As my mother was bringing me up, feeling miserable and beaten down in her marriage to an insensitive, crotchety husband, she became friends with some of the women who also took their children to the park, and they started getting together at their homes so that the kids could play. Spending more and more time talking with them as she bounced me on her knee, she began to see her own situation more clearly. Every week they’d meet up at a different friend’s house, and that’s how she came to realize that almost all the women had babysitters or nannies; I think that my mother and a half-Swiss, half-Turkish woman were the only ones looking after their kids alone. Over time, she noticed that her friends all had happy households, which she admired greatly. Admiration, after all, is nothing more than envy that has been defeated and reined in.
“What is depression? A state of self-resentment.”
Someone said that at one of the women’s gatherings my mother attended. She’d jotted it down in one of her many small red-leather-bound journals. When I was old enough to read, one of the few pleasures I had was poring over those confessional entries in which she bared her soul.
One day, my mother borrowed a dress and a pair of size 37 knee-high Isabel Marant boots from my father’s sister. Raising an eyebrow, my aunt said, “I thought you were a size 36.”
“I was. But after giving birth, I had to move up a size.”
That was a lie. She just wanted to wear something nice. Before putting them on, she stuffed cotton balls into the toes of the boots.
“Perfect.”
My mother looked beautiful. But her air of happiness was borrowed. Seeing the happiness and satisfaction of her friends, and listening enviously to their tales of joyful, cozy homes, only drove her deeper into depression. As we returned home from those visits, I felt like I was walking with a zombie by my side.
My mother could barely contain her excitement when it was her turn to host her friends at our place. Now hers was the compassionate hand spreading bread crumbs outside a window that looked out onto the wall of another apartment building. Now there were cheery, chirping birds in front of that window. The women and their children were at our home. I’d never seen so many people in our apartment or my mother so happy.
When a newly established publishing house rereleased my mother’s book of poetry, which had gone out of print, she made a little money. She felt better than she had in years, and the first thing she did was go out to buy herself a pair of boots. There was an indescribable glimmer in her eyes as she watched the salesclerk wrap them up. Soon after, she got a job, which I think I already told you about. All the same, those early days at that swanky diet clinic in Nişantaşı were anything but easy. The others there had little patience for my mother’s gloomy moods, and if they’d seen her when she’d been walking the streets in search of a job, looking like a tramp, they never would’ve let her in the door.
The doctor represented a promise of love. My mother’s transformation shifted into second gear.
One day, my mother picked me up from kindergarten wearing a pink silk spaghetti-strap dress, stylish sandals, a silk scarf, and coral earrings with gold inlays, and her hair was shimmering in the sunlight. On the days when the doctor was expected at the office, she blossomed.
“Mom, you’re just like the Little Prince’s rose.”
Normally, she wouldn’t have asked about anything that concerned me.
“Who read that book to you? Did they read it at school? So you liked it . . .”
My mother would come home, illuminated by the red glow of the setting sun despite the fact that a new apartment building had been built in front of ours and we had no view of the city. That’s what hope is like. It doesn’t seep from our hearts, nor does it drain away like blood, for if it did, we’d die and that would be the end of us. I watched her through the eyes of a five-year-old child.
Sometimes my grandma would pick me up after school. She’d place a heaping plate of peeled, diced fruit on the table in front of me and turn on the television, and when my father showed up, she’d waste no time in heading out the door to go back to her own apartment.
One time, my mother was wearing a nice blue cotton dress, which meant that the doctor had been at the office. The next day, before my father got home, she called one of her friends and excitedly told her about everything that had happened, and I listened carefully.
Wide-eyed, I’d watch my mother as she came through the front door: she’d set down her cloth purse and, cringing in fear as my father snapped at her for making too much noise, pull her shoes from her graceful feet and gently place them in the shoe cabinet, even though she would’ve preferred to kick them off after yet another day filled with elation and joy. Then she’d go through her evening routine but smiling, smiling, smiling the whole time.
She’d found a new brand of perfume that she liked.
“Are you going to squander all your money on that stuff?”
My father was ruthless in his questioning of her spending habits, despite the fact that she now paid all the bills and did the shopping. Ever since she started making her own money, she’d stopped using his credit card, and she even cut it to pieces with a pair of scissors before his very eyes but without the slightest trace of anger or disdain, as if she was calmly snapping green beans in preparation for dinner.
In order to avoid having to listen to his tirades, she secreted away the things she bought. A new dress. Makeup. Shoes. Sunglasses. Creams. Fine shampoos. Everything she’d been denied over the years. All the wonderful things she’d let herself be denied. Now, she bought those things with pleasure and wild abandon, bringing them home in nondescript brown bags to keep them hidden from her husband, whom she still feared.
My mother was happy when she was seeing the doctor. Once, she described how, on the days when the doctor was at the clinic, she’d wander around like a ghost looking for him.
She’d become a ghost of love. A ghost of that love that was her lifeblood, pulling her back from the cusp of death and a life of groveling.
“I could hear his voice,” she said, “but I didn’t know where he was. I wanted so much to see him and for him to see me, so I wandered from room to room at the clinic. If anyone had asked me what I was doing, I wouldn’t have said a word because I don’t want anyone to know that I’m in love with him.”
Ah, that naive mother of mine.
How long can we keep a secret before giving in to the temptation to whisper it to someone?
If my father had been more of a friend to my mother, she wouldn’t have felt a desire to stray. It was terrible loneliness that drove her to that point, the same kind of loneliness that led me to ramble on to myself like I’m doing here. Ultimately, my mother—to use an expression my grandma loved to use—started “traipsing after” that doctor. As far as I could tell, the doctor had his hesitations, though it was obvious that he longed to pluck that blossoming rose with his teeth so he could breathe in its scent. But he was afraid. As we all know, however, love is not for the timid. It demands courage. Love is courage. That statement, which admittedly is as trite as can be, was written on the piece of paper that Derin drew from a fortune-teller’s stand in front of Hayal Kahvesi in Beyoğlu. Here’s how it works: as you stroke the rabbit on the fortune-teller’s stand, you ask a question, and then you choose a slip of paper, which supposedly provides you with an answer.
I got: “He will find you.”
Pembe got: “Don’t lose hope.”
Derin asked, “Why are these things so damn short?”
“That’s the way of the world now, accept it. Everything’s an SMS.”
“You are aware, little lady, that we live in the age of text messages, right?”
Ah, those messages! How quickly you forgot about that day when those girls got into a hair-pulling brawl in the bathroom at school over a text message from a private number. “Snapchat whore!” one of them cried. Of course, everyone knows about Snapchat now. Still, allow me to offer a brief explanation in case you’ve never hear
d of it.
When you view a Snapchat video, it automatically deletes itself after a while. In that way, people can share the most intimate images of themselves. I should note that our most intimate moments cannot actually be seen, but that’s a topic for another time. Getting back to the story, one girl sent another girl’s boyfriend a Snapchat of herself wearing nothing but a G-string. The second girl recognized the first by the tattoo on her ass, which consisted of a rose, a heart, and the words “I love you” encircled by a ribbon with tattered ends. Scandal, scandal, scandal! In the end, both girls were expelled from school.
Shaking with rage, the headmaster snorted, “Never in the history of our school has anything so scandalous happened!” Then again, Snapchat hadn’t existed before, but anyways.
Those fortune-tellers with rabbits had caught a glimpse of the future of the wiles of time: in the past, we’d get hung up for weeks on end about something we’d heard, but now we don’t even remember it the next morning. As for my mother, she was hung up on the doctor’s intentions, as she didn’t understand what he was really after. She’d lost her self-confidence. She’d ask her friends, “Do you think he’s in love with me?”
They’d listen to her syrupy love story, as engrossed as if it was One Thousand and One Nights, and then offer their interpretations. My mother wasn’t listening to her heart. Even if she’d listened, she wouldn’t have been able to hear what it was saying. Although one might have expected her to cheat on my father not just emotionally but physically as well, she couldn’t bring herself to do it, and the doctor was too much of a coward to make a move.
But who knows, maybe she held back because she really loved my father.
Still, she was having a romantic love affair, and she was content with seeing the object of her love and talking with him, and later imagining what it would be like if they made love. It was the kind of romance Jane Austen wrote about two hundred years ago.
They became closer and closer, and just as the fuse of their fireworks of passion was about to be ignited, the doctor panicked and fled. Based on what I heard my mother say over the phone, they’d never even kissed. As you can tell, we’re dealing here with a love story of the most archaic and innocent kind. Sometimes the two of them would leave the clinic together to have lunch or walk from Nişantaşı to Taksim on the pretext that the doctor had to be in Beyoğlu for business later in the day. While my mother was pleased that he was showing an interest in her, she was also waiting for him to make a decisive step forward, which he failed to do, perhaps because he knew of my father or they had common acquaintances. Needless to say, what existed between my mother and the doctor never developed to the point of becoming a relationship.
If there has ever been anything that ended abruptly before it even got started, it was my mother’s love story.
As for the doctor’s flight . . . He fled far. Across seas and oceans, in fact. All the way to America.
My mother found out that the doctor was going to move away by coincidence. At a flower shop she ran into a friend of hers—not a particularly close friend—who, during the course of their conversation, mentioned that the doctor was making a change in his life. That friend knew nothing about the love affair that had turned my mother’s heart into a pile of smoldering ashes.
“He’s moving to Houston. He said that he probably won’t come back. He already had his furniture shipped over.”
He already shipped off his furniture!
My mother was in a state of shock. That chaste love story, for which she had been prepared to cheat on my father and leave him without looking back, had been going on for quite a long time. She had interiorized that love, which for her, as the saying goes, had roots as deep as the crown of the tree was tall, and told her friends all its leafy details. It had been a cry of loneliness from a precipice, a persistent longing for an echo. Instead of poetry, she’d written her story of love.
The doctor never told my mother about his plans to move away, which meant, “You don’t mean anything to me.” At least, that was the interpretation offered up by her tele-friends. Only one person, an older male friend of hers, said, “It’s clear to me that something happened and he’s running away.” If you ask me, all she needed to ask him was, “Do you love me back?” It would have been that simple!
And if he’d gawked at her like a moron, she could’ve said, “Don’t be afraid. My love for you is more than enough for the two of us.”
She could’ve written a poem starting with that line and left it on his desk, but she didn’t. I think she was even more afraid than he was when it came to confessing her desires.
One time I said to her, “Mom, you’re such a coward!”
She was caught off guard.
“Why do you say that?”
At the time, I was in the living room, drawing in my notepad on the coffee table I’ve mentioned already, the one made of the gravestone overlaid with glass—don’t worry, I’ll come back to that at some point. My mom had just concluded yet another one of her despairing phone calls. Looking up at her again, I said, “You’re a scaredy-cat!”
I said it with anger in my voice. Most likely, she’d never considered the possibility that I fully understood what she was going through or was able to put all the pieces together. Nobody would’ve expected that of such a young child. It would’ve been inconceivable. What my mother didn’t know, however, was that her love story constituted the only relationship she had with me because she and I never talked. Just as my father never talked to her.
In the days that followed, my mother hit rock bottom.
She cut herself off from everything. How wrong she’d been! Her grand tale of love had come crashing down. The doctor would no longer be there to console and nourish her with love. She’d lost him.
The creases at the corners of her lips reappeared as her face settled back into that expression of glumness. It pained me to see her lapse back into that impenetrable silence, but my father didn’t even notice the change. Once again, the light in her eyes flickered out. The sun that illuminated her inner world had set one more time. Night had fallen. A night of infinity.
“I see you’ve used the word ‘infinity’ here in this sentence. It’s out of place. Why do you even bother trying?”
Özlem Hanım went on slamming my work in the space allotted for such attacks: the depths of my mind, the outer space of thought.
“You may as well have used ‘infirmity.’ It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
Unable to bear it anymore, I started crying, which, I think, was her ultimate aim. She flashed a tiny smile of victory, which then curled ever upward, as if an invisible thread were slowly pulling her lips higher and higher.
“Please,” she said in a mockingly consolatory tone of voice. “Don’t get so upset.”
I could hear Derin and Pembe whispering to me, “Stop crying.” Helplessly I looked at them, noticing that their eyes were as moist as mine. “Infinity” was clearly something I’d never forget, as it came to mind even when I was far up in the treetops. The mind is the outer space we carry within. Nothing ever gets lost there.
The doctor really did go. And in the end, my mother was left with a series of disappointments, including my failed novel, the writing competition I failed to win, and the fact that as a result I wouldn’t be getting a new scholarship.
For a while she considered having another child, as she wanted to throw herself into a different kind of misery. It was a masochistic desire born of a yearning to punish herself. But her fears prevailed and she gave up on the idea, which was for the best. However, she did wind up getting pregnant, which came as a surprise. At first, she thought of keeping the baby, but then decided against it and made an appointment so she could get an abortion. By chance the doctor turned out to be an antiabortionist. He lied: “Legally it’s too late. You have no choice but to go through with the pregnancy.” One morning, she woke up and said, “No, I’m not keeping this child,” and even though we’d already told my aunt a
nd grandma the good news, she got an appointment with another doctor who told her she was only ten weeks pregnant, and that was the end of my chance to have a brother or a sister.
After pulling herself together to a certain extent, she set her sights on becoming a famous dietician as a way to fill the void left behind by the doctor and her lost love. To achieve her ends, she did some things that might be deemed unscrupulous. You might be asking yourself, “What could she have possibly done?” For starters, she told a massive lie that proved to be irreversible. She did become famous for a short while, but that all collapsed, leaving her more frustrated than ever.
So, did I start living in the treetops so I could ponder all these things? Let’s consider that.
Your life is inseparable from everyone else’s and you are inextricably bound up with the lives of others. Let me put that another way: we are all other people’s stories. Have I said that already? My mind is like a music box that plays the same melody over and over as I keep winding it up. I apologize for repeating myself, but that’s just how it is. On second thought, there are no repetitions here. You only think that because I said so. You believe everything I say, including all that passes through my heart and the depths of my mind. Do you ever stop to mull over things in all their dimensions? While it is true that my determination to live up in the trees reflects a certain amount of creativity, I am also just as ordinary.
“Your writing is serious, but sometimes it is also quite irreverent. In the same way, it is creative but simultaneously droll. Through the use of familiar sentences, the simple narrative is subjected to a transformation via your interventions, becoming something new and uncanny in the process.”
The Girl in the Tree Page 14
