“So what? Our forefathers whupped them.”
“The color of the Judas inspired the Byzantine aristocrats. Purple is the rarest color. Only they were allowed to wear cloaks the color of the flowers of the Judas tree.”
“Purple’s my favorite color.”
“There’s a legend about the Judas tree; perhaps you don’t know it. Because if you did, you wouldn’t want to be a Judas tree . . .”
“Learning is a religious duty. Tell me, so I can know about this legend.”
“Learning is a religious duty!” Ah, Aunt Hülya, how were you being molded like that?
“So: Judas, one of Jesus’s disciples, betrayed Jesus after the Last Supper. Afterward, unable to bear the shame of what he’d done, he went and hung himself from a Judas tree. Even the tree couldn’t bear that shame, and its white flowers turned red. That’s how the tree got its name.”
“Interesting. It’s not just a story; it teaches us something too. Stories like that go beyond religious sects and divisions. In the end, the important thing is humanity.”
My father was silent.
Queen Hülya went on: “Do you know why I like the Judas tree? Because it’s a tree of light. In order to grow, all it needs is space, freedom, and light. All it wants is to open its arms to the sky and be free.”
“So, are you free?” My father had a habit of asking pointed questions.
“For God’s sake, who among us is free? Just what is freedom? Who knows, I might be freer than all of you.”
My father lapsed into a silence that was like a pendulum. Either he was conceding that she was right, or he was insinuating that it would be best to drop the conversation and let her go on thinking like that. You decide.
My aunt went on as though she’d been waiting for years for the topic of the Judas tree to come up and had prepared her little speech beforehand.
“Just now I referred to the Judas tree as a tree of light . . . The blossoming of the Judas tree lasts such a short time, and then the flowers wilt and die. We mortals can only truly grasp the meaning of transience, the meaning of how everything bathed in that light comes into being and vanishes in the blink of an eye, from the Judas tree. Believe me, we mortals could learn much from it.”
I’d like to say to my father, “So, did you get your answer, little man?” In the depths of my mind, my father is enveloped in a purple cloud, flickering in and out of being. You should have seen his face—it was as if it had atrophied. That is such a vile word, “atrophy.” But his expression at that moment couldn’t be described with a better word. Obviously, he hadn’t been expecting such an outpouring.
Aunt Hülya concluded by turning to my mother and saying, “I think that, if you were a tree, you would also be a Judas tree.”
That was the last thing anyone should’ve said to my mother, whose blossoms had so recently wilted. The story of her unrequited love, which had cooled when the doctor went to America, had been resurrected recently when she’d received a bit of news, and my mother had been shaken to her core. The doctor had gotten married! And to whom? That queen of dieticians. My mother’s boss. My mother quit her job, and now she was floundering. Soon after, as she proceeded down her career path, she would say that monstrous lie that would trap her beneath it. Very soon.
My father couldn’t make sense of why my mother suddenly broke down in tears. Then again, what sense could he make of anything?
“That’s how men are,” my grandma once said. “We women give life meaning. Men just know how to go to war and screw.”
My aunt—my father’s sister—replied, “Some of them speak kindly. Some of them are good hearted.”
My grandma closed the issue by saying, “I’ll shove my foot up the ass of the whole lot of them.”
On the issue of the Judas tree, which radiates through my memories, Aunt Hülya was so inspired by the conversation that she got a tattoo of a Byzantine empress on her back, right at the base of her neck.
“It’s beautiful,” my mother said.
“It’s exquisite,” my other aunt said.
“Crazy woman,” my grandma said.
I was enchanted. I have a proclivity for that. There it was, on Aunt Hülya’s shapely back, kind of between her shoulders—see, I can’t even really describe the spot. I’m hopeless when it comes to writing; maybe my classmates were right. In fact, that tattoo—it was temporary—wasn’t actually all that exciting. I’m hammering home the point that it was temporary because in a sense it was proof that Aunt Hülya no longer had the courage to do anything. But who of us did? Who had any courage left? There was this idea of being consumed by life, and we’d all been consumed. There was only that Byzantine empress who drew your eye with all her bright colors and movement, and she was beautiful, so very beautiful—the essence of beauty. But after a while, she too was consumed. Between Aunt Hülya’s shoulder blades, those shrewd eyes, that purple and green mosaic dress, that gilt crown, they all faded, until in the end they’d become nothing but a deep bruise.
That’s why my aunt’s question and investigation “What’s Under the Headscarf?” was so important. It was published, but in truncated form. Eventually, the parts that had been cut out were published, becoming my aunt’s first journalistic book. She took it to Ünsal, that teacher of teachers, as he had promised he would read it. I was with her that day because she’d gotten stuck with me. She was the one who’d picked me up from my mountain-climbing class. When her teacher told her on the phone, “Come over. I read the book, and I have a few comments,” she had no choice but to take me with her. I can’t remember much of what they talked about, but I can guess. It must have been around June of 2009. I was eleven years old at the time.
Ünsal asked me, “You still reading Don Quixote?”
“That’s a bit too much for her,” my aunt said.
