Portrait of a Turkish Family

by Orga, Irfan

  Bedia paused uncertainly and I was aware of my grandmother’s still, immobile face from the shadows of her winged chair, of her contemplative hands demurely folded on her lap. Bedia went on: ‘Mother started to get angry because grandmother would not answer her. She seemed to direct all her talk to her; she was really only using me as an excuse. I could see that. Then she told me that she hated grandmother, that she had hated her for many years and was responsible for a house that was burned – a long time ago, I think,’ added Bedia apologetically, not yet being familiar with family history, not knowing of the square white house that had burned to the night skies. ‘Mehmet is in Bandırma, he went there by torpedo-boat a few days ago so he was not here for all this. Mother kept asking for him and kept forgetting that I had told her where he was. Then she burst out that she could not understand what I was doing in her son’s house. “I know you are his wife,” she said, but with an awful contempt in her voice, “but I do not like your painted mouth. Nobody in this family ever used paint on their mouths.” Then she told grandmother that she would cure her deafness for her and asked me to fetch her some olive oil. She said she would heat it and pour it into the bad ears. I did not want to do it but she insisted so I went to the kitchen and got what she asked for. When I came back she was looking at a knife that was still on the table and which she had not used when she was eating.’ Here Bedia shuddered, in remembrance, her eyes going dark. ‘And she said in an odd sort of voice that the knife had a lovely edge, that it was so clean and shining. And she looked at grandmother all the time she spoke but grandmother only watched her, not having heard anything she had said. I took the knife from mother and put it away and when I turned back to her she said, “But is it wrong of me to admire the way you keep your cutlery, Bedia? Did you think perhaps I was going to injure grandmother?” I said, no, I had not thought that and then she came over to me and I screamed and she looked surprised and asked why I did that and I did not know what to say. And all the time grandmother sat there, not saying a word, not interfering, making mother more and more angry and I was terrified of what was going to happen,’ she added naïvely; ‘grandmother is very obstinate, you know.’

  I nodded, remembering that obstinacy from other years.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said to Bedia. ‘Go on.’

  ‘There isn’t very much more to tell,’ she said. ‘After a while mother said that she would go to bed, that she could not bear the aching of her head and asked me if I had any aspirins. I had not, so she said it did not matter. When she had gone to her room, grandmother suggested that we should get a doctor for her. I asked why, and grandmother said that she knew her daughter-in-law very well, that she had given trouble for years and that in the mood she was in tonight she was capable of doing a lot of troublesome things. Anyway, I went to get a doctor and he came straight here with me, wondering what was wrong for really I had been unable to explain very much to him. When he went to her room she was still awake and asked me who he was. I told her that he was a doctor and that he would give her something for her headache. She seemed very suspicious of him but allowed him to examine her and leave some tablets, and then he came to the salon with me and began to ask grandmother all sorts of questions about mother. Finally he said that it would be better if she were put into an institution for a few months where she could get good nursing and good food. “She looks as if she has been starving herself,” he said. Then he left us but we had not realised mother had heard everything that had been said. You see, the doctor had had to shout to make grandmother understand him and she had shouted back at him, without knowing that she was shouting. It was terrible. Mother came back into the salon in her nightdress and said: “Do you think I am mad that you want to put me away where I shall never see my children again?” Grandmother tried to pacify her, although mother was very quiet, but upset too, and she sat down on the divan and looked at me pitifully. “Bedia,” she said, “do you think that I am mad? Is it madness to want to help the poor, to love my children too much, to fear for my eldest son’s death? Is it madness to live alone so that I shall not be a burden to the married happiness of you and Mehmet or Muazzez and her husband?” And I said no, I did not think so. She sounded so terribly sane and I began to think we had done the wrong thing by calling a doctor to her and by telling him so much afterwards. Mother sat there and then she burst into tears and ran back to her room, where she locked the door. I ran after her but she would not let me in and I could hear her moving about all the time, crying, and then grandmother came and banged on the door and roared out to her to open it for us. But her voice seemed to set mother crazy. She suddenly flung open the door – she was already dressed – and she pushed us out of her way saying to grandmother: “You are responsible for everything that has ever happened to me,” then she flew down the stairs and out of the house. I ran after her immediately but I could not catch her. She seemed to have the strength of ten people. We heard afterwards that she had run almost to Şişli and had called a taxi but when she was getting into the taxi she had fainted. She was weak of course for she had not eaten anything for days – only the small amount I had given her that evening. The taxi-driver took her straight to Medical Jurisprudence; the police came to tell us so this morning. They said she had screamed at them in the police station and had fought to get away. They had called a doctor and he had given her injections and then sent her in an ambulance to Jurisprudence – ’

  Bedia stopped speaking and I looked at her, not yet eighteen, to have seen so much passion unleashed, to have witnessed the outbreak of the sores that had rankled for twenty-six years. And I thought that she had emerged from it all with the little touching look of youth gone from her face forever, her little fragile air vanished like snow before the wind.

  ‘Where is she now?’ I asked.

