Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  The last evening we spent in the house of our neighbour Mehmet was inclined to be fretful, calling for İnci but was eventually persuaded to sleep by Madame Müjğan’s upstairs maid.

  I lay there in my little narrow bed, listening to the street-sounds drifting in through the window. Somewhere I could hear Bekçi Baba crying his news of a fire and sleepily I remembered the night I had seen him for the first time. Then I remembered the shivering, mournful beat of the drums the day they came to take my father away and I felt suddenly lonely, lying there in an unfamiliar room. I wondered if the pigeons had brought the new baby yet and finally drifted into sleep to the sound of Bekçi Baba’s voice. He still cried of a fire that raged somewhere in this city but a fire was not exciting to me, for I had never seen one and I did not know that the wooden houses and konaks of İstanbul were a heaven-sent opportunity for enemy spies. I did not know that one day I should see my beloved İstanbul burning, burning to the empty skies.

  The next day İnci arrived to take us back home. On the way across the gardens she said to me: ‘Your pigeons have brought a lovely baby sister for you. Aren’t you pleased?’

  I was uncertain until I had seen the wonderful baby, so reserved my judgment, and İnci thought I was sulking and laughed at me.

  Upstairs in my mother’s room all was arrayed as if for a wedding. Lace pillows supported my mother’s dark head and a satin quilt dropped almost to the carpet. Mehmet and I stood awkwardly in the doorway, uncertain whether or not to advance into such grandeur but my mother smiled and called us over to her. Excitedly we ran for her kiss, my grandmother fussily warning us not to jump on the bed.

  ‘Where’s the baby?’ we wanted to know and my mother pulled back a lacy sheet and we looked down at a little dark head and a red crumpled rose leaf of face.

  Mehmet said: ‘Why doesn’t she open her eyes?’

  And my mother laughed and replied that she was sleeping. She put her hand against the baby’s dress and drew out a long white box.

  ‘Look what she has brought for you from your father,’ she said and we took the box in delight, discovering chocolate bonbons inside, a rare luxury nowadays. We were happy that the baby had not come empty-handed and disposed to regard her more kindly.

  The days passed by, those sunny May days of 1915, and one day my mother was downstairs with us again and we became accustomed to seeing the baby sleeping in her white cradle on the terrace. Mehmet and I would peep at her curiously, anxious for her to open her eyes and smile at us. She was so quiet, lying there, such a remarkably docile baby that we quite grew to love her, for no matter how much noise we made, she still slept on. We were never hushed for her sake and I think our love for Muazzez dates from that time.

  About this time too my grandmother started to disobey her husband and visited us whenever she pleased. One day she helped my mother compose a letter to my father, telling him of the birth of his daughter but we never knew whether he received the letter or not. Neighbours began to alarm my mother, hinting that his long silence might mean that he was dead and advised her to go to the War Office for information. But this she would not do, perhaps fearing to hear what they would say.

  Aunt Ayşe paid us a visit from Sarıyer, eager to see Muazzez. She looked so different that I could scarcely recognise her, so gaunt and white and with cheeks sunk in. She started to cry when she saw Muazzez and I remember that I fascinatedly watched her. The tears poured down her face and Mehmet plucked uncertainly at her sleeve, distressed to see such sorrow, his small brown face looking unhappily at Aunt Ayşe. When her tears ceased she began to cough, in a sickening sort of way, and my grandmother, who sat out on the terrace with us, looked impatient and tapped her foot, as if she abhorred such a display of emotionalism.

  I stood there, pondering about crying. Everyone seemed to cry nowadays and for no reason at all, in so far as I could see. Rebelliously, I wished my father back with us again. I had not thought about him for weeks, perhaps for months, yet suddenly there he was before my eyes and my heart ached with longing to see him come striding on to the terrace, to hear him call out to us, in the old way. And I felt rise in my throat a great lump and I did not know that crying was infectious. Afterwards I heard my aunt say that Uncle Ahmet had been blinded somewhere in the desert and she could not understand why the authorities did not send him home to her. Her unhappiness nagged at the heart, even phlegmatic Mehmet noticing it and trying to climb across her knee to console her. My mother told her we would all come to Sarıyer later in the summer, when Muazzez was a little older and in a better condition to travel. And my aunt sighed and asked if we remembered last year there.

