Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Only happiness – that I, an old woman, have been able to get the price I wanted out of a Jew!’

  And she pulled me down beside her and there was a great ripping, tearing sound from under me. We looked at each other in dismay, then suddenly burst out laughing, for the trousers, unable to bear the strain, had finally given way.

  ‘Never mind!’ comforted my grandmother. ‘We shall buy you some more. See! We have plenty of money again!’ And she held up the greasy liras triumphantly, then carelessly threw them on a little inlaid table. ‘After handling those,’ she shouted happily, ‘my hands need washing!’

  And she stumped downstairs to the kitchen, from where, presently, came the merry, splashing sound of water running. When she came up to the salon again she took the eau-de-Cologne to fastidiously sprinkle over her palms and she said to me: ‘Always remember! Never let anyone know when you are desperate. Put your best clothes on and pride on your face and you can get anything in this world.’

  ‘Why?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Because otherwise you will get nothing but kicks,’ she roared. ‘If that Jew had known how desperate I was, he would have succeeded in beating me down to his own price. As it was, I succeeded in beating him. Why,’ she continued complacently, ‘he even complimented me on my jewellery,’ and she patted the emerald pendant affectionately. ‘Your grandfather always had very good taste and only bought the best.’

  She took off the flashing lovely pendant and all the rings from her fingers and they lay gleaming in the palm of her hand with their lively, separate life.

  ‘Now I shall lock them away again,’ she said to me. ‘And the next person to wear them will be your sister, who is going to be a great beauty one day.’

  My mother came in from market with Mehmet clinging to her.

  ‘What are you dressed up for?’ she asked my grandmother suspiciously.

  ‘Look!’ commanded my grandmother, pointing to the half-empty salon.

  My mother’s eyes flickered a little then she turned back to my grandmother and said in an ordinary, normal conversational sort of voice: ‘A great improvement. It was time to clear the room of all that heavy old furniture.’

  And her eyes met my grandmother’s and held for a moment and they both smiled and my mother pushed a chair to a different position, standing back to see the effect.

  ‘Oh decidedly better!’ she said merrily.

  And I was immeasurably touched by her gallantry and by my grandmother’s too for neither of them broke down to weep that half their home had gone. Instead they stood in the salon and tried different arrangements with the furniture that was left and pretended that they had sold because the room was not big enough to house everything. And young as I was my heart swelled with pride.

  Then my mother caught sight of my burst trousers and the bare skin showing through and she said, laughing at me, that she hoped that this had not happened whilst the Jew was here.

  ‘No indeed!’ said my grandmother energetically. ‘If it had I would have slapped his backside hard for that bit of bare skin might have cost me fifty liras or so!’

  And everyone laughed together; even Mehmet – that solemn little boy who rarely smiled – puckered his mouth into a grin and clasped my grandmother about the legs, deducing rightly that she was the cause of our happiness.

  Life flew back to the little house again and there was much gaiety and good food, and my mother even sang for us and my grandmother bellowed advice like the old autocrat she was. And the neighbours marvelled at her cleverness with the Jew dealer and shook their heads in pity over the poor man, saying that if there were a few more of my grandmother’s calibre – why, the Jews of İstanbul would soon be bankrupt!

  CHAPTER 15

  Charity School in Kadıköy

  No matter how the women of my family tried to stave off poverty, it came eventually – this time the real, unadulterated thing. There was nothing left to be sold or, more correctly, what was left was unsaleable, for though the carpets and furniture were very fine the price they would have brought would have only been sufficient to keep us a matter of months. And all prices had dropped considerably – that is, excepting the price of food. And this still continued to soar. Even had she been so disposed to sell them, my grandmother’s jewels were useless. The people wanted food – not jewellery, as the dealers took pains to point out when they offered a few liras for genuine stones, worth hundreds. There seemed to be no way out of this impasse and eventually my mother had to leave us and go to the Army Depôt behind the Gülhane Parkı. It was the first time we had ever been separated from her and we were overcome with a sense of loss. My grandmother did the marketing, leaving us three children to look after ourselves and returning with the shopping-bag pitifully empty, for the money she had bought only the most meagre supplies. It seemed to us that we had lived forever on lentils and cabbage soup and the dry, black apology for bread. Yet although our stomachs recoiled against this diet, we were always so hungry that we would wolf down the tasteless, insipid mixtures almost with relish.

  Up and down the length of the street continued to come the tragic news of the dead or dying or wounded relatives. And fresh sickness broke out, for the people were starving and likely to go on starving unless they bought from the Bourse Noir. And who in that poor street was capable of raising sufficient money to buy from the Bourse Noir?

  One day my grandmother took us to see my mother. I remember it was a soft mild day, mild enough for us to dispense with our thin coats. We were very excited at the thought of seeing my mother, and when we reached the Depôt and a soldier halted us, enquiring our business there, we were afraid perhaps he would not let us pass. My grandmother could not hear a word he said, but I explained that we had come to visit our mother and he stood aside for us to pass. The building was old and dirty and we went up a long, tortuous flight of broken wooden stairs, making a great deal of noise, and another soldier, stationed at the head, again enquired our business. I stammered why we were here and he showed us into a large, gloomy room, where many women sat working at their machines.

