I fell silent, not wanting to argue with her in front of everyone. I hoped that my aunt would step in and take matters under control.
My aunt said, “I’ll stay with her.”
And that’s what happened. My aunt stayed with me. After all, she’d worked for years as a journalist and knew about such things.
The night turned out to be unbelievably beautiful. As if it had wings of silk, as if it was a living being, alive with a spirit of its own. That kind of night. I realized that my aunt didn’t know that I used to go there with my grandma. I told her about those days as I munched on the grilled cheese sandwich she bought me, wishing I’d asked for orange juice instead of ayran. My aunt also didn’t know what had happened to her mother in her youth. Nothing at all. I watched the face of my aunt, who didn’t know what I knew, as if I was watching the night. She asked, “Why are you gawking at me like that?” I replied, “I’m not.” Like how I later watched the sky.
Something was drifting down from the sky. Dead leaves? They spun gently down to the ground. I was sleepy. I felt relaxed. I had seized that day, that now, the moment. I heard Yunus make his bird call, which meant that he wanted me to go down to the top of the wall, to the fire escape, but I ignored it because I was so tired. I also knew that the surveillance camera could land us in trouble. I thought it was impossible that Yunus, who knew about the cameras in the hallway and had warned me about them as he took me to an empty room, could have overlooked that detail. I had always thought. I’d thought all my life. But I hadn’t lived my life because I’d thought so much. That’s just how it was.
I awoke with a fever in the middle of the night. I could see the stars through the canopy of branches above me, shining like silver pins stuck into the sky. All because of the fever. My tonsils were swollen again. If my grandma had been alive, she would’ve said, “I told you we should get them removed.” It was so painful that I couldn’t even close my mouth. I felt like a powerful hand was gripping my esophagus. Esophagus, throat. Or slicing it with quick jabs. Without fail, every year I’d incur an infection throughout my body when my tonsils got inflamed. “Incur an infection”—that was a phrase we learned from reading the work of Suat Derviş, whom we’d studied the year before. Not with patriot Özlem Hanım, but in a class taught by the literature teacher who’d been fired because he’d let the students use words like “vagina” and “coochie” in the student newspaper. There you have it, a French school in Turkey. You can be sure that the fighters in the French Revolution would turn over in their graves if they heard about such censorship. Now, we were destined to be subjected to it here. But when I say “here,” what do I mean? Where am I? In the treetops or in a dark sea of memories?
18
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For two days I slept, wracked by fever. Perhaps I should say that “I think” I slept, because it was Yunus who later told me that’s what happened. When I didn’t respond to his birdlike calls, he got worried and walked over to the tree where my nest was. But that was the next day, because the day before was his day off. He said that he’d wanted to check on me that day too, but didn’t have time because at the crack of dawn his father had made him go to the hospital so he could get his yearly checkup for his kidney. Yunus said, “The lines to get a checkup are so long, I swear they’re going to be the death of me.” The next day he came and saw that part of my fur coat was hanging over the edge of the nest, as was one of my hands. I was unconscious, and he came to my side.
Just like that.
Let’s linger on that for a moment. It was no simple feat.
Coming to my side involved a major adventure.
From the outside, he locked the door leading to the hotel’s fire escape.
Then he propped the ladder up against the wall.
He climbed up to the top of the wall.
He was determined.
Using a belt he had looped through his own belt, he secured himself to a branch of the tree. Straddling the branch, he inched his way forward, not once looking down. It took him an hour to reach the nest. He hadn’t even taken anything to give him courage.
My eyes were fluttering. Thankfully, I had my bottle of water. I was taking little sips, like a bird. I felt as though I’d been buried under a mountain of rubble. All the same, I felt like I was outside myself. Three squat words side by side, “all the same”! I’d tell you not to crowd around, but you already swarmed that sentence of mine. To continue: being in a dream state. It wasn’t clear to me if I was sleeping or dying. I remember moaning in pain. If you’ve been through it, you know that tonsillitis is a horrific thing.
Then I heard Yunus whisper. At first, I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming or if it was real. He seemed to understand right away that I had a fever. He placed his hand on my forehead. His hand felt as cold as ice. He later told me that I smiled. I remember that he said to me, “You’re sick.” I replied, “My throat hurts.” Like a child that’s been taken to the doctor, I even tried to open my mouth to show him what was wrong.
“I know what it’s like to have a fever,” he said. “When my kidney gave out, I was trembling from head to toe, burning up. It felt like it wasn’t me trembling but the world.”
Apparently I murmured, “Well, I’m not trembling.” When I asked, “How did you get up here?” he understood that my condition wasn’t life-threatening. And when I asked, “Did you get hopped up on pills again?” he knew that I wasn’t delirious.
But after he left, with worry in his eyes, I became suspicious: What if he was to tell someone about my condition in order to save my life up in those trees? That fear prompted me to raise my head, which felt as heavy as a stone. I saw Yunus clumsily and apprehensively making his way toward the wall. He was straddling one of the tree’s thick branches, sliding forward on his butt, holding on for dear life to the branches on each side. Even so, he lost his balance, and in a state of panic, he flailed around for something to grab on to, scratching up his arms and neck in the process. The belts he’d used to supposedly secure himself were clumsily lashed together. I called out to him. Or perhaps I moaned: “Where are you going?”
