Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  We stayed out in the hot garden all through the morning, and when we went into the dining-room for luncheon, my mother looked odd and lonely seated alone at the great table. We children and İnci used to eat at a smaller table in a little recess, and all through that meal I was conscious of my mother as she toyed with her food and poured many glasses of water for herself from a crystal carafe. In the middle of luncheon Feride came hurriedly in, announcing that the doctor had arrived, and without any ceremony, and leaving her meal half touched, my mother left the room. İnci called to Feride and asked what was the matter, but Feride, with a quick, warning look at me, said she did not know.

  During the afternoon my father was sent for and I remember his thin worried face as he passed me, without being aware of me, where I stood in the hall.

  İnci took us to the playroom for it was too hot to play any more in the garden. I vaguely recall playing with bricks, with Mehmet crawling over a large mat on the floor and İnci sitting in a rocker by the window, a pile of mending by her side. We were all listless with the heat. After a little while my father came for me and, picking me up in his arms, said: ‘Grandfather is very ill but he wants to see you. Will you be a good, brave man and come with me?’

  I nodded dumbly and we left the room together, the tall young man and the solemn little boy who was once again overcome by the events of the morning.

  In my grandfather’s room it was twilight. The windows stood open but the cool green shutters had been fastened against the glare of the afternoon sun.

  My mother was seated on one side of the bed, holding a silver pitcher which I knew to be filled with water from the grave of Muhammed. I knew also that this precious water was only to be used in times of extreme emergency. My grandfather had once made the pilgrimage to Mecca and had brought this water back with him and afterwards he was always known by the title of Haci, signifying he had been to Mecca.

  My grandmother stood by one of the windows, her eyes straining through the little spaces in the shutters. The fierce white glare from the gardens must have hurt her eyes yet she seemed oblivious to it. She stood perfectly still, like a statue, and the tears poured unchecked down her cheeks. It was a shock to see my usually composed grandmother crying so unrestrainedly and it tightened the feeling of fright that already half-paralysed my heart.

  A doctor was washing his hands in a corner, quietly, quietly, making scarcely any sound.

  As we came in my mother put down the silver jug on a side table and took me from my father. He went to the other side of the bed and took up the Koran, beginning to read aloud from it in his soft, musical Arabic. I stood looking at my grandfather, awed by the unaccustomed sight of so much solemnity surrounding him. He moved his fingers and my mother lifted me up to him, saying, ‘Father, this is İrfan.’

  He laid his heavy, old hand on my head as though giving me his blessing, then his fingers moved feebly through my curls and down, down, slowly down over my face. I kissed his hand and ached with unshed tears. He tried to say something and the doctor came quickly over, motioning to me with his head, and my mother took me out. She told me to go back to İnci then left me and returned to my grandfather’s room, the door closing gently behind her. I started to cry suddenly, there on the quiet landing, and still I remember, as if it were yesterday, how a big fat wood-pigeon flew past the window, coo-cooing in his soft throaty voice.

  It is still the best-remembered sound from that day.

  CHAPTER 2

  An Autocrat at the Hamam

  Now and then, usually about once in a week, my grandmother had a sociable turn of mind and when these moods came upon her she invariably went to the hamam. Hamams, or the Turkish Baths, were hot-beds of gossip and scandal-mongering, snobbery in its most inverted form and the excuse for every woman in the district to have a day out. Nobody ever dreamed of taking a bath in anything under seven or eight hours. The young girls went to show off their pink-and-white bodies to the older women. Usually the mothers of eligible sons were in their minds for this purpose for these would, it was to be hoped, take the first opportunity of detailing to their sons the finer points of So-and-so’s naked body. Marriages based on such hearsay quite frequently took place, but whether or no they were successful few of us had any means of knowing.

  In the hot rooms of the hamams little jealousies and rivalries were fanned into strong fires and very often fights took place between the mothers of attractive daughters vying for the favours of the same young man.

