“I’d like for you to do something for me tomorrow. Call my mother. But use a pay phone, not your cell. Tell her that her daughter is fine and that she needn’t worry. Naturally, don’t tell her where I am. Say to her, ‘She’s happy and content where she is. Don’t get me wrong; she’s not dead. She’s doing just fine. She asked me to call you and tell you this.’ Tell her that.”
“Sure, I can do that for you,” Yunus said, slowly closing his eyes.
When I awoke in the morning, he was gone.
And I had no idea how many days it would be before I’d see him again.
My guess was that he’d slipped away so that he wouldn’t have to say goodbye to me. I recalled his warning about making sure that no one saw me. Night and Yunus, his arms raised upward, us making love, me feeling so wet between my legs . . . He looked at me and said, “Be very careful while I’m away. If you can, stay here. Don’t go on top of the wall, and don’t go out climbing from tree to tree.”
I nodded.
As I was walking back to the laurel tree, to my nest, I put on the fur coat. It was cloudy that day, and winter was rehearsing for its grand entrance. In Istanbul, winter cuts ahead of autumn to take to the stage. When I reached the place where we’d had dinner the night before, I saw that my scarf was fluttering in the breeze on the branch where I’d hung it. I stopped and watched it for a while. The remnants of our dinner were scattered around, and I figured that Yunus had pushed to the ground the remnants of the chicken, as the pack of dogs that had made off with the shoes I’d left at the foot of the tree on my first night were now gnawing the meat from the bones. Blown by the wind, the bottles of ginger ale were rolling back and forth on the top of the wall.
After taking my scarf down from the branch, I kicked the bottles off the wall. Not into the park but to the other side, where the ground was hard. They shattered. Not dizzied in the least by the height, I stood there atop the wall, looking down. At the broken bottles. I had once shattered like them too.
30
OTHER OPTIONS
There was a storm the next day, and as it blew through the city, rain hammered down and the trees swayed in the wind. I spent the entire day huddled in the nest. Every few minutes, I thanked the laurel tree, because its branches and leaves were so densely interwoven that they protected me from the wind and rain. It had grown strong over the years. I wondered how old it could be—two hundred years, maybe? I too needed time to grow strong. But I hoped it wouldn’t take two centuries for me to do so.
Sometimes the rain blew in from the other direction.
When that happened, it would spatter my coat. I hadn’t been so immobile in a really long time. It reminded me of the adventure of a man who crossed the ocean in something like a barrel he’d made himself. My father and I had watched the documentary together on the National Geographic Channel. And then there was the man who explored the poles of the earth. In order to avoid freezing to death, he’d squeezed into the corpse of a dead animal and remained there for days. While watching both documentaries, I remember that I kept thinking about immobility and how hard it must be to remain still. But now, it was doing me good. It felt nice to stop moving. I felt as though I could hibernate through the winter in the stork’s nest, wrapped up in my soft, warm coat. I even thought that perhaps I really had drifted off into hibernation. A feeling of peace swelled within me. When Yunus left, he’d hung a bag filled with water, crackers, cookies, and apples on a branch. But I knew that soon my period was going to start—what would I do then? Make do with leaves? Or be civilized and make use of one of the pads he had brought me? Based on the amount of food he’d left, I tried to estimate how long he’d planned on staying away, and I wondered why I hadn’t directly asked him the night before. Probably I didn’t want to make him feel like I was scared of being alone, and I certainly didn’t want to be a burden on him, especially since he was already in so much trouble already.
After all, they were trying to force him to hand over his salary.
As I got more and more irritated with those men I didn’t even know, I started getting worked up, but it didn’t bother me in the least to have to sit still.
I lay there curled up, as if I’d slipped into depression and didn’t want to get out of bed. It wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable. Once in a while I’d wiggle my toes and flex my fingers, and give my wrists and ankles a few turns to keep my blood circulating.
There’s something else I said that wasn’t quite true. During their trip, Derin and Pembe didn’t send me a single text or video. You ask, Why am I bringing that up now? Because they’d posted on Twitter that the long journey was wreaking havoc on their joints. I stalked their tweets the whole while. “But it’s all worth it,” they wrote. At the time I wished like crazy that I’d gone with them. I knew that it would’ve done me good and helped me get a grip on myself and my feelings. They knew it as well.
“You need this trip more than either of us,” Pembe said. “To come with us, to go there. And, to be honest, out of the three of us, at heart you’re the kindest hearted, the most conscientious, and the most sensitive.”
Unable to hold back her feelings on the matter, she texted that to me three days before they left.
“Out of the three of us, at heart you’re the kindest hearted, the most conscientious, and the most sensitive.”
I think we can agree that “at heart” was pretty out of place in that sentence and should have been cut. Its presence said, “Actually, you’re not those things, but we’re trying to put the squeeze on you.”
I’d bought a bunch of notebooks and markers for the kids, as well as some coloring books.
In that sense, I was ready for the trip.
