Istanbul, don’t forget my grandma either.
“Istanbul, don’t forget me. If you do, damn you to fucking hell!”
“I may not have had that panoramic view, but when I closed my eyes, I could see it.” That’s what my poor grandma said. Do you call everything you went through “life”? This isn’t life; it’s the worst of torments. You’re confused. That’s all this country has to offer its women and girls, in lieu of a plaque.
Did you know that my grandma kept a “crap diary”? That’s what she called her tally of days when her slow bowels actually kicked into action. Her crap diary. As for the things she despised, allow me to list them: menstrual cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, smelling sweaty, bathing with anything but old-fashioned white soap, bathing at home, housework, smelly groins, mice, bedbugs, itching, and mosquitoes. But her obsessions and dislikes didn’t stop there: bidets, bug poison, swimming pools, delivery trucks, hair in sink drains, humidity, mold, noisy motorcycles, the sound of drawers opening and closing, and much, much more.
Her voice had been weary, melancholic, full of disappointment. That wasn’t the effect of cigarettes. Life had done that to her. I’d seen her laugh on many occasions in her dimly lit apartment, but I wondered if it was because she was enjoying herself or if it was out of sorrow.
Hope never ends. In fact, the story doesn’t really come to an end when death rolls around. People speak of your life and you go on existing through those stories. Like those panoramas that go on existing even after you die.
Shrugging off the mysteriousness of what had happened, I stood up and headed in the direction where I’d last seen my grandma. First I walked out of the garden and then out of the courtyard of the mosque onto our street. There was an ambulance in the middle of the road, its back doors swung wide open, which made it look like a wild, winged creature about to take flight. My aunt was standing behind the ambulance. A stretcher came rolling out of our apartment building. On it was my grandma. Her feet were bare. I could see the edge of her vervain flower-print nightgown—one of her favorites—where the blanket had been pulled up a little. But it didn’t make any sense, because she’d been with me just a minute or two earlier.
I’d say that’s when I lost it.
Perhaps. I’m not sure.
Everyone has experienced a moment when they were severed from life, driven hither and thither. We remember moments, not days. That’s why moments are so important. I think my grandma really died that time. Even though she’d appeared to me in the small garden of Cihangir Mosque with its panoramic view and bid me farewell, she had died. But that wasn’t the first time she died. True death occurs when the spirit dies, regardless of whether or not the ephemeral body goes on living.
So, how does the soul die?
Take the case of what happened to my grandma on September 6 in 1955.
But this is life, and you seek consolation. That’s precisely what my grandma did. She stitched anew the tattered dress, which her mother had showed to the neighbor as if to say, “Look at what they did to the poor girl.” Day and night, she sat for hours, stitching. At first her mother didn’t say anything, as she thought it offered her daughter some comfort. When my grandma said that one day she was going to wear that dress when she went to Sirkeci train station to welcome back her lover, her mother planted herself in front of her and took her by the arm, prompting my grandma to scream wildly, “Let me go! I’m going to see him! I’m going to pick him up at the station! Let me go!”
We hurt the people we love the most: “Shameless! Instead of fighting with your mother, you should’ve fought back against those men who had their way with you!”
Grandma, if you were going to die, you would’ve died at that moment when you heard those daggerlike words spoken by that woman you knew as your mother. But you didn’t die. Grandma, you’re immortal!
But that’s how it is now. Are you here among us? No. Because you’re dead.
Her mother couldn’t stop her. She went to the train station. He was there with his mother and father, and a distant cousin. His mother wanted to marry him off to the cousin. They all knew about it. Peri, Perihan, stood off to the side like a ghost.
“What happened to you?”
That’s what he asked her. He wanted to approach her, but his mother grabbed his arm.
“Don’t go to her. Now she’s nothing but scrap.
“I don’t want to say I told you so, but I told you so.
“Don’t go to her. Now she’s nothing but a trap.”