  As against the mothers of daughters the mothers of sons took pride of place. There was a sort of sharp dividing line drawn between them and it was quite easy for a stranger to tell which of the plump, matronly ladies had the best wares for sale. For whereas the mothers of daughters were inclined to laugh a lot, to draw attention to their family groups, the mothers of sons lay aloof on their divans – too conscious of their own superiority to contribute to the general noise and scandalising. They would lazily nibble fruit, eye the simpering, posturing young girls critically and sometimes accept the offer of having their backs washed by some ravishing young creature but with such condescension that immediately the wildest speculations were engendered in the other female breasts as to why such an obvious favour had been shown at all. The back-washing concluded, the ravishing young creature would be dismissed and one by one the mothers of the ignored daughters would sidle up to the devilish old autocrat who had just had her back washed and whisper the most damning things about the character of the recent, elated, now vanished back-washer.

  My grandmother had no eligible sons for sale but nevertheless this did not prevent her from making her presence felt. Sociability would develop in her over a period of days until one morning she would grandly announce to my mother that on such and such a day she would go to the hamam. My mother, having no social interests, or the nature maliciously to enjoy intrigues or broken or pending romances, rarely accompanied her to the baths. Generally she sighed at the thought of all the extra work my grandmother’s decision was going to make for the servants.

  Quite frequently I was taken by my grandmother, although after my fifth birthday it was strongly doubted by the other members of the family as to the seemliness of taking such a grown-up young man to a place full of naked women. My grandmother, however, who would have been the first to object to this in other people, always set aside the idea that five was a great age and would insist on taking me with her.

  She always engaged private rooms for herself at the hamam, a room for disrobing and another for washing herself, feeling quite definitely that she could not be expected to mix entirely with the common herd. Sociability could only go so far.

  I well remember the flutter she caused in the household when she announced one day that on the morrow she would go to take her bath. It practically paralysed the administration, so to speak, for it could not be lightly decided just like this that one was going to the hamam less than twenty-four hours hence. Preparation was necessary. Special foods had to be bought and cooked and packed. The private rooms had to be booked. My mother vainly tried to persuade her to wait a day longer but this interference unfortunately only had the result of making my grandmother’s determination all the stronger and more fervent.

  Feride was sent to the hamam to warn them of our arrival on the morrow – for it had already been decided that I should go too. Looking back, I have a suspicion that Feride rather liked this sort of mission for she had lived so long with my grandmother that she quite enjoyed creating sensations and bullying the servants of others by right of her exalted position as personal factotum to my grandmother, whose social position was undoubtedly the greatest in the neighbourhood.

  The owners of the hamam were of course well acquainted with the various foibles and idiosyncrasies of my grandmother and thought nothing of giving her private rooms whenever she wished – even on occasion dispossessing women who had previously engaged them. My grandmother was a great force and, because she knew this very well, shamelessly took advantage of it
and altogether behaved like royalty.

  The rooms having been reserved for her the next thing of importance was to have long and futile discussions with Hacer as to the sort of food she wished to have prepared for eating in the hamam. Murat, the coachman, was despatched post haste to the market, just as my mother was wanting him for something else, with a basket almost as big as himself, for he was a small man, and he arrived back with enormous quantities of food – most of which would undoubtedly be wasted. But my grandmother, at her most gracious now that she had gained her own way and hospitality simply dripping from her, explained this extravagance away by saying she liked a large selection of food from which to choose and that in any case she liked to feel that the unfortunate ones left at home would enjoy the same delicacies as she herself would be enjoying at the hamam. Food was good at all times in the house for she always ordered everything herself – certainly never allowing my tranquil mother to express any preference, completely disbelieving that anybody’s ideas could be better or more original than her own. Furthermore she did not encourage originality of thought, cherishing the belief that this when related to food ruined the digestion, perished the lining of the stomach, tore the nervous system to little pieces and was the cause of every known disease.