  ‘I do not know,’ replied Bedia wearily; ‘the police will tell you. I would have gone myself to ask but I was waiting for you to come.’

  My grandmother laid a hand on my shoulder and I thought of the listening, straining face that must have watched my mother, the closed ears that had heard nothing, even though she must have been aware of danger. I thought of the indomitable courage that had held her in her chair in the face of the bright, sure blade of the knife, when one unguarded movement might have incited my overwrought mother to use it on her. My heart turned over and I felt my skin begin to creep. Of the pain and the heartbreak and the jealousy of the long years, of the teeming, crowded brain of my mother, I would not let myself think. Not just yet, I said. Not yet. Time enough to think of that later on. If you think of these things now, you will hate Bedia and your grandmother for not having understood. Think of something else.

  I went to Medical Jurisprudence and the doctor who had admitted my mother granted me an interview.

  He was an old, white-haired man with kind eyes, and when I asked him if I could see my mother he said gently: ‘She is not here any more. You are a young man and an airman and you have witnessed many tragic things; it would not be right to subject yourself to such torture.’

  I pleaded with him but he was firm.

  ‘She is not here,’ he repeated. ‘We have sent her to Bakırköy. She will be well looked after there.’

  I remembered the red, windowless ambulance that had just driven off as I had arrived at Jurisprudence and suddenly I knew it had held my mother. They had boxed her up in that airless place, to make sure that the already unstable brain would crack. I felt the sweat break out coldly on my forehead. Was there no humanity anywhere? Was it necessary to treat her like a possessed, witless creature who had no feelings, who knew nothing? I knew as surely as if she had been speaking to me that she was perfectly aware of what was going on, that she had known why they put her in the windowless ambulance. How her own heart had always been wrung with pity whenever she had caught sight of these ambulances in the İstanbul streets.

  ‘Poor things,’ she had said. ‘They are unwanted by their families. They are being taken to Bakırköy, where they w
ill not be allowed to give anybody any trouble.’

  I could not rest until I had tried once again to see her, to comfort her if she could still be comforted.

  I left Medical Jurisprudence and got a train for Bakırköy, fretting at the long wait at in-between stations, cross because I had not taken a taxi for the whole journey.

  I managed to get a phaeton at the station and was driven to the Mental Home, a grim building enclosed in lovely gardens and high, unscalable walls all about it.

  I walked in through the gates, after a porter had sharply enquired my business. He looked at me suspiciously and but for the fact that I was in uniform I do not think he would have admitted me at all.

  A man came towards me, a perfectly normal-looking man, and I asked him where I could find a duty doctor. He grinned at me and made vague gestures with his hands and I looked at his luminous eyes and passed on. I could not control a little shiver of apprehension.

  I went up some steps and inside in a hall I saw a door marked: ‘Private. Secretary.’ I went in and stated my business.

  ‘When did she arrive?’ the Secretary asked fussily, thumbing through a sort of ledger.

  ‘Today,’ I said, risking the shot in the dark, and he looked in a file on his desk and said, yes, she had been admitted that morning. He directed me to an opposite building for further details. He spread his large, white hands indicating that he was only the Secretary, he could not know everything.

  I went out into the hall again and found that it was now full of patients, with their sleeves rolled up, all waiting for injections. I passed through their tidy ranks, feeling horror if I had to touch them, perhaps half afraid of them. They looked at me incuriously and I passed through their lines quickly, my head bent, embarrassment uppermost in my alienability to them.

  In the other building I found a doctor who informed me that on no account would I be permitted to see my mother.

  ‘Come back in six weeks time,’ he said thoughtlessly. ‘Perhaps you can see her then.’

  Beaten by his obduracy I asked if she could be moved into a private room and he shrugged, intimating that the treatment afforded her there would be no better.

  ‘She will feel more private there,’ I said. ‘She will not be all the time aware of the other patients around her.’

  Coldly his eyes raked me.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ he said with terrible hardness, terrible lack of understanding, ‘she is not in a condition to be yet aware of anything.’

  I hated his cold, precise voice but I insisted nevertheless that she should be moved to a private room. He arranged for this whilst I was there, accepting the cheque I handed him with a doubtful air, as though suspecting that it might not after all be valid. As he was writing out a receipt for me he said: ‘It is preferable to pay with money, lieutenant. I wonder would you be good enough to remember that the next time you come?’

  I did not reply and he stood up, indicating that he was a busy man, that the interview was at an end. As he said goodbye his white hand lay limply in mine, his eyes seared through me so that I realised here was a man with a mission, that given half a chance he would put me under observation too.

  I left Bakırköy, having accomplished very little. All the way back in the train I speculated wildly as to what they would do with her. Would there be a window in her room, to give her all the fresh air and sunlight that she loved? Would there be a view over the gardens or would they keep her strapped down on her bed, helpless in the face of their sane ministrations? The tears were never far from my eyes and I did not return to Mehmet’s house. There was nothing more to say and I did not want to meet the questions in my grandmother’s eyes, the compassion in Bedia’s.

