She met him through some friends, and they had dinner together once. This all happened at a time when her unhappiness was at its peak. She was weary of life, fed up with my father’s moods, and tired of looking after her three-year-old daughter, who was always tugging at her skirt. But to get back to the story: As I said, my mother was smitten. And he didn’t seem averse to falling in love either. After that sleepless night, she and I went down to the children’s pool in the morning. I don’t remember all this per se—after all, I was just three years old—but there is one image that somehow remained lodged in the depths of my mind, only to surface much later. I was playing in the pool, the water of which came up to my waist, in a pink swimming suit. My mother was there with me. Who knows where my father was—he never spent much time with us. We bored him. He wouldn’t talk to my mother or listen to anything she said. In a journal she kept when she was pregnant, she wrote that sometimes the only person she talked to for days on end was her obstetrician. As the woman went through her routine checkups, she would chat with my mother for a minute or two, which lifted her spirits for a while. My mother was a terribly lonely woman, buried in the wreckage of her life. And then I came along, and she was saddled with the burden of taking care of me. What I mean to say is that someone in her position could see a mere twig as a proposal of sorts and then fall head over heels in love with the tree.
That morning, my mother had fallen asleep by the pool. She was lying on a lounge chair in her red bikini with a faded towel tucked beneath her, a shapeless lump weary of promises of love, mouth open, drool running down her chin. Standing in the water, I looked at her. There she was, asleep, not paying any attention to me. No one was. When she awoke, my mother could have been confronted with the sight of her three-year-old daughter floating dead in the water. If I just stuck my head beneath the surface, I could’ve drowned on the spot.
At one point, my father came and woke her up.
I heard the end of the story as she was talking on the phone. In her mind, psychoanalysis was something you could do over the telephone, so with her friend listening silently on the other end of the line, she would talk and talk, which I also like to do. But there’s a difference: she would only talk about herself. People are different that way; some can tell the story of their own lives by talking about others.
So there you have it, the path of that doctor who had swept my mother off her feet led directly to the door of the clinic where she worked, for he showed potential as the hero of a tale of adventurous love that had yet to unfold but very well could. His first day of work at the clinic happened to be his birthday, so they held a party for him. My mother gave him a copy of her book of poems as a present, which not only surprised him but secured his interest, which was precisely what she longed for.
The doctor was scheduled to work at the clinic three days a week, and my mother would anxiously await the arrival of each and every one, her excitement burning as brightly as a star. In turn, he would come to enjoy the attraction that this woman, who was eighteen years his junior, felt for him. So each week they had three days of flirtation that made my mother’s heart flutter in her chest.
If something drives you from yourself, cast it from your life.
Even renounce the world if that is what you must do.
“Those are my favorite lines from your book,” the doctor said.
My mother had become the paragon of a woman in love, and I had never seen her that way: blue spaghetti-strap dress, toenails painted red, a new hairstyle that suited her quite well, the graceful curve of her shoulders. She was talking on the phone, explaining and explaining. Explaining it all! As she held the phone, she seemed to be dancing, and I sat there watching her, wide-eyed. At last she hung up, which meant that it was time for us to be alone with that love story of hers:
“Have you finished eating your lunch?”
I nodded my head obediently, savoring the feeling of being loved by my mother.
“Would you like to go down to Grandma’s place?”
No one could outdo me in the art of agreeing to anything.
How could I possibly bring myself to say, “But I just got home and I want to play with my toys”? After my mother turned on the stairwell light, I made my way down the two flights, clutching the handrail all the way. I knocked on my grandma’s door, and before she even opened it, I heard my mother close our door upstairs. She trusted me so much! Or she didn’t worry about me. My grandma opened the door.
“What are you doing here? Go home.”
As I silently turned around, she sighed and took me by the arm to pull me inside. I had just gone up three flights of stairs to go home only to be sent down two, and now I was in my grandma’s apartment, which was much darker than ours because its windows faced the apartment buildings on the side street.
She turned on the television for me and sat down by the window, which was her usual habit. But ever since that encounter in the barbershop, she’d been plunged into thought—I’d never seen her so quiet before. She just sat there as if she was taking in the view, though there wasn’t much to see. While the living rooms on the upper floors looked out over the city, on this floor all you could see were the apartments across the way with their balconies shrouded in gloom, along with a few scraggly fig trees and some shrubs, the branches of which made me think of giant ferns. Most of the rear balconies were filled with a jumble of old furniture, while on the inside the houses were neat and tidy. It occurs to me that maybe our minds and thoughts are like that too. Just one of the balconies, a single one, had any semblance of order. There was a rope attached to the wall for beating carpets, a folding ladder draped with a piece of cloth, and some old newspapers meticulously stacked in the corner. Sometimes an old woman would sit there with her daughter, who looked almost as old as the woman.
