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The short and incomplete story of a pair of ordinary Turkish parents

Somehow I had hoped that the possibility of imminent death would make the thoughts which keep bubbling up in my head easier to crystallize, to articulate. To my dismay, I find that there is little change. I could be dying (yes true, aren't we all, but if you suspect that you have testicular cancer and a few months to go then the light at the end of the tunnel is there smack in your face rather than waiting for you just around the corner or years down the road) and there may not be a moment to waste (and of course there isn't but who is really counting if they are trying to make it in the world) but it's still as difficult as it used to be - this business of trying to catch the soap bubble thoughts which pop into my mind, drift randomly here and there and then burst before I can give them substance. I end up with absurdly constructed and painfully drawn out sentences. I feel like I am fiddling with senseless fingers through a foreign language to grasp that one word that fits, the needle in the haystack if you will. There we go - metaphors and similes which seem to fit, which impart a sense of what I am trying to describe but are they the right thing to say? I don't even know anymore. This language is not mine, but it's the one I use for these feeble efforts. Hey, I comfort myself, it worked for Conrad, dinnit?

I'll rewind and start right at the beginning; start once again - another one of countless restarts.

My mother, according to grandma, was a beautiful woman. "I don't know what she saw in *him*". I can visualize her even now, after all these years: muttering through pursed lips as she raises her liquid pale blue eyes to mine and smiles a bitter smile. She is in one of her angry-at-Dad moods and she will preach her mind to her seven year old grandson whether he wants to listen or not. "Engineers wanted to marry her, aye, and doctors, too." Conspirationally shaking her head, she whispers: "There was this doctor fellow who committed suicide over her even". There's a sort of glee in her eyes when she says that.

Then she delivers the final verbal blow, as if she was delivering a stake to Dad's heart, which considering her Transylvanian roots, may not be totally out of the question.

"She had to go and marry him - we could have been rich."

"But then would I be here grandma?" I cry out. I am not really angry at her; I can't be angry at this old woman who has brought up me and my sister. Except when she is in her complaining mood, she is the sweetest - cooking, doing the housework, helping us hide the fact that we are not finishing our food by allowing us to surreptitiously slip spoons of it on her plate, telling us all the stories which her grandma used to tell her and if we are good, giving us chocolate covered marshmallow sweets (but only once a week).

"Don't say that my bread-tree; of course you would be." she counters. She has called me her bread-tree as long as I can remember - I am to look after her and bring home the bread when I grow up. "You'd just be a different you but still my bread-tree."

My mother was a beautiful woman but she was also - for lack of a better word - unconventional. In those times in Turkey in the small city which they lived in, women did not go unmarried into their late twenties (unless they were destined to be old maids), did not go to the university to study pharmacy and they definitely did not start their own business. She would not be flattered if you called her a feminist but I think she must have been one of the first in her town, if not the country.

Society would not accept my mother easily - to them the idea of a single, working woman in her mid-twenties was an aberration. As a consequence, men were always after her, believing that she was just waiting for the right guy to come along, or even worse, that she was just playing coy. Thus she rejected engineers and doctors and tax collectors. At least, according to grandma. I have never been able to ask mom herself.

It was the tax collectors who were to be the end of my mother's single years. It must have been in 1968. Two of them came to audit her pharmacy - a routine visit, they said. A few days after their arrival, she was presented with a choice - either she would marry one of them or they would put her in so much trouble that she would wish that she had said yes. She protested that all her books were in order and may even have believed that this would save her. Even if she did, she was wrong.

Enter my dad, the socialist leaning prosecutor-turned-defense-lawyer, stage left. Prosecutors working for the Turkish state were supposed to do what any obedient civil servant should: Obey the authorities. Leftist leanings were not looked upon with favour. People suspected of harbouring such leanings were rooted out. In his case, he had been told to prosecute two youths for communist propaganda. Their crime was, after having been roughed up by some thugs on a public bus, to complain (perhaps too loudly) that things were surely not this bad even in Russia. Dad had refused to prosecute and been exiled - in the exquisitely clever fashion that our government apparatus tends to display in such cases (and sadly only in such cases) - to a jail for political prisoners. He was to administer the state's justice on his comrades. So he gave up the state's job and started working for unions and taking on defence cases across the nation for those who could not afford legal fees.

