by Moris Farhi
‘If I knew, I could try and prevent it from happening ...’
She stroked my cheek. ‘You’re so sweet. It’s very vague at the moment. And I may have got it all wrong. But confusion – uncertainty – doesn’t help. Just drives me mad all the more.’
‘Can’t I do something? Help in some way?’
‘Can you make me go to sleep? And never let me wake up?’
‘If we saw each other more ...’
She kissed me on my lips. ‘Take care. Always.’
Then she ran off.
Two days later, Germany invaded Poland.
Winter set in. And it proved to be one of the coldest winters of the century. Temperatures in some parts of Anatolia dropped below minus 30 degrees centigrade.
On 26 December 1939 my mother went to Erzincan, in eastern Turkey.
As I mentioned before, my mother had trained as a midwife. She had so excelled in this specialization that she had soon surpassed most of the obstetricians who had been sent to study abroad. In 1938, following glowing recommendations, the ministry of health commissioned her to structure a nationwide training programme for midwifery.
The principal recommendation for my mother had come from none other than Professor Albert Eckstein, a German Jewish paediatrician who had been given asylum from Hitler’s Germany by Atatürk himself and who, over the years, had attained the status of saint in Ankara’s Nümune Hospital – the institution that serves as a model for every hospital in the country. It was through the auspices of this professor that my mother had procured the oxygen cylinder when I had contracted diphtheria for the second time and, indeed, on his advice that my doctor had performed the tracheotomy. I know this because Gül once told me he had been one of the doctors she had telepathically begged to save me.
(Atatürk’s offer of refuge to those persecuted by the Nazis – an offer that not only saved countless European artists, academics and intellectuals from certain death, but also enabled them to pursue their careers – emulated the way Sultan Beyazιt had opened the empire’s doors, almost 500 years earlier, to vast numbers of Jews and Moors fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Professor Eckstein, I should add, had been initially targeted by the Third Reich more for being an anti-Nazi – which in those days was equated with communism – than for being a Jew. As my father once remarked, the fact that the good professor was greatly esteemed by a Turkish administration that had outlawed its country’s own Communist Party, and imprisoned most of its members, gives an idea of the paradoxes that ruled – and still rule – Turkey.)
Inevitably, my mother had to travel a great deal. Though this was hardly to my liking, my father accepted it with equanimity. A research botanist at the Agricultural Academy in Çiftlik, on the outskirts of Ankara, he understood only too well the priorities for a nation trying to jump from the eighteenth century into the twentieth in a few decades. So the two of them turned every homecoming into a celebration and enjoyed a marriage that was the envy of their friends. (Sadly, to this day, my paternal grandparents will tell whoever chooses to listen that my mother’s all too frequent absences seriously hampered my development by diverting my interest to sport instead of good old-fashioned commerce. But then they are so determined to camouflage their Dönme origins that they would criticize any act of non-conformity. And of course they have the field to themselves. My maternal grandparents, also Dönme and said to be enlightened, were killed during the battle for Izmir in 1922.)
As I said before, my mother went to Erzincan on 26 December. She arrived there at about 9 PM – a fact my father established from the log of the bus that had brought her from Erzurum. Almost immediately, she gave a lecture at the city’s hospital. The next morning she was scheduled to address a group of middle-school graduates interested in a career in midwifery.
At roughly the time of her arrival in Erzincan, Gül rushed into our apartment screaming that my mother was in danger.
Weeping and agitated, she urged my father and grandparents to contact my mother immediately and tell her that she had to leave Erzincan and travel as far north as she could.
Of course, my father and grandfather knew about Gül’s prophetic gifts. But they could not bring themselves to accept that my mother was in mortal danger.
I did. So did my grandmother, who believed in all things occult. And together we prevailed on my father and grandfather to try and contact my mother.
They rushed out to find a telephone – not an easy task on a bitter winter’s night in Istanbul in 1939 – while we prayed that the country’s antiquated telephone system would somehow defy the elements and get through to the mountainous east.