But then my mother had those breakdowns, the window frame came loose and slid down, and we had the worst of our traditional mother/daughter arguments. Those things had nothing to do with my plans to take part in the trip and arose in parallel with it:
“Sure, you’re so sensitive to the needs of people you don’t even know. You love kids, so much so that you want to help them. Wonderful. Good for you. What a generous child I’ve raised. But at the same time, I’ve brought up this little demon who’s blind to her own mother’s suffering!”
She compared herself to the mothers of classic tragedies, who, in the middle of the play, would fall prey to fits of shouting:
“Just look at this child! She doesn’t see that her mother has died. She doesn’t see that she’s living with the corpse of her mother. She can’t smell the stench of rotting flesh. And now she’s leaving that corpse behind to go off on a trip. My child has such a good heart! She’s a real angel. See how she tries to make herself look like a good person in the face of tragedy.”
With that last sentence of her monologue, my mother lit the fuse of the bomb nestled in the core of our argument. The longer I stayed silent, the hotter the fire roared. But, as always happened during our fights, I yelled back at her, yet I was unable to break free and run out the door. I didn’t make it to the ferry. I didn’t cross to the other side of the city. I didn’t get on the bus. I didn’t join Pembe and Derin. I was stuck there.
We would’ve gone on vacation when we got back. Really, we would have. Or we would’ve been together in heaven and perhaps taken a short jaunt down to hell to give that suicide bomber a thorough thrashing. Well, I’d like to say that we’d beat the fuck out of her, but the fact of the matter is that because we hold solidarity with our fellow women in such high regard, we wouldn’t have done anything to her. Because women, youth, and children are blameless. The reason we put life jackets on them and shuffle them into lifeboats first is not because they’re weak, but because they’re blameless. They’re going to heaven anyways, so they are the first to be sent off to safety by the powerful who can’t seem to make enough room for themselves to squeeze into the world . . .
Have a good trip. When I said to that cock-mouth Özlem Hanım, “I wrote a novel about a country that despises its children and youth,” she leered at
me through her ass. Let me tell you, if the women, children, and youth in a given geography are suffering, that’s a shitty place. If I were you, I’d flee without looking back, but then again, the ghost of this place will track you down and find you no matter where you go. No one can escape their own reality. The realities of our countries become our personal realities, infecting our private lives, our loves, and our friendships. It’s a terrible, terrible thing!
A gust of wind shook the laurel tree violently. I had nothing to worry about, however, because I’d lashed myself to a branch with my slackline strap, so even if the nest were to topple to the ground, I’d be fine. And it’s a good thing I did so, because it wasn’t the wind I needed to be concerned about but what seemed to be the forty thieves gathered at the foot of my tree.
They were saying, “Hey, there’s something up there! In the stork’s nest. Something’s covering it. It moved! I can see it moving!”
I was so scared that my breath caught in my throat. Out of fear I couldn’t bring myself to pry an opening in the branches and peer down. I lay there as still as possible, listening to them. One must have picked up a rock and thrown it at the nest, because it lurched to the side.
“Go get some more rocks! It’s her, the girl! Stone her!”
They started to stone me.
I couldn’t figure out where they were finding such big rocks. Were they prying up paving stones like we’d done during the protests? Each one they threw hit its mark. After a while, I couldn’t help but make a sound.
“Hey! Did you hear that?”
In the end, they managed to knock the nest loose and it started to slide downward. Horrified, I realized that the turnbuckle on my strap suddenly popped open and the strap let go, zipping around my body once, and then the nest and I were falling to the ground. I fell.
When I hit the ground, there was a sudden silence. There was the sound of the rain, the sound of the crows, and the hum of the city, but the men who had knocked me out of the tree with stones were eerily silent. Perhaps they didn’t believe it could be true, that there was a girl hiding in a stork’s nest up in a tree. But there she was. And right in front of them! The pain I felt at first quickly died away. It felt as though I was bleeding from my mouth and ears.
Now it was the bullies’ turn to be scared.
“Her mouth and nose are bleeding.”
For a moment I caught sight of their bodies as they leaned in to take a closer look. Dirty jeans. They were all wearing fake Nike Airs, as if they’d been handed out for free. As my eyes started to close, I thought, Is this how it all ends? It’s so unjust. I revolted with all my might. But I was pleased that I was going to be with Pembe, Derin, my aunt, and my grandma. That is, of course, if there was a place where we could meet up.
I woke up filled with that feeling of doubt, which made no sense.
It had been a dream.
The effects of that dream clung to me for a long time. Eventually the rain slowed to a patter, but the feeling that dream instilled in me refused to dwindle. It was a dream. A dream.
31
YOUR PREFERENCES
When my grandma got home, she came across some things that the American archaeologist hadn’t taken with him. Things he couldn’t pack into his suitcase. His İzzet Ziya paintings.
The American really loved those paintings. He hung one of them up over the dining table and the other one in the living room. My grandma told me that he could hardly take his eyes from them when they were eating or when he was sitting in the living room, waiting for his Turkish coffee.
“Looking at them makes me feel at peace.” That’s what he would say.