He turned to her and said, “You haven’t understood a word of what I’ve taught in class or said to you. I swear, I’m going to really teach you a lesson.”
I spoke up. “It’s not too much for me. There are windmills and a donkey. And then there’s Sancho Panza.”
“Ha ha! She’s a sharp one. I should’ve been teaching that book to her generation, not yours.”
He looked like the old man in the film Up, which had just come out. I’d bought a pirated copy and watched it over and over. I whispered into my aunt’s ear, “He looks just like that old guy.”
“What did she say?” he asked.
Which meant that he placed importance on what young people had to say . . . I remember how happy that made me.
Sometimes we talk about the most trivial things in order to avoid speaking about the most important. We ramble on like we’ve got diarrhea of the mouth. All so that those critical things will get mixed in, and then drown.
Ünsal said, “Let’s move on to what’s beneath the headscarf.”
With a penetrating, self-assured gaze, he went on: “I think that there is an exception beneath the headscarf you talk about in the book.”
He may have said that, or I might be making it up. In any case, some of our memories are fake, crafted by our minds. Intelligence. Souls. All of them. Working together. Like a gang.
Ah, the pinks of the chestnut tree.
My father would say, “These trees live so long they get the seasons confused.” But I didn’t understand what he meant. In those days, he was working at the Archaeology Museum and sometimes we’d walk home together. That museum was where he’d always wanted to work, where he wanted to retire from, and where his heart was sealed in a sarcophagus. I must have been around six or seven years old. At the time, I didn’t understand much of anything that he said. But now I understand him.
A chestnut tree, blooming out of season. Does this season shed flowers?
Anyways . . . I think that there’s a Judas tree beneath the headscarf.
Everyone has a Judas tree within them.
Everyone has their own betrayals and feelings of shame.
A Judas tree woul
d not conceal me nor shelter me in its branches.
They are too short to hide in, but ideal for hanging yourself.
Let’s move on to something far more important . . . I had surrendered to the trees. I trusted them. That’s why I gave myself over to the branches of that chestnut tree I’d fallen in love with. I stretched out on one of the branches growing off its thick trunk and let my arms hang down into the void below.
I was no longer afraid of the trees.
Nor were they of me.
We weren’t afraid of each other.
Like we said at the protests, “Free and alone like a tree, yet like a forest in fraternity.” But it doesn’t work that way. They don’t let it.
19
COMPLAIN ABOUT INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT
Yunus called out to me from the top of the wall. He parted the branches of the plane tree like it was a thick green curtain, revealing his face, which was dripping with sweat. We were bearing witness to something which, for him, was yet another miracle. He was standing fearlessly on top of the wall.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “I was getting worried.”
“The real question is, How are you? You seem to be feeling better.”
I got to my feet and started walking along a branch, just like I’d done all those days before on my red slackline strap. Yunus’s eyes opened wide in horror.
“Be careful. Tie yourself off with your strap.”
“I don’t need that anymore.”
“Aren’t you afraid of falling?”
“‘Cowards die many times before their deaths.’ ‘The only thing you have to fear is fear itself.’ ‘There is no illusion greater than fear.’ Shall I go on?”
“How do you know all those sayings? I bombed the university entrance exam. They asked questions about idioms and things.”
“You didn’t pass?”
“Nope.”
“Get back to the subject. Where were you?”
Yunus was incapable of lying.
“They saw us.”
“You mean you didn’t notice that there was a camera?”
“I knew there was one . . . But they never check the one on the fire escape.”
“So, how did they catch us?”
“They were going through the footage looking for something else. That’s when they spotted us.”
“What’s going to happen now?”
“Don’t worry, I made a deal with them.”
“With who?”
“Security.”
“How did you make a deal?”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re the Girl in the Tree, right? Go on enjoying living up in the trees like a monkey.”
“I’m not some primate! This is about me too. What if they find me?”
“I told you not to worry about it. I took care of everything.”
“Fine, but how?”
“Enjoy the grapes but don’t ask where they came from.”
“Was that another question about expressions on the entrance exam?”
“No, it’s what my older brother always says.”
I was now standing on top of the ancient wall. And he was sitting atop it like he was straddling a horse. One of the rare pink flowers of the chestnut tree lay on top of the wall. He picked it up and held it out to me. Looking him in the eye, I took the flower, which must have fallen recently because it was still fresh. I put it behind my ear.
“You look beautiful like that.”
It was as if we’d been whisked back to a time before the wall had been built. I felt as if such beauty and sincerity could only have existed in such ancient times. That’s how it should have been.
“Come with me,” I said. I held out my hand, he reached out, and I took his hand in mine.
“I’m going to take you somewhere.”
When he got to his feet, his legs were shaking. There was a look of helplessness on his wan face, but he quickly put on a determined expression, which I took as a compliment, a sign of his dedication to me.
“How wonderful,” he said. “You’re standing there before me like a fearless princess.”
“Walk as if you were walking along a path on the ground. Don’t think about falling. Just imagine that you have wings.”
We walked along the wall that runs between Gülhane and the palace. Taking tiny steps. Ever so slowly. As if we were walking in the dark.
