Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  Inexorably time crept on and one morning we took our usual places in the classroom that looked much as before, yet was vastly different for the examinations would begin today. The first paper, I well remember, was History and by the end of the morning we were all dropping with exhaustion. Through worry I had developed a stye on one of my eyes, and it was a very small stye when I commenced the examinations but at the end of the History paper the swelling was as big as a hazel nut and the pain intense. My brain was fluffy like cotton wool. The last paper that day was French and I had hoped to get through it reasonably quickly, yet at the end of two hours I was stupid with fatigue and pain. I found myself repeating over and over again: ‘Je viens mon vieux, mais où est mon chapeau?’ and wondering what in God’s name the dancing, familiar yet unfamiliar crazy words meant. Were they French or Greek or Chinese or just plain gibberish and who had said them to whom and for what absurd reason?

  The next day my throbbing eye gave me no rest at all, despite the quantities of aspirin the doctor gave me. I staggered into the classroom and took up my Maths paper. I sat looking at it for so long that the Invigilator got the impression I was cheating and came fussily over to my desk, examining my pockets and the inside and the outside of my desk and the floor beneath it in an effort to discover possible hidden notes. Not satisfied with this he practically undressed me and finding nothing had to return to his place. He continued to eye me doubtfully for the rest of the day, unwilling to abandon the idea that I was cheating.

  The examinations went grindingly on for fourteen days, and we who had started reasonably fat and healthy looking ended up as if we were in the last stages of consumption.

  We heard the results some ten days later. Three hundred and seven of us were assembled in the Hall together, all of us in the final class, though divided all our school lives into classes of forty or so.

  One of our captains read out the results and he looked stern-faced and forbidding as he reeled off the growing list of names, most of them with the word ‘failed’ after them. I felt less isolated. When he came to my name I felt my face stiffen. He paused a little, then said the word ‘passed’ and there was a wild, mad moment when all the sweetest music in the world played in my ears and my heart pounded crazily in my chest. I did not hear the number of marks I had received for each subject, so I shall never know whether they were good or not. The magic, unbelievable word ‘passed’ stood on the air in letters of fire and my eyes ached with the effort to control the silly, conquering tears. I could only think that ten years lay behind me, ten years that had held good and bad in about equal proportions. Harbiye Military College lay before me and soon I should be an officer.

  I became vaguely aware that friends were signalling their congratulations to me and I smiled sheepishly, coming back to awareness.

  The captain looked down at all of us from the raised dais, his eyes steely that his class had produced such bad results. The palms of my hands were sticky and clammy and streaks of violently coloured lightning sizzled in my brain, telescoping at last into the one shining, vivid word ‘passed’.

  On May 29th, 1929, I said goodbye to Kuleli and the bits of my life that would live there forever. There was a rousing send-off from the boat-station for us lucky ones but I think we were all of us reluctant to say goodbye to Kuleli, regretful not to sleep again under its tall roof.

  The boat we sailed in was gaily decorated with flags and as we sailed down the Bosphor I leaned over the rails, taking my last long look at Kuleli, that still seemed as beautiful to me as it had that first long-ago morning in 1919, when I had gone there for the first time and a cross old porter had directed my mother to the inferior grey school on the hill.

  At Galata Bridge the Military College band was there to greet us and a unit of the College students and proudly we marched with them through the İstanbul streets.

  The watching crowds cheered and cheered until they were hoarse and the stirring martial music of the band held triumph and victory as well as the heartache of all marching soldiers.

  On, on with the band we marched, our shoulders squared in military fashion, our dark-blue-trousered legs one unbroken line. Past Beyoğlu we went and all the shopkeepers stood in their doors to watch us go. Up to Taksim Square and then the great yellow building of the Military College came into view, its back to the Bosphor and close, high trees shading the gardens with their stiff, pale flowers in formal patterns. And on other side of the Bosphor lay Kuleli, but it could not be seen from Harbiye however hard one looked for it was too far down the Bosphor, hidden by an elbow of land. But we who had so recently left it knew that it was there, that it would always be there to shine bravely to the skies, to throw its white reflection to the blue waters.

