Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  Every two weeks my mother used to visit me and for many days beforehand I looked forward to her coming.

  Sometimes during the play-hour I used to go to a corner of the garden, away from the others, and sit on the broken, low stone wall and look over the Marmara and I would think about my mother and wonder if she were missing me, or was she glad to have handed over the responsibility to someone else, someone more impersonal? I would bury my face in the long grass and cry for her and for Mehmet, whom I never saw at all.

  There was a small building to the left of the main school building and in it was our cinema, such as it was. There was a little window just inside here, with a high step leading up to the operator’s room, and sometimes I used to climb on this step for I could see the large main gates from here and I would wait there as many hours as I dared. I waited to see my mother’s figure turn in at the gates, my heart pounding with excitement and always the fear that perhaps, after all, she would not come today. When I saw her, I would rush from the cinema and hurtle towards her like a small rocket, flinging myself into her arms which never warmed, eternally begging the one thing: ‘Am I coming home today, anne?’

  ‘Not today, my son. Perhaps soon – ’

  Always the same question, always the same answer. Soon. Soon. Soon.

  She would bring nuts and sultanas for me and tell me about my grandmother and my sister but as the months flew by these things interested me less and less. They had all receded far into the background, even not seeing my brother had lost the first bitter poignancy. Only one thing remained real and bright and shining, my mother. Still I clung to my early image of her, trying to force her to show some love for me and would cry myself to sleep after she had gone, for her visits were never anything more than formal, duty visits. Time healed tears too, even dimmed love, and the months flew over my head and I grew taller and stronger, and good food filled out the hollows in my cheeks. New uniforms were given to me and I went up two classes and the habit of school grew strong within me and longings for my mother’s love became fainter and fainter until eventually they died altogether. I still watched for her visits but without the excited heart and I no longer asked when it was I would see my home again.

  But the spring of 1918 saw the return for us to bad food and even worse conditions for my mother. The War was going badly for us and food was running short in the whole country. At the school we had now begun to leave the dining-room hungry after meals, and no more butter appeared on the tables. We went to sleep hungry, awoke hungry and went through the day hungry. When my mother nowadays brought me precious nuts or dried fruits, I ate them so quickly that I was almost always sick after them. The German Sisters disappeared, and old Turkish women replaced them, and the school began to smell less and less of disinfectant and one missed the stiff crackle of the white aprons in the corridors. Lessons were rare and singing had stopped altogether, for how could we sing if we were hungry? But there still hung in the music-room a large portrait of the Sultan, Mehmet Reşat, and we used to shout ‘Padişahim çok yaşa!’ – even on our empty stomachs.

  When the summer of that year was upon us we did not even have dry bread in the school and the old women used to take us to a place called Fenerbahçe, where grew many big sakız ağacı (gum trees), where the small red, resinous berries grew in thick clusters. We used to throw stones into the trees, sometimes being lucky enough to knock down the berries into the long, wild grass. These we would scramble madly for, knocking each other down to find the berries to eat them avidly, like little animals. They had a sour taste but were curiously satisfying and we used to fill our pockets, taking them back with us to the school to eat during the night. At other times we would go to Fikir Tepesi, where we would pull and eat kuzukulağı (sorrel), helping the younger amongst us to choose the right grasses. We would search at Kalamış for bayırturpu (small white radishes), which gave us a raking thirst. And many times I remember eating the almond-blossom from the trees, stuffing the blooms into my ever-hungry mouth. Once in a sea field, bounding one side of our gardens, soldiers were pulling broad beans and throwing the green stalks to the edge of the field, the edge nearest our palings. We put our fingers through and took the stalks, sucking them afterwards with great relish.

