by Orga, Irfan
‘Men born between 1880 and 1885 must report to the recruiting centre within the next forty-eight hours. Who fails to do so will be prosecuted.’
And dan-dan-da-da-dan-dan went the drum and my heart echoed its melancholy.
Orhan Bey shouted: ‘What does it mean, Bekçi Baba?’
And the reply was: ‘War! War! Don’t you know your country is at war?’
Bekçi Baba moved off, and the old, old man with the drum followed him, to spread their news farther.
We went in to the ladies. There they stood by the window, like three flowers blown in out of the black night, their silk dresses spreading about them and their faces pale to the lips.
Madame Müjğan started to speak, then swayed uncertainly and fainted in my mother’s arms. Yasemin and Nuri ran to her, shouting ‘Anne! Anne!’ and İnci was despatched for eau-de-Cologne with which to massage the wrists and forehead of Madame Müjğan. Whilst my mother was busy with her, Orhan Bey put his arms about his two children and said: ‘I was born in 1885 – ’ and broke off, too full of tears to say any more.
He pressed his children closer to him, so close that Yasemin cried out that he was hurting her and then he released them, looking at them for a moment or two with the eyes of a sleepwalker – the eyes of a man who no longer saw two frightened children before him but the long, dark, stinking nights in the trenches and the gun-flashes to now and then lighten the sky and finally the long dark night of death.
Presently his wife recovered. He took her on his arm and with great dignity thanked my mother for her evening and for what she had tried to do for his wife.
He bade us good night. My father went with them across the garden, the two children tightly clutching his hands. Mehmet was taken away to be washed and I stayed in the salon with my mother and my grandmother.
‘Ahmet was born in 1885,’ said my grandmother.
She repeated it softly over and over again like a litany.
The next day my father left home early for he was going to Sarıyer to see Uncle Ahmet.
All that long day the house was a dead house. I tried to play in the garden with Mehmet but I was bored and uneasy, sensing accurately my elders’ alarm. There was no sign of the children from next door and the first hint of there being anything out of the ordinary about the day came with the arrival of the cook of Madame Müjğan. I was on the back porch at that time and heard her asking Feride if the bakkal (grocer) had been with the bread. Feride replied that she too was waiting for him, since she had no fresh bread for luncheon. They talked for a few more minutes in whispers and although there seemed to be a great sense of urgency about their talk, I could not distinguish anything. I was just left with that queer, empty feeling of there being something wrong but I could not put a name to what it was. The morning wore away. İnci set the table for luncheon but still no bread appeared. Feride eventually told my mother, who treated the matter lightly, saying that no doubt bakkal had forgotten us this day and gave permission for Feride to go out to buy bread. We waited over an hour for her to come back, my mother growing more and more impatient but when she did come wearily back she had no bread.
‘What is wrong?’ asked my mother, very surprised.
‘There is no bread anywhere, hanım efendi,’ replied Feride. ‘Since I left here I have been standing in a queue, with the people killing each other and breaking each other’s heads to get near the baker’s door. Some of them were buying twenty loaves at a time. Every family in the district is there, with all their children and their servants and all of them trying to get a loaf each. The baker had sold out before it was my turn.’
So we sat down to our meal, grumbling that we had to eat the previous day’s bread. We did not know that one day we might be glad to eat bread a week old.
During the afternoon Feride again went to hunt bread but again returned with empty hands. This time she reported that the shop was shut and that, although the queues were greater than ever, nobody knew when the shop would open. Nerves were uneasy that day and tempers broke easily. My grandmother sat reading the Koran, decorous and pious-looking in her black dress and her face pale. My mother sat most of the day in front of one of the windows, watching for my father’s return and her hands strangely empty. What a difference there was already in them! Looking at my grandmother, reading the Koran so soberly, it was difficult to find in her the amusing old lady who only yesterday had made us all laugh at her culinary efforts. My mother was very white, a fact emphasised by the dark stuff of her dress, and her busy hands were twining and untwining all the time in her idle lap. Once she asked İnci to fetch her a glass of wine and the request was so unusual that, momentarily, İnci forgot all her good training to stare at her in wide-eyed surprise.
My father returned in the middle of the afternoon, having been unsuccessful in finding my uncle. My aunt had told him he had left that morning, early, for the Recruiting Centre and she did not know where he was now. She was, my father observed, very distressed.
He had called at the Sarıyer Recruiting Centre on his way back to the boat-station but all had been confusion and uproar there. Harassed officials roared instructions and civilians were herded like cattle, hungry, hopeless and apathetic. No one had been able to give news of my uncle. In fact no one, it appeared, had had time to listen to my father’s questions and at one time he had been in danger of being herded with the other conscripts. My mother mentioned the incident of the bread and he laughed tiredly. The streets, he said, were full of panic-stricken people, all looking for something to buy and store. News of Turkey’s entry into the war had swept fear into İstanbul and rioting was taking place in some quarters.
He went out himself to seek bread and returned after many hours with one small, hot loaf in his hand. He looked ineffably weary and dispirited and there was a long scratch down one side of his face, inflicted by a panic-maddened woman who had tried to snatch his bread.