  There was a great silence in that room, as though the women were either far too occupied to gossip together, or as though the discipline was too severe. We stood uncertainly in the doorway, nobody taking any notice of us, and presently Mehmet espied my mother and broke away from us, flying on his thin, brown sticks of legs down the busy ranks of the women. He reached my mother and flung himself into her arms, sobbing as though his heart would break. We followed him but there was no place to sit, so we stood around her table, our shadows blocking the light from a few of the other women sitting near her. It was the first time we had ever visited her here, and I was shocked by the dirt and the meanness and the poverty-stricken air of the place. My mother looked tired, her eyes red-rimmed and her hands slightly soiled. All the fastidiousness in me was revolted and I felt impotent, childish rage that my mother should have to work in a place like this. Perhaps my face spoke volumes to her for she said to my grandmother: ‘It would have been better not to have brought the children here.’

  My grandmother shrugged indifferently, shifting the weight of Muazzez to the other arm, then, in answer to my mother’s outstretched arms, gave her over to her.

  ‘What else could I do?’ she grumbled loudly, all the other women momentarily pausing to listen to what she said. ‘There was nobody with whom I could leave them and I need money.’

  My mother reached out for her purse, pushing the small contents across the table. My grandmother querulously asked if that was all. I saw that my mother flushed brilliantly and the widow, who was sitting next to her, said – perhaps to create a diversion: ‘We get all our food here, you know. Not much, but better than I could get at home. And they give me money and a place to sleep and what more do I want?’

  ‘Perhaps you are contented here,’ roared my grandmother pointedly. ‘But you have no family to depend upon you. I have these three children to try to feed and this money w
ill not buy very much for them.’

  Her lips folded obstinately and she looked with disdain at the few coins in her hand and I saw the shadow of distress in my mother’s eyes. She looked as though she wished to apologise for us children and I ached to comfort her, to give some sort of assurance, but I did not know how. Then I saw her lift her hands in a little gesture of helplessness and she said: ‘I wish I knew what to do! I wish something could be done for the children.’

  My grandmother’s face was cold and obstinate.

  ‘They will die with hunger if they stay much longer with me,’ she declared. ‘I am old and I can do with little food if necessary, but these are young and keep demanding, demanding – ’

  My mother could not answer. She sat looking down at her roughened, soiled hands and a few of the women threw sympathetic glances at her but nobody said anything. There was nothing that could be said.

  After some minutes, my grandmother retrieved Muazzez and prepared to depart. She looked anxious and mutinous and grey-faced and was probably as hungry as I, but in that moment I hated her with a passion that had nothing childish about it. She had humiliated my mother and spoken roughly to her and given her additional unhappiness.

  ‘We are going now,’ she said.

  My mother offered her cheek to be kissed and there was no way of clasping her and telling her that one loved her and that she was not to worry. Her kiss was as distant and as cold as the waves that break on the seashore, her eyes looking past us to some torment we could not see but could perhaps dimly comprehend. In an effort to bring awareness of us back to her remote face, I wriggled against her shoulder, insinuating my warm face against her cold one.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said absently to me, not thinking of me, and I withdrew rebuffed and helpless in my inarticulateness – feeling unwanted.

  We left her and passed back through the ranks of the disillusioned women and at the door we turned to wave to her but she was not looking at us. She had her face cupped in her hands and perhaps she was crying. We did not know. We trudged home with my grandmother to the silent, cold house in Bayazit, all the world seeming dark, for my mother had seemed to renounce us that day, and my grandmother said she did not want us. There was nothing we could do, for we were children and our voices would not be heard amidst the greater clamour of the world.

  The next time my mother came home from the Depôt it was earlier than usual and we wondered what had brought her at this hour. She said she was home for three days and my grandmother ladled the everlasting cabbage soup into her bowl silently, intimating perhaps that one more mouth to feed could make little difference to the food. My mother said she had received a letter from the Depôt commander, telling her that, if she wished, her children could be cared for at the school recently established in Kadiköy for the protection of children who had lost their fathers during the war. The idea appalled and frightened me and the more my mother elaborated the theme, the more frightened did I become. It appeared from her conversation that she had made up her mind to send Mehmet and me to this school, and I felt as if everything of the old life was ending and that my mother no longer wanted us with her.

  My grandmother seemed relieved by the decision, saying she would keep Muazzez with her, and I ran to my mother, crying: ‘No, anne, no! Don’t leave us, don’t send us away.’

  And Mehmet took up the cry but there was no softening in my mother’s eyes as she looked at us.

  My grandmother snapped irritably, as if all life was not ending for us: ‘Stop crying, both of you! There is nothing to cry for. You will enjoy being at school and you will get plenty of good food to eat.’

  ‘I don’t want good food,’ I sobbed, longing for some relaxation of my mother’s hard, disinterested mood, some softening of expression that would let me run to her to be comforted.

