by Loren Edizel
I smiled and said, “No, but I’m going out with someone.”
“No!” she shouted, alarmed. “No! Don’t ever get married. Listen to me. You’re going to school, you’ll get a job, why marry? Don’t let men near you.” Her eyes were wide open; she looked so exasperated she could hit me.
“You’re not happy, Fatosh?” I asked furtively.
“No. I was stupid. I was so happy here with you all, and I didn’t know it. Now, I’m sorry every single day. Men are awful. All of them. They’re animals. You stay away from them, you hear?”
I was heartbroken, as a child, when she had announced she had a fiancé and started preparing her trousseau every evening. She had no time for fun anymore. She no longer secretly passed me her tabloids filled with pictures of scantily clad second-rate Turkish actresses having steamy affairs with mustachioed leading men, because she now spent her money buying sheets, tea towels, and other boring objects. She didn’t show me how to squeeze pimples or my all all-time favourite, how to squeeze your nose with your fingertips to get tiny white worms of grease to jut out from the pores. She could get a hundred to squeeze out simultaneously like charmed snakes simply by moving her nose upward. But she no longer had time for such frivolities. When she finished her trousseau, she got married and moved to her own house far away, and I hardly ever saw her after that until this final meeting in Kalabak. I thought she had come to see me, especially, as I had left the country and had been gone for a while. Years later, I found out she had come to ask my mother for help because she was having serious financial problems. Her husband had lost his job at the textile factory where my father had placed him through connections. He was a hot-headed, good-for-nothing fool, apparently. And so Fatosh scolded me, wagged her finger, and pushed my face away in lieu of a slap even as we kissed and hugged goodbye, making me swear I would never marry.
As a small child I must have been a nuisance to her, second only to my nonagenarian grandmother who suspected Fatma was stealing her immense white cotton boxer shorts and therefore kept asking her to return them, in Greek. She had learned a few words of Greek from my granny and would shout “ohee, ohee, Néné.” Néné would calm down for a while, then she would start again, pulling at Fatma’s sleeve, taking her to the dresser to show her drawer filled with a dozen ironed shorts. Fatma would nod her head once backward going “tschk” to mean “no,” and would shout “ohee Néné, ine poli megalo,” meaning, “no, granny, your undies are too large for me.”
Néné would mutter something under her breath and shake her head as if to say, “you think you’re clever, but I’ll get you next time.”
Fatosh would leave the room muttering “Öff, aman be Néné, yeter artik!” (“Enough with this, Néné!”) and shaking the front of her T-shirt with her fingers to indicate how terribly fed up she was. When she caught me watching her, she would say, “Va jouer dans la chambre!” She had a knack for languages.
I was in awe of Fatosh and would not be dispensed with so easily. So I interrogated her.
“Where is your home, Fatosh?”
She would shrug and say, “Here with you.”
“Do you have a mom and dad?”
“My mom got very sick and died.”
“Do you have sisters and brothers?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In Soma.”
“Where’s Soma?”
“North of here.”
“What does it mean, Soma?”
“It’s just a name.”
“What do people do there?”
“They work in coal mines.”
“Your father too?”
“No, he’s an imam.”
“What does an imam do?”
“I don’t know. He prays, I guess, then there are circumcisions, weddings, funerals. He tells people what to do.”
“Do you miss him?”
“No. He beat us too much.”
“Do you miss your mom?”
“She’s dead I told you!”
“Do you want to go back?”
“No.”
“Why do you live with us?”
“You don’t want me to?”
“Sure I do. Do you go to Soma on weekends?”
“No.”
“Where do you go?”
“My aunt’s house.”
I would spend hours sitting beside her as she scrubbed something or other, drilling her with all manners of senseless questions to which she responded in curt, irritable spurts.
We slept in the same room. We gave each other goodnight hugs and colds, and had to do steam inhalations with eucalyptus, putting towels over our heads at the kitchen table. She would show me her white nose worms once in a while and we would giggle as we put our noses back over the steaming hot bowls.