  When my mother took to giving me a little pocket money, I, like the others, used to buy broad beans for myself, eating them raw, feverishly stuffing them down me until in the end I would vomit – then feel hungrier than ever. It became the custom amongst us to carry salt and red pepper in little bags concealed about our person and if we were ever lucky enough to find potato peelings or raw aubergine skins, we would wash them at the pump, expertly mix them with the contents of our little bags and eat them when we were desperate with hunger. Our food-starved eyes overlooked nothing in the way of sustenance. But one day in my hunger I ate something unknown, something I had thought was radish, and which made me very sick so frequently that I was rushed into the school hospital. Here it was discovered I had poisoned myself and almost at the same time scabies developed. I had been suffering from itchiness for weeks but had thought nothing of it, and in any case the old women who had replaced the smart German Sisters never paid any attention to things like that. Scabies spread over my body until I was almost crying with craziness, with the red-hot, prickling itch that would not let me rest. Every morning I was taken to the Turkish Bath, the scabby places scrubbed with a hard brush until my body was bleeding and agonizing. It was a torture and I would scream continuously but to no avail, for the scrubbing continued mercilessly.

  The food in the hospital was a little better, not very much, but at least we were not driven to the fields with hunger. We were given a little lapa (watery rice) in the middle of the day and a thin vegetable soup at night – but no bread, for there simply was not any to be had. We were always hungry and half an hour before a meal was due we children allowed up would gather impatiently under the big clock over the door. We used to count the seconds until sixty, then say triumphantly, ‘One minute!’ and so on, thinking thereby to reduce the waiting time. And it became a habit with me, and my right leg would jerk in time to the counting so that automatically today when I am very tired or depressed my right leg commences to jerk to the ticking of a clock.

  All the time I was in hospital my mother had not been to see me and I was worrying for news of her, for never before had she failed in her two weekly visits. The long weeks passed and still no sign of her. I was released from the hospital, weak as a cat and very thin, for the last few months of starvation had taken all the roundness from my body and cheeks. When I got out of the hospital I found that we were no longer allowed into the cinema to spy from the operator’s window, but instead a blackboard had been erected in the garden, and as the visitors arrived, the children’s names were inscribed on the blackboard. Like all the others, I took to waiting beside the blackboard on visiting days but my name never appeared. After a while alarm swept through me that I should never see my mother again, that she had at last deserted me for ever. I would have to remain in this frightful place for years, and vague, formless notions of escape began to take root in my mind. But then, unexpectedly as all miracles are, the lovely thing happened and one summer day of 1918 I saw my name being written on the blackboard. I walked slowly towards the reception hall, my heart ready to suffocate me and my right leg perilously inclined to jerk as I walked. When I reached the hall I saw my mother sitting on one of the chairs, though indeed she was so changed that only the eye of love could have singled her out from the rest of the drab humanity about her. I ran to her, crying, and she clasped me in her arms, holding me tightly with hands that trembled.

  Then she said to me: ‘But what is this, my son? You are so thin and white-looking! What have they been doing to you?’

  So I cried again, in the unaccustomed luxury of sympathy, and told her that I had been in hospital, how they had scrubbed my body until the blood poured and that we had no food to eat. She looked horrified.

  ‘Why,’ she said
, ‘you would have been better off at home with me.’

  I asked her why she had not been to visit me and she said that she too had been ill, a return of the fever which would not entirely leave her. And then I realised that she too had become pitifully thin and gaunt, like a faintly animated skeleton she was, with her white face and her large eyes that never smiled. She had kept her beauty, largely because it was a beauty of bone and would never die, but now it was a mournful, disillusioned beauty that met the eye, with fine lines beside the mouth and sorrow etching the broad forehead with gossamer threads.

  She put her hand over my cropped head and said that I looked like a charity boy. I asked eagerly after my brother and a troubled look ran across her face and she said no, for he too was ill and they had not let her visit him at all. Presently she stood up to go and this time I did not ask when I would be coming home, for one had learned not to ask embarrassing questions and home seemed remote as a dream nowadays, only a word with no meaning.

