Portrait of a Turkish Family (11 page)

Muazzez must have continued to be a quiet baby for I remember next to nothing about her from those days. Looking back, I find it is easier to remember all the strange, unquiet things that happened. I suppose all memories need only a little shaking-up to restore again places and things and people. Certainly I have had little difficulty in delving back into the past. Letters and photographs and latterday conversations have brought all these long-dead days before the mind’s eye again, in some cases with startling clarity. For instance, I still recall the day my grandmother came to take Feride away from us.

It was high summer and we played in the garden, under the eye of my mother. She was sewing clothes for Muazzez, who kicked on a rug, İnci being inside in the house working. Feride’s singing voice drifted out from the kitchen and a great peace lay about us. It was a cloudless, blue, shining day and I had a surge of happiness for no reason at all. Never had my home looked prettier, standing there squatly and compactly in its green lawn, the flower-beds a blaze of colour, the house blindingly white where the sun’s long fingers touched it, blotched with grey, lacy patterns where the leaves of the vine and the fig tree sheltered it. Recalling that scene now, did an uneasy peace linger in the sky above it, I wonder, making the tranquillity stand out all the more sharply by contrast – because of the things to come? That morning remains etched on the mind, one of a series of pictures that will never die whilst I live.

My grandmother called towards noon, coming across the grass to us, severe in her high-necked gown.

İnci followed her almost immediately with a tray of iced sherbets – cooling, effervescent drinks that tasted of roses.

My grandmother sat down in the
chaise-longue
my mother pushed forward for her, unveiled her hot face and held her hand to us children to be kissed. She was disposed to be gracious, praised the looks of the baby, gave my mother some entirely unwarranted advice regarding her embroidery and was altogether so charming that I felt she must want something. For my grandmother was never known to waste her charm on us.

She lay back in her chair, talking animatedly and fanning herself with a little ivory fan which she carried everywhere with her. My mother sewed tranquilly, replying to the other’s rapid questions in her light, low voice which seemed to blend so well with the dreaming mood that was upon the house that magic day. My grandmother finished her sherbet, then came to the main point of her visit. Her husband, she said, was giving a very big dinner-party that night to some business acquaintances and she was distracted to know how she would manage, since her cook was in bed sick and the other servants did not know how to cook any of the elaborate dishes she wished to give the guests. Here she paused, eyeing my mother uneasily, but the latter never betrayed by as much as a flicker of the eyelids what it was she was thinking. She sewed peacefully on and Mehmet, thoroughly bored by this woman’s talk, commenced to pull grasses from which to suck the sap. I hovered uncertainly behind my sister’s rug and my grandmother began to display the faintest trace of irritability.

‘Well, Şevkiye!’ she demanded in her old bullying voice, all the sweetness gone. ‘Did you hear what I was saying, or have you been dreaming all this time?’

‘Of course I heard,’ returned my mother, looking at her steadily. ‘But I cannot suggest anything. Perhaps your cook will be well enough to get up and prepare everything and then go back to bed again.’

‘Don’t be silly!’ said my grandmother waspishly, the control beginning to go out of her face. ‘Well, I suppose I shall have to manage something. You could not spare Feride, could you?’

‘No,’ said my mother very gently and I marvelled at such control and discipline.

My grandmother’s mouth folded obstinately.

‘But only for the one night,’ she begged. ‘I shall send her back tomorrow morning.’

My mother did not reply and my grandmother talked on and on, putting forward all sorts of reasons why she should have Feride with her.

In the end, worn out by such volubility, such unceasing persistence, my mother gave in but on the condition that Feride was returned to our house that same evening.

Sulkily my grandmother agreed to this but she could not afford to be too sulky, since my mother was quite capable of changing her mind. But I think my grandmother had hoped to retain Feride until her own cook was well again. It mattered nothing to her that İnci and my mother should do all the work of the house between them – although if you were to ask my grandmother to do anything she would be highly indignant and explain to you that she was not a servant.

Once she had gained her own way she hurried off, refusing to stay for luncheon but stopping on the way to tell Feride what had been arranged for the afternoon.

My mother sighed after her but made no comment to us.

After she herself had gone to the house Mehmet and I continued to play listlessly for the sun was very hot. The grass was burning to my hand, the pigeons cooed sleepily and the whole romantic little scene was so peaceful that it might have been something in a dream. I think too the mood for dreaming was heavy upon me that day or was I only weighty with prophecy? It is a fact though that I remarked to Mehmet, or so my mother in after years assured me, that it would be a pity if all this peaceful life were to be swept away. Mehmet it is to be assumed would have only looked at me drowsily, his black eyes uncomprehending, and perhaps it is also to be assumed he would have asked me what I meant. And if he had I could not have explained. There were no words yet in my vocabulary to express my only half-formed, inarticulate thoughts. The white house, the green lawn, the brilliant flowers all seemed threatened with annihilation but where were the words to tell this picture? The dark flash that had for a moment lit my imagination would have been dismissed as a silly, childish fabrication. With Mehmet’s drugged eyes holding mine I might have forgotten the threat that had hung in the bright air, the dark hand that had hovered over me.

Little things stand out from that day, all of them unimportant then but having their own sad value in after years. Luncheon was hurried, Feride anxious to get away, and İnci was sent to look for bread for she had a way of insinuating her lithe body between the crowds in a manner the more solid Feride could never emulate. Madame Müjğan came across from her garden in the middle of the afternoon, Yasemin and Nuri trailing hotly after her. My mother and she sat idly talking until evening crept into the brilliant sky and Madame Müjğan was begged to stay to dinner. My mother was loath to eat alone these days and welcomed the little diversion her neighbour made.

Madame Müjğan talked of the war and her husband but my mother I thought seemed anxious to discourage this trend in the conversation. She rarely mentioned my father even to Mehmet and me; she spoke of him seldom so that after a while his face would rise before us the face of a stranger or the face of someone well loved a long time ago, now only vaguely seen or recognised. For long periods at a time we forgot him altogether and could not imagine him ever again in the house. The squat white house he had bought for his family now seemed a woman’s house and it needed an older imagination than mine to give it back my father’s lounging figure or my uncle’s laughter. My grandfather had receded far into the distance. He held no place in this house; he had never known of its existence. Their male figures were dimmer now and every day they dimmed a little more, waving their ghostly hands in farewell.

The day would no doubt come when they would be back with us again – as İnci not infrequently reminded us when we were disobedient – but in the meantime they had lost their authority with us.

The sun dropped lower down the sky and the faintest breeze blew through the long grass. The ladies drew little cashmere shawls about their shoulders and İnci came to take Muazzez to bed. Mehmet and I gathered our playthings then took our guests, Yasemin and Nuri, to wash before dinner. Yasemin splashed cold water across her face and her reflection glimmered palely in this place of uncertain light. She said, catching sight of herself, ‘How odd I look!’ and there was a doubtful note in her muted voice as if not recognising herself.

The dining-room was filled with a lucent, tender green light and all the windows stood open to the empty garden. The snowy table set with damask and glass and silver, with plates of cold food, looked cool and remote, a dish of black and white grapes making a sombre mark in the centre, like a bruise on a white face – like Yasemin’s face so lately seen in the mirror, her eyes like bruises in the pallid ivory of cheek and nose and forehead. Wine chilled in a cooler and we children were allowed for this once to sit at the big table.

İnci appeared from upstairs, her day with Muazzez finished, and my mother told her not to bother about waiting at table but to eat her dinner quickly then go to collect Feride. She was so anxious to have the absent Feride back in the house again that she told İnci the table could be cleared the following morning. Never had I known such a thing permitted before, she being most punctilious in having the house in order before she retired for the night. After İnci had gone we few were alone in the house and a great, waiting silence seemed to descend upon us even though wine flowed in the glasses and the ladies’ laughter tinkled.

Dinner over we left the salon – leaving the débris on the table, which looked a little vulgar now as tables always do after a meal has been eaten. My mother made coffee on her little silver spirit lamp and we sat there in the lengthening dusk that shadowed the salon, a little tired now that the day was over. Presently we would go yawning to bed and the square white house that held us would creak and grumble and mutter before settling into sleep under a summer sky. Yasemin and Nuri were petulant with tiredness and Mehmet nodded by himself in a big chair. It was nine o’clock and long past bedtime. Madame Müjğan gathered her children and we roused ourselves to walk with them across the garden to the little gate between the houses. We bade them good night and came back again along the white path glimmering in the dusk and a little bit of a moon was rising in the clear sky. My mother waited for us in the french windows of the dining-room. She looked unreal and ghostly standing there, like a figure in a play, so pale she was in her pale clothes. The house by night looked withdrawn and secret, a little frightening in its tall shroud of trees. We went in to my mother, who tightly shuttered the windows and the dirty, littered table looked like a table in a dead house. I helped to fasten doors and windows and then we went up to bed together, a tall, golden candle lighting our way. The house seemed incredibly quiet without İnci and Feride.

‘How will they get in?’ I asked.

‘Who?’ asked my mother, puzzled.

‘İnci and Feride,’ I replied and she laughed at my anxious face, telling me that they had the front door key and then Mehmet suddenly said that he wanted İnci and started to cry. My mother put her arm around him and he sobbed that he was frightened.

‘But there is nothing to be afraid of,’ said my mother amusedly.

The image of Mehmet’s fear had imprinted itself on the dark air and I too began to feel vaguely uneasy. When my mother kissed us good night, I begged her to leave her door open as well as ours. She seemed so reluctant to give in to our fear that Mehmet started to weep again and her own face began to reflect his terror. I do not know why we were so unaccountably afraid that night. Perhaps a little bit of the future impinged on the consciousness. Or perhaps – But I do not know. I only know that having slept contentedly in the dark for years, that night both Mehmet and I were unwilling to see the candle go out of our room and across the landing to my mother’s. Before she left us she stood a few moments at the window and the tak-tak of Bekçi Baba’s stick could be heard coming nearer to us. My mother sighed imperceptibly.

‘Bekçi Baba is a great comfort,’ she said, adding, ‘I wish he could stay outside this house all night.’

Then she recollected herself, closed the window a little and went across to her own room, where Muazzez slept peacefully. I lay sleepless for a long time after she had gone. Street noises drifted in, two cats were fighting in the gutter, hissing and spitting at each other with cold, rapacious felinity. The house was very still, the bedroom door a dark cavern, and as the street noises gradually died, I had an odd sense of waiting. I waited and the house waited and the empty staring sky waited but I do not know for what it was we waited. But I grew tired first and slept and wild dreams threshed to and fro in my brain. How long I slept I do not know. But I remember waking to a terrible crying from my mother, or was the crying only part of my dreams? Someone was shaking my shoulder, telling me to get up quickly and run – run.

My tortured mind could only absorb the one word ‘run’, so still enmeshed in violent dreaming was my mind. Mehmet whimpered like a little animal and I caught his hand as he ran blindly past me, swinging myself from the bed, bemused, bewildered, wondering if this horror was still part of a nightmare. My mother was screaming, no control left in her voice, but what it was she said I shall never know – only guess at perhaps – and the unendurable nightmare persisted. In the dark doorway clouds of thick, acrid, eye-smarting vapour caused me to choke but my mother, with Muazzez wailing in her arms, inexorably pushed Mehmet and me on before her. Down the dark stairs with the hot, thick vapour burning our throats. Blindly we stumbled, terror-stricken and half stupid with sleep. A great, dark-red lick of flame belched upwards to meet us.

‘No! no!’ screamed Mehmet, hesitating and dragging on my hand to impede progress.

‘Fire!’ I shouted, suddenly wide-awake and comprehending, but my mother pushed me on and I dragged Mehmet after me, his feet slithering reluctantly on the stairs.

‘Run!’ commanded my mother in an awful voice, a voice to freeze the blood in the marrow, and she forcibly impelled me onward, with such force indeed that Mehmet fell on one knee, letting go of my hand. She swooped down on him, frantically tearing him by the shoulder, shouted to me to hold her skirts and ran like the wind down the narrow pathway through the flames. For a moment that seemed an eternity she wrenched at the overheated front door, swinging it open for us to fall into the daylight of the street. Oh to remember that night, when the enemy spies set fire to the wooden houses of İstanbul, when they burnt like
matchwood
under a summer sky! The street was daylight for all the houses on both sides were a lurid, blazing mass.