  Up the wide steps of Harbiye we marched, feeling raw and new in this alien atmosphere, and the paused crowds in the street sent up their cheers and their blessings to us. Soldiers guarded the doors but we passed through for we belonged here now, and we went into a marble hall with marble corridors running to right and to left and let into the walls were plaques to commemorate the dead officers of Harbiye who had died in the 1914–18 War.

  Before us stood a door that opened to wide green lawns and away at the bottom glimmered the eternal Bosphor.

  Great intricacies of electric globes lined the high ceilings and I was awed by the splendour and majesty of Harbiye, proud to belong to this ancient place. For here I walked hand in hand with history where many more famous than I had walked before me, where Kemal Atatürk had once walked long ago.

  The band had ceased playing and there was silence in that cool, white hall and we newcomers stood awkwardly, ill at ease, longing for Time to have merged our separate identities into the one great identity that was Harbiye.

  We were granted three days freedom and our new Commanding Officer pointed out that during these three days we were to make up our minds for what it was we wished to train. I had never given any serious thought to this problem, my main objective having been to have done with school life. I was astonished when I realised that my friends mostly had their plans ready. Some wanted to be doctors, some dentists, some cavalry officers. I could not make up my mind at all. I turned over all the professions in my mind but was uninterested in them all. I made instead a discovery of the most appalling magnitude. I was a soldier. I was in the Military College and I knew nothing of life outside the military establishments, yet my heart was not in soldiering. That was a terrible discovery to make at the beginning of my career, when it was too late to rectify the mistake. I wore the uniform of an officer-cadet and had worn it with varying degrees of pride for ten years, and for many more years still to come I would wear an officer’s uniform – whether it fitted my ambitions or not.

  But what were my ambitions? In so far as I could discover I had none.

  At the end of the three days I was depressed and uneasy, as far from a decision as ever.

  When a very red-faced major asked me what I wished to put my name down for and I replied that I did not know, he looked at me as if suspecting insolence.

  Finally they put me down for an infantry regiment and I escaped from their presence, not caring.

  In the garden a friend hailed me and announced with pride that he was going to the doctors’ school, and I could not help but envy him for his clear-cut decision.

  I was jealous of him at the same time yet could not help wondering what it was we had ever appeared to have in common with each other.

  He said to me: ‘I suppose you will go to infantry?’

  I nodded, not wishing to discuss it, then I said without being able to help myself: ‘I don’t really mind. The truth is there is nothing I want to be badly enough.’

  ‘I suppose there is no use in wishing you good luck?’

  I shook my head to his doubtful face.

  ‘Not the slightest,’ I said.

  When I was a child I had wanted to be a general, now that I was a young man I wanted to be nothing.

  Sixteen cadets, my
self included, were sent to train for six months in an infantry regiment.

  We went to Mudanya, four hours journey down the Marmara from İstanbul. When we arrived there the Commanding Officer, quite a different type incidentally from any we had ever met in the military establishments, divided us into the units.

  The officers treated us like dogs and the soldiers treated us like dogs for this was the only opportunity the soldiers would ever get in their lives.

  We used to sleep in a large tent the roof of which had hundreds of holes in it. On bright nights when we lay down we could see the stars peeping through the holes, and sometimes mulberries used to drop from the trees on our sleeping faces so that one would come awake with a tiny shock of surprise to find an over-ripe, succulent mulberry just rolling off one’s nose.

  Our uniforms soon lost their crisp, conceited look and I never remember coming back to the garrison from training with a dry jacket. Mud and rain and perspiration all combined to give our uniforms a greenish, indeterminate hue so that we sixteen cadets soon began to look like well-seasoned soldiers.

  There was a young lieutenant who used to give us physical training. He would walk up and down, up and down the field, playing with a whistle in his hand, his face sharp with the tortures he was thinking up for us. Suddenly he would blow smartly on the whistle and we would jump to attention.

