Young Turk (4 page)

‘Be well, Rιfat. And be careful.’

‘Sure.’

‘Terrible things are happening. In Europe. China. Worse to come.’

‘You’ve been seeing things again?’

‘Streams of them. All the time. Death everywhere. Not just for Jews. For everybody. Even for our friend ...’

‘What friend? Who?’

‘I can’t tell yet ...’

‘If I knew, I could try and prevent it from happening ...’

She stroked my cheek. ‘You’re so sweet. It’s very vague at the moment. And I may have got it all wrong. But confusion – uncertainty – doesn’t help. Just drives me mad all the more.’

‘Can’t I do something? Help in some way?’

‘Can you make me go to sleep? And never let me wake up?’

‘If we saw each other more ...’

She kissed me on my lips. ‘Take care. Always.’

Then she ran off.

Two days later, Germany invaded Poland.

Winter set in. And it proved to be one of the coldest winters of the century. Temperatures in some parts of Anatolia dropped below minus 30 degrees centigrade.

On 26 December 1939 my mother went to Erzincan, in eastern Turkey.

As I mentioned before, my mother had trained as a midwife. She had so excelled in this specialization that she had soon surpassed most of the obstetricians who had been sent to study abroad. In 1938, following glowing recommendations, the ministry of health commissioned her to structure a nationwide training programme for midwifery.

The principal recommendation for my mother had come from none other than Professor Albert Eckstein, a German Jewish paediatrician who had been given asylum from Hitler’s Germany by Atatürk himself and who, over the years, had attained the status of saint in Ankara’s Nümune Hospital – the institution that serves as a model for every hospital in the country. It was through the auspices of this professor that my mother had procured the oxygen cylinder when I had contracted diphtheria for the second time and, indeed, on his advice that my doctor had performed the tracheotomy. I know this because Gül once told me he had been one of the doctors she had telepathically begged to save me.

(Atatürk’s offer of refuge to those persecuted by the Nazis – an offer that not only saved countless European artists, academics and intellectuals from certain death, but also enabled them to pursue their careers – emulated the way Sultan Beyazιt had opened the empire’s doors, almost 500 years earlier, to vast numbers of Jews and Moors fleeing the Spanish Inquisition. Professor Eckstein, I should add, had been initially targeted by the Third Reich more for being an anti-Nazi – which in those days was equated with communism – than for being a Jew. As my father once remarked, the fact that the good professor was greatly esteemed by a Turkish administration that had outlawed its country’s own Communist Party, and imprisoned most of its members, gives an idea of the paradoxes that ruled – and still rule – Turkey.)

Inevitably, my mother had to travel a great deal. Though this was hardly to my liking, my father accepted it with equanimity. A research botanist at the Agricultural Academy in Çiftlik, on the outskirts of Ankara, he understood only too well the priorities for a nation trying to jump from the eighteenth century into the twentieth in a few decades. So the two of them turned every homecoming into a celebration and enjoyed a marriage that was the envy of their friends. (Sadly, to this day, my paternal grandparents will tell whoever chooses to listen that my mother’s all too frequent absences seriously hampered my development by diverting my interest to sport instead of good old-fashioned commerce. But then they are so determined to camouflage their Dönme origins that they would criticize any act of non-conformity. And of course they have the field to themselves. My maternal grandparents, also Dönme and said to be enlightened, were killed during the battle for Izmir in 1922.)

As I said before, my mother went to Erzincan on 26 December. She arrived there at about 9
PM
– a fact my father established from the log of the bus that had brought her from Erzurum. Almost immediately, she gave a lecture at the city’s hospital. The next morning she was scheduled to address a group of middle-school graduates interested in a career in midwifery.

At roughly the time of her arrival in Erzincan, Gül rushed into our apartment screaming that my mother was in danger.

Weeping and agitated, she urged my father and grandparents to contact my mother immediately and tell her that she had to leave Erzincan and travel as far north as she could.

Of course, my father and grandfather knew about Gül’s prophetic gifts. But they could not bring themselves to accept that my mother was in mortal danger.

I did. So did my grandmother, who believed in all things occult. And together we prevailed on my father and grandfather to try and contact my mother.

They rushed out to find a telephone – not an easy task on a bitter winter’s night in Istanbul in 1939 – while we prayed that the country’s antiquated telephone system would somehow defy the elements and get through to the mountainous east.

About 11
PM
, while my father and grandfather were still out, Gül quietened down. She turned to us, utterly exhausted. ‘It’s too late now. She hasn’t got time to run away.’

I tried not to believe her. But my strength drained away. I sank on to the floor and curled up.

Gül crawled to a corner and stared into the void.

After an hour of nightmarish silence, my father and grandfather returned. They had scoured all Istanbul in vain for a telephone. Finally, my grandfather had thought of going to his Masonic Lodge, which had a switchboard. They had duly woken up