one bit, always drifting through campus as if we were planets that had been knocked out of orbit. We were misfits, outcasts bound ever closer together by the punishments the system unleashed on us.
Blackmail wasn’t in the cards for me. When I put it like that, it sounded funny. And how we laughed! We laughed far more than any situation called for. In a last-ditch effort to keep my scholarship, I signed up for the school’s writing competition. I signed up but lost. Not only did I lose, but my novel was subjected to the harshest review of all. Before taking part, we’d been asked, “Once the competition is over, do you give permission for your work to be subjected to critical review, whether positive or negative?”
Naturally, people have no idea what may befall them in sickness and in health, or on their best or worst of days. But I remember that day. My hand shot up so fast that it seemed to be in danger of snapping off my wrist. Not once did it occur to me that I might lose the competition; even more unthinkable was the possibility that I’d write the worst submission of them all. As a rule, whenever people start something new, they’re incapable of thinking straight. Everything starts with an amorphous cloud of dust and gas, nothing more. I glanced around at the other students, grinning like a grilled sheep’s head as I waved my hand, enthusiastically yet blindly showing my support for the idea of critical reviews. At this point I should note that cooked sheep’s heads do, in fact, grin. Our biology teacher, who was French and had first seen sheep’s heads in the windows of the butcher shops in Istanbul, explained the neurological reasons underlying the phenomenon of the dead sheep grin. Later someone showed him the red carnations that butchers stick into the buttholes of the slaughtered lambs hanging in their storefronts.
“Turkey,” he said, “is a very interesting country.”
“Like we’ve never heard that line before,” Derin muttered as she drew a picture of a skull in her notebook.
The teacher said, “Mademoiselle, what was that you said?” He was a prime example of a fascist who paints himself as a conservative.
She replied, “You heard what I said. So why are you asking?”
That’s how mon amie Derin ended up in the headmaster’s office for the second time.
Still, I wasn’t uncouth like Derin and Pembe. My father was fond of that word: “uncouth.” Whenever I said it, he’d laugh. “Oh, sweetie,” he’d say, “the old mothballed trunk is chattering again . . . You’ve got to keep up with the times.”
“How about if I lick up the times instead?”
“Lick them up and swallow them down?”
I was always baffled by the inscrutability of time. Something else I found incomprehensible was why I hadn’t won the writing competition. My entire being was shaken to its core. That was the end of my scholarship. Even now as I remember those days, I can feel the disappointment deep down in my bones in a way that can best be described as uber, ultra, mega . . . I think you get what I’m saying.
Her lips curled into a sneer, our literature teacher said, “When you were cranking out that novel of yours . . .” But when she said “cranking out,” I could’ve sworn it sounded more like—let me put this delicately—“crapping out.” A few moments later, she added, “I don’t know what you were thinking when you were working on it, but . . .”
I thought, Ha! I was thinking of my mother’s privates!
After class, as Pembe and Derin tried to console me, they also completed the teacher’s sentence with a sexist slur that often rolled off their tongues. I don’t refer to Pembe as “Rose” here because after all she went through she came to appreciate her name and, in fact, truly came to embody it—in all its pinkness. In those fine days, we used to laugh and say things like that. Those fine bedraggled days. Those bittersweet days when we were on the verge of outright rebellion.
If I’d been able to articulate my hurt and anger “in proper terms,” I would’ve written the best novel and won that scholarship.
In the end, the most pretentious girl at school won it. The saying goes that even lies express some truth. Her? None at all. First of all, she didn’t even need the scholarship, while I was worrying about how I was goi
ng to pay the following year’s tuition. I know that I may have caused some consternation because I wrote the book for the sake of a scholarship. But please don’t confuse me for those people who dream of what they’re going to become through writing rather than what they’re going to put to paper. True enough, I wrote to win a scholarship instead of studying harder to improve my grades. But the reason is simple: I wanted to write, to express something.
For me, the world was full of injustices.
“It’s the downtrodden who will create the world anew!”
I saw that scrawled on a wall. Why am I telling you this? Because I get the feeling that you think I write whatever comes to mind. No, that’s not quite true. I mentioned it because our literature teacher said about my book, “This is not how novels are written!”