  All the memorable day Hacer was kept busy over the cooking-stove. Dolmas were made from vine-leaves, stuffed full of savoury rice and currants and nuts and olive oil. Every few minutes my grandmother would dart into the kitchen to interfere and offer her unwanted advice to the more experienced phlegmatic Hacer. My grandmother tasted everything. This was an awful business for Hacer and on these nerve-racking occasions I would wait for her to burst into wild tears of rage or swipe all the crockery off the tables and have a fine display of hysterics. Poor Hacer was always the luckless one. She would stare apprehensively as my grandmother critically poked and sniffed at her cooling dolmas, and nine times out of ten she was ordered to prepare and cook fresh ones as those already made were only fit for the Christians to eat. Feride was called in to superintend the making of kadin-ğöbeği, heavy, syrupy doughnuts which when properly made are light as air and heaven to eat. I was very fond of kadin-ğöbeği and purposely delayed in the kitchen looking for a chance to steal one of them as they were cooling in the rich syrup. The advent of the supercilious Feride caused sulkiness to mount in the breast of Hacer and she muttered many unmentionable things beneath her breath.

  Her beloved Feride safely installed in the kitchen and nothing likely to go wrong, or so she fondly hoped, my grandmother next went upstairs to her bedroom taking İnci with her, to my mother’s annoyance, since this left Mehmet and me with no supervision. İnci was instructed to sort out the clean linen and bath-robes and innumerable towels that would be required at the hamam. Bars of soap and a large bottle of eau-de-Cologne were brought from their hiding-places and all the other appurtenances needed for the correct toilette of a lady about to take her bath. İnci was told to pack all these things in little embroidered cloths, which were kept especially for this purpose, and I was several times called upstairs and warned of all the things I must not do at the hamam. By the time my grandmother had herself uselessly run up and down the stairs several more times, she suddenly came panting into the salon and threw herself without the least semblance of elegance into a large chair. She fanned herself vigorously then complained to my mother that she was very tired and that she could not understand why it was that whenever she wished to take a bath it was she who had to do all the work about the place. Hacer, she said, was more than ever useless and she did not know why she continued to keep her, excepting perhaps that it was because she felt pity for her, knowing that no other household in the world would keep her for more than a day. My mother, who had a soft spot for the maligned Hacer, here interrupted to tell my grandmother that – on the contrary – when she went to the hamam she completely disorganised the entire house. Warming to her subject in the face of my grandmother’s disbelieving attitude, she said that here was she – starving, with no one to prepare a meal for her, her children were hungry too and that as Hacer had already been twice told to throw away all the dolmas she had spent the entire morning cooking, she felt that the rest of the day would go by in similar fashion until we would all die with the hunger.

  This considerably enraged my grandmother, who thought the whole accusation very unjust indeed, and she then added chaos to chaos by impetuously ringing for Murat and ordering him to run immediately to the butcher to buy meat as everyone was hungry. Murat, who was hungry himself, went with great haste lest my grandmother changed her mind again. She, with great indignation at being so unjustly accused, went off in a temper to the kitchen to instruct Hacer to leave everything and prepare luncheon since my mother, worn out with all the embroidering she had done that morning, was starving.

  She suddenly recollected that henna had to be applied to her hair and called Feride away from the kadin-ğöbeği, demanding to know why the henna had not been prepared before this time. Her obstreperousness affected us all, and me in particular so that I was continuously fractious, eventually reducing İnci to weak tears of rage.

  ‘If I go to the hamam,’ she ground out at me through tightly clenched teeth, ‘you will come home looking like a lobster. I shall hold your head under the boiling water until you die and pull your nose until it is as long as an elephant’s nose!’

  Sufficiently intimidated I fled to Hacer who gave me sugar to eat and sat me on a high chair so that I could watch what she was doing. But the hot smell of food overcame me and in any case I was far too excited to sit still for very long, so I demanded to be lifted from the high chair and went in search of my grandmother. I discovered her in her bedroom and as she was in a gracious mood she permitted me to enter just inside the door to watch what Feride was doing. I could not help laughing when I saw her because she looked so funny. She was sitting in a straight-backed chair in front of a long mirror, Feride beside her placing layer after layer of clean white paper over the revolting brown mess of henna which covered her hair. A silver cup with the remains of the brown mess adhering to its sides stood on a low plaited stool beside them and next to it was a Moorish table piled with snowy towels and a tray of small gold hairpins.

