It had been a month since Pembe and Derin had been killed. I wondered if I’d managed to pull myself together a little, and concluded that I had. At the very least, I wanted to talk. I wanted to talk without listening to what the other person had to say. Because of the “golden shot” confession I’d made to my aunt not long before, I was feeling ashamed. Like a complete loser. I wanted my relationship with my aunt to be as it had been before.
“Perhaps,” I said, “instead of messing around with the novel, I should go on that trip I’d been dreaming about.” I brought it up in the hope that it would reopen the lines of communication.
We were sitting at the kitchen table, which bore the remnants of the breakfast we’d just had. No longer did my aunt smoke her cigarettes huddled up by the exhaust hood—now she puffed away everywhere.
I could tell she wanted to lash out at me: “Forget about that book. You have to be a good person in order to write. Honest, conscientious.”
“Really? Are we going to write a new constitution?” That was how I wanted to respond, but I opted to remain silent.
“There’s no substance in your writing. That teacher of yours—Özlem Hanım—she was right. The other night I couldn’t sleep, but since there wasn’t anything else to read, I took a look over the copy of your book you’d given me. It’s complete crap. I’d even say drivel. You may have thought that you were toying with the reader, but what you wound up doing was bullshit.”
“For example?”
I had to force the question out of my mouth. And it burned my lips on the way out.
“For example . . . you describe something as if it were real, but then you say it was a dream. That’s the cheapest trick you can use. It’s like when stupid kids do something wrong and then say it was a joke. I despise writers who do that in their work.”
“Özlem Hanım said the same thing.”
“Meaning that she understands how things really operate.”
Who doesn’t understand—right, Grandma? Who doesn’t understand . . . True, the ending deserved a sound volley of verbal abuse, but who cares. We’ll keep womanhood for ourselves.
I wanted to say to my aunt, “Please don’t hate me too.” But I couldn’t. Sometimes our silences express so much more than the things we say. At the very least, I hope that is the case.
My aunt didn’t have to commit suicide.
Okay, so she did it, but I wish that her body hadn’t been found so soon. I know that may sound strange, but try to curb your indignant anger. There’s a certain amount of legitimacy to what I said. If her body had never been found, we could’ve gone on hoping that perhaps she was still alive somewhere and would reappear in our lives one day. Like the daughter of Muhterem Hanım, who swapped properties with my grandma. Muhterem Hanım’s daughter was a flight attendant. Her plane crashed in the Sea of Marmara, but her body never was found. Every time someone knocked on Muhterem Hanım’s door, her heart would fill with hope. She even wrote a letter to Sarah Jessica Parker, who looked a lot like her daughter, because she thought that maybe she’d washed up on the shores of America, having lost her memory.
It is good to hope.
It is good to have desires.
I wish that I had hope and desires. I’m here because I don’t have either.
When I found out that my aunt was dead, the first emotion I felt was anger, not sadness.
At the time, I’d recently lost my two best friends, had one foot in the grave already, and hadn’t recovered at all; on the contrary, I’d been multiplied and divided, even pared back to my square root, so how could she set off another bomb in my life? What was the point of committing suicide just then? Not long before, we’d found the building developer on Facebook. His pics revealed a man of impressive horizontal girth.
She cried, “What’s become of him?!”
“Oh wow,” I said. “And look at you, fit as ever. If he saw you, he’d crap his pants.”
“Judging by this picture, it looks like he already has.” And she was right.
He was now married with three kids, and appeared to have a bale of hay sagging in the rear of his trousers.
“I wonder what it would’ve been like if he and I had gotten married?”
I wondered: When you were seventeen years old, why couldn’t you leave him out there in the snow? In that way, how are you any different from my aunt Hülya? Right, she wears a headscarf, and you don’t. But the raw materials are the same. If only your tenant’s TV series had caught on, if only the ratings had been better. Then he would’ve paid the rent and the three of us wouldn’t have been living together in a shoebox like broke students. In those days, we weren’t on speaking terms with my aunt Hülya. If we had been, we could’ve at least asked for some logistical support. There was that time my mother ate at a café in Cihangir and sent the bill to Aunt Hülya. She didn’t pay the bill, so we were never able to go back there again. The café happened to be on our street, which didn’t really make any difference; there were now more cafés than roads in Cihangir. The neighborhood had changed a lot. My mother once saw someone famous in one of those cafés and, after running up to her table, introduced herself as a dietician, then said, “If you’d like, I can help you lose weight.” She placed her business card on the table. The star gagged for a moment on the piece of cheesecake she was eating and then proceeded to ignore my mother, which the others in the café took to mean, “Get this woman away from me.” Within seconds, the waiters showed up and frog-marched my mother straight out the door. She lost it for a few seconds: “Whose damn neighborhood do you think this is? I was here a long time before you! Instead of going to the bathroom at home, we used to use this place. It was always empty. And now you’re throwing me out of this place where I’d come to take a shit?”
The topic at hand, however, is not my mother. It’s my aunt. So, Mother, would you please step aside? Please take a seat right over here.
So, to continue:
My aunt slowly approached the threshold of suicide in the same way that Yunus and I walked atop the wall: tiny, tiny steps. Be that as it may, there were other options aside from death. In my opinion, it happened suddenly. I decided that I did the right thing by not telling her about my grandma’s secrets, the stories that she told me while lying on her deathbed . . .
Secrets are bombs that slam into our homes. One had blasted the hell out of our place already.
That night my aunt would disappear from our lives forever, she came and kissed me on the cheek, which may have meant that she didn’t want to part on bad terms. She left her phone. I answered it whenever it rang. Just the day before, she’d applied for the position of editor at a newspaper and they were calling her in for an interview.
After twenty-four hours had passed, the news editor and police reporter who worked for the paper that had fired my aunt offered to help find her. But there was no need for help. No need to search. There was no need for me to mumble that I thought I saw her jump into the crevasse between the two retaining walls, nor any need for anyone to probe that chasm between the apartment buildings, which purportedly led all the way out to sea, a story she herself had reported on years earlier. No, my aunt would be found of her own accord.
Her fate was to be caught in a fisherman’s net like a beautiful fish.
The fisherman would say, “I thought I’d snared a really nice fish. Forty years ago, I used to be able to catch cod. I thought that’s what had found its way into my net.”
The fact that the fisherman was familiar with cod, could properly identify a cod when he saw a cod, was a miracle of sorts—it reflected a touch of elegance, a certain refinement. Even my aunt’s death had an air of sophistication to it.
“Or a swordfish. I thought it could be a swordfish as the net churned through the sea toward me.”
We were at the police station in Istanbul’s Hisar district. From there, they took us to the Sarıyer Public Hospital. “Are you going to identify her body?” My mother had fainted at the hospital. My father, deepl
y tanned from being out at sea all the time, simply stood there, staring at one of the hospital walls as if it were the Wall of Shame, becoming an inseparable part of it in the process. It was left in my hands. The fisherman explained how he pulled her from the Bosporus so poetically: “I took her in my arms, just as I had taken my beautiful bride into my arms years and years ago. I held her and pulled that beautiful woman out of the water.”
That’s why I wasn’t scared of seeing the body of my aunt. To the contrary, I was glad I was going to have a chance to see her one last time.
My aunt was lying stretched out on the table. The fisherman had been right; the water had not caused her to swell nor inflicted any harm on her. Even down beneath the waves, she’d remained untouched. A swift current had swept her along and protected her. It was a shame that the goodness she’d deserved in life had only found her in death. Quickly she’d traversed a safe path from life to death. The current had pulled one of her boots from her feet, but the other Isabel Marant remained . . . My aunt . . . Beauty. Courage.
When the seller of lottery tickets, who also sold iced almonds, said to her, “Ma’am, you’re an extremely beautiful woman,” he couldn’t have been more right.
“I’m a woman. A lady, if you prefer. But a ‘ma’am’ is something I’m not and will never be.”
My grandma, aunt, mother, and I were at a restaurant. A spontaneous night out together for drinks.
As she popped a few almonds into her mouth, my grandma said, “So, you’re not a ‘ma’am,’ eh? Well, don’t be so hard on the guy.”
I disagree, Aunt. Let them go on being what they are. And you stay just as you are. In all your beauty.
I wrote to the developer on Facebook to tell him that my aunt was dead.
“Had she been sick?”
“She committed suicide.”
“What happened?”
What I’m giving you here is the corrected version, as his messages had a lot of spelling mistakes.
“She jumped into the sea.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. May God give her peace. She was such a good person.”
Who knows what thoughts were running through the mind of Mr. Smile, Mr. Beautiful Thirty-Two Teeth, what memories he was dwelling on.
That beauty sitting up in bed in the room at the Pera Palace Hotel with a view of the snowstorm. That beauty’s squeals of pleasure as they played in the snow at Fındıklı Park. That delicious thing, like a burst grape, in the back seat of the Mercedes on Lovers’ Hill. That beauty, love itself.
I got straight to the point: “You’re a moron!”
“What gives you the right to say that?!”
“It would’ve been better if you’d taken my aunt as your wife and moved in with us. All of Cihangir would’ve been yours for the taking. You could’ve torn the entire neighborhood down and rebuilt it as you wanted.”
He said, “I was too scared of that witchy grandmother of yours.”
There was no way I was going to let him go on with what he was saying—I couldn’t bear yet another bomb slamming into our home.
What would I do if he started to say something like, “I bought the flowers and the chocolates, and I was on my way to ask for your aunt’s hand in marriage, but that Perihan witch, ah, that hag!”?
So I blocked him on the spot. But that wasn’t enough, so I deleted him and filed a complaint. But then I couldn’t stop myself, so I went to his excavation business on the other side of the city in Ümraniye, where he sells sand and gravel. It turned out just as I expected it would.
“What did your aunt tell you about me?” he asked with the smug confidence of someone who believes themselves to be unforgettable. Adjusting that “heartthrob,” thirty-two-toothed smile beneath his mustache to creepy leer mode, he stirred his glass of tea, the tassel of the prayer beads around his wrist constantly threatening to dip into the glass.
“Nothing,” I said, and started heading toward the door.
As I was stepping out, he asked, “By the way, how old are you?” I think the nitwit was considering the possibility that I might be the illegitimate fruit of his affair with my aunt.
“Things like that only happen in the movies. I’m not your daughter, dumbass.” With that, I walked away.
Some things are best left alone. You shouldn’t dwell on them because, if you do, you’ll end up being scooped up in the briny deep by a sand excavator and dumped into a construction site to be mixed into concrete. And as a result, you’ll be the death of that building when the concrete crumbles, eaten away by the salt. That’s just how it is.
At the end of it all, I said farewell to everyone. I did it up here in the treetops. I said farewell to all the people in my life. Every single one of them.
32
FOLLOWERS
When I opened my eyes on October 4, 2015, I was happy.
Yunus had come. He’d made his way all the way to the stork’s nest. That was the second time he displayed such courage. While he may have started getting used to being up in the treetops, as you know, he usually waited somewhere where it was safe. Since the day when he found me in the grip of a fever, this was the first time he’d dared come all the way out to my nestside.
I lay there for a while, looking at him, thinking, Is this a dream too? I was like a baby in her cradle, looking up at the faces of the people dotingly hovering over her. Yunus gently stroked my hair.
That’s when I realized that his face was battered and bruised.
Even though I had strong suspicions that I was dreaming, I still bolted upright.
“What happened to you?”
“A little tussle.”
“With who?”
“Who do you think?”
He nodded in the direction of the hotel.
“They really did a number on you.”
“This is what happens to you when you learn how to fight by watching movies.”
“Didn’t you grow up on the streets?”
“Yeah, but we didn’t fight each other much. Turns out I don’t know what to do when you’re getting beaten. I didn’t get in a single punch!”
“That’s a shame. But what started it all?”
“That’s why I’m here, to tell you all about it . . .”
Yunus spoke for the most part, and I listened. He was still wound up and nervous. He said they could come after us at any minute, maybe try to track us down. I decided it would be best not to tell him about the nightmare I had.
He said that he’d managed to pass his entire salary along to his father.
“But why did you do that?”
“He needs it. He’s got a lot of debts.”
“Because?”
“The banks don’t like to give people like us loans. No social security, no guarantees. We can’t document the money we make by the sweat of our brow. Even when we tell them that a debt is a debt and we’ll pay it back, they don’t believe us.”
“They don’t pay your social security at the hotel?”
Yunus shook his head.
“Look at what this country’s coming to!”
I wanted to shut down that dull, dry talk about social security. Still, isn’t it strange that people have to live in such a state of uncertainty? Is that any way to live? But people do it.
“Because he couldn’t get a loan from a bank, my dad went to a loan shark. He didn’t have any other choice. We make payment after payment, but we can’t pay off the debt. We’re stuck.”
“I see . . . So, what happened at the hotel?”
“Those pricks working security came pounding on our door, thinking they could force me to hand over the money. But there wasn’t a single kuruş left. So they beat me instead.”
Here’s an inventory of the external damage that had been inflicted on Yunus: he had a split lip, a swollen eye, and a busted eyebrow that was held shut with one stitch. Completely at ease, as though he was unaware of the damage, he quickly went on: “I thought a lot about the situation. I said, ‘Come on, Yunus, d
on’t be afraid of those guys. Go to the head manager and explain what happened.’ And that’s exactly what I did. After listening to what I had to say, he watched the security camera footage.”
“The footage of us?”
“Yes.”
Which meant that they had all seen us kissing on the fire escape. Yunus seemed embarrassed.
“They watched up until you went into the room and then as you left the room, noting the times and date. They even started watching the other employees who were going into rooms and using them. Now they’re screwed too. My guess is that they were thinking, ‘You guys were having orgies and didn’t invite us?’ Or something like, ‘You’re planning to rob us.’ That’s how their minds work. It’s always dirty business with them. Then they asked me where you went after you returned to the wall. I said that I didn’t know.”
He pursed his lips as if he really didn’t know and shrugged his shoulders.
“Then they asked me why you used the fire escape to get into the hotel.”
“What did you say?”
“Because you were sneaking in.”
Not a very illuminating answer.
“After that, they tried to figure out where you could have gone from the top of the wall. Since they would never think that a girl like you would want to live in the trees, they decided that the only possibility was that you used the steps—if they can be called steps—that lead down into the tea garden. They think that’s how you came and went.”
“So I escaped.”
“Right. I used those steps to get up onto the top of the wall today. I won’t be able to get to the top of the wall using the fire escape anymore, because they fired me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“There’s more,” Yunus went on to say. “They’re going to tear down those steps I used today and put up a barrier between the fire escape and the wall. They were surprised, because they thought you’d somehow climbed up the wall. ‘That’s quite a girl. Good on her.’ That’s what the manager said.”
The Girl in the Tree Page 33