  ‘Lie down,’ he would say and obediently, like dogs, we would lie down.

  ‘Get up!’ he would snarl and we would scramble to our feet with more alacrity than dignity. We had no time for dignity.

  ‘Again!’ he would command. ‘Get up quicker the next time, you lazy young swine.’

  Thirty minutes of it – up, down, up, down. Fling yourself on the stony ground, drag yourself erect again. Pant for breath and feel your jacket dampening with perspiration, and pick the jagged stones from your bleeding, lily-white hands. Listen for the whistle that will reprieve you for less time than it takes to tell, pause for the breath that comes painfully, chokingly. Wait for a change of command. Run! Lie down! Get up! Run! Lie down! Get up! On, on, cowardly body! Shake off the betraying puppy fat and grow slim like the sardonic young lieutenant who is enjoying your misery, who is taking it out of you all the more because he is young enough to remember his own despair.

  Hours and hours of training every day for months until our abraded knees through our torn trousers became immune, until our ladylike hands were tough and brown and insensitive and our waists were clipped in to imitate the young lieutenant, who had become our model.

  Then we went to Bursa area for the biggest manoeuvre the new Republic had ever staged, where the Reserve officers had already poured in and we would really see field action. March, march, march. On under the blinding sun and the hot roads to scorch your feet and never mind if your ill-fitting boots hurt you. This is the Army. This is the life.

  We marched those days until we were ready to drop and the forty-year-old reservists felt it worse than we did. Sometimes we slept in the fields and were not aware of the heavy rain that soaked us, that ran into the tents and turned the heavy ground to mud. We could wake in the mornings stiff and aching and our jackets wet through, but presently the sun would come up again to dry us and burn us and parch us with thirst and we marched all the time. Sometimes we walked through the long chilly nights, leaning against each other and sleeping, or against the necks of our mules and even the mules would plod wearily too. Many times we started to march before dawn, our clothes chill with dew, our limbs stiff and heavy, not belonging to us any more. We would march on through the new day into the torrid sun of afternoon and soldiers would start to fall out of the lines. Down the lines of weary men would come the passed-on, never-ending cry: ‘Sick soldier fallen out. Sick soldier fallen out.’

  And when we came up with the sick soldier, or maybe there would be more than one, he would be lying on his side, too exhausted to care if he never lived again. Perhaps some of them would have their boots off, their torn and bleeding feet looking frightful under the glare of the shadeless sun and the flies already gathering to feast. Then I would remember the stories I had heard of my father and imagine him in that soldier’s uniform, waiting patiently for the wounded cart which might never have come, for that was war and this was only a manoeuvre.

  I marched automatically, hearing only the steady plodding of the mules’ feet and the wearier, heavier tread of the marching lines. At the end of that manoeuvre they put a red ribbon on my arm and said I was a Corporal and I felt I had nobly acquitted myself, even though my body and my feet would never know pain again.

  May 1st, 1931, dawned quite differently from any other day, for that day I became an officer, school life lying forever behind me.

  On that proud morning I was handed a smart new uniform, a clanking sword and white gloves and my shoes shone like mirrors. I tilted my cap to an angle and thought there was nobody like me in all the world.

  After a ceremony at Taksim Square we went back to Harbiye and were handed our diplomas, the Commanding Officer wishing us the customary good luck and telling us we were on leave until our postings came through.

  The rest of that day seemed to be filled with the dashing sight of the new officers strutting a trifle self-consciously through the corridors and out in the wide gardens of the college. We were all awaiting the arrival of our families to take us home, for as usual, we none of us had any money. Taxis constantly arrived to depart again with a very important-looking new lieutenant seated in the centre of his admiring family like a precious jewel in a casket. As the afternoon wore on I became anxious that nobody would come for me. Awful visions of sudden deaths or taxi crashes began to obsess me.