He wanted to say to his lover, “You’ve lost so much weight.” But her belly was poking out like she’d swallowed a coconut. Her cheeks were sunken, and she had bags under her eyes the color of murky water. Arm in arm, the family walked away.
“Come quick, she’s fainted!”
She was in a swoon. Who could bear being left like that? Who could bear the disappointment, the pains of love, seeing your hopes and future wrenched from your grasp?
As one of the strange coincidences of life, it was a vegetable dealer who came to her aid.
“Here, sit down. You want some water, ma’am?”
He walked her all the way home. Her mother promptly made up a story to tell that steward of destiny who showed up on her doorstep, and she decided to marry my grandma off to him. After delivering and killing the baby my grandma had been carrying, her mother made up a string of lies: “Some guy tricked her, saying that they’d get married.” The vegetable seller said, “I don’t mind. But I’ve got a wife. She’s sick, bedridden. I’ll have to divorce her first.”
And he did just that. Afterward, he and my grandma got married. But out of spite, the brothers of the woman he’d divorced reported him as being a draft dodger. He was sent off to the military, and from 1956 to 1960 he did his service, finally finishing after four grueling years. The first child they had—my father—was born in 1962. My grandma offset the pain of being with a man she didn’t want to marry by putting sleeping pills in his soup and tea to keep him docile, and if she didn’t have any on hand, she’d slip in some sulfate of potash. She also tried to make sure that her mother was always at home, so that he couldn’t try anything. One day, however, the vegetable dealer went out, saying that he was going to the wholesale market, but he hid around the corner, and when he saw my grandma’s mother go out to visit one of their neighbors, he rushed back home, and that’s how my grandma unwillingly got pregnant with her second child—my aunt. She was born in 1970, eight years after my father. As for the vegetable dealer . . . One day, as he was going to Ankara, where he was born and raised, and where he did most of his business, he was killed in a car crash. My aunt was a baby at the time, just forty days old.
His business partner said, “There he was, dead, lying in a pile of cauliflower.”
I don’t want my grandma’s husband to be parted from you in such a gentle manner. Nor do I want to give you the impression that he was a good man in his own way. My heart wouldn’t allow it. He was unbearable, intolerable, even if he did only spend three days a week in Istanbul and the rest traveling back and forth to Ankara. If you ask why . . . Because he was a jackass who cut up the champagne-colored dress that my grandma kept hidden in her drawer just to look at once in a while, because he burned a pair of shoes that she’d wanted to wear when she got her picture taken at a photography studio, and because for some reason he cut off the backs of all the chairs in their home, turning them into stools.
In short? My grandma was glad to have been saved from a life with the man she’d been forced to marry.
Derin would say “in short” as if she was saying “snips” or “scalpel,” like when she’d get the urge to shut up a babbler through a surgical intervention of their jabbering. Yes, so in short: being stuck for years in a forced marriage is sheer torture. Don’t get the wrong idea; I’m not trying to exonerate my grandma. But at the same time, accept that I’m not going to slander her either. Back to the point: my grandma was embarrassed to be seen going around Cihangir with her vegetab
le-dealer husband because the man she loved still lived in the area. When you break up with your lover now, you erase their pictures from your Instagram account and you block them. They were forced to go on with their lives in the same neighborhood with lofty detachment, while now you bury each other in the virtual world. The man my grandma loved married the cousin his mother had found for him, and they ended up having twin girls, whom they would take to Cihangir Park and the garden of the mosque. My grandma wouldn’t let her children play with them. It was a kind of blocking, I suppose.
My grandma’s only hope for the two children she’d had with that vegetable dealer who perished in a heap of cauliflower was for them to get a good education. Still, there’s more: everyone finds love in life and experiences what it’s like to fall in love. The same held true for my grandma. After the death of her husband, she started working as a housekeeper at various hotels. When a hotel in Pera had to be fumigated because of an infestation of bedbugs and the customers were left in a bind, my grandma said to one of them, perhaps because he’d already caught her eye, “My place is in Cihangir. How about if you rent a room from me?”