  She took my hand and said we were going to the Matron’s room – not the same Matron of two years ago, but a Turkish woman, more formidable, more unapproachable. We saw her without difficulty and I could not believe that I was hearing aright when my mother said she was taking me home with her and that she would come for my brother in two weeks time. The Matron coldly commenced to argue but my mother was in no mood to be browbeaten. She said she would not move from this place without me and that my uniform would be returned when she came for Mehmet. She pressed for information regarding him but the Matron was vague, disposed to be distant, either because she knew nothing or because she chose not to tell.

  All the time they talked, I stood by the door, my heart beating in a strange fashion. This day had come at last, this day I had longed for for over two years, but it had come too late and now it did not matter whether my mother took me or not. It was true that I wished to be out of this place but where I wanted to go I did not know. Home held no promise of heaven and it was so remote it was difficult to remember, and it held in my mind an even lesser security than did this mean, charity school.

  So we went home, to the same sort of conditions I had left two years ago, and bitterness brooded because one had left this meanness for another kind of meanness and one had returned no better off. My mother was brave in 1918 to make such a decision but childhood asked – perhaps unreasonably – why she had not been brave in 1916, when she banished two small boys to a German-influenced school, killing all trust and love, then trying to win it back when it was too late. For that is how it seemed to us, and does today, even though she is long since dead and past all criticism.

  Home was a strange and alien place, with my grandmother still serving the eternal vegetable soup, and the rooms appearing smaller and darker after the large, bare rooms of school. Muazzez was now three, a thin little creature with blue eyes and hair that had lightened to brown. She was fretful and listless, for she was hungry too – like all of us. I would try to play with her but she seemed uninterested, as if playing was something strange for her. She could not talk plainly either, stammering and flushing and running away from me, preferring to be alone for she had never known anything else. An odd, nervy, sensitive child, always hungry and always inclined to tears. I could not feel closeness to her, as I had once felt for Mehmet, that little, brown-eyed, silent brother who had known my father and shared my toys.

  My mother was still at the Army Sewing Depôt and my grandmother looked after the little house. One day I went with her to market but we could not buy anything. The shops were shuttered and closed, the few that remained open having only a little Indian corn and rotten vegetables for sale. Flour was treble its normal price, black and sour-looking, giving off an acrid smell. My grandmother looked at what she had bought and at the few remaining coins in her hands, then said in amazement: ‘This is the first time I have ever come back from market with money still left in my hand!’

  And that day we ate sour bread and soup which tasted like salt water. Then came a succession of days when only olive oil, much adulterated, could be poured over our ration of bread and I became so weak I was even unable to walk. I remember lying most of the day in the salon, faint with hunger and unable to as much as move a limb. Muazzez was with me, sitting on the carpet and whimpering that she was hungry, but I was far too light-headed to pay much attention to her. My grandmother did not return until dusk, from some long trek she had made into the hills to God knows where. She gave us bread, fresh, almost white bread and quartered raw onions and butter which was rank but made no difference to our appetite. We ate until we could eat no more and Muazzez went to sleep where she was, stretched out on the carpet and no one cared because she was not in bed.

  My grandmother sat by the window crying and talking to herself as was her habit nowadays.

  ‘There is no food anywhere,’ she said. ‘For the first time in years I have money in my pocket and there is nothing to buy with it!’

  Where she had got the money I do not know. Perhaps she had sold some small thing for less than half its worth in order to buy food from the hoarding, greedy peasants who would never be too hungry.

  I think she sat by the window all the night through for when I awoke the next morning she was still there, her old eyes rimmed and strained from tiredness, and Muazzez still lay sleeping on the hard floor.

  CHAPTER 16

  Ending with the Barber’s Apprentice

  I shall not easily forget the day we went to Bebek, to the hospital where Mehmet lay dying.