  I remember that I felt the one kuruş that lay in my pocket and started to laugh at myself, for here I was, a new young officer, with but one kuruş in my pocket.

  I drew it out and looked at it then I placed it in my sword, where it still rests to this day – a souvenir of that time.

  Up and down I walked impatiently and sometimes no doubt I stared at myself in the mirrors and thought what a very fine fellow I was, to be sure. I thrust out my chest and squared my shoulders under their new khaki jacket, then slowly, pompously, I strolled out to the garden, my head in the clouds, already a general, but my sword clanked rudely against the stone steps and I heard the one kuruş rattling and I came out of my daydream.

  At last a taxi arrived for me with a giggling, excited Muazzez within and we set off for home with a great fanfare from the klaxon.

  At home I was rushed into excitement and congratulations and half the street had crowded into the little rooms. Old friends had arrived and strange old women kept kissing me and senile men I had never seen in my life before kept crying over me, telling me they had known my father. Drinks were circulated and through all the merriment I noticed my mother’s proud, cold face keeping its secrets, but I who knew her, knew that she was happy for a red rose was tucked into her hair and her eyes smiled each time she looked at me.

  Pretty Muazzez was there in a brief blue dress, seeming to eternally hand bon-bons on a silver dish. My grandmother wore black, her diamonds flashing scintillatingly, brought from their resting-place for this occasion. Her high old voice talked arrogantly, praising, always praising … I saw the widow, fatter now than the day I had first seen her as a child, and I caught her worn hand and held it tightly for she was shy of approaching me in all my splendour. My head grew giddy and light as air with all the liqueurs I had consumed so that I laughed without reason and flirted with all the pretty girls.

  Mehmet arrived from Kuleli, with the news that he had passed the examinations into Harbiye, and the laughter and the excitement grew more intense, the kissing more indiscriminate, and all the time the tray of liqueurs circulated non-stop. My head grew dizzy but what of that? Float, stupid wooden head, and care nothing for tomorrow. It is not often an officer comes out of famous Harbiye.

  Woozier and woozier grew my stupid head and I loosened my jacket and sought fresh air, tur
ning my back on the chattering, merry crowd. I looked out to the stars in the sky and I remembered that Kuleli was lying under these stars and I heard the faint sigh of the Bosphor as it lapped the shores where none walked by night. But they broke into my dreaming and called me back to the merry throng, for the neighbours were departing and they wanted to wish me once more good luck.

  ‘Long life to you, my friends,’ I said and tossed off yet another fiery, sickly liqueur.

  In December 1931 I transferred from an infantry regiment to the Air Force as volunteers had been asked for. And I left İstanbul on January 20th, 1932, for two years of training at the Eskişehir Air College. We left Haydarpaşa Station on a cold, frosty evening, and when we arrived in Eskişehir in the early hours of the following day thick blankets of snow lay everywhere beneath a heavy, white sky. The cold was so intense that our breath froze on the air.

  We newcomers had the customary three days freedom from lessons and after luncheon on the first day were given a bus to visit the city. For the first time in our lives we were being driven somewhere, not forced to march as always before. Air Force life, we told ourselves joyously, seemed to promise better things than an infantry regiment.

  The road from the aerodrome was very bad, rutted and uneven beneath the deceptive snow, and now and then our heads hit the roof of the bus with frightful cracks, oddly reminiscent of the journey we had once made to Tokat. We came to the outskirts of the city, the old Eskişehir of 1932 which has long since disappeared in the onslaught of progress.

  Little mud houses marked the beginning, so small that one wondered how anyone ever lived there at all. Narrow side roads gave us glimpses of more of these primitive houses and here, where the snow had melted into slush, would presently be great rivers of uncrossable mud. There were no pavements and now and then a stone would fly from beneath our wheels, hitting one of the mud houses with a sound like a rifle-shot and passers-by would press back to avoid the snow we flung up from our wheels. These queer little houses belonged to the Tartar families and sheltered innumerable members of the one family.