We should write about our thoughts, not our feelings—right? By thinking things out. At least, at present that notion has taken hold of my thoughts. Sentences, words, letters, even those pinched commas and anal full stops—they can all pick up on your hesitation.
In my mind, I replaced the word “downtrodden” in that sentence: “It’s the writers who will create the world anew!”
And that’s how I answered the question “Why did you write this novel?” I should’ve known from the start that I’d lost the competition, in which a mere fourteen students participated out of the hundreds at the school, when I saw the cynical look on the teacher’s face as she read my answer.
We should all agree that it was such heartbreak and injustice that killed Amy. And in the end I found myself where I was because I was running from that pain, the world, my “fucked up life,” as my two more verbally graphic friends would’ve said. All these things happened long after that half-assed writing competition and the summer that Amy died. We hadn’t rebelled yet. After the rebellion, a new world built upon tear gas and clouds of dust started to come into being. But that world didn’t exist yet. That’s why I’m in this tree. In other words, you’re not listening to the ramblings of some teen. Instead of the term “ramblings,” I’d rather use a sexist swear word. I’m here because I don’t feel at ease as a woman on the face of the earth and I’m a feminist through and through, even though I may not know about the meaning of this or that, or devour books and pamphlets. That’s the way it should be. My friends swore because they didn’t know how else to deal with the world either. But I’m going to get my thoughts straightened out here. They never got the chance.
To throw another mothballed word at you: I’m sequestering myself!
Or, to use the modern idiom: I’m going to reset myself!
I laughed to myself when I said that. When we laugh, it helps us pull ourselves together, like how the wind carries something from one place to another. Laughter is the wind of the mind and soul—it picks you up and whisks you far away. Laughter signals that the place where you are now is no longer a good place to be. The wiring is fried. A belt has snapped. The brakes are overheating and you can’t stop.
My poor mother, who was one of the biggest losers in life, used to say to her patients, “Laughter is the cheapest medicine.” When I say patients, I mean overweight people. You see, she was a dietician. People with a weight problem shouldn’t take offense. If I were in their shoes, I’d resist the fascism of body size. Don’t fall into that trap. I’d push back against the idea that people can use your body as a source of employment and make a living by forcing you to adhere to a certain standard. Take Pilates, for example. It was used in World War II for bedridden soldiers. Are you bedridden? You can do the same exercises on your own without having to pay into the industry. As you may have noticed, I’ve got something to say about everything. It’s just that today’s day and age hasn’t been able to hook and reel me in.
I’m also surprised that I’ve suddenly opened up so much. It must have something to do with being at the top of this tree. An astronaut I follow on Twitter said something similar. Once in space and seeing the earth so far away, the astronaut suddenly became a chatterbox, saying everything that came to mind and eventually describing the condition in one tweet as “diarrhea of the mouth.” The astronaut’s husband—by the way, the astronaut is a woman—is an agriculturalist.
The tweet clarified, “In fact, he’s a farmer!”
@Travis, one of Twitter’s most vicious users, replied with more than a hint of sarcasm, “Ooo realy!”
To which @ticarisagacek, a Twitter user I also follow, replied, “He’s an agriculturalist with a university degree who decided to do his own thing, so what’s it to you if his wife said he’s a farmer?”
So there you have it, a woman astronaut who looks out at the world from space and asks, “Hey, I wonder where my husband’s fields are?” and there’s her husband the farmer. I say everything for a reason: My father, who studied archaeology, and my mother, who graduated from the Health Sciences Faculty’s Department of Nutrition and Dietetics, were brought together by the fact that they were born and grew up in Cihangir. That particular neighborhood of Istanbul, which is now quite posh, was the brothel quarter in Ottoman times. The apartment building in which we live was apparently built over what was once the area’s most extravagant whorehouse. I’ll pick up that discussion later, as it’ll be a long one. For now, how about: What am I doing at the top of this tree? Why are people born into the world? That’s easy. So they’ll have a story to tell. Some of us die before the story ends, some of us die long after the story has ended, and some of us die right at the very start.