“To get some medicine and water for you.”
“Don’t bother. I’m fine,” I said. Or perhaps I moaned.
He didn’t reply. I watched him as awkwardly, always awkwardly, he clambered onto the wall using a technique that could be called “the awkward belly crawl.” I curled back up in the nest. When I was in the world down below—I was actually going to say, “When I was alive”—I liked getting sick because life stopped. It ground to a halt, as though there was nothing left for you to do, as though there was nothing you could do. It was a pause.
Yunus didn’t come back.
Three whole days passed. I got better, but Yunus didn’t come.
I went out on a small exploratory journey.
That day, I found something that made me fall in love for the second time: a huge chestnut tree. It wasn’t spring or a holiday or anything like that, but all the same, the tree had burst into pink blossoms. I gulped, thunderstruck at the power of nature to console me. I got to know about trees thanks to my grandma. Every time we went to Gezi Park, she’d tell me about them as we ate the fruit that we’d brought along.
She’d ask, “Is there anything else in the world that sends down roots?”
When I didn’t reply in a flash, she’d get angry.
As I labored to chew a mouthful of orange slices, a few drops of juice dribbling down my lower lip, I’d say no, with her glowering face looming before me.
Then there was Aunt Hülya . . . She knew a lot about trees. To get her riled up, my mother would say, “The only thing that Hülya doesn’t know are the five daily prayers.”
Aunt Hülya would get furious with my mother. At home, once in a while she’d indulge herself in a cigarette, but she wouldn’t wear a real headscarf, just a loose-fitting hood of sorts, which made her look like she’d just stepped out of Hogwarts. I told her that once. I was quite young at the time.
She winked at me and said, “I went to Hogwarts. They really do have records that Harry Potter attended the school. It’s a wonderful place.”
She actually had a good sense of humor.
Wearing a headscarf didn’t dampen her spirits in the least; it just protected her from the outside world. For her, a headscarf was a kind of shield. When she and my mother would get into squabbles, she’d say, “Your filth can’t get to me! Because I wear a headscarf!”
Maybe it was like armor. Who knows what it was like to wear one? But my mother was absolutely certain that the only reason my aunt started wearing a headscarf was for the sake of her husband’s political activities. Those activities weren’t really going anywhere, but that’s another issue. He was an unlucky man. Or the party was just stringing him along. It seemed that way because, before every election, he never made it past the stage of being short-listed as a candidate. Still, he told everyone that his name had been brought up as a candidate for district head in the local elections.
He had a faded photograph of him and the party chairman. That was the only plunder he had to show after dedicating his life to politics.
Aunt Hülya had gotten used to going through life with a headscarf.
My mother would say, “What choice did she have? She had to get used to wearing one.” And she’d add, “I don’t see her as being a headscarfed woman. Most of the time, she’s way ahead of the rest of us anyways. Open, you know.” When Aunt Hülya became irate, she’d call my other aunt a “whore” and my grandma a “slut,” but in my mother’s eyes, she only said such things out of anger. That vulgarity, that crassness, was just the manifestation of her pent-up rage. Grandma, I said “manifestation,” which was one of your words. Can you hear your granddaughter? Do my words reach the other world?
I should confess that the pink flowers of the chestnut tree reminded me of Aunt Hülya, not my grandma. In the face of her husband’s failed political ambitions, she never buckled, nor did she protest. She was skilled in the art of consolation. As for the man himself, he gave people the impression that there was always hope: “True, I haven’t made much of a political career or become more than a party member, but . . .”
What that “but” meant was that, whenever a school dormitory was going to be built or an organization was going to be set up, they bought all the appliances from my uncle. As a consolation prize, he became the owner of the party’s most endorsed appliance store in the entire district of Beyoğlu. Wasn’t that enough? Anytime Aunt Hülya and his mother-in-law gave him a hard time, that’s what he’d ask, and with tears in his eyes he’d say, “It just isn’t enough, is it? Tell me, what’s lacking in your lives?”
Aunt Hülya would calmly reply, “Thankfully we’re not wanting for anything. We have even more than we need.”
And that was the truth. Their home was jam-packed. Every year they bought new furniture and redid their kitchen. They couldn’t quite settle on what to do with the bathroom. One day it was a Turkish bath; the next day it was in the French style with a bidet. The living room was another matter altogether. One year it was somber English with wallpaper, and the next it was country. Their home had a thematic style that changed more quickly than the seasons: “I think we should do something with an Ottoman touch, like gilt tulips on the walls and hand-painted ceilings.”
My mother was right when she said, “Their house must be worn out.”
If you were to excavate their place, who knows how many layers of culture, style, and aesthetics you’d come across!
My aunt would say, “Life is consuming us, so we may as well go through life consuming.”
“Actually, Hülya is a sweet woman, a kindred spirit.” Sometimes my other aunt—my father’s sister—would say that. When Aunt Hülya got hooked on the idea of getting some tattoos—yes, you read that right—she asked my father’s sister to do an investigative piece called “What’s Under the Headscarf?” They even ran a photograph of Aunt Hülya with the story. Her face was blurred out, but you could clearly see all her tattoos. My other aunt took the pictures. Aunt Hülya’s husband couldn’t do a thing about it.