The year was 1973. The man who settled into one of the rooms of that two-story wooden house was an American who’d been assigned to a post in Istanbul. He was in charge of a large-scale archaeological project being carried out at Hagia Sophia. That’s what you call poetic justice! My grandma’s mother started saying, “She just went off and married an American.” As they say, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. September 6 and 7 in 1955 were testament to that. Atatürk’s house in Thessaloniki hadn’t even been bombed! Getting back to the point, my grandma started falling in love with the American, and the two of them would take her kids to Cihangir Park.
My aunt would exclaim “Daddy!” in English, and throw her arms around his neck.
One day he said, “One of the archaeologists working on the Hagia Sophia project also lives in this neighborhood. He’s got kids too. I told him to bring them along and meet us here.”
And just who might that Turkish archaeologist be?
Who?
Who might it be, Grandma? You planned this, didn’t you? Isn’t it so, you imp? Isn’t it so, you vindictive little thing? Isn’t it so, you stubborn goat who believes that revenge is a dish best served cold? Isn’t it so, woman who rose from the ashes? Isn’t it so, you who are as sturdy and resilient as the dome of Hagia Sophia? Isn’t it so, Perihan, our Perihan mother, who is as strong as Hagia Sophia’s buttresses?
Who was it? None other than the archaeologist whom my grandma had been in love with. I suppose that’s how fate weaves its web. The American was the head of the project, the lord of it all. The Turkish archaeologist worked for him, and was clinging to him in the hopes of being able to ride his coattails to America when he went back. Once upon a time, there had been a teary-eyed girl at Sirkeci Station who was left in the hands of a vegetable dealer . . . Her return was magnificent.
“You’re screwed now, Mr. Archaeologist!”
I imagined that my grandma, who said that to my own father for years, whispered those same words while discreetly flipping off the man who’d left her in tears at the station.
There are so many things to experience.
So many things to say.
My grandma would’ve said that life is anything but short. Indeed, she would’ve said it is rather long. Very, very long. I agree. But don’t let that frighten you. You still have a chance to grab hold of all those opportunities you let slip past and live them out to the end. There’s still time for your plans to come to fruition, for you to seek vengeance, for your loved ones to return, for people to see that you were right, for justice to prevail, and for your dreams to become a reality.
In my first year of high school, we were asked to interview an elder from our families. We were allowed to do it in pairs or groups of three. A kind of oral history project. Fate had already mapped out the path for me and the others in my group. The only older person left in my family was my grandma, but since we were going to present the interview in transcription, I figured I’d need to weed out her outlandish swearing.
“She’ll read our fortunes too. She’s really good at doing it from the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup.”
That was the first time my friends came to my place. The apartment where Derin lived with her parents was small and basic. But very clean. The cleanest apartment in the whole country. You could hardly bring yourself to tiptoe across the floor. It was so clean that it made you feel filthy in comparison. You can probably guess what Pembe’s place was like: a four-hundred-square-meter apartment in Caddebostan, a real palace. You could fit the Sea of Marmara and the islands in there. The furnishings were semiclassical, nice enough for people who are into that kind of thing, but the decor lacked taste. There was nothing unique about our place, however. It occupied a position somewhere between Derin’s and Pembe’s, and it could’ve been mistaken for being wannabe bohemian. There was the old sofa, the coffee table with the glass-topped inscription, my father’s archaeological library, a desk in the corner, and the tiny living room, which was dominated by my mother’s treadmill.
“Where do you eat?”
“We don’t. My mom banned eating.”
“The kitchen’s bigger than a widow’s cunt,” my grandma said, striding through the door. “We can eat there.”
We were in ninth grade at the time. Vestiges of childish behavior still clung to us. Derin and Pembe tittered with their hands over their mouths. I’d told them my grandma swore a hundred times worse than them, but they hadn’t believed me. “You see?”
“Whoa!” Pembe said.
“Wow!” Derin said.
“Your grandma looks just like Marianne Faithfull!”
“Who’s that?”
