Without a Country

by Kulin, Ayse

  “She’ll have to find her own path and her own happiness. Just don’t expect her to be like you. That would be asking for far too much.”

  Suzi got into bed and nestled against her husband. Demir pulled the blanket all the way up over her head so the early morning light wouldn’t get in her eyes. Her last thought before she fell asleep was, Perhaps Korhan will show this same tenderness to Sude.

  At the end of September, the Şilimans returned to Frankfurt, the Atalays returned to Ankara, and Sude stayed in Side with Korhan.

  Their first winter together wouldn’t be their last. In their early days, they did all the things Korhan had promised. They painted and cooked and made pickles. Sude had her violin sent from Ankara, and Korhan would accompany her on the flute. Sometimes they’d give impromptu concerts in the Roman amphitheater for tourists and locals. They’d get into Korhan’s beat-up old car, drive to nearby villages, and talk, talk, talk. Sude would tell Korhan things about herself she’d never put into words. It was during those long talks that she realized she’d never been in love with Enver and that she was absolutely devoted to her mother.

  And they made love.

  It didn’t take long for Sude to realize she wasn’t in love with Korhan. She liked him a lot and thought he was interesting, smart, and good with his hands. She and Korhan could talk about everything but politics. No, there was one other thing: the forbidden zones were Turkish politics and Korhan’s earlier life. He was an easy companion and a good listener. He had interesting ideas and helped her learn about herself. But Korhan preferred listening to talking, for some reason. The more Sude opened up to him, the more he seemed to retreat inside himself. By reading between the lines, she learned that her lover’s family was originally from the Balkans and that he’d studied archaeology. His house was full of books on art history and ancient civilizations, so that was no surprise.

  One piece of information that did astonish her was Korhan’s friendship with Suat Şakir, the brother of the novelist and travel writer Cevat Şakir. Korhan told her many stories about all the things he had learned as a kind of apprentice at Suat’s famous dinner table.

  He never told her about the woman he had loved and lost, but he didn’t need to.

  Two years passed, and if Sude ever worried that she was looking for herself in all the wrong places, she didn’t let on. Her family sighed and told themselves she seemed happy. At least she was living near the summer house, and they could see her for several months a year. And her friend seemed nice. A self-made, soft-spoken intellectual. By refusing to criticize their daughter’s relationship, Demir and Suzi prevented others—chiefly, Nazmi Bey and Bedia Hanım—from daring to make a fuss.

  After two years of wandering, music, relaxation, and chess, Korhan and Sude opened a little restaurant in the courtyard of the stone house, just in time for their third summer together. Korhan was the cook. He specialized in the local seafood, invented elaborate salads, and made liqueur out of mandarin oranges. Following her grandma Elsa’s recipes, Sude baked cakes with walnuts, cinnamon, and raisins, and sold them to the coffeehouse in the town square. That summer, their house was fragrant with vanilla and clove.

  The money they made was spent on winter trips to Egypt and India, where they met a roaming band of kindred spirits, the flower children out making love, not war.

  Suzi and Demir kept track of their daughter’s whereabouts through the postcards they received. Whenever they started to worry after not hearing from her for too long, they’d get a call from Side saying Sude and Korhan were back home.

  When Sude and Korhan weren’t traveling during the winter, they’d go into a form of hibernation. Korhan never read the paper or switched on the radio. He didn’t own a television, either. Winter was for reading, music, and resting.

  In 1976, Sude learned about the student occupations of the universities, the paramilitary attacks, the protests, the long lines for gas, and the Van earthquake from the television set at Grandpa Gerhard’s summer house. In 1977, she was watching the news in the town coffeehouse when she found out that at least thirty-four people had been killed by mysterious rooftop snipers during the May Day celebrations in Taksim Square. She didn’t know that the sermons delivered in some of the mosques were now calling on the pious to attack leftist demonstrators. Religious passions were being openly inflamed to serve a political agenda. Governments fell and were formed, power outages lasted for over five hours, and inflation was rampant.

  In 1978, terrorism got even bloodier. Homes and shops were firebombed in Kahramanmaraş. Clashes between the police and the activists trying to occupy a government building killed seventy-eight people.

  When Sude tried to bring up politics or current events with Korhan, he would cover his ears. “I don’t want to know,” he’d say. “There’s nothing I can do.” All Sude wanted was some words of comfort and the chance to share her worries with her lover. But it had become painfully obvious that Korhan wasn’t capable of that.

  Another winter passed and another summer came. New restaurants opened in Side, poaching many of Sude and Korhan’s customers. They couldn’t compete. The new restaurants didn’t bother to catch their own fish, hunt their own octopus, and gather their own mussels. That winter, they hadn’t made enough to go anywhere. Sude started spending more time at the town coffeehouse. All anyone could talk about was the new Kurdish terrorist organization led by Apo and the latest round of assassinations, this time of journalist Abdi İpekçi and of two outspoken professors—but at least they were talking. Sude couldn’t take any more quiet.

  By 1980, even Korhan was growing alarmed. With March came a memorandum, more bloodshed, eight devaluations over six months, another ultimatum from the army, and then, finally, on September 12, another coup.

  The street violence stopped, but tens of thousands had been rounded up and thrown into prison. Revenge for Apo was wreaked on the Kurdish population at large. It was a dark time, both in Turkey and in the stone house. They stopped playing music and chess. Sude started going over to her grandparents’ house more often, not just to water the plants but as an excuse to run into a few neighbors or a tradesman. Sometimes, she would sit in the summer house and watch TV for hours. News, entertainment, soap operas . . . it didn’t matter as long as she heard new voices.

  On one of those days, she switched on the TV to find a blond woman in a floor-length gown singing in a mournful alto in front of an orchestra: “I am swept away by the winds of destiny, to the horizons I say, tomorrow I’ll be on my way.”

  Those lines were stuck in Sude’s head for the rest of the day.

  The following morning, Sude got up, made some tea, carried it out into the courtyard, and looked up at the spot where Korhan had first seen her. In her mind’s eye, she could see the outline of a young woman with slumped shoulders. The very picture of misery.

  She didn’t like what she saw.

  She went to the bedroom and got dressed, tied her hair in a ponytail, packed a few items in a large leather saddlebag, and put her violin in its case. Then she went to the kitchen.

  Korhan was leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette.

  “I’m going, Korhan.”

  “To the market?”

  “To Frankfurt to live with my grandparents.”

  “Really?” He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Did something happen?”

  “Yes. I’ve decided to get a degree.”

  “Oh! I thought something bad had happened.”

  “No, God forbid. Grandpa’s eighty-six, but he’ll easily live to a hundred.”

  “What are you going to study?”

  “Art history.”

  Korhan tossed the cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. He glanced over at the amphitheater. Then he looked at the sky. “I knew you’d leave one day,” he said. “I’ve been expecting it. But why now?”

  “I received a sign that it was time to go.”

  “Do you believe in signs?”

  “Yes.”

 
“Well, then I wish you all the best.”

  Sude went over to her lover of the past six years and gave him a peck on the cheek. He put his arms around her, sniffed her hair, kissed her on the forehead, and held her for a few minutes.

  “Do you want me to drop you off at the bus station?” he asked.

  “That’s okay. I’ll walk.”

  “I’ll miss you,” Korhan said. “When you get your diploma, come back and celebrate with me.”

  “Okay. I’ll leave my violin here, then. We’ll play something by Mozart again.”

  “Come back to me,” Korhan said. “Travel, enjoy, learn, chill, and then come back to me.”

  Sude walked through the kitchen door and into the garden. She reached the garden gate without looking back.

  She kept walking. She considered saying good-bye to a couple of friends, but she didn’t want to have to explain why she was leaving. Taking deep breaths of the morning air, she went straight to the station. At the ticket office, they told her there weren’t any window seats left on the bus to Istanbul and warned that the only aisle seat was next to a man. For years now, conservative agitators had been trying to segregate unrelated women and men on bus rides. But this was Western Turkey, and people here were still resisting.

  After she’d sat down next to an elderly man, Sude closed her eyes and started thinking.

  Had she and Korhan just spent six wonderful years together, or had she let six years slip through her fingers? She couldn’t decide. She’d learned to play the flute, make cherry liqueur, take good photographs, run a small restaurant, and appreciate archaeological ruins. She’d also learned how to share her life with someone. But she was still very much on her own, sitting on the stone steps, with no idea of what was most important in life.

  She would go and find out.

  When the bus pulled out onto the highway, the old man turned and smiled at her.

  “Enjoy the journey, my girl,” he said.

  Part Three

  Time to Go

  April Fools

  The locals in Side thought I was a “love child.” But my mother insists I was conceived not in love, but in logic. If I’m a logical person today, however, it’s not thanks to either of my parents. I credit my great-grandfather Gerhard, a Jewish German doctor. Grandma Suzi agrees that I take after him. Otherwise, how could I, the offspring of a philosopher bum of a father and an aimless free spirit of a mother, have managed to get through medical school?

  I should give my mother her due. Her time with my father transformed her from a middle-class girl in search of comfort to an independent woman in search of freedom at all costs. And she’s not unintelligent. But what defines her in my mind is her status within our family as the only baby who was truly conceived in love. That, and the fact that she is unapologetically self-centered, just like my father.

  My parents have always thought only of themselves and have lived only for their own pleasure. They couldn’t care less about stepping on toes, about hurting feelings, about breaking hearts. When my mother chose to shack up with her lover in a small seaside town, she didn’t stop to think about what the consequences might be for her family. Nor did she spare a thought for my father the day she suddenly walked out on him.

  I asked her once why she’d done it. I must have been about fourteen.

  “Turkey had become unlivable,” she told me. “The power was always out, there were long lines for everything, and there wasn’t any coffee. And then, on top of that, there was a military coup! Communists, Kurds, and homosexuals were being persecuted, arrested, tortured . . . I couldn’t bear it, so I left.” But I already knew that those things had happened in the big cities, not in Side. Plus, at the time she left, nobody knew about the widespread torture. In short, she was making things up. The reality is that one morning she realized she was fed up with the man she had been living with for six years. So she left him.

  My mother went to Germany to live with her grandparents.

  She left my father’s home in the midst of spectacular ruins and, finding that contemporary art was all the rage in her new circle, decided she was just crazy about it, too. First, she got an undergraduate degree in art history; then she went to a doctoral program in England and traveled the world, doing research and writing her dissertation. It was called “The Social Impact of the Arts.” After that, still feeling restless, off she went to New York, where she became a guest lecturer at Parson’s. Along the way, she found time to fall in love. She followed a colleague and lover to South America, where they lived together for a time.

  As my mother flitted from adventure to adventure, the country she’d left behind was being transformed. The new prime minister, Turgut Özal, opened his insular but self-sufficient country to the world. The monetary policy was recalibrated. The invisible hand of the market was given free rein. The children selling black-market Marlboros on street corners and the men making home deliveries of bootleg whiskey found themselves out of a job. Even the dustiest corner grocer started carrying international brands. Turks became enamored with sliced pineapple and Chiquita bananas, a giant, flavorless version of the sweet fingerlings grown along the coast near places like Side. The orchards near the coast between Antalya and Mersin were uprooted, and five-star, all-inclusive resorts were erected. On the bright side, the local women, whose share of the family inheritance had always been the salt marshes and rocky plots least suited for farming, discovered that they were sitting on gold mines.

  In the meantime, the Islamist movement bided its time. Even back then, there were those who suspected that the invisible hand pulling those particular strings belonged to Uncle Sam.

  I learned about some of my history from Rozi, who, even though she wasn’t a real relative, was treated like a member of our family after her mother died in the Lape Mental Hospital.

  My mother never visited Turkey in those years. She learned about the country she’d left behind from the occasional letter and during rare meet-ups overseas with family and friends.

  She wasn’t at all pleased with what they told her.

  Side wasn’t protected from the new Turkey. Investors had stepped in and concrete monstrosities were built. It started attracting a different kind of tourist, too: people who didn’t care for the local food, culture, or even the folk music.

  The one constant in Side was Korhan. A Robinson Crusoe marooned in a rising sea of change, he stayed in his stone house and painted, cooked, and read. I picture him in those days as a kind of lean tomcat stretched out in the sun, oblivious to the world. That would all change, of course, the day Mother came back into his life.

  How did that happen, you might wonder?

  Like this: My mother had decided she was weary of travel and was “totally into” Eastern philosophy. She was literally sitting in the lotus position on a mountaintop in Nepal, pondering the meaning of life, when it hit her.

  She knew she wasn’t interested in money, or becoming a famous professor, like her grandfather, or becoming a nature lover in permanent hibernation, like her ex. There was a hole in her soul, a void that only the most precious gift of all could fill.

  Unconditional love.

  And there was only way to get it. A child!

  That is, me.

  The seed for this child should come not from just any old lover or a sperm donor, but from the man who had first taught her the importance of being herself.

  She was in her midthirties. She was running out of time. She returned to Side.

  I’ve heard the story a million times. She retells it every time I see her.

  My mother supposedly went straight to Korhan’s house. The gate was closed and locked. She climbed over it and landed on her feet in the garden. The kitchen door, which they’d always left open, was locked, too. She went to the coffeehouse in the square, but it had turned into a pizzeria. It was the off-season, and the seedy souvenir shops now cluttering the area around the ruins were mostly shuttered. She didn’t recognize Side anymore. Everything had changed. In o
ne of the narrow alleys, she found Şükrü’s barber shop. He was sitting on a stool out front, smoking a cigarette. Immediately recognizing my mother, he jumped up and told her she’d gotten even more beautiful. She accepted his offer of tea and sat down in one of the empty chairs. After a few sips, she asked about Korhan. Apparently, he’d left on a trip to Vietnam two months earlier.

  “He’ll be back soon,” Şükrü told her.

  When she asked if there was anyone in Korhan’s life, Şükrü laughed. “They stay with him for a night or two,” he said. “But there hasn’t been anyone serious since you left.”

  My mother dug a little deeper, not about what Korhan was doing now, but about the man he was before she met him.

  “A lot of people have come in and out of this shop over the years,” Şükrü began, twirling his mustache. “I’ve heard things. Something about a motorcycle accident. Something about a wife. They say she was pregnant at the time. Korhan survived, but he was badly hurt. A friend of his told me he was driving the motorcycle when it happened.”

  So that explained the scar on his chest and the one on his cheek half-hidden by his beard. He blamed himself. That explained a lot.

  My mother let herself into my great-grandparents’ summer house and waited. Every evening, she’d go to the Roman amphitheater, sit on the stone steps, and watch as the sky blushed pink.

  Near the end of the third week, the sun was sinking into the sea, dragging my mother’s plans with it, when a sound came from behind a column: Click, click, click.

  There he was, shaggy as ever, his skin still the color of copper, wearing a ragged T-shirt, a pair of cargo shorts, and a huge smile. But his hair was no longer a light brown with streaks of blond. It was a faded mop of brown and gray. And the smile accentuated the lines around his mouth and his eyes.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  My mother got up and said, “Have you got any of that cherry liqueur?”

  “I sure do. I always have a bottle set aside just in case you show up,” Korhan said.