About 11 PM, while my father and grandfather were still out, Gül quietened down. She turned to us, utterly exhausted. ‘It’s too late now. She hasn’t got time to run away.’
I tried not to believe her. But my strength drained away. I sank on to the floor and curled up.
Gül crawled to a corner and stared into the void.
After an hour of nightmarish silence, my father and grandfather returned. They had scoured all Istanbul in vain for a telephone. Finally, my grandfather had thought of going to his Masonic Lodge, which had a switchboard. They had duly woken up the night-watchman and, after what had seemed an eternity, had finally contacted my mother at her lodging. Though she had sounded fine, my father thought she had been perturbed by the call.
Gül made no comment. She withdrew further into herself.
We dragged ourselves to bed.
At about 2 AM Gül started screaming again. ‘She’s dead! Crushed! Dead! Dead!’
We jumped out of bed in panic.
My grandmother, always calm under pressure, switched on the radio.
And after many torturous hours of shuttling between hope and despair, we started hearing about the Erzincan earthquake. Eight on the Richter scale – a mere one degree less than the maximum. Striking at 1:57 AM. Lasting for fifty-two seconds – an eternity for those caught in it. One survivor described it as the Devil shaking the earth as if it were a die in a heated game of backgammon. All of Erzincan and many surrounding villages razed to the ground. Telephone and telegraph lines destroyed – hence the length of time for the news to get through. Regions stretching hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre also affected. (In Ankara, a relative’s son, aged four, squealed with joy as his cot was shunted from wall to wall, believing that the tremors were a new game.)
The death toll reached 33,000. Approximately 120,000 homes had been destroyed.
My mother’s body was never recovered. The earth where her lodging was located had opened up, swallowing all the buildings; then, as if contrite at what it had done, it had closed up again, barely showing a fissure.
I only saw Gül once in the weeks that followed. She came to show me some newspaper clippings which reported that broadcasts from Nazi Germany were calling the Erzincan disaster divine retribution; perhaps now Turkey would agree to join the Axis forces and cut off relations with Britain and France. Though I could see that Gül, as a Jew, was extremely disturbed by these demented rantings from the Nazis, I did not have the sensitivity to soothe her. I was too involved with my own grief, too much in pursuit of the desperate efforts children make in order to accept life without a parent.
Then, on Saturday 3 February 1940, I received a brief letter from Gül: ‘God be praised! I know how to stop seeing.’
I rushed to her house. Her mother told me she was spending the weekend with her friend, Handan. They intended to go on a film binge.
I went to Handan’s apartment. Gül had not spent the night there. In fact, Handan had not seen her for a couple of days.
On an impulse, I went to the park where the summer fair takes place. Like a sleepwalker I went to the bench where we had sat and had ice-creams.
Gül was there. Stretched out. Like Snow White. Peaceful. Seemingly asleep. But preserved in hoary ice. She had frozen to death.
She had died smiling. Or did I imagine that?
2: Musa
Lentils in Paradise
Paradise was Sofi’s gift to Selim and me. She took us there frequently. I, Musa, was about seven; Selim a year or so older. Paradise was the women’s hamam, or Turkish baths, in Ankara.
I can still see Sofi watching out of the corner of her eye as Selim and I surrendered to ecstasy – smiling, I’m convinced, under the scar that ran diagonally across her mouth. (Years later, Eleftheria, my Greek lover – her name means ‘freedom’ – who took great pride in being many women all at once, called our ecstatic state ‘the sorcery of ten dances’, a heavy Hellenic pun on ‘decadence’.)