Thanks to the cigarettes she chain-smoked, my grandma’s voice was hoarse and raspy. She dyed her own hair, insisting on Koleston’s ash blond, which produced good results with her white locks. Thick black eyebrows, slightly sagging cheeks, and permanently moist eyes. “I’ve got eyes like a dog’s. The American liked me just as I was.” With her large mouth and jowls, she had all the physical characteristics of that rock-and-roll queen she’d never heard of. As she sat down, my grandma repeated her question. My friends were so polite. They’d gotten up and greeted her at the door.
“I asked you, ‘Who’s that?’”
“It’s you, Grandma. Let me make you a cup of coffee.”
Soon enough, she’d seen right through my friends. Her eyelids were being tugged downward as if weights were attached to them. For all her hawkishness, my grandma looked sad. With each passing day she looked sadder and sadder. Despite the chain of events she’d been through because of her marriage to the vegetable dealer, she was still a formidable person. She had an air of savviness about her as a woman who’d found a father for her children and a husband for herself in the American archaeologist, even if the relationship was just for show. She was a queen who’d fallen on hard times, a queen who’d been born and grew up in the heart of Istanbul, and although she’d been through so much, she persevered. Those were the things I was going to emphasize in my oral history presentation, whether my grandma actually said the words or not.
I stepped out of the kitchen, holding an Arçelik Turkish coffee maker. “Grandma, how do I use this thing? Where does the water go? Where do I put the coffee?”
The cord of the coffee maker was draped around my neck, as if it was a snake and I was a snake charmer about to perform at a circus. She replied, “You’re just like a girl with no experience who doesn’t know where to put a cock.”
“Oh my God! We’ve got to get some videos of your grandma.”
My grandma swelled with pride. And buoyed by that pride, she had her first and last interview in her life.
“You can’t climb out till you’ve reached rock bottom. Everything I’ve been through is what every woman has been through.”
That
was the title. I said, “At least I think that’s what she means.” Derin, and therefore Pembe, didn’t say a word. They weren’t convinced. Truthfully, my grandma hadn’t said anything like that. Not exactly. She really wasn’t a Marianne Faithfull. Still, that meaning could have been extrapolated from what she said. At least, I thought so. With that smirk I always despised, Pembe asked, “So, girls, what’s our hashtag for the interview?”
Of course, I didn’t say, “Your mother’s cunt!” But I wanted to. I was irritated. I was an irritable young woman. When my grandma said, “Don’t think with your pussy,” I wasn’t about to take any advice she had to give very seriously. Maybe that was the first time I swore. Granted, I was just echoing my grandma. As you know, the person who opts to swear at his enemy instead of throwing a spear has established a form of civilization. Actually, I was still clutching a spear, but my friends didn’t realize it. There’s more of my great sin to reveal.
Getting back to what my grandma did talk about: Cihangir, cats, how young women used to get married, her semi-second marriage, how she was always hardworking and curious about learning new things, and so on, and so on. A pack of lies, in short. True in the rough outline, pure fabrication in content. But that made sense. How’s a person supposed to get over something that had such a powerful impact on their lives? My grandma was living proof that it could be done. Most of the time, there’s a real image that mirrors don’t reveal. Life consists of things you don’t know about, things you could never predict:
“What did you do after all of your friends left Istanbul?”
“I made friends with the cats. Cihangir was wonderful in those days. The city hadn’t been fucked yet. There weren’t as many cats as there are now, but there were some. When my Greek friends left, I tried to keep their memory alive. I took care of the animals that had been left behind. In any case, I’d hurt my back.” (My grandma fell silent at this point. I wondered innocently how she’d hurt her back. My first guess was that she’d slipped on the steep, narrow stairs of that wooden house she called a chicken coop, but now we know that wasn’t the case. As her orthopedist said, “She’s lucky she didn’t break her back. One of her vertebrae nearly got knocked out of place.” One vertebra? My grandma’s entire life has been knocked out of place! But no one would ever know that.) “I couldn’t get out of bed for forty days.”
The Girl in the Tree Page 19