  Because my grandmother had henna on her hair she was unable to go to the salon or the dining-room, so she stayed in her room and ate lokum (Turkish Delight) out of a large dish on her lap and drank rose sherbet. She then languidly refused the tray of luncheon brought to her by İnci, saying she was not hungry and that she needed very little to keep her going. I begged to be allowed to eat the tray of refused food and permission was indulgently granted but my mother was furious when she heard of it and sent İnci to fetch me to the dining-room. I regretted having to leave the close, scented atmosphere of my grandmother’s room and bit İnci’s finger on the way downstairs in revenge.

  After luncheon was over Feride reprepared all the bathrobes and lingerie İnci had so carefully packed during the morning. Feride put little bags of lavender between each fold, annoyed because İnci had forgotten to do this. The smell of lavender always lingered in our house for all the drawers and cupboards were full of it, tied into little muslin bags and placed between the linen.

  Every year the wild, gaunt-looking gypsies used to gather it in the hills then come down to the city to sell laden baskets full of its sweet perfume. Lavender grew in a corner of the garden too but we always bought from the gypsies. I remember a merry-eyed gypsy girl who used to come to the house when I was small. She would stand in the street singing her lavender song and then she would be brought into the house by Feride, who would bargain astutely for the lavender. Hacer would make Turkish coffee for her to drink and I would steal into the kitchen to look at the dark, alien face of the gypsy girl as she sat on the table and swung her long, bare legs. Sometimes my grandmother would order Hacer to give the gypsy a good meal and afterwards she would be called to the salon to read the future for my mother and grandmother, who both had a childlike belief i
n such things. She would be given a cushion and would sit on this, just inside the door, fearful to advance too far into the elegant room, careful not to put her bare, dirt-grimed feet on the carpets. Having read the amazing things revealed in her shining crystal ball and thoroughly fevered my imagination, she would take out a handful of dried broad beans from a bag attached to the wide belt she wore, extricate a handkerchief remarkable for its cleanliness and some blue glass beads and begin the fortune-telling all over again. When this was finished my grandmother would toss her a gold coin which she would catch dexterously.

  She had long slim fingers, I remember, the filbert-shaped nails always tinted with henna, and a brown little face with a wide mouth that always seemed to be laughing. She wore strange, exotic garments of every hue and her shining black hair had twisted through it many vividly hued glass beads. She would tell us about her life in the tents and of her husband, who made baskets to sell to the peasants or sometimes to the rich house of İstanbul. She gave one the impression that she was sharp as a monkey and oddly alluring, and I used to imagine a fine, swashbuckling husband for her, with swarthy face and gleaming white teeth and gold earrings dangling, flashing in the sun as he moved his leonine head. A tall, muscular man he would be with magnetism to match the strange charm there was about her. I was very disappointed one day when he accompanied her to our house, wishful to sell one of his baskets to my grandmother for Murat’s use. He was small and thin and ugly in a frightening way with a pock-marked face and a cruel mouth and eyes which looked as if they were perpetually narrowed by avarice. He exuded danger and dark deeds on a windy night and I was very afraid of him. He was jealous of the gypsy girl who was his wife and I noticed she was very subdued in his presence, the laughter dimmed in her eyes. He was very free with Feride, who became taut and haughty and almost incredibly like my grandmother in a rage. He slapped Hacer’s rolling backsides several times, roaring with laughter each time she protested. I fled from the kitchen to the salon, my eyes for some reason or other blinded with tears. I felt a helpless, childish rage against him and his coarseness, and pity for the poor, merry gypsy girl he had married. I did not know that life and people are seldom what one expects them to be.