  I listened to her soft voice, rising and falling, but in my eye was a picture of Sarıyer. I saw the old house set amongst the trees and heard again my uncle’s merry laughter. I went fishing with him on the Bosphor and slept again in the little rose-scented room above the tangled old garden. I heard the ships’ sirens as they passed in the night – and yet I never left the terrace. But the memories were so clear and insistent on the brain that for a split second in time I had been back again in Sarıyer.

  When my aunt left us to return home I felt sorry that she had to go. She looked so little and lonely that I yearned to protect her from the world she found so hard now that my uncle was not beside her.

  She did not kiss us, I remember, but stood fondling our heads, reluctant to leave yet anxious to return to Sarıyer, where news from Uncle Ahmet perhaps awaited her.

  ‘We shall come in June,’ said my mother confidently, as if nothing might happen to disturb that promise.

  Aunt Ayşe left and I never saw her again in my life. I never saw Sarıyer either, for many years afterwards when I visited it nothing remained but a tumble-down house and a garden choked with weeds. The Sarıyer I knew and loved was no more, vanished like its long-dead owners. Yet that Sarıyer still shines clearly for me today, just as Aunt Ayşe’s face emerges out of the mists of time, and shines too. There are some things in the heart that do not die and the loves of early childhood are the strongest loves of all.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Long Farewell

  Muazzez must have continued to be a quiet baby for I remember next to nothing about her from those days. Looking back, I find it is easier to remember all the strange, unquiet things that happened. I suppose all memories need only a little shaking-up to restore again places and things and people. Certainly I have had little difficulty in delving back into the past. Letters and photographs and latterday conversations have brought all these long-dead days before the mind’s eye again, in some cases with startling clarity. For instance, I still recall the day my grandmother came to take Feride away from us.

  It was high summer and we played in the garden, under the eye of my mother. She was sewing clothes for Muazzez, who kicked on a rug, İnci being inside in the house working. Feride’s singing voice drifted out from the kitchen and a great peace lay about us. It was a cloudless, blue, shining day and I had a surge of happiness for no reason at all. Never had my home looked prettier, standing there squatly and compactly in its green lawn, the flower-beds a blaze of colour, the house blindingly white where the sun’s long fingers touched it, blotched with grey, lacy patterns where the leaves of the vine and the fig tree sheltered it. Recalling that scene now, did an uneasy peace linger in the sky above it, I wonder, making the tranquillity stand out all the more sharply by contrast – because of the things to come? That morning remains etched on the mind, one of a series of pictures that will never die whilst I live.

  My grandmother called towards noon, coming across the grass to us, severe in her high-necked gown.

  İnci followed her almost immediately with a tray of iced sherbets – cooling, effervescent drinks that tasted of roses.

  My grandmother sat down in the chaise-longue my mother pushed forward for her, unveiled her hot face and held her hand to us children to be kissed. She was disposed to be gracious, praised the looks of the baby, gave my mother some entirely unwarran
ted advice regarding her embroidery and was altogether so charming that I felt she must want something. For my grandmother was never known to waste her charm on us.

  She lay back in her chair, talking animatedly and fanning herself with a little ivory fan which she carried everywhere with her. My mother sewed tranquilly, replying to the other’s rapid questions in her light, low voice which seemed to blend so well with the dreaming mood that was upon the house that magic day. My grandmother finished her sherbet, then came to the main point of her visit. Her husband, she said, was giving a very big dinner-party that night to some business acquaintances and she was distracted to know how she would manage, since her cook was in bed sick and the other servants did not know how to cook any of the elaborate dishes she wished to give the guests. Here she paused, eyeing my mother uneasily, but the latter never betrayed by as much as a flicker of the eyelids what it was she was thinking. She sewed peacefully on and Mehmet, thoroughly bored by this woman’s talk, commenced to pull grasses from which to suck the sap. I hovered uncertainly behind my sister’s rug and my grandmother began to display the faintest trace of irritability.