Fatma struck me as the picture of solidity in those days; she tamed brooms, buckets, and chairs into submission with her quick determined movements. She had a wide open face with high cheekbones and a low forehead, thin eyes slanting upward, a soft wide nose, and well-shaped taut lips. Her arms and legs were muscular, her fingers stubby and her toes, plump and square. Her dark brown hair was parted in the middle and tied into a ponytail. I enjoyed the timbre of her voice when she laughed. It gave a sense of thoracic fortitude and of being connected to the earth where edible things grew, like the rest of her. She wore mini shorts in the summer, like my older sister, but I don’t remember what she wore in winter. I loved her woolly smell, and the look of her. I admired her for learning Greek and French and felt secure when my parents repeatedly told us that she was part of our family. I wanted to know what she would do later on in her life, being so smart. If she was part of our family, I expected she would get an education, get a good job, then marry someone educated and refined, while at the same time suspecting this was not really the plan for her because she was working as our maid and had a life outside of our home that involved a vague family in Soma and an aunt who lived on mysterious hills. I worried that one day she would inevitably grow up and live a sad life — marry a brutish uneducated man and live on her aunt’s hills where her intelligence would wither away.
I used to do as she bade when I was young except this one time, again in our summer cottage in Kalabak, where our house had an upstairs, unlike those of most of my friends. The wooden staircase was a fascination for us, first for sliding on the banister and also, for spying quietly on happenings in the living room without being observed. The rooms upstairs intrigued my friends, who were deprived of such mysteries in their own cottages. We had two sets of bunk beds in the children’s room that served as sailboats during afternoon naps. My brother, cousin and I would deck the sides of the beds with sheets for sails and have seafaring adventures against pirates. It did not occur to us to be pirates ourselves; we were, invariably, the good guys and whenever we caught the dastardly pirates, we would magnanimously let them back into the sea the way fishermen release unsavory fish back into the water, issuing warnings to change their ways “or else….” There were falls from heights in the middle of the night, cousins sleepwalking into attics to pee on suitcases, vomiting sessions from eating too many lokums, and all sorts of drama that only seemed to happen on the second floor of our house. We had two long attics flanking the sides of the second floor, filled with strange objects and cobwebs. Naturally, these places needed further exploration and I proudly offered tours to my eager buddies. One had to circumvent Fatosh for this, and it wasn’t easy. She was the keeper of the upstairs and under my mother’s strict orders no kids were to be allowed there to play, or hide, on account of bringing sand into the rooms with our dirty feet. So Fatosh somehow heard us as we tiptoed up the stairs and ran to the living room to chase us out. “Shht!” she shouted. “Get down and out you go. You’re not allowed upstairs.”
“Yes, we are!” I shouted back feeling cocksure.
�
��No, you’re not and you’d better come down this minute!” she yelled back.
“No, I won’t!” I insisted louder to impress my friends and stomped my foot.
“You will get a spanking if you don’t!” she countered.
Then I said the words.
“This is not your house, it’s my house, and you can’t tell me what to do.” The words hung in the air for a moment. No one moved. Her eyes widened, as if she had unexpectedly been slapped very hard. Quickly, she collected her face, shrugged and muttered I was a spoiled brat with bad manners before walking away.
The words continued to hang there, small, deflated and loose like balloons on sagging garlands after a birthday party. They trailed after me upstairs to the attic where my friends squealed and giggled irritatingly in their afternoon dresses and white socks. I found an excuse to make them leave and sat alone in the semi-darkness of the waning afternoon, wanting to punish myself and not knowing how. I never apologized to her from sheer embarrassment. I wanted her to forget that moment as soon as possible and the apology would serve to remind her of the insult. She would pretend to forgive me while nursing the wound I inflicted on her in her deeper thoughts. She would perhaps pretend to love me, out of a sense of duty, as part of her job. I hoped she would say something mean and hurtful to me, so we could get even. But she didn’t. That fall, she started looking for a fiancé.
Fatma’s contact with my mother became sporadic over the years. Once in a while, she would visit; occasionally she would call or send word. Whenever she resurfaced, there were issues like joblessness, illness, hunger, or need for clothing, and my mother would put together money and packages for her. A few years ago she got word that Fatma was very ill with a kidney problem and had no money to go to the doctor because her husband had left her and her sons were jobless. An envelope was sent to her via one of the sons who came to collect it. I don’t think she ever heard from Fatma again after that.
Recently, while reminiscing about earlier days, my mother told me the story of how Fatma came to live in our house. She was a teenager, barely thirteen, when she was brought to our house by an acquaintance, announcing her as a girl looking for work. My mother hired her on the spot. On her first day, Fatma told my mother she was never to be left alone with my father in the house. It was her condition for working with us. At first she would not say why. When my mother pressed her, she said she was afraid he might do something bad to her. Like what? My mother asked.
Like rape me, she said.
Why do you think he would he do such a thing to you? my mother asked, cautious.
Because men do these things, she replied.
Did someone do this to you, my child? my mother asked. Fatma looked down. Did someone rape you? She insisted.
My older sister is pregnant, she said.
Who did that to her?
Fatma looked up, her chin trembling. My father … my father … and I was next. So, I ran away. I ran from the house. My sister gave me some money. I took the bus to Izmir, to my aunt’s house. Please don’t leave me alone in the house with your husband. I will sleep with the kids, in their room. Never alone. I will sleep on the bare floors. I don’t care.
The Whisper
I DON’T LIVE AS YOU DO; in fact, what I am is not living. Think of a draughty room, or being accidentally hit by an electric shock; I am that gust or current. One day I am blown or jolted into your mind on account of some words, and to borrow a human expression, “your goose is cooked.”
I’m an idle spirit, a jinn, or a demon if you prefer, hovering in ether until the words are uttered. My kind is often thought of as evil. The truth is we do not exist in a moral dimension. You say the words that retrieve us from our vaporous inertia to hasten us toward your lives. Not yours specifically; the lives of others. We enter the lives of others. Should we enter yours, you would instantly become, and think of yourself as, an “other.”
My journey started with these words: “I curse you to hell. May this fortune you have stolen from me bring you and your descendants nothing but suffering and misfortune.”
They were uttered by Vassilis Cacoyannis in 1952.
Vassilis and his family had fled Izmir thirty years before that, during the great fire of 1922 that destroyed the city. They managed to escape on a caique, with nothing but their wet clothes and the few chains of gold they managed to hurriedly put around their necks with rings, medallions, and whatever else of value they had that could go through them, underneath a few layers of shirts and sweaters. They had a seaside mansion in Bayraklı with their own private beach, and their caique in which Vassilis liked to go fishing at dawn. Bayraklı was not on fire, but the Turkish army was entering Izmir. It was safer to join those already out at sea, protected by British and American war ships looming large in the bay, than to barricade themselves in the house waiting for soldiers or looters to come crashing in.
Vassilis herded his two children and wife into the caique and rowed until his hands bled. He persevered through poyraz winds rocking the Aegean, telling his family to hold on to the sides of the boat. His wife did not know how to swim; she kept crossing herself, whispering prayers. He had no map, no sense of where he was headed. The island of Chios was not too far from the coast, and he hoped he wouldn’t miss it by rowing in the wrong direction. Even if he did, he intuited, he would eventually find inhabited land in this vast sea dotted with islands. Before escaping his house at dawn, he had asked his best friend, Leon Dimarco to protect his belongings and care for his home until it was safe for him to return.
He rowed the entire day, and when night came, he scrutinized the stars for direction; but there were so many that he found no help in them. The caique had already left the bay, adrift in the greater sea as he rested his wounded palms. The children were whimpering, huddled beside his wife who had given up on prayers and was now quietly sobbing too, her knuckles white from squeezing the sides of the rowboat in that vast moonlit darkness. Once in a while, a school of fish would rush along the boat and make mysterious swishes in the water, increasing the children’s wails. He had to placate them, pretending he knew what he was doing. “Sing them a song and put them to sleep!” he ordered his wife as he tore a piece of his white shirt to bandage his bleeding hands. She started singing a song that everyone in Smyrna knew how to sing whenever there were celebrations and feasts. “Yalo, yalooo, piyenameeee.” A song about taking a boat ride along the coastal city. She was singing it softly, like a lullaby. The children became quiet, listening to the familiar melody, something known at last in the fearsome liquid darkness enveloping their lost lives. They watched their father dip the long wooden oars into the blackness, making small splashes, and waited for them to resurface as he pulled the boat forward until the monotony of this rhythm and their mother’s soothing voice hypnotized them into mouth-hanging slumber. “We will survive, I promise you,” he said to his wife when she finally stopped singing and was about to resume sobbing.
The next day, before sunset, they were rescued by a large boat overflowing with hungry refugees like themselves, to be eventually dropped off in Piraeus. They made their way to Athens, rented a small cockroach-infested apartment above a grocery store, selling one gold medallion at a time to survive. At first, Vassilis worked as a shoeshine man on the street. The children were ridiculed and bullied at school for speaking funny Greek. His wife, who once had servants, was now a charlady, scrubbing other people’s houses. Her soft, soulful hands that played Schubert on the piano were calloused and roughened from washing clothes. There were deep new lines forming around her nose and lips, giving her cheeks a sagging, melancholy aspect. Vassilis noted all this, bitterness for his circumstances seething deep inside of him. At night, he often dreamt that Dimarco had filled his house in Bayraklı with strangers and that no one remembered he was the rightful owner. He would arrive there in wet clothes, dripping on the marble tiles in the vestibule from having swum across the Aegean. He would gaze ar
ound his house, the hand-painted blue and brown foliage and garlands of flowers on the ceilings, the decorative moldings, the marble columns reaching for the domed ceiling, and feel a sense of profound relief that everything was still there. But whenever he tried to reach the large aquamarine vase made of Kütahya porcelain in his bedroom, he would be prevented from getting near it by some absurdly horrifying circumstance that made him scream. His wife would push his shoulder in bed, “Vassilis! You’re doing it again.”
They lived in that dingy apartment for some years. His wife got rid of the cockroaches with her diligent fumigations, and he bought the grocery store downstairs with whatever was left of the gold chains and rings. His wife was constantly scrubbing something. She would come home from cleaning houses, put on an apron and start scrubbing the store. At night, she fell into deep sleep the way others would jump off a cliff to end it all. The children stopped speaking Romeika altogether, and replaced it with mainland Greek. Whenever their parents spoke it between themselves or uttered Turkish sentences from habit, the children would glare at them. “Speak proper Greek!” they would hiss between their teeth. “They will hear you.” The children were afraid of being seen in public with their not-properly-Greek parents, lest they opened their mouths and made it clear to all within earshot that they were refugees from Smyrna. They already had had to change schools once and finally managed to make a few friends by wiping away all traces of Anatolia from their demeanours. The last thing they wanted now was for the clumsy parents to come to a school play or birthday party and spoil it all with their ridiculous Greek. Vassilis and his wife Theodora lived a submissive, heartbroken life among their vegetables and cigarettes, despised by their children for failing to become “real” Greeks, their hearts gnawed away daily with homesickness for the piano, for their large terrace facing the bay, for the vestibule and its mirrors with intricate hand-sculpted frames, for the fragrant rosebushes and fine clothes, for the willow tree under which they had conceived their first child. They sought out other refugees to befriend and listened to Smyrneika songs that only served to enhance their yearning for the home they would never see again.
