“Don’t push your Perihan, Mother, or I’ll bite your damn head off!”
That was the extent of the dispute between my mother and grandmother. My grandfather would come over, but rarely, and my grandma would never be around when he did.
“In neighborhoods like this, people hold grudges all the time,” my father said, without knowing what the issue was really about. Without thinking. Without even considering the possibilities. So at ease! He’d talk and talk, drink in hand, stroking his beard.
What heavy burdens my grandma carried. It should come as no surprise that it all made its way out transformed into cursing and swearing.
Was that the end of it? By no means. When those snowy days of 1987 came to an end, they moved everything out of the house. It was torn down and digging commenced for the foundation of the new apartment building. That’s when it happened. Fortune smiled upon my father, who was studying archaeology at the time. The workers came upon a grave and a tablet with an inscription, as well as the skeletons of a woman and a newborn child. By reading the inscription, they wrote history. The history of lineage. It turned out that the house my grandma had blithely traded away so she could be free of it had belonged to us since time immemorial. To our family. To our lineage.
But how?
Like everything, there’s a story behind it all. The history that my grandma couldn’t bear to abandon and ended up seeing across the way day in and day out as the result of that childish barter is buried there. Women’s history, or the tragedy of the women of these lands, was buried on that plot of land. But, of course, what had she traded it away for? And how far away could the poor woman have fled? No one can escape from the misfortune of being a woman in these lands. Don’t fool yourself. So, are you ready to listen?
The woman who was buried with that inscription died in the year 1550. The houses that had been precariously perched on these hills, which are visible from the palace, were always the site of work of a less savory nature. The girls who wound up there never went of their own accord. In fact, no one went there—they were taken there. They were hunted down like birds and taken there. Some were brought from the slave market. In particular, the most down-and-out of the women were those who were left over at the slave market after the effendis of Istanbul had picked through the best ones. Some were taken there in exchange for the bribes that the bordello owners paid. Some were kidnapped from the gardens and vineyards where they worked, women who, if they’d been sold at the slave market, would have ended up in the palace because of their beauty and pedigree. The woman who had been buried beneath our land with the inscription was one of those. A young Jewish woman from Edirne. She ran and ran but was caught in the end, only to find herself in that house in Istanbul that smelled of opium and rang with laughter. What was done was done. Janissaries would come one after the other, and the house was practically shaken off its foundations. Is there any need for an explanation of the state that the poor girl was in? Not if you ask me. There shouldn’t be. The forced descent into degradation shouldn’t be discussed. That girl who put up with that life, not even knowing where she was, eventually grew accustomed to it and went on living that way. My grandma described it all much better as a deterrent for me, but I think that is enough on the matter. Ultimately, the girl got sick and died. After ten years of enduring the ups and downs of working as a whore, she had an inscription carved for her while she was on her deathbed. She was buried in the garden of that house, which had its greatest days of glory and wealth as a bordello thanks to her, and the inscription was placed at the head of her grave.
That was the grave that was found on the plot of land given to the developer in 1987. As a student of archaeology, my father took the inscription into his care and spent a great deal of time translating it. Here is what it says:
Here lies a woman / She was a person just like you / Flames burn her like the rest of us / The wind buffets her / Thorns make her bleed / But she wasn’t like you / If only someone had told her, “Don’t be afraid” / If only she could have been given her freedom like the blowing wind / If only she could have been treated like a man by the world / Womanhood is beauty and bounty / Womanhood is that which gives life / Womanhood is misfortune in this world / This is your last breath / Here lies a woman / Who bowed to everyone’s desires / In my youth I was as independent as the wind / No one could ever stop me / They grabbed me by the hair and stuck me in a cage / Youth and women and children are more sagacious than the sages / The world should belong to women, children, and the youth / If only women could live as free and beautifully as those lords and men with wicked hearts
“It’s a bad translation,” my father said, “but it’s the best I can do.”
The translation really was shitty.
Then there was a debate about whether the person buried there was a regular woman or really a whore. My father even took the inscription onto a television show. “In fact she was a whore, but that’s beside the point. The inscription is a eulogy for women and youth, so we prefer to take it up as a plea related to the issue of gender.”
“Let’s see if the whore in the grave agrees with your preference.”
That was what my grandma had to say on the matter. The woman’s remains are still on display at the Archaeology Museum as “the skeleton of a woman dating back to 1550.” It would appear that no scholars of Byzantine history have examined the tattered remnants of cloth in which the baby was wrapped. Otherwise, they’d be stunned by the lab results, as they’d show that they only dated back to 1956. Anyone who is curious should go and see for themselves, but out of respect for my memory, they should keep their mouths shut about the story.
Of course, it doesn’t end in the year 1550. As I mentioned, Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent built a mosque in the area for his hunchbacked son. The mosque, which was completed around 1560, didn’t guide the local residents onto the true path. A woman who was my grandma’s great-great-grandma first set foot in the place in the middle of the 1800s. She’d worked at a bordello in Galata, where all day long she was forced to sit behind the latticed window of a dingy house that faced the street. When a customer showed up, she’d take them inside. Like most of the women involved in the business in the area, she was Jewish, as was her madam. Because she was young and beautiful, they decided to move her to Cihangir so she wouldn’t go to waste in that run-down house. The house that would become the place my grandma called a chicken coop was redone and still smelled of freshly cut wood when the madam reopened it as a bordello. The lineage of the women of our family can be traced back to that girl who was taken from Galata and put to work in that bordello in Cihangir. That woman who established this royal lineage joined up with her pimp and killed the madam who’d been running the place. Supposedly, a fight had broken out. The madam got stabbed. The house caught on fire. Then they rebuilt the house, and the story goes on. Toward the end of the 1800s, the bordello was passed from mother to daughter. When it was passed down to my grandma’s grandmother, things changed and it became a regular home. The stories of most of the abutting houses on the street are more or less the same.
“Are you sleeping?” I asked Yunus. “Or have you been listening to my every word?”
“If I’d fallen asleep,” he said, “I probably would’ve rolled off the top of this wall.”
He leaned down, took my head between his hands, and kissed my lips, eyes, forehead, cheeks, nose, and earlobes. And then. And then. And then he left, vanishing as if he’d never existed. If you ask me, love is a beautiful thing.
24
CHIRP
I found out later that it was the holiday of the Festival of the Sacrifice. I’d been wondering why there were more people than usual in the park. Still, the trees in which I perched were at the far edge of the park—yes, I’ll repeat that a thousand times—so I remained secluded. Only people with something to hide ventured into my area, such as secret lovers. Yunus worked all through the holiday, and he came to see me whenever he got the chance. It seemed that he�
�d grown accustomed to being cut off from the ground below. While he may not have been as confident and nimble as me on top of the wall and in the branches of the trees, he had overcome his fear. At least, that’s the impression I got.
One day, before Yunus came to visit me, I saw some other people on the fire escape for the very first time. After looking at the wall and discussing something, they readjusted the surveillance camera. Hidden in the shadows of the laurel tree, I watched them. Only my eyes were visible. If they saw anything at all, they probably thought that a bird was flitting about in the branches of the tree. That’s how well hidden I was. All the same, they were looking in my direction. My best guess was that they were the security guards with whom Yunus said he’d made a deal. But I couldn’t help but wonder—how had he made a deal with them? And on what issue, precisely? I think that they were trying to understand what had happened to that girl Yunus had kissed—that girl being me, of course: Where had she gone? Where had she disappeared to after lingering atop the wall?
When Yunus showed up, I explained it all to him.
“I know,” he said. “I’ve been taking a different route when I come to see you.”
“How have you been getting here?”
“There’s an easier way further down the wall, past the hotel. I climb up to the top of the wall and then I walk along its length as if I were taking a stroll down a path, telling myself, ‘To hell with it, if I fall, I fall.’ There’s a big tree on the far side of the hotel, the one with the two branches that have grown against the wall, making a kind of bridge.”
“The silver birch.”
“Is that what it’s called?”
“Yes. The one next to it is a regular birch. And then there’s a beech tree. Beside that there’s an alder, and then there’s my horse chestnut with its pink flowers. After passing by the thorn apple, beech, and red dogwood, you arrive at my trees. This laurel, which cradles the stork nest in its branches, and the eucalyptus, plane, and pine trees beside it.”
“How do you know so much about trees? I don’t know what any of them are called.”
“That doesn’t matter. If you want, you can look them up online. So long as you respect them, that’s all that matters.”
“During the Gezi protests we wrote some graffiti like that. That was my slogan. ‘Respect the trees.’”
Yunus spoke those words with the utmost sincerity and excitement. I wished that I had a cigarette. Or some weed. It would’ve been so nice to get high together. We would’ve become one with the smoke and wafted up into the sky. We would’ve become smoke.
My thoughts drifted back to the times of the protests.
“You look distracted,” Yunus said.
“What’s the date today?”
“The twenty-seventh of September. Sunday.”
“So I’ve been here for thirteen days.”
“Does it seem like it’s been longer?”
“It does,” I said. “It was like that during the protests too. When I poked my head out of my tent one morning, I felt like I’d been there for hundreds of years. As if I’d sent down roots like a tree and been there for so many days and nights—weeks, months, years.”
Yunus and I were in the embrace of the trees. After seeing those people on the fire escape and listening to their conversation, I was on full alert. I knew someone would come along the route Yunus had described, the one that led to my roost. That tree he mentioned—the silver birch—may very well have been the oldest tree in the park, and it was certainly the most respected of them all, looking over the rest. As Yunus tried to explain, its strong branches extended outward like a bridge. It really was like a bridge—I’m not exaggerating. Yunus would come to call that pathway that brought him to me so fearlessly “the bridge of love.”
We were nestled in the silver birch’s branches, which were so beautiful you could never get enough of stroking them, whispering to each other. As we embraced, the tree embraced us too. I mean, it seemed that way. I forgot about the security guards, who had suspicions about my existence, as well as the secret agreement they had made. Forgetting is such a wondrous thing, isn’t it?
But Gezi wanted to remind me of its presence. Gezi, where I belonged. Gezi, which made me feel so deeply that I had always lived there.
“After you got wounded . . . after being at the mosque . . . did you go back?”
“My family was apprehensive. After the events of the third of June, they wouldn’t let me go to the park again. But we ran away. To be more precise, first I ran away, and Derin and Pembe followed. I was so sure they’d come that I went to Decathlon and bought three sleeping bags and a tent big enough for all of us.”
“I didn’t have a tent. We made our own sleeping bags out of blankets. I slept outside under the trees, and all night long I watched the clouds drifting across the sky. They broke apart and merged together, only to break apart again. The night was so much like the day. I got the feeling that daytime was refusing to become night, as the sky would not darken.”
“The park was like a huge open-air dormitory. Everyone was free and happy, and all the good people of the world were there. That’s what my mother said. ‘I don’t feel the least bit afraid here.’ Those were her words. Then she said, ‘But I am afraid of the people who don’t want you to stay in the park.’”
“She was right to be afraid. They tried to kill me. At first, I thought I really was dead. When I got shot in the stomach with a tear gas canister, I fell to the ground as if I’d been gunned down in a war. And when I pulled my hand away from my stomach and saw the blood—I literally started screaming my head off like a girl.”
“Why do you say that? As if only girls scream! Look, things like that really piss me off. There’s no need to be crass. Leave your sexism at the door along with your shoes.”
Yunus laughed. That’s how Gezi was. Like a smile, a grin, laughter born of pain, indescribably beautiful and powerful. I’m sorry, but I can’t put it any more eloquently. Gezi can’t be described because it was something different, unlike anything else that has ever happened.
Whenever they got the chance, my mother and my father’s sister would stop by the park. They were happy too, and hopeful as well, as if they’d stumbled upon an unexpected consolation. There was something liberating about saying, “Enough already!” My mother compared “our movement” to a book that she’d read when she was younger in which a city was left to the youth and they lived however they pleased.
“Not so much in terms of the subject, but the way that the kids here are living so freely is a lot like that book.”
My aunt said, “Like when your mom goes to visit the neighbors and you make a mess of your house?”
Although she may not have been aware of it, her eyes still welled up whenever she used the word “mom.” She’d stop on the threshold of breaking into tears. Two months had passed since she’d lost her mother, and she still missed her terribly.
Yunus asked, “Where were you when you got hurt?”
Summer refused to leave the city. It went on and on, the longest summer in the history of Istanbul. Not a single leaf fell from the trees. They were making a stand. What I’m saying is that Yunus seemed to have vanished into an otherworldly green. Even his eyes looked like they were turning green, and when he smiled or grinned, his teeth looked like they were taking on a greenish hue as well.
“I,” I said, unable to pry my gaze from the deep green of the leaves on the branches surrounding us, “was at the bottom of the steep road that goes to Dolmabahçe when I got hurt. In the neighborhood of Akaretler, they called us the ‘Shot-Put Girls’ because that’s how we threw the paving stones we pried up from the sidewalks. The guys from the Çarşı group of protesters—as you know, they led a lot of the protests—cheered us on. ‘But this is where things are going to heat up. You should stick around.’ We went up the hill to the other side of İnönü Stadium.”
“We had taken up a position behind the barricades we set up near there. I can honestly say
that I made the barricade in front of the military hospital with my own two hands. I swear, it’s true. I made that big old barricade all by myself.”
“I believe you.”
“You should.”
“There was another barricade further down from the one you made.”
“I know.”
“That’s where they got me.”
“We were practically in the same place.”
“Maybe. When there are concerts at the stadium, people go to that little knoll up the way to listen to the shows for free. It’s right behind the stadium.”
“I know where you’re talking about.”
“Well, that’s where I was.”
As one of the Shot-Put Girls, my confidence had been unbounded. Teasingly, I said to Derin, “You’re the best shot-putter of all of us.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re the only one of us who has ankles as thick as her neck, ha ha ha!”
“The atmosphere was so strange. Or maybe it was the bombardment of tear gas. In any case, we were out of whack, that’s for sure. We had been for a long time, from the very start. So there I was, dazed, incapable of looking after myself. Derin tugged at my arm a few times, and Pembe tried to shove me back. But just as I’d blindly accepted all the conditions of that stupid writing contest, I unconsciously made my way to the front lines. I went up to the front and got hit in the head with a tear gas canister.”
“And then what happened?”
“For a second I thought my head had been knocked clean off my body. That’s how hard it hit me. The sound of the canister meeting bone was terrifying. I really thought that my troubled head flew off like a ball.”
“Huh! So it really was that brutal?”
“It was so brutal, it knocked me out. When I came around, I found myself in the mosque by the seaside that they were using as a field hospital.”
“Dolmabahçe Mosque.”
“Yeah, that’s the place. There’s a little cove next to it where some fishermen tie up their boats. When I was younger, my grandma and I used to take little trips on one of those small motorboats. She knew the owner. They were about the same age and had been friends for a long time. He lived in Cihangir too.”
The Girl in the Tree Page 27