  It was a fine, warm, summer day and from Galata Bridge the green hills of Anatolia shone fair and peaceful under the light-filled sky. Seagulls cried in the wake of the boats, the big and little boats that rode the Bosphor, so divinely blue this day that the heart expanded with happiness in the human breast. Hunger was momentarily forgotten in this translucent illusion of peacefulness, and when we arrived at Eminönü, to board the tram, I was giddy and slightly light-headed from the shine and sparkle of the new day and the crisp, salt tang blown from the sea. The tram hurtled through the streets in the heart-lurching way of all İstanbul trams. Up hills we flew and down again, faster and ever more furious and with a constant clang-clang-clang-clang, as though the driver and the tram together were impatient of these mean, secretive streets and were wistful to reach the clean, breathtaking sweep of Bebek as soon as might be.

  So deserted was Beşiktaş that day, that we might have been alone there. On, on we flew exhilaratingly, past Ortaköy, catching a glimpse of its white, shining mosque with the two tall minarets piercing the heavens, the mosque itself looking over the Bosphor. Down to Kuruçeşme, with its tumble-down wooden houses over which lay the black film of coal dust from the innumerable depôts. Still down until we reached Arnavutköy – the word spelling romance in itself, since it means ‘Albanian Village’. All along the low sea wall we ran now, looking across to Anatolia, Çengelköy like a jewel in its wooded hills, the long white Military School of Kuleli skirting the Bosphor, until finally the tall granite walls of the Summer Palace of the Khedive of Egypt hid the view and we spun furiously down the single-track line which led to Bebek and the glorious sweep of the bay.

  Bebek catches the heart with its fragile, fadeless beauty – a beauty which is made up chiefly, I think, of the blue waters that lap the shores and the tall, white-masted ships that seem to lie there eternally at anchor. And the old narrow houses that rise high behind the town; on up the steep hills they march, up to the forests that brood greenly all the year long. That summer morning in 1918 I had my first glimpse of Bebek and I was transported with joy that such subtle, pictorial beauty should meet my starved eyes at last.

  From the tram terminus my mother enquired the way to the Children’s Hospital and when we found it we had to wait in the cold, tiled hall until a Sister was free to see us. She came at last, efficient and rustling in her starched skirts, the traditional white veil bound low over her forehead, hiding all trace of hair so that today she would resemble, were she still i
n existence, a surgeon ready for the operating theatre. There was difficulty in locating Mehmet. In those days in Turkey there were no surnames, consequently there was quite often the greatest confusion in identifying people. The formula went something like this: Mehmet, the son of Hüsnü and Şevkiye of Bayazit. Clumsy as this method was people could usually be safely identified in the end as there were rarely two or more parents with exactly the same set of names or a child with the same name.

  When the Sister had finally sorted out who Mehmet was, she informed my mother that she could not see him as he was too ill. But my mother was obstinate and pressed hard for details. The Sister hinted at malnutrition and my mother thought about this for a moment or two and then said she wished to take him home with her. The Sister raised horrified eyebrows and said that Mehmet would certainly die if he were moved from the hospital. My mother insisted and the Sister doubtfully went to find a doctor. Whilst she was gone, my mother opened the package of clothes she had brought for Mehmet and fretted that they would be too small for him but that there had been nothing else to bring.

  A doctor, old and untidy-looking, came back with the Sister and proceeded to bully my mother but she replied in kind and said that she only wished to remove her son from this place.

  ‘I want my child,’ she insisted stubbornly. ‘If he is to die, he can die at home as easily as here. I am prepared to take all the responsibility.’

  The doctor shrugged with total indifference and turned to the Sister and told her to have Mehmet got ready. My mother handed over the bundle of clothing and signed a paper which the doctor gave to her. We sat back to wait for Mehmet.

  When the Sister returned she was carrying across her arm a small, lifeless-looking child. She handed the child to my mother, who only however gave a very brief glance, saying: ‘This is not my son. This is a baby and my child is five years old. There is some mistake – ’