  ‘Well, Şevkiye!’ she demanded in her old bullying voice, all the sweetness gone. ‘Did you hear what I was saying, or have you been dreaming all this time?’

  ‘Of course I heard,’ returned my mother, looking at her steadily. ‘But I cannot suggest anything. Perhaps your cook will be well enough to get up and prepare everything and then go back to bed again.’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ said my grandmother waspishly, the control beginning to go out of her face. ‘Well, I suppose I shall have to manage something. You could not spare Feride, could you?’

  ‘No,’ said my mother very gently and I marvelled at such control and discipline.

  My grandmother’s mouth folded obstinately.

  ‘But only for the one night,’ she begged. ‘I shall send her back tomorrow morning.’

  My mother did not reply and my grandmother talked on and on, putting forward all sorts of reasons why she should have Feride with her.

  In the end, worn out by such volubility, such unceasing persistence, my mother gave in but on the condition that Feride was returned to our house that same evening.

  Sulkily my grandmother agreed to this but she could not afford to be too sulky, since my mother was quite capable of changing her mind. But I think my grandmother had hoped to retain Feride until her own cook was well again. It mattered nothing to her that İnci and my mother should do all the work of the house between them – although if you were to ask my grandmother to do anything she would be highly indignant and explain to you that she was not a servant.

  Once she had gained her own way she hurried off, refusing to stay for luncheon but stopping on the way to tell Feride what had been arranged for the afternoon.

  My mother sighed after her but made no comment to us.

  After she herself had gone to the house Mehmet and I continued to play listlessly for the sun was very hot. The grass was burning to my hand, the pigeons cooed sleepily and the whole romantic little scene was so peaceful that it might have been something in a dream. I think too the mood for dreaming was heavy upon me that day or was I only weighty with prophecy? It is a fact though that I remarked to Mehmet, or so my mother in after years assured me, that it would be a pity if all this peaceful life were to be swept away. Mehmet it is to be assumed would have only looked at me drowsily, his black eyes uncomprehending, and perhaps it is also to be assumed he would have asked me what I meant. And if he had I could not have explained. There were no words yet in my vocabulary to express my only half-formed, inarticulate thoughts. The white house, the green lawn, the brilliant flowers all seemed threatened with annihilation but where were the words to tell this picture? The dark flash that had for a moment lit my imagination would have been dismissed as a silly, childish fabrication. With Mehmet’s drugged eyes holding mine I might have forgotten the threat that had hung in the bright air, the dark hand that had hovered over me.

  Little things stand out from that day, all of them unimportant then but having their own sad value in after years. Luncheon was hurried, Feride anxious to get away, and İnci was sent to look for bread for she had a way of insinuating her lithe body between the crowds in a manner the more solid Feride could never emulate. Madame Müjğan came across from her garden in the middle of the afternoon, Yasemin and Nuri trailing hotly after her. My mother and she sat idly talking until evening crept into the brilliant sky and Madame Müjğan was begged to stay to dinner. My mother was loath to eat alone these days and welcomed the little diversion her neighbour made.

  Madame Müjğan talked of the war and her husband but my mother I thought seemed anxious to discourage this trend in the conversation. She rarely mentioned my father even to Mehmet and me; she spoke of him seldom so that after a while his face would rise before us the face of a stranger or the face of someone well loved a long time ago, now only vaguely seen or recognised. For long periods at a time we forgot him altogether and could not imagine him ever again in the house. The squat white house he had bought for his family now seemed a woman’s house and it needed an older imagination than mine to give it back my father’s lounging figure or my uncle’s laughter. My grandfather had receded far into the distance. He held no place in this house; he had never known of its existence. Their male figures were dimmer now and every day they dimmed a little more, waving their ghostly hands in farewell.