Sofi cherished us as if we were her own; and we loved her just as much. In fact, I can now admit, we loved her more than we loved our mothers. We reasoned that since she was under no obligation to hold us dear, the fact that she did meant we were worthy of affection. Consequently, we never believed the loose talk from parents and neighbours that, given the law of nature whereby every woman is ruled by the maternal instinct, Sofi, destined to remain unmarried and barren, needed, perforce, to treasure every child that came her way, even curs like Selim and me. (I remember a neighbour’s refrain: ‘A virgin she may be, but who’d take a lass with a scarred face?’ And the curs, Selim and I, shouting in unison – prudently, out of earshot – ‘Us! As soon as we’re older!’)
Sofi was one of those young women from the Anatolian backwoods who, having ended up with no relatives and no home, found salvation in domestic service in the cities. Often payment for such work amounted to no more than the person’s keep and a bed in a corner of a hallway; wages, if they existed, seldom exceeded a miserable lira or two a month. But in the early 1940s, when Turkey’s policy of neutrality in the Second World War had brought on severe economic problems, even this sort of employment was hard to find; the sizeable metropolises, Istanbul, Izmir, Adana and the new capital, Ankara, were rife with chilling stories of the misadventures that had befallen many maidens from the countryside who had failed to find just such a job.
My parents, I’m glad to say, paid a decent wage despite the constant struggle to make ends meet. For Sofi was an Armenian, a member of a people that, like the Jews, had seen more than its share of troubles. Sofi herself, as her premature white hair and deep scar testified, was a survivor of the Passion suffered by the Armenians under the Ottoman regime during the First World War.
Selim and I never accepted the distinction that Sofi was a servant. With the wisdom of young minds we dismissed the term as derogatory. We called her abla, ‘elder sister’. At first – since Selim was not my brother, but my friend who lived next door – I insisted that she should be known as my abla, but Sofi, who introduced us to everything that is noble in humankind, took this opportunity to teach us about true justice. Stroking my forehead gently – while Selim, recycling some doorbells we had found in a dump, rigged up a telegraph system with which we planned to disseminate her supreme message to the whole world – she impressed upon us that since Selim and I had been inseparable since our toddling days, we should have acquired the wisdom to expel from our souls such petty impulses as greed and possessiveness. She belonged to both of us, what was more natural than that? Which meant ‘all for one and one for all’. So hear, hear, everybody! Follow our example! And, naturally, share all you have. Amen.
And hear, hear, everybody! Eat well, build the world and grow wings naturally, like the silkworm that feasts on mulberry leaves, weaves a cocoon and emerges as a butterfly. Amen again. ‘Naturally’ was her favourite word. And let the eye behold all that is good and beautiful, naturally, the way water runs. Amen.
And hear, hear, in paradise our eyes did behold, naturally, the way water runs, all that was good and beautiful.
The event that paved the way to the women’s baths occurred, almost as if preordained, the moment Sofi set foot in our house.
She had arrived from the eastern Anatolian province of Kars. The journey – mostly on villagers’ carts; occasionally, using up her few kuruş, on dilapidated trucks – had taken her about a week. And for another week, until she had heard on the grapevine that she might try knocking on my mother’s door, she had slept in cold cellars procured for her, often without the owners’ knowledge, by sympathetic countrywomen. She had washed in the drinking fountains of the open-air market where she had gone daily in search of scraps; but, lacking any spare clothing, she had not changed her sweat-encrusted rags. So when she arrived at our flat, she had come enveloped in the pungent smell of apprehension and destitution.
My mother, seasoned in matters of disinfection – she had attended to my father whenever he had come on leave from the army – immediately gathered a change of clothes from her own wardrobe and guided Sofi to the shower, our only fixture for washing. (The shower, I should explain, though an object of pride for my father for being a modern Western appliance, was a primitive affair: rigged over the oriental toilet, it comprised a tiny rose – spurting the thinnest of sprays – crowning a couple of rickety pipes one of which always rusted in the summer because hot water was available only in winter.)
We had hardly settled in the sitting-room – I remember we had visitors at the time: my parents, Selim’s parents, some neighbours and, of course, Selim and me – when we heard Sofi laughing. My mother, who had taken to Sofi instantly, looked well satisfied, no doubt interpreting the laughter as a happy omen.