“The top of the wall is like a road now. It seems wider.”
“Go on thinking that way if that makes you feel better.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the heart of the panorama.”
I said that because it felt like we really were walking through the heart of Istanbul. Our backs to the sea, we were heading in the direction of the palace. It’s not that I didn’t know where I was taking Yunus. In my mind, there was a place we could go without our feet touching the ground, but I wasn’t sure if we could safely get there by walking on top of that wall. Being unsure is a nasty feeling. It leaves you out of breath. It suffocates you. That’s why I cast those doubts from my mind.
It was so nice to feel Yunus’s hand in my own, which he was squeezing tightly. He slipped his fingers between mine and stroked them with his thumb. The place I wanted to take him appeared on the horizon. A domed roof straight out of a fairy tale.
I was taking him to the Tiled Pavilion in the gardens of the Archaeology Museum. The back of the seraglio faced Gülhane, and the entrance opened onto the gardens. The high walls surrounding Gülhane embrace from behind an elegant summer palace known as Sırça Palace, or Sırça Seraglio. My father told me about it once. We had left the museum and were walking hand in hand through Gülhane Park. He stopped and pointed it out to me. Always his mother’s son—he liked explaining things. All the same, he has no place in our story. It simply wouldn’t do. Ultimately, a family’s story is about the women.
“We’re here,” I said. “This is the place.”
As if entering a magical realm, we stepped onto the roof of the Tiled Pavilion with its multiple lead-sheathed domes, between which were flat areas. I tripped, as my feet were accustomed to branches and bark, not stone.
As we sat down, we leaned back against one of the domes of the building, which had been there since 1472 and seen so much: the sea, the sky, migratory birds, earthquakes, rain, storms, epidemics, weddings, holidays, explosions, coups, wars, peace, upheaval, fury, destruction, change, incrustation. That was where the Tiled Pavilion sat ever so gracefully, puckering its lips as it gazed at Istanbul, its eyes asquint.
I’d said to my father, “If the Tiled Pavilion was human, it would be a woman.” He laughed.
Look, there we are still, father and daughter, looking at Sırça Palace. It made me feel good to hear my father laugh. Who doesn’t like the feeling of knowing that you’ve made your father or your mother laugh? That’s why I went on: “What’s more, the Tiled Pavilion would be a girl, and she would blink her eyes as she looked out at the world. Like this . . . She would pucker her lips as if she was going to kiss the city.”
Later, they would ask me to do the impression again.
“The girl’s got a knack for impressions.”
“She’s got a strong imagination.”
My father’s sister, my grandma, my mother, my father, Aunt Hülya, her little husband . . . That girl is still a little girl. They never took her anywhere.
“What are you looking at?”
Yunus looked at the spot I was staring at. That void upon which my eyes were locked.
“There’s no one there. You were looking at the spot as if you’d seen someone. It seemed like you were about to say something.”
“No, no. Maybe it just seemed that way to you. If someone talks to themselves, people say they’re crazy. That’s what my grandma used to say. Then, without realizing it, she’d talk to herself.”
“Who doesn’t? My father says that he chats with his conscience all the time.”
We were two lonely young people leaning up
against the lead sheathing of a dome, and we were there to look out over the world. I wish we could’ve stayed forever.
“Why did you think of bringing me here?”
What was I supposed to say? “I don’t know.”
His expression softened and he looked around.
“But it really is beautiful here. Different.”
Different. I wanted to say, “What’s different about it? What’s different?” Because we were encoding that which is beautiful as different. Different is beautiful. But different is what is fixed—fixed I’m telling you!
“Look, the sun is setting like a giant orange. No one could ever find us here. If the world were to go to pieces, we wouldn’t be affected. That’s how isolated it is here. It’s like we’re watching a movie.”
It was nice to see how excited Yunus was getting about being there.
All day long the lead dome roof had been soaking up the heat of the sun. I pressed my cheek against it, and then I spread my arms and pressed my entire body against the dome, feeling its warmth. That warmth was something like compassion. Yunus slowly approached me. I was afraid that he would ask me for permission, and my fear came true:
“Can I kiss you?”
“Well, who kissed me on top of the wall?”
“That wasn’t me. It was my ghost.”
“What about that girl you were seeing? On the first day we met, you said you had a girlfriend.”
“She’s imaginary too. A figment of a ghost’s imagination.”
I smiled and gave him the thumbs-up. Then I turned so he could kiss me. He leaned in. We kissed. And kissed. And kissed.
As Derin and Pembe would have said: “Kiss, kiss, kiss.” Like a bird chirruping out of love.
When people kiss, it shouldn’t be too quiet because then you can hear the sound of your kissing, which is funny. It makes you want to laugh. You shouldn’t be thinking about other things, but then you find your mind wandering.
Derin would say, “You can’t think when you’re really excited.”
I wrote a song with that line. Rather, I wrote the lyrics for a rap group’s song. You might be thinking, “Why didn’t you mention that before?” Here’s my answer: “I haven’t gotten to that because I’ve been talking about the novel.” You don’t stop; you just keep on going. “Okay, but why?”
The Girl in the Tree Page 23