  The day would no doubt come when they would be back with us again – as İnci not infrequently reminded us when we were disobedient – but in the meantime they had lost their authority with us.

  The sun dropped lower down the sky and the faintest breeze blew through the long grass. The ladies drew little cashmere shawls about their shoulders and İnci came to take Muazzez to bed. Mehmet and I gathered our playthings then took our guests, Yasemin and Nuri, to wash before dinner. Yasemin splashed cold water across her face and her reflection glimmered palely in this place of uncertain light. She said, catching sight of herself, ‘How odd I look!’ and there was a doubtful note in her muted voice as if not recognising herself.

  The dining-room was filled with a lucent, tender green light and all the windows stood open to the empty garden. The snowy table set with damask and glass and silver, with plates of cold food, looked cool and remote, a dish of black and white grapes making a sombre mark in the centre, like a bruise on a white face – like Yasemin’s face so lately seen in the mirror, her eyes like bruises in the pallid ivory of cheek and nose and forehead. Wine chilled in a cooler and we children were allowed for this once to sit at the big table.

  İnci appeared from upstairs, her day with Muazzez finished, and my mother told her not to bother about waiting at table but to eat her dinner quickly then go to collect Feride. She was so anxious to have the absent Feride back in the house again that she told İnci the table could be cleared the following morning. Never had I known such a thing permitted before, she being most punctilious in having the house in order before she retired for the night. After İnci had gone we few were alone in the house and a great, waiting silence seemed to descend upon us even though wine flowed in the glasses and the ladies’ laughter tinkled.

  Dinner over we left the salon – leaving the débris on the table, which looked a little vulgar now as tables always do after a meal has been eaten. My mother made coffee on her little silver spirit lamp and we sat there in the lengthening dusk that shadowed the salon, a little tired now that the day was over. Presently we would go yawning to bed and the square white house that held us would creak and grumble and mutter before settling into sleep under a summer sky. Yasemin and Nuri were petulant with tiredness and Mehmet nodded by himself in a big chair. It was nine o’clock and long past bedtime. Madame Müjğan gathered her children and we roused ourselves to walk with them across the garden to the little gate between the houses. We bade them good night and came back again along the white path glimmering in the dusk and a little bit of a moon was ris
ing in the clear sky. My mother waited for us in the french windows of the dining-room. She looked unreal and ghostly standing there, like a figure in a play, so pale she was in her pale clothes. The house by night looked withdrawn and secret, a little frightening in its tall shroud of trees. We went in to my mother, who tightly shuttered the windows and the dirty, littered table looked like a table in a dead house. I helped to fasten doors and windows and then we went up to bed together, a tall, golden candle lighting our way. The house seemed incredibly quiet without İnci and Feride.

  ‘How will they get in?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’ asked my mother, puzzled.

  ‘İnci and Feride,’ I replied and she laughed at my anxious face, telling me that they had the front door key and then Mehmet suddenly said that he wanted İnci and started to cry. My mother put her arm around him and he sobbed that he was frightened.

  ‘But there is nothing to be afraid of,’ said my mother amusedly.

  The image of Mehmet’s fear had imprinted itself on the dark air and I too began to feel vaguely uneasy. When my mother kissed us good night, I begged her to leave her door open as well as ours. She seemed so reluctant to give in to our fear that Mehmet started to weep again and her own face began to reflect his terror. I do not know why we were so unaccountably afraid that night. Perhaps a little bit of the future impinged on the consciousness. Or perhaps – But I do not know. I only know that having slept contentedly in the dark for years, that night both Mehmet and I were unwilling to see the candle go out of our room and across the landing to my mother’s. Before she left us she stood a few moments at the window and the tak-tak of Bekçi Baba’s stick could be heard coming nearer to us. My mother sighed imperceptibly.