My grandma could’ve looked at that balcony and said, “I wish your aunt lived with me. That way, we could rent out her place. It would be for her own good. Once in a while she has people over and I don’t say anything because she’s single, but still, they make such a racket! It gets so bad sometimes that I have to sleep in the living room. You know, I wish my bedroom wasn’t under hers because that girl takes home any cock she can get her hands on. I’d move my bedroom to another room, but I just can’t be bothered. The damn tramp. Hussy. Whore.”
But that day, she couldn’t even bring herself to say such things.
Because of the steepness of the road, the apartment buildings have retaining walls that secure their foundations, and the gap between the retaining walls of some of the buildings is extremely deep in places. I’ve been told that, before I was born, a woman who’d been living in the building across the street killed herself by jumping into one of them. My other aunt wrote an article for the newspaper about the incident. But it wasn’t just sensational news about a random suicide—the woman’s body was never found. True story.
“Is the chasm really so deep?”
“Not in the least. I remember when there were no buildings here at all.”
Some geophysicists showed up, and a few Byzantine historians too, because underground cisterns often have long tunnels that connect them to the surface. As they worked, hitherto unseen things were brought into the realm of the seen. But they still didn’t find her body. Who knows how many women have disappeared into it? What it really makes you think about is the fact that every suicide is the death of a person.
My grandma was gazing down into the chasm.
She closed the window.
And then she turned and looked at me.
She noticed that I’d been watching her. Maybe for her that meant a return to the realm of the living. After all, Efrosa hadn’t come back.
“Don’t gawk with your mouth open like that. People will think you’re a dingbat.”
I closed my mouth. But I couldn’t silence the thoughts racing through my mind. At the time, I was five or six years old, about yea tall. What am I really doing up in this tree? Trying to grow up all over aga
in?
My mind refuses to fall silent. It is inevitable that people will one day break their silence, but you can’t explain everything all at once. You must do it slowly, hearing your voice as you go along. And when you get started, it’s the voice of your emotions that speaks, not logic. That’s what this is all about. If logic gets the upper hand, things fall apart because it doesn’t have the power to heal.
Who would believe that I would curl up and go to sleep in a stork’s nest, or that Pembe and Derin would die? Who would believe that one day my aunt—the reporter—would disappear without a trace? Who would believe that my mother’s days of glory when I was five or six years old would collapse in ruin, or that it would come to light that my grandma harbored a terrifying secret that tormented her?
I hadn’t really gone through anything yet. As you’ve seen, I was but a child back then. When I was three years old, playing by myself in that pool, I could’ve died. But I didn’t. I survived. I clung to life. And I still am.
Just like the lyrics of that unforgettable song they’d play at my aunt’s parties: “I Will Survive.”
Ah, everyone was so happy at those parties. The ones at my aunt’s place. The people there were reporters, both men and women, and all so cheerful.
Reporters who were happy, who loved their work more than anything else, made enough money to get by, and felt secure in their jobs. My aunt had won an award. Is that what they were celebrating? There was an older professor who had taught my aunt and her colleagues everything they knew about journalism. Ünsal was his name. He was chuckling on the mustard-yellow sofa, a copy of Don Quixote in his bag.
“I’ve been rereading it. What an enjoyable book!”
When I got curious about what was happening at the party and went downstairs to investigate, he gave me the book because I’d once told him that I wanted to be a writer one day.
“Good for you!” he said with an encouraging smile.
“He’s the best of teachers,” my aunt said to me. “Listen to what he has to say.”
“Is there any need for that?” her teacher asked. “She looks like a bright girl already.”
My aunt had another piece of good news to share: “By the way, I finished writing my book.”
“That’s great! Let me take a look at it.”
“Would you really?”
“Of course. Were you going to publish it without letting me read it first?”
“No, no, I’d never do that . . .”
Everyone was happy. We were all happy. They probably played “I Will Survive” ten times back-to-back that night. Laughter echoed through the flat. The woman who lived in the apartment with the tidy balcony called out into the darkness. She wasn’t rude at all, or even irritated: “Excuse me? Excuse me, please? I was wondering . . . My mother can’t sleep because of the music. Maybe you could—”
“Please forgive us. We’re having a celebration. Is there any way you could sleep in the living room? Can you hear the music in there?”
“It doesn’t bother me, but I’m not sure about my mother.”
“Why don’t you join us? We’ve already kept you up. Join the party!”
And she did.
That old lady who lived with her mother in the apartment with the tidy balcony came to the party at my aunt’s place. She had short gray hair, eyes so dark they looked black, and teeth that glimmered like pearls. While she may have had a slight hunchback, she turned out to be the best—and not to mention most active—dancer of the night. Pulling Ünsal to his feet, she danced with unexpected skill and elegance. Roaring with laughter, Ünsal clapped and deftly stepped along to the music. He was a man who loved life.
“This woman is the best thing that’s happened to this party!” he said.
“Dance like no one is watching, love as if you’ve never been hurt, sing like no one is listening, live as if the world is heaven itself!” Those are the secrets to a good life and happiness.
A gathering of journalists. Such beautiful people, enjoying themselves. The next morning, they would shower and go to their desks, smelling of shampoo and lotion. Newspapers would be printed thanks to their passion, the meeting to discuss the day’s news would cause tempers to flare, but so be it—it’s better that way. “I’m going to get the scoop on that story.” That was the life my aunt led. Later, they all lost their jobs. It was unbearable to see. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?
I’m here because I want to live.
Either that or I’m imagining some other kind of death.
I’m astonished that the stork’s nest is holding up beneath me. Then again, they wove the twigs together so skillfully, placing the nest on a sturdy branch far from danger.
No one else has ever slept in a stork’s nest. Tell me, have you? I felt like I was becoming lighter and lighter as I longed to cast off my ties to gravity. I slept just as lightly, and the night was cold. When the lights in the park went off, I was buried in a deep darkness. It covered me like a blanket. Nature knows how things should be done—it’s people who spoil the game. I breathed in the soft scent of the laurel leaves above my head. Such a secluded, tucked-away place. As I pulled my knees up to my chest, I wrapped my arms around myself even tighter. Taking advantage of the cover of night, birds and butterflies flitted around me, and one even landed on my chest, giving me a fright.
When our night drifts off to sleep, the sounds of the other night awaken.
There was a nursery rhyme that went like that. It always scared me when I was a child. One day, as we were singing it at kindergarten, I burst into tears because it made me think of the enigmatic behavior of the people in my family. Just what were those things—let’s recount them, like the lyrics of that nursery rhyme: my mother’s unhappiness and the cold way she treated me; my father always so distant, lost in his own world; the things my grandma kept to herself, refusing to speak of them.
But then a feeling of relief washed over me as I knew that I was in a dark place where no one could touch or reach me. If I were to say that I was no longer afraid because I lay there so stiffly, not moving a muscle, that wouldn’t quite be true. I was frightened of falling to the ground, and for that reason, I feared waking up as well. But I slept. A deep, wonderful sleep.
In the morning, I was awoken by the sound of the sprinklers and the chill in the air. But I was still in the embrace of sleep and I refused to open my eyes just yet. There you have it: I had spent the evening in the tree. I’d survived my first night in its highest branches. When I heard someone call out, “Hey, you, I know you’re up there,” I opened my eyes.
Hey, me, have I been up here?
6
NOTIFICATIONS
It was him again. Yunus. But I didn’t know his name at the time. Only later would I find out. I leaned over to peer down because his voice had come from below. No longer was he on the other side of the wall in the hotel’s garden. Indeed, he was standing right beneath the enormous, ancient tree with the stork’s nest. The tree’s leaves made it seem like a laurel, but the trunk was more like an oak. Yunus had probably spotted my hand, which was hanging over the nest’s edge. He wasn’t wearing a uniform now but a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he had a backpack. If his face hadn’t been burned into my memory, I wouldn’t have realized it was the same person. It was like a dream, and looking down all that way to the ground just after waking up made my head spin.
“Be careful,” he said. “Don’t fall.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. For a moment I considered telling him to fuck off.
Instead I said, “Go away.” The words simply fell from my lips, as if he was an old acquaintance of mine.
“Why are you up there?”
Sneering like Derin would in such a situation, I replied, “What’s it to you? It’s not like I have to get your permission to be here, do I?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean, then?”
“You were up in a tr
ee last night too. A different one, but still a tree.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Well, I was curious.”
“Don’t poke your nose in other people’s business.”
“Here’s the thing . . . You climbed up that tree, and if you’re stuck there like a cat, I can help you.”
“I don’t need any help. Leave me alone, and pretend you never saw me. That would be best.”
“Are you hiding up there?”
“Shut the hell up already, fuckface!”
Pembe would say that sometimes swearing was the only way to get out of certain situations. It was, she said, a good shortcut to screw everything up in a flash, as well as to explain and present yourself.
“Well, damn, no need to be like that. When I saw that you were still in the tree, I decided to bring you some water and crackers.”
In fact, I was hungry and thirsty, but I wasn’t about to get out of my tree just for some crackers and water. Truly, have you ever seen a corpse rise from the grave?
“Won’t you come down?”
It suddenly occurred to me that he might be setting a trap to get me out of the tree.
“How did you sleep up there? In a stork’s nest, as if it were a crib? You know that even stork chicks fall out sometimes, right? How is it you didn’t fall?”
“Don’t your damn questions ever end?”
I went on imitating Derin, which brought tears to my eyes. She and Pembe sent me a video and then a Snapchat clip of them laughing on a bus full of young people. I replied with a message loaded with emojis: “Go on, have your fun, bitches! But we’ll see who has the last laugh.”
“Well, girl, you should’ve come too! You’re missing out.” Toward the end of the exchange, they sent an emoji of a hand flipping me off. Who knows where they found that one.
“Look at you, sounding just like your grandma! Puahaha, ‘whoever laughs last, laughs best.’ Yeah, right!”
“Sooo, sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Puahaha!”
The Girl in the Tree Page 7