Dinner was a sober affair, with us children being urged to hurry and our elders silently making a pretence of eating. Gone were the leisured, laughter-filled nights of good eating and good conversation, with my grandmother tossing off sparkling, malicious epigrams and my silent, shy mother only offering her grace and beauty as a contribution to the dinner-table.
The next morning Uncle Ahmet came to say goodbye to us. Mehmet and I greeted him quietly, no noise, no fuss this time, for our parents’ faces set the pattern for our behaviour. He had brought boxes of bonbons for us and we were sent into the dining-room, whilst they discussed the serious business of war in the salon.
Some things in life stand out sharply in the memory, making a picture so vivid, so clear-cut, that the mind’s eye retains them indelibly forever. Such a precise memory I have, of that November day my uncle visited us for the last time. Sharp and cold was the morning, with sunlight playing behind the scurrying clouds. The house was peaceful and still as if great things were not happening all around it. The odd-job man was sweeping the terrace of the last fallen leaves. Feride was creating a good, appetising smell from the kitchen and İnci was pegging out the washing in the little side yard. The washerwoman sang lustily in the laundry, uncaring of the draughts which swooped moaningly from all about her. What cared she for war? And what cared Feride or the young İnci for war? Everyone that morning had something to do. I stood with my nose pressed against the window-pane and looked out to the windy, rustling garden that held its own wild, winter beauty and Mehmet played busily on the floor.
My father came into the room to decant some wine and, perhaps because I looked dejected or perhaps because İnci was not there to guard us, he told Mehmet and me to go to the salon and play there.
In the salon my uncle was drinking Turkish coffee, looking unhappy. Nobody took any notice of us so I sat down in one of the chairs and my mother looked at me, perhaps wondering why I was there. My uncle was talking about my aunt, saying that her health seemed to be getting worse. There was a peevish, worried note in his voice. Then he mentioned the farm, saying that most
of the men had registered with him and who would look after things in future he did not know.
My grandmother sat very silent. She sat looking at Uncle Ahmet as if her eyes could never see enough of him, her eldest born. She was an unemotional woman but that day the tears were seldom far from her, only her fierce, high pride beating them back. I suppose she was realising for the first time in her life what war might do to families. For the first time, I think, she saw herself as a defenceless, ignorant woman who knew nothing of events outside her own small world, the world which held only sociability, women’s gossip and formality. And the last two men of her family were going from her. I am quite sure she did not pause to consider my mother’s or my aunt’s feelings. Naturally cold and a bit of a despot she only ever saw things in relation to herself. She was losing her sons, might lose them forever, but my mother and my aunt were only losing their husbands.
And although my grandmother had a high opinion of husbands she had a higher opinion of sons. It is trite to say that little escapes the eye of a child, but nevertheless it is a fact and I knew my grandmother better then, if more inchoately, than she would ever know herself. She had no time for self-analysis and the Freudian theory had not yet burst over İstanbul. My mother too I knew and the latent streak of hardness there was in her, so that in after years, when hardness had become her chief characteristic, I was not taken by surprise, having all along recognised its deep-down existence. I could not write a true picture of them today, were I not looking back with the eyes of a child to pictures I had thought dead. But just as today these pictures bring back so vividly places, scenes and conversations that are gone, so too do they recall in part the sensations I felt as a child.
That November day, for instance, I knew as if she were screaming her thoughts aloud what was going through my grandmother’s head. When she asked my uncle to stay for luncheon I knew she was prolonging the fatal moment of goodbye and when he refused she seemed to shrink into herself, looking small and lonely in her tall chair. He said he had many things to attend to in Sarıyer and was anxious about my aunt and all the time he carefully avoided her eyes, perhaps feeling if he looked at her too closely he too would break down.
Presently he stood up to go and I can still see his tall figure dark against the windows.
‘I shall be leaving tomorrow,’ he said and when my grandmother enquired for where he shrugged his massive shoulders and replied that he did not know.
He leaned over his mother, kissing her hands, and she murmured a prayer over his bent, dark head and one hand escaped from his kiss to tenderly stroke his cheek. Uncle Ahmet swung Mehmet on his shoulders, took my hand in his and went out to the hall. My father said he would accompany him to Galata Bridge and my uncle beat his foot impatiently whilst İnci helped my father into his overcoat. Then they were ready and we were kissed. My uncle put his hand over my hair and I saw his mouth suddenly quiver and my inadequate heart longed to comfort him. Down the short path they went to the street and at the corner they turned to wave to us, then they were hidden from our view and we went back into the house again, Mehmet and I – two small boys who knew of no way to relieve the partings.
That evening Orhan Bey came to bid us farewell. He too was off the next morning to a place he did not know. We drank his health and wished him well, Mehmet and I holding our glasses high with the others. And down the street the drums beat for someone else. For in those days going away to the war, any war, was a brave and noble thing to do and as the young men left a district so the band would play outside each of their houses, the Turkish flag being handed to the newest recruit. And all the youth with their wild, wild hearts leaped and danced and shouted, the better to drown the noise of the women’s weeping. When they were leaving their homes the band played a song of unbelievable sadness and everyone started to sing:
‘Ey gaziler yol göründü
Yine garip serime
Dağlar taşlar dayanamaz
Benim ah u zârima … ’
(‘Oh wounded ones I am coming to take your place and my heart is crying because I am leaving my beloved ones. The mountains and the stones cry with me … ’)
Orhan Bey bade us farewell and left for his own home and in the street the band still played.