Moments later, the laughter turned into high-pitched giggles. Giggles became shrieks; and shrieks escalated into screams.
As we all ran into the hallway fearing that Sofi had scalded herself – she couldn’t have because it was summer and there was no hot water – the toilet door flew open and Sofi burst out, wet and naked and hysterical.
It was Selim’s father who managed to contain her. While my mother asked repeatedly what had happened, he threw a raincoat over Sofi and held her in a wrestler’s grip until her screams decelerated into tearful, hiccupy giggles. Eventually, after sinking to the floor and curling up, she managed to register my mother’s question. As if relating an encounter with a jinn, she answered, in a hoarse whisper, ‘It tickles! That water tickles!’
The ensuing laughter, expressing as much relief as mirth, should have offended her; it didn’t. Sofi, as we soon learned, believed that laughter had healing qualities and revered anybody who had the gift of humour. But it had never occurred to her that she herself could be comical. The revelation thrilled her. And, as she later admitted to me, it was her ability to make us laugh that had convinced her to adopt us as her kin. Yet her decision to join our household could not have been easy. Having classified the shower as an infernal contraption, she must every day have dreaded going to the toilet and squatting, as she had to, beneath its silent and threatening head.
The afternoon ended well. When Sofi, hesitantly, asked whether she could finish washing by the kitchen tap, my mother – truly a golden-hearted person, whatever her shortcomings – promptly took her, together with the women visitors, to the hamam.
Thereafter Sofi became a devotee of the baths. And she used any excuse, including the grime Selim and I regularly gathered in the streets, to take us there. My mother never objected to this indulgence: entry to the hamam was cheap – children went free – and Sofi, Selim and I, sparkling after so much soap and water, always appeared to confirm the adage, ‘Only the clean are embraced by God.’
In those days, Turkish baths were seldom able to maintain their Ottoman splendour. The neglect was particularly evident in Ankara. This once humble townlet which, with the exception of an ancient castle on a hillock, had barely been touched by history, was rising fast as the symbol of the new, modern Turkey. As a result, some ‘progressive’ elements saw the baths as totems of oriental recidivism and sought to reduce their popularity by promoting Western-style amenities.
Yet, here and there, the mystique prevailed. After all, how could the collective memory forget that, for centuries, the Sublime Porte’s spectacular baths had entranced and overawed flocks of discerning Europeans?
And so
the tradition survived: discreetly in some places; openly, even defiantly, in others. And when new baths were built – as was the case with most of the establishments in Ankara – every attempt was made to adhere to the highest norms.
Two cardinal standards are worth mentioning.
The first predicates that the primary material for the inner sanctum, the washing enclave itself, must be marble, the stone which, according to legend, shelters the friendly breezes and which, for that very reason, is chosen by kings for their palaces and by gods for their temples. (There used to be a rumour in the early fifties that a particular establishment in Ankara, exclusive to diplomats and members of parliament, had, in an effort to outshine all its competitors, laid dramatic marbles ingrained with shadings of pink, blue and silver specially imported from countries with strange names.)
The second standard stipulates the following architectural features: a dome, a number of sturdy columns and a belt of high windows; for this combination will suffuse the inner sanctum with a glow suggestive of the mystic aura of a mosque. Moreover, the high windows, while distilling Apollonian light, also serve to deter voyeurs. (Despite this last provision, stories about spidermen who had scaled the heady reaches of the windows for glimpses of bathers were commonplace. I remember the gruesome tale of three delikanlι – the word, often used affectionately, literally means ‘youths with maddened blood’ – who, having climbed up, for a bet, to the windows of a hamam in Konya on a day when the temperature was minus 35 degrees centigrade, had stuck to the walls and frozen to death; rescuers had had to wait till spring to peel them off the dome.)
Our women’s hamam, which adhered to these standards, claimed to be one of the best in the land. For Selim and me, it was the epitome of luxury.
Let me take you in, step by step.