My grandma knew that if she took the paintings back, she might wind up getting back together with the American again, not unlike a bird caught in a snare, so she refused to do so. And because she knew that they were precious, the works of a palace painter created for a sultan, she refused to turn them over to the guard at Hagia Sophia. She’d gotten angry at the American when he’d bought them because they’d cost a fortune—in her mind, at least as much as a new refrigerator would cost.
In the end, she kept them as a memento of the American. I was told that, when she was a little girl, my aunt would look at them and say, “Mom, when’s my American daddy coming back?”
When my father would come home for the weekends from the lice-ridden boardinghouse at Galatasaray High School, he’d sit and gaze sadly at the painting over the dining table as he ate the meatballs and potatoes that his mother had prepared in honor of his visit. And when he’d sit in the living room, waiting for his coffee to be brought to him—a sign of prestige, as he was now the man of the house—he’d do the same there as well. Over time, the paintings became part of the home and family. When the family moved, the paintings found their places on the walls of the new apartment, but the traces they’d left on the walls of the old wood house, where they’d hung for years, left my grandma with a heavy heart. The passing of time leaves similar traces on the human spirit. Fools and saps like us realize that time has been passing when we see the outlines on the walls left behind by such paintings. Walls yellow and fade, just as time takes its toll on us. How are we to bear it? If you ask me, we can’t.
Thankfully the paintings were cheerful. One of them depicted a young boy standing naked on a beach, and the other some women enjoying a day at the sea as they lounged under a canopy held up by four sticks, their legs stretched out. Beautiful, right? Heartwarming.
My grandma had been put off by the naked boy, but when my aunt looked at the painting and took her pacifier out of her mouth and said, “Pretty willy,” everyone laughed, and thereby the painting was saved from a life of being stashed away behind a wardrobe. Many years later, my grandma and I took that “pretty willy” to the neighborhood of Çukurcuma and sold it for a fraction of its real value. That was in 2007. So all that was left was Seaside Leisure with its cheerful women. My grandma said, “That one is your birthday present. It’ll be part of your dowry.” Knowing they were valuable, she had asked her son-in-law how much the most expensive refrigerator cost and pinned the price of Pretty Willy to that. When the antiques dealer asked, “How much do you want for the painting?” that was the price she gave. Without saying a word, he handed over the money in full. Two days later, my aunt noticed that the painting was missing. “Mom,” she screamed, “what have you done?!”
My grandma replied, “I really loved that painting. But what else could I do?”
She was right. Deep love brings about equally deep hatred.
“Water carries hatred to the mill of being deeply loved.”
Ah, Grandma, you put it so beautifully!
In the end, my aunt took me with her to the antique shop and got the painting back.
My aunt.
Our story starts with our names. While it starts there, it also ends, like all things that have a beginning. Which is precisely why I didn’t mention her name—I didn’t want her story to end. My story is unimportant. But she should have lived. You know that desire to “live on in name,” right? Well, it’s something along those lines.
I told you about my grandfather—the vegetable dealer—who wasn’t allowed to be part of my father’s side of the family. The one who died. When my aunt was born, he picked her up in her swaddling clothes with his large, calloused hands and said, “She’s beautiful, just like a rose.”
My grandma scowled at him when he said “like a rose.” It was a glare that said, “You, seller of vegetables, what the hell would you know about roses?!” Mother and daughter, of like mind, would go on to forge the most powerful alliance in the world. Deserving of men and evil!
“Just like a flower,” he added. “She should be named Rose.”
Appalled, my grandma said, “What kind of a name is that?!” She proposed the names of the twin girls she often saw at the park with their parents and whom she was quite fond of. That way, there wouldn’t be any room for the name that the vegetable seller wanted to give her. The name entry on
her birth certificate would be too full.
The vegetable seller wasn’t able to say, “Is this some kind of joke?”
But that didn’t mean it was the end of the struggle over how she would be named. Like me, she wound up with two names.
Not far back, I mentioned something when I was describing my dream. In fact, long before that, I said something as well. But first I’m going to tell you about something else. Another memory that flashes through my mind like tiny strikes of lightning: as my aunt was trying to console me with insipid statements like “What’s done is done” and “The dead can’t help us get through what’s happened,” I said, “I’ve started working on my novel again.”
“What?!” she exclaimed.
In those days, she was staying with us. She’d become fed up with rural life and the municipality’s so-called press and human relations department, so she moved back to Istanbul, and since her tenant couldn’t pay the rent, she wasn’t able to get a place of her own. So there we were, us three women, living together. For those of you who like timelines, my grandma’s place had been sold long before then. If you’re wondering what happened to the money, suffice to say that my father bought a boat and was trying his hand at a ridiculous venture: underwater archaeological tours. What happened next was nothing short of a “speak of the devil” moment, as just that morning she’d been having a bitter argument on the phone with my father.
“That son of a bitch is out on a boat! He’s hustled some rich tourists into taking a tour of some underwater ruins or something.”
I think it was my father who hung up, thereby concluding the conversation, because when my aunt tried to call back, he wouldn’t answer. The operator continued to try getting through to him, but eventually his number was closed to all incoming calls.
The Girl in the Tree Page 32