  But there was none. Only separation and school for us, no love for there was nobody to give it to us. I wonder, did my mother make her decision with tears and misgivings or with relief that at last a place was found to house us, so that she need no longer feel responsibility for us? These are questions to which only she knew the answer, and she did not tell us these things. But it is not an idle thing to say that the heart and mind and spirit of a child can be broken, and the events of that melancholy day governed the whole of my future life. Love can die as easily in the childish heart, if more bitterly, as in the adult. Where the senses scream and beat helplessly against the ruthlessness of a decision, whether lightly made or not, and are forced to fall back, unrecognised, unheard, then love dies too, although a child would not call it that. Perhaps it is only fully realised afterwards, when the child himself becomes adult and feels an old enmity, looking back to that withered day.

  So Mehmet and I went to bed that night knowing that rebellion was useless, that we were only children and would not be listened to, even if we had had the words to explain our agony of mind. My mother went to Kadiköy to register our names, and I asked my grandmother to explain why it was we must go. She gave me several very good, cold, material reasons but was farther from understanding my distress than I was from knowing how ruthless she could be. She could not see that the poor food of home meant nothing to us, as long as we could remain there, that home meant security if nothing else. So I gave up futile questioning, for even one’s flesh and blood can be most cruelly unaware of sorrow.

  The next day Mehmet and I were taken to Galata Bridge by my mother, to cross the Bosphor for Kadiköy on the Anatolian side. On the boat she told us so many times how we would like this school that we became quite silent, no longer answering her. And she misunderstood the silence for sulkiness and set her lips tightly.

  From the Kadiköy boat-station we walked to the school – the building that is today the French Hospital. It was in a beauty spot, looking out across the sea, the school building so clean and fresh that it gleamed like gold in the mellow sun. We went up some wide, stone steps and still one of us hoped for some reprieve, some hitch in arrangements, for defeat is a difficult thing to accept. A uniformed porter in a cold, antiseptic-looking hall told us to sit down whilst he fetched someone to attend to us. I sat on the extreme edge of a rickety chair, my heart thumping so loudly that I expected everyone to hear it, and a big, white-faced clock on the wall ticked away the minutes in time with my heart. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock it said unceasingly, uncaringly, and the big hand moved inexorably, not to be stopped by my silent pleading to stand still forever. Several starched-aproned sisters passed through the hall, bending incurious eyes on us but there were no children to be seen or heard.

  Presently a woman dressed in a blue dress with a stiff white apron about her – who we afterwards learned was the Matron – came across to my mother and they started to converse softly. She spoke appalling Turkish overlaid with a thick, guttural accent, for she was a German matron with fair braided hair and blonde skin.

  After a little while she turned to Mehmet and me and said: ‘Say goodbye to your mother.’

  We began to cry and she said sharply: ‘Your mother will come to see you sometimes. Do not cry.’

  So we leaned towards our mother and brushed her hands with our lips. I longed for a kind word from her, for a look that held expression but her face remained closed, empty, with nothing in it for us. We watched her go through the big glass door then her shadow preceding her down the glittering steps, but she did not look back or give any sign of her feelings. Was she distressed at having to leave us here – or hard, as we had never known before? We could not know, we little insignificant two who stood beside the plump German matron, who told us to kiss each other goodbye – for Mehmet was to be taken to the Kindergarten, a separate building from the one we were in.

  Mehmet clung to my arm and would not let me go, his brown eyes asking what was happening to us, and I whispered to him that everything would be all right, that I would soon be seeing him again. A red-haired nurse led him away, a small, silent boy of three and a half who did not know what to make of this topsy-turvy
world. Another nurse took me from the Matron’s side and I was bathed and put into a drab, grey uniform – a charity school’s uniform. Next I was taken to the dormitory and shown my bed, a narrow iron bed with a white coverlet and a low stool beside it for my folded clothes each night. I was then shown the classroom and the place where I was to sit, the dining-room and the Sister to whom I was responsible, a gimlet-eyed woman with no understanding of children. Big-boned she was and sadistic, with enormous red hands capable of chastisement. Timidly I asked her if I could see my brother and she snapped that I could not and that, furthermore, it would be as well for me to learn to speak only when spoken to. And during the whole of the time I remained in that school, some two years, I never saw Mehmet, even though once I heard my mother begging the Matron to let him see me occasionally, as he was fretting for me. But the uncaring Matron said that the rules of the school must be abided by. It was ‘verboten’ for the juniors to mix with the kindergarten and the Matron was not a German for nothing. Verboten was verboten and that was all there was to it.

  The food was very good at first and everywhere very clean and always smelling of disinfectant. We had classes every day and there was no chance of dreaming over the lessons, for the teachers would pull one back to attention in their excruciatingly bad Turkish, and the punishments even included going without meals. Twice a week we had singing lessons. One of the Sisters would play the piano and we would sing old Turkish and German folk-songs, enjoying ourselves for it was one of the few times we could really let ourselves go and shout as loudly as we wished. In the evenings we used to gather in the garden, that lovely wilderness which looked out across the Marmara, and the busy sisters would form us into martial lines about the Turkish flag. Lustily we would chant ‘Deutschland über Alles!’ and, as an afterthought, ‘Padişahim çok yaşa!’ We were all too young to see the irony of this.