I don’t know if you remember me saying this, or if I said it at all, but you see—and I’m not trying to be evasive here—it’s just that I’ve reached a point where I can’t remember much at all, so I might be repeating myself when I say: The tree I climbed was a plane tree. Its branches forked out at the top of the towering trunk, creating a deep curved hollow. I settled in quite comfortably but still felt uneasy about leaning back against one of the tree’s branches. Feeling uneasy and going through life constantly hounded by concerns are terrible things. I learned that from my mom. And from my aunt as well. Unease weighs you down, like melancholy or grief. It is an emotion, and an unpleasant one at that. And that is exactly how I felt. Uneasy.
I looked down, which made me feel dizzy, but quickly enough I realized that I could find some peace of mind by just keeping my head up. That, however, was a passing feeling. If I fell, I knew I’d die, and I was perched there for the precise reason that I didn’t want to die. Still, I have to ask: What was threatening my life? What was it that had threatened Amy’s? Unease, depression, melancholy, sorrow, anxiety, unhappiness, and fear are far more harmful than drugs. At the very least, drugs numb you. Yes, I’ve tried them. I never had the desire to go too far because I didn’t like the feeling of being out of control. Still, I’d probably go for some weed if I came across it. As if I say no to anything at all. There was this one time I tried to commit suicide in the most ridiculous way. I didn’t even know if I really wanted to die or not. Here’s what I did: I took a bunch of my mom’s sertraline, drank a bottle of Efes Dark Beer, and then I puked. For a whole week my mom tried to find her bottle of pills but gave up in the end, deciding that she must’ve misplaced it somewhere. Not once did she consider the possibility that her daughter had taken them in an attempt to end her own life. I’ll talk more about my mom, but later, because I haven’t even got to the night that Amy died! As Pembe and Derin would say, “Whoa, ho, no!” I miss them so much. “Aw, seriously?” The way that Derin would say, “Done deal,” and, “Sherioushly”?
When I wrote my novel, I tried not to say things like that. And I still didn’t win. It was all for nothing. Let me put it like this: “At first, I was writing it for the scholarship but then it turned out to be a salve for my soul . . .” I’m pulling that description out of my ass, but I couldn’t think of anything else, sorry. Then I could continue with: “. . . and to heal my wounds.” But the thing is, the girl who wrote the winning book spoke of her adventure with writing in precisely such “assburg�
� terms. Everyone listened in dead silence to her speech. But do you know how it seemed to me? It seemed like everyone else was asleep while I was the one who was awake. Yet I still lost. Why? Because the ignorant hordes flock to that which is vapid and spiritless. Literature can’t be that way. I don’t want it to be that way. But those are the times for you. The times change. Time speeds up. But if you ask me, literature shouldn’t keep up with the times. It should linger in the fields and pastures where Jane Austen walked with her skirts trailing behind her in the grass and in Ahmet Hamdi’s rooming house, Dostoyevsky’s gambling halls, and Tolstoy’s farms, tearooms, and the train station to which he fled. That train station was his treetop.
Maybe I was exhausted. Maybe I was afraid. Well, I was afraid—why am I being such a sissy about that when I already admitted it? Sissy—I dislike such masculine language. It has seeped into every aspect of our lives. That’s why my aunt took me to meetings at a women’s NGO, so that I could break free of it. And I did a bit. Pembe and Derin came a few times too. Our awakening that summer when we were fifteen years old came about because instead of going to the shoddy Star Beerhall we spent time with those splendid women.
As I was saying, I was afraid, and I puked. Whatever went askew in my body, that’s what happened, I puked. In any case, I know that I write like I’m puking up everything inside of me. I never would’ve imagined that it could be so easy to pour out my thoughts and feelings, that it could be so easy to start explaining this all. Did I mention that already? So be it, life is but a series of repetitions. Like repeating a year at school. It’s not good to be stable. If you ask me, the best way is to be weak and then break away and fall apart, letting yourself go to pieces. Because then you’re exempt from life. Exempt, excluded. Like the insane. I suppose they’re the only ones who are truly exempt. That might also hold true for writers because they create whatever worlds they damn well please in their writing and then live in them as they flesh them out. Let’s include actors and artists as well. And girls in trees, like me. Yes, I climbed up here so that I could be exempt from life. Not that anyone was going to come along and ask why, but still.
The Girl in the Tree Page 2