They actually met by chance - Dad had taken a case in her town which is about a four hour journey across the Marmara Sea and almost did not make the return trip, having to implore the judge to wrap up when the case went on for much longer than anticipated and then running to the harbour and jumping across the gap as the boat was pulling away. These feats were accomplished not because he was a hotshot daredevil lawyer who liked to fly by the seat of his pants but because he could not afford to buy another ticket for the boat. She was on the same boat, perhaps trying to see of she can seek help in Istanbul or even quit the country. In those days it seemed that everyone (including some of her good friends from the university) was going to Germany to find work.

I am not too clear on how they actually ended up together. I did; however, grow up watching them touch each other every time we saw that old ship, which, even though it had not been kept on the same route, was kept wearily plying the waters around Istanbul until it was finally retired and scrapped a few years ago.

1969 must have been a time for ideals and plans and hopes. They both had similar politics, similar backgrounds, similar ideals. There was a possibility that things would change - for the better, they must have hoped. Bad news (though they did not know it then) arrived soon afterwards in 1970 in the form of one noisy baby boy who was followed by a girl in 1973. Dad left the union in 1974 - it had become the time to make a choice between family and ideals. We did not have a place of our own; we had been moving from one small rented flat to another in Istanbul. A bigger house was needed. The children had to be sent to school - with the best ones costing a lot, money had to be acquired.

The times were hard for leftists. By the end of the eighties, my parents had seen former comrades detained, harassed, tortured and broken. They have seen former comrades turn coat (have they themselves also done so - I am sure they must ask themselves this question) and sell out. Some ex-leftists even started dubious business ventures, collected money from friends and then absconded. My parents have seen the society they once hoped to make a difference in become dirtier, baser, more materialistic. It was around that time that they started telling their kids the mantra: "Our generation could not do it, perhaps yours will."

They have retired into their shells of routine and have become indispensable for each other. Dad could not cook to save his life and Mom would not even dream of driving anywhere in the city. So it is with everything - a perfect division of labour. With the loads of the years on their shoulders they now tell their kids how hard it is to be lonely in one's old age. They hope that their children will learn from their experience and not waste time chasing ideals. My dad's words echo thus, in my mind: "You can't change it. Nobody can change anything in this system, let alone have an effect on the world. This was not the way it was supposed to happen, but it did. And it does.

"Make sure that your own boat is floating and never mind the rest." So I sit with unsatisfied plans, unkept promises and unvisited places. I wonder how much time I really have left. Whether I should be wasting my time like my parents (allegedly) did. I wonder how much of their story is actually true (I know some of it isn't since I changed it myself). As if it mattered, I wonder if it'll ever be published, whether people will like it. I think about my parents, in their petrified cages of the routinity of life; I think of their unfinished plans: What could they be and what do they think of them now?

"We had to make hard choices." That's Mom's voice coming to me over the hissing international telephone line.

So I sit, petrified between the requirements of Turkish middle class roots: Get a steady job, get married, make sure your own boat floats and the empty feeling that this story leads to. The tension between the thought that I am being ungrateful and that I am too complacent. Am I being too harsh, too clinical, too cynical? I then get frustrated by thinking around in circles and chasing my own mental tail. I think that it's not fair that the word "to think" is expected to be used with decisiveness all the time. I then cross out all the crap that I have written; and rewind. And begin, once again, at the beginning...

There's no doubt that my mother was a beautiful woman - at least according to grandma.

Aberdeen, 19 February 2000

Copyleft notice: Copyright (C) 1999-2005 Mustafa Ünlü. This information is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

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