Again the next day my father hunted for bread and once again tried to see my uncle. He came home very late and my grandmother immediately asked if he had seen him.
‘Yes,’ replied my father, ‘I caught a glimpse of him as they marched him away.’
‘And did he look well in his uniform?’ demanded my grandmother eagerly.
My father said gently: ‘He had no uniform. All the men wore their own clothes and carried bags on their shoulders. They had no marching boots and armed soldiers kept between them and the crowd. And all their wives and mothers and sweethearts were there. I followed with the crowd and they were put in a building in Sirkeci. We all waited, hoping for a sight of them but nothing happened and in the end the soldiers guarding the building sent us away.’
My father ceased talking and his eyes looked bitter. He had seen Uncle Ahmet ordered and pushed and prodded by the butts of the guns of the peasant soldiers. He had seen a soldier kick one of the men but he did not tell these things before my grandmother.
The next day my mother prepared a bag for my father, made like the bags the other men had been carrying across their unaccustomed shoulders. Nobody mentioned anything about his going but we all knew the day would come. So my mother sewed a bag for him, a coarse white linen bag which she sewed with exquisite stitchery. And I think she sewed her heart into that bag too for after my father had gone we who were left saw nothing of her heart.
My father’s business had been sold and now he spent the days at home, awaiting his turn with horror and impatience at their delay. It seemed as if the Government would never call him and now that he knew he would have to go he wanted to be away, to be done with the waiting that tore the heart and whitened the cheeks.
But the day came at last. The same drum beat out its poignant message, the same Bekçi Baba stood under the same lamp and delivered his ultimatum: ‘Men born between 1886 and 1892 must report to the Recruiting Centre during the next forty-eight hours. Who fails to do so will be prosecuted … ’
And dan-dan-da-da-dan-dan mocked the drum.
My father had been called at last and we thought that nothing worse than this could ever happen to us.
He went the next day to the Recruiting Centre and all the remaining young men of the district seemed to go with him. When he returned I was in bed but I was not sleeping, even though I could not hear what they talked about. It was a grey day when he left us, a grey, cold day in early December, and because so many others were leaving with him, the band was going to play them all out together, from the lives they had always known to the bleakness of the battlefield. Feride packed the coarse linen bag with cakes and pies and other delicacies she had prepared for him. My father stood in the middle of the salon, already gone from us in spirit and he looked about him for the last time. His face was secretive and closed, an alien, soldier’s face that had no right in this elegant, smiling room. My mother stood close beside him and she too had that alien, shut-away look. But my poor, huddled grandmother, who could not go to where these two had gone, sat in the windows and listened for the drums that would take away her youngest son. İnci brought in Turkish coffee, Feride following with the packed linen bag and Mehmet ran to pull at her skirts, not understanding what all this fuss was about or that his father was going away. I went to my father and put my arms around him and he lifted me up in his arms.
‘You will be father from now on,’ he said and I pressed my head against his face and felt a tear drop on my cheek. Whose tear was it, mine or his? Perhaps it fell from both of us for tears tormented both of us. Feride and İnci burst into loud wailing, their soft hearts inexpressibly touched but my mother stared dry-eyed. She had, I think, shed all the tears she would ever shed in some more private place than this. And now he
r frozen heart was able to look on this farewell scene with almost-tranquillity.
My grandmother prayed without stopping and then she began to mutter: ‘My eldest son and my youngest son. My eldest son and my youngest son. They have taken you both.’
The distant drums began and my father put me down, drinking his coffee quickly. He said: ‘Şevkiye! Don’t look like that! Smile for me. I shall come back again – ’
And my mother’s frozen face relaxed to give him her old, dazzling smile and my father said to her: ‘You would make a better soldier than I.’
They stood there facing each other, smiling their brilliant smiles, not touching each other yet indissolubly merged into each other. The band came nearer and now we clearly heard the drums and the zurna and the shouting of the following children.
My mother’s eyes flew away from my father’s and the lovely miracle was broken. She picked up his heavy bag and handed it to him and they kissed like strangers, those two who had no need of kissing. My grandmother held out her hand for his gesture and Feride and İnci then came forward to pay their tribute to him. They were crying bitterly and he patted their heads, as if they were children again, like Mehmet and me. He swung his bag over his shoulder and went to the front door and the crowd that waited outside. The band played softly and mournfully and my father kissed us children, then said his goodbye with lips that were wooden and stiff.
An old man came forward and handed him the Turkish flag and the people all shouted ‘Padişahim çok yaşa’ and my father stepped into his place, amongst the other recruits. The waving and the cheering went wildly on but there was no need to drown the weeping from our house, for the women did not weep. They stood there gently smiling and the band played for my father:
