My stepmother didn’t come to live with us. She was reluctant to leave the home where she believed she had been happy with my father. A human being’s conception of happiness can be very strange indeed. Consulting books or listening to what people have to say on the matter, you might well conclude that we are creatures of reason—that mental faculty meant to distinguish us from animals. To use a tired phrase, man is king of the jungle. But if we examine how we manage our affairs, we are hard-pressed to find any trace of reason at all. And neither does reason influence our apprehensions or affections. When my stepmother turned down the invitation to come live with us in the house in Soganaga, it would have made more sense for her to justify her decision by saying, “What business do I have in someone else’s home? Perhaps if I were your biological mother, but even then . . . Anyone can tell with a glance that we aren’t family.” But after keeping her distance for so many years, the old parasite had burrowed her way into our home. Saddled with an invalid husband, and perpetually ill-tempered, before the war she’d never fully accepted the place as her own—so it drove me to distraction to hear her say it was her happy memories of the place that prevented her from leaving. It was beyond all logic or reason—as absurd as Abdüsselam Bey’s insistence on my marrying Emine or Emine’s exuberant acceptance of my proposal. The two reactions were no different. My stepmother was under the delusion that she had been happy in our home. She had so inflated the joy of being a part of the family (for years, before marrying my father, she had lived in a separate world, even imagining our family beyond her reach) that she was now unable to leave, but the fact remained that her arrival at our home was entirely inauspicious and not at all a source of happiness. Founded on supposition and hinged on the loosest of recollections, her happy memories proved so powerful that Abdüsselam Bey was obliged to respect her choice.
Emine was a charming and innocent young woman; above all she had a good heart. In the face of adversity she showed remarkable courage. Her life in Abdüsselam Bey’s villa had been that of a caged bird. Her world was made up of only the people she knew there. At the time of our marriage she was a stranger to the outside world; taking her first tentative step into it, she nearly turned around and scampered back inside. But she seemed to have been wise since birth: almost never was she caught off guard. Not even the strangest situations fazed her. Always possessed of sound judgment, she was brave and affable to the end.
Our first years together were happy. Once I finished school I took a position at the Post and Telegraph Office. Later on, with the help of one of Abdüsselam Bey’s friends, I found a job at the Tünel management office. At the time I was earning a respectable sum of money. I had no complaints, apart from the loss of our first child at birth. But the fact remained that we had no life to ourselves. Yes, everything at home was comfortable, plentiful, and secure, but we were never truly free and were certainly never left alone.
There was no escaping Abdüsselam Bey’s ministrations; no one in the house could elude him. If he heard so much as a footstep or a light cough, be it in the entrance hall or in one of the bedrooms, and at any time of night, Abdüsselam Bey would race to the rescue, never allowing anyone to remain alone for more than a minute. Except for my time at work, I lived under his thumb. We would have breakfast together. And before I left, he would give me the name of the coffeehouse where I could find him that evening, and he would be sure to arrive there an hour early. Ferhat Bey, who had recently retired, would usually be there with him. Later in the evening we would go home together and sit and talk until bedtime, which he never failed to find a way to postpone. Meanwhile his real son-in-law—his youngest daughter’s husband—would be out carousing, on behalf, he claimed, of all the men in the household; sometimes he even took his wife along with him.
Emine and I made the decision to move out at the first opportunity. In fact Emine had already visited my old home several times to see how she might put the place in order, while always taking care to show due respect to my stepmother’s fond memories of the past; after throwing away the moldy wicker mats in the front hall, she took the clock pendulum off the wall and hid it somewhere in the attic—my aunt having told her long before we were married the story of how it came into our possession.
“I don’t understand why you don’t like it! It’s a charming little home. You’ll see. I’ll make it a paradise. We must free ourselves of the smothering love in our present home.”
Emine couldn’t have known anything of the language of the melodramatic Turkish cinema in those days, but describing our predicament in Abdüsselam Bey’s home, she’d naively say we were “slaves to love.”
It wasn’t just Abdüsselam Bey’s attentions that convinced us to leave. The old man’s ever-worsening financial woes made us more and more uncomfortable. Everything he owned had been sold, and whatever was left had been pawned. Deep in debt, Abdüsselam Bey hid the severity of his financial problems from us all. Despite our concentrated efforts, Ferhat Bey and his stepson and I were unable to persuade him to let us share the household expenses. And so his good cheer slowly faded. He became distracted and pensive. The man who had never before set foot outside unaccompanied now crept out alone at night in secret search of loans. In the end, Emine and I decided it would be wrong to continue to burden him.
But we were unable to carry through with our plan. The very day we’d hoped to tell Abdüsselam Bey of our decision, his son-in-law managed to get himself posted somewhere in Anatolia. After protracted deliberations, protests, and complaints, Abdüsselam Bey at last gave up and let his son-in-law and daughter go. As she left the house, Ayse Hanımefendi cried out to us, “Our father’s now in your hands. In a way, he’s your father too.” Her husband, standing at her side, said more or less the same thing. But after she moved out of earshot, he whispered, “God give you patience.” We were stuck. We simply couldn’t abandon the old man. And the fact was that he needed to be cared for by someone truly committed. His body, like his memory, was failing. And it was more than just forgetfulness: he was becoming increasingly confused.
So I contacted his eldest son, who lived in Çamlıca, as well as the middle son in Anatolia, asking them to come and take him. It was the least I could do for this poor man who had done so much for me over the years.
The middle son simply sent a telegraph, during Seker Bayram, with his salutations to his father and a few photographs of his family. The son living in Çamlıca came to pay his respects over the holiday, along with his younger brother, as he always did, taking this opportunity to explain just how difficult it would be for him to welcome his father into his home. “My wife made me swear on the matter. I just couldn’t,” he said.
“At least you could help him a little,” I said. “He has no money, and he’s up to his eyes in debt. I give him everything I earn, but secretly. I’m always afraid he’ll find out. He’d never accept money from me. If things continue like this, you’ll wind up in debt yourself.”
But he didn’t believe me.
“You don’t know my father,” he asserted. “There’s money somewhere—that’s for sure. Who knows where he’s hiding it.”
“Fine,” I replied. “But if something happens to him, we’ll be ruined. And Emine and I will be incriminated. That would be uncalled for, wouldn’t you say? Why don’t you come and live with the man. Come and claim what is rightfully yours!”
He shrugged off my proposal. By then his father was already in the room with us. As he left, the son looked long and hard at me. “I have faith in you,” he said. But it was not a look I could trust. A strange fear came over me.
That year, after Kurban Bayram, Ferhat Bey married a widow in Kadıköy and left the house. Echoing the old man’s other son-in-law, he said, “May God give you patience and lighten your burden!” Then he added before he left, “And if there’s a shred of reason left in your head, you should by all means follow my lead.”
Now we were alone with Abdüsselam Be
y in his home. Here was the man who had once lived in that enormous villa behind the Burmalı Mescit, amid a vast tribe of sons, grandchildren, and relatives close and distant. Now he would die in the hands of two virtual strangers. Such was his fate.
Throughout my life I have seen how it is often the case that a man ends up with the very thing he fears most. Not long after the night Aristidi Efendi burned to death following an explosion in one of his alembics, I found myself back in Nuri Efendi’s Time Workshop. Everyone had something to say about the accident. Someone—I cannot, just now, recall whom—spoke of it as a curious coincidence, seeing as Aristidi Efendi had always feared this eventuality. Nuri Efendi had been listening to us in silence when suddenly he dropped the watch he was holding and said:
“As far as I am concerned there’s nothing strange about it at all. Indeed we might even consider it natural. For there’s no such thing as the present: there is only a past, and a future at its beck and call. In our subconscious minds we are forever constructing our futures. From the moment Aristidi Efendi began conducting his experiments, his fate shifted. He became, in effect, the architect of his own death. Why are you gentlemen so surprised to hear that he had sensed this all along?”
Abdüsselam Bey may have set the stage for this ultimate solitude through his overabundance of affection—one might even see it as a kind of addiction—for humankind and his overwhelming love for his family, near or far. Had he not been burdened with an overabundance of love and a dread of solitude, then surely those near and dear to him would not have abandoned him so hastily, and he wouldn’t have suffered the desolate loneliness that marked his decline.
The following year not one relative came to see Abdüsselam Bey over Seker Bayram. Yet for each holy night of Kandil, and on all the other religious holidays, he would purchase gifts for every son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and grandchild, as well as all his other living relatives, and perhaps even some no longer alive, according to their age and standing in the family hierarchy. Who could say how he found the money for all this.
Silk handkerchiefs and ties and shirts by the dozen, cheap jewelry for the girls, watches for the boys, and flowing robes for retired servants—it was all piled up in a room. And dressed in his old redingote and a freshly starched shirt, his gleaming spectacles perched on his nose, his hand stroking his neatly trimmed beard, his eyes glued to the clock on the opposite wall, and his ears alert to the slightest movement on the street, he sat and waited three long days, convinced the doorbell would ring at any moment, and when he heard footsteps at the door he would leap up to see who was there.
Great holiday feasts were prepared—enough to feed all who had once lived in the old villa, enough to give them all a taste of the dishes they liked best. We knew only too well that we’d have no visitors, and yet the table was ready to be set at a moment’s notice. On the evening of the fourth day of Kandil, Abdüsselam Bey would turn to Emine with a look of despair that he could no longer mask and say:
“Emine, my good child, take these packages away and put them in the children’s room. They can pick them up when they stop by.”
The children’s room had become a sort of emotional depot for Abdüsselam. A mountain of meaningless castaway objects accumulated dust: eleven cradles, two or three mattresses (all victims to Abdüsselam Bey’s conjugal nights), wardrobes, mirrors, old toys, and chests—in short, a whole collection of odds and ends his daughter and son-in-law couldn’t bring themselves to pass on to junk dealers when they moved out of that monstrous villa. Abdüsselam Bey called it the children’s room, though not a single child was born there or ever lived there, and the strange thing was that the name somehow stuck. Perhaps it was the name alone that made the room feel haunted—for eventually we all came to believe that the spirit of the old villa resided in that room. It was a room of remembrance and loss, piled high with farewells, with the dead stacked one on top of the other, where each of us could see the death of our own childhood and youth; the furniture heaped together in its center like a ship run aground was a steadfast reminder. The room was Abdüsselam Bey’s heart, in every sense of the word. Only those who ventured inside could begin to grasp how disturbing it might be to share a life with this good-natured man, because here, in this realm beyond time, he had drained all these objects of their indifference. The key hung on the door, but no one dared venture inside.
Despite her sunny disposition and her rational frame of mind, Emine had so absorbed her master’s misery that she wouldn’t so much as walk past the door. She carried inside her all the psychological traumas of the house that had been her home since childhood.
Faced with Emine’s refusal to carry the packages into the room, I was the one left to do it, albeit with reluctance. Tripping over the old, abandoned furniture, when I crept into the room I’d be startled by a faded, ghostlike, and altogether unfamiliar reflection of myself in a mirror that was suddenly illuminated by a beam of light from the outside; and a peculiar fear of unknown origin would pass through me.
Where did it come from? And how very strange that it could take dominion over my entire person. These were, after all, the days when I was meant to be dizzy with love. My wife and I were expecting a baby. Every now and then Emine would turn to me, smiling, and say, “Kicking up a storm down there . . . must be a girl!” She complained constantly of these little kicks and affected serious concern when she said, “But how will I ever manage?” Even the low-spirited Abdüsselam Bey was overjoyed, and he never tired of saying, “How many days left? Go and ask.” And he would always insist that I do so. Then he would do the calculations on his fingers, measuring each new answer against its predecessor. It had been some time since a child had been born in the house. The man couldn’t stop exclaiming, “Oh, I shall be a grandfather once again!”
When it came time to put away the packages, he would give us a meaningful look and say, “Let’s hold on to these—their rightful owners will be here soon enough.” Emine would blush deeply as she left the room. And Abdüsselam Bey’s face would light up with one of his rare smiles.
“Haven’t you spoken with Ferhat Bey? Why did he go off to live with his wife in Kadıköy rather than bring her here? We could have all lived together. How could someone up and leave the house that was his home for so many years?”
“The woman refused to leave her father’s house. She simply wouldn’t leave!”
Abdüsselam Bey looked me directly in the eye. “Then why did he marry her? Couldn’t he have found himself a poor and wretched wife?”
I was shocked. That old fear of mine now took on a sharper form, gripping me more violently. Where a pure love for humanity had once resided, there now was only the terror of solitude. But that wasn’t all: something more significant was happening. We had surrendered ourselves to this miserable man because I lacked the will to stand up to him.
Zehra’s birth eased Abdüsselam’s anguish at being forgotten by all his relatives. He called for the most splendid cradle in the house to be rescued from the children’s room. The latest grandchild in the family of Ahmet the Signer took her first sleep in this heavy cradle, made of walnut, inlaid with silver and mother-of-pearl, and as large as a train compartment. It goes without saying that Abdüsselam never left it untended from the day the baby was born. In line with an old custom of the villa, it was he who named the baby, not me. And though he had intended to give the child the name of my mother, Zahide, in the confusion of the moment he chose his own mother’s name, Zehra.
II
This tiny mistake set off a series of catastrophes. At first the old man was able to laugh with us about it, but soon he became distressed and accused himself of having committed a terrible offense. In the end it became a full-blown crisis of conscience: He came to believe he had robbed us of our child. And he was convinced he would be held accountable in the afterlife for doing so. However, this served only to strengthen his bond with Zehra, and he even took to addressing her as “Mothe
r” on account of her name. He began to plan for her future. Soon the house was awash in legal documents willing to the child what remained of his fortune. God knows how many he drew up on a daily basis. During the last three years of his life, such documents could be found almost anywhere in the house: hidden under carpets, kilims, and pillows or stashed away in desk and dresser drawers. Though Emine and I would tear up at least a few of these every day, great piles of them emerged after his death; almost all stated that he was bequeathing his remaining wealth to his “mother Zehra Hanım” and strongly urged us to give the utmost attention to her education and up-bringing.
“That her mother and my daughter, Emine Hanım, and her father and my son, Hayri Efendi, look after Zehra and pay due attention to her education and upbringing until she is married . . . ,” and so on—thus a gentle old man’s will entrusted us with the care of our own daughter.
As the war in Anatolia had long since finished and a good number of soldiers had already returned to Istanbul, many of Abdüsselam’s relatives and friends were in the city when he passed away. They flocked to the house the following day, each with a different version of his will. But of course by then their wills were out-of-date and legally void. Some time ago we had, however, agreed that we would take only our child and our personal effects when we left the house. And that’s just what we did. But a few days after our departure, the atmosphere changed. In a number of his wills, Abdüsselam Bey had bequeathed to my daughter a great many things he had already pawned, and for quite considerable sums, and for some reason he had left wills with two different notaries. And so to settle the affair we were obliged to go to court.