  I returned to İzmir and threw my energies into work and waited for news. Mehmet wrote several times but I did not bother to reply. What was there to say? I hated their continual harping on the subject of my mother. Could they not leave her alone now?

  I was glad to be living in the aerodrome, where companionship now assumed a precious quality.

  In March 1940 I was given permission to go to İstanbul and took passage in a boat from Galata Bridge; when I disembarked, I went straight to Bakırköy, by-passing Mehmet and his family. I was eager to learn about my mother for myself with no second-hand information to influence the mind.

  By great good luck it was a visiting day when I arrived at the Mental Home and the lovely gardens were crowded with visitors and patients, and sometimes I had great difficulty in distinguishing one from the other.

  I stated my errand to a crisp-looking, hard-faced nurse and as she walked away from me I hoped she did not have the handling of my impatient, impetuous mother, otherwise her chances of recovery were nil.

  I waited in the gardens, feeling unequal to sitting tidily in the bare waiting-hall. My heart almost choked me and my stomach kept turning over and over in the most unmanageable way. Suddenly I felt unequal to this and wished I had waited until Mehmet had been free to accompany me. I felt foolish and full of insecurity as I hesitated on the springy, dry grass and I looked about me at the patients and the visitors, and thought that one should have nerves of steel and the imagination of a brick wall to come here.

  There was a tall old man making an impassioned speech to a dim, elderly lady who might have been his wife. He talked at her without ceasing, scarcely seeming to pause for breath, his bony fingers wagging before her passive face. Occasionally he would thump his chest with a massive, destructive gesture and let out a roar like an angry lion. A doctor halted by me, his distinguishing marks in all this mass of doubtful humanity being a white coat and a stethoscope dangling from his pocket. ‘The old man is not really so bad as he looks,’ he said amusedly to my disbelieving face. ‘We hope to have him completely well again in another twelve months.’

  A young girl held court with her father and mother, who watched her with fond, anxious faces.

  ‘So of course I could not marry him,’ she was saying in a light, scornful voice, ‘I could only refuse him – ’

  She looked all around her, so pretty and young and witless with her chestnut hair and large eyes. She caught sight of me and smiled entrancingly, pointing me out to her parents.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘That is my husband. Do you not think he is very good looking?’

  I pulled the doctor by the arm, hurrying away across the lawns. I asked him about my mother.

  ‘Has she any chance of recovery?’ I asked and he paused for a moment and I paused too, turning to face him. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘I should like to know.’

  He replied, not looking at me: ‘She has very little chance. She became worse suddenly, you know, and we have to keep her quiet with injections – ’

  I saw her in my mind’s eye, knowing the place she was in, wanting to get away to freedom, becoming violent because they had thwarted her, kept quiet with the injections that would be ruthlessly, relentlessly shot into her. We must have quietness here, I could hear them all saying. This patient is not quite mad enough yet. She needs disciplining.

  The doctor was watching me now, reading perhaps many things from my face. He said gently: ‘She will die soon. You would not wish her here for perhaps many years, would you?’

  I thought of my grandmother and the words she had spoken that morning in İstanbul, when Bedia had told me the awful truth.

  ‘Is she dead?’ I had asked and she had answered sternly: ‘Better if she were.’

  But I could not face the thought of her death like this. She still represented all the things I had looked for in life, even though I had never found them in her. I started telling the doctor all the things I had thought to be forgotten, things from childhood that suddenly for this brief, illuminating second stood out in high relief. I told him of my father’s going away, of the fire, of poverty, of the years in an orphanage in Kadıköy, of my mother’s working in the Sewing Depôt at Gülhane Parkı, of the old, old hatred that persisted and magnified with the years between my mother and my grandmother. I spo
ke of the love that had tried to chain me, of the restraints imposed, and all the time the doctor listened, nodding now and then as if he were beginning to understand her better. Presently he left me and I stood alone on the sunlit grass, trembling, glad to have spoken of these things to another person.

  I waited for my mother.

  Presently I saw her coming, with two nurses, one on each side of her, supporting her. Her high, querulous voice reached me across the space that separated us and she tried, in vain, to rid herself of the encompassing arms of the sturdy nurses. My heart bled for her and I thought it would have been better not to have come here, not to have seen her so defenceless.

  She stopped in front of me and I said, ‘Mother,’ and I saw a wary, trapped look come into her eyes.

  She looked at me as if she did not recognise me. I said: ‘Don’t you know me?’

  Then she said: ‘Oh, it is you? My eagle, my airman son – ’

  But there was no emotion in her voice, nothing save haughtiness, the voice she would have used to a stranger. She pointed to a man and said: ‘He is our cook. Not a very good one, I am afraid, but we could not get anyone else.’

  I looked at the man she pointed to, a visitor, and she saw my look and added: ‘He is really far too distinguished to be a cook, but there you are – ’

  Her voice trailed off and she turned away from me, ignoring me and began to tremble with such frightful violence that the nurses had to lead her to a seat.