“Don’t lecture me! You’re the sniveling stooge who couldn’t get a seat in parliament.”
There’s your answer, little man!
Aunt Hülya got her tattoos secretly done at our place, since she didn’t want people to gossip. The tattoo artist was a woman, and she designed the tattoos herself. Aunt Hülya got a spiderweb on her stomach with a spider hanging from it, an ivy pattern on her arm, and a rose on her breast. She loved her tattoos. Others could only see them when the situation required it. Those “others” were the doctors who performed an operation on her gallbladder and some women at an event held at a hammam. Those women were important, however; one of them was the wife of the provincial party chairman, and the rest were her assistants. It was a pre-wedding party at a hammam, attended by important women from the capital.
“Maybe they were there, but I didn’t recognize them because everyone was naked, as usual at a hammam.”
Before she went, Aunt Hülya racked her brain about how she was going to be at a hammam with her tattoos. She and my mother put their heads together, trying to come up with a solution. The thing about solutions, however, is that when you seek them out, you can’t find them. If there is one, it will find you. The alliance between my mother and my aunt was ongoing, which was natural because they were sisters. Despite everything. My mother suggested, “Wrap up in a hammam towel, and put a bandage on your arm. If anyone asks anything, just say you burned yourself.”
As you may have guessed, my aunt had her hesitations about the plan: “What if the bandage falls off when I’m getting scrubbed?”
“Okay, so wear the Burqini you wear when you go to the beach . . . Enough already, you don’t like any of our ideas!”
“That makes more sense,” she replied.
In the end, it was my other aunt who came to her rescue.
“What are you so afraid of? If anyone asks, just say that you got the tattoos done before you started wearing a headscarf.”
“What if they ask why I didn’t get them removed?”
“Tell them it hurts too much.”
Aunt Hülya’s eyes gleamed. “I’ll say that they remind me of my sinful past, and that I repent whenever I look at them.”
“You’re a sneaky one, you are! Not even a headscarf can put a damper on your greed and worship of worldly things.”
“God knows best about who’s going to get what and when.”
There was plenty of room in my mother’s and aunt’s lives for Aunt Hülya. They may not have talked about their private lives or made plans together, but they had a friendship rooted in the past. Even if Aunt Hülya was launched into space and never came back, that would still be the case. Memories have their own gravity that brings people together. They weren’t enemies. Nor were they friends. They just knew each other really well.
Aunt Hülya made quite an impression at the bridal hammam event that day.
“It turned out that they were really curious,” she said to my mother, who asked how she pulled it off. “I said the tattoos were really old, from when I was studying at Mimar Sinan University, before I started wearing a headscarf.”
The women were intrigued, and Aunt Hülya explained the situation at length, saying that my uncle had spent his life toiling away, selling appliances, so he’d never been able to launch a political career. That was the moment when the foundations for that career were laid. The women had loved Aunt Hülya to death because she wasn’t dull like the other wives of party members.
Proudly, she said, “If there had been elections that day, he would’ve been at the top of the list of candidates.”
My uncle had called Aunt Hülya and said, “Woman, you’re really something!” It turned out that the provincial chairman had called him to say, “It seems that wife of yours is quite pleasant company.”
Tickled, my uncle said to Aunt Hülya on the phone, “God spare me, I almost
said, ‘Mr. Chairman, were you there too?’ He said to me, ‘My wife says she wants to see her, she really must see her again, and she told me to call her husband and have her come to Ankara, where they can attend to business together. So that’s why I called you. When my wife asks for something, I can’t let her down. I’ll do whatever she says. Don’t shoot the messenger, as they say.’
“I said, ‘I’m the same way, Mr. Chairman, I’m exactly the same way . . .’ They’re going to call you, so don’t be surprised when they do.”
He was ecstatic.
Whereas Aunt Hülya was put out.
She always came up with an excuse to turn down the invitations to go to Ankara. She kept finding ways to string along my uncle, promising that she would go, saying she would definitely go. One time she even said that she was going to Ankara, but in fact she went on a hot-spring spa holiday with my grandma.
Aunt Hülya was a pink flower of the chestnut tree. It’s so rare to find such blossoms.
She once said to me, “If I were a tree, I’d be a Judas tree.”
“Enough already,” my father said.
You heard me right, Father. Shadow father, no father, father who wasn’t mentioned. Did you lament to yourself, “Why doesn’t she talk about her father?” What’s it to you?! I’ll talk about whomever I please. As the situation calls for. As much as is needed. My father was right to be surprised when his sister-in-law said, “If I were a tree, I’d be a Judas tree,” so he felt a need to tell the Judas tree’s story, its place in the world. Shrugging her shoulders, my aunt ever so sweetly argued with him about everything he said.
He said, “The Judas tree was the most important symbol of the Byzantines and Istanbul.”
“So? I’m in love with Istanbul.”
“But, Hülya, there are the Byzantines too . . .”
The Girl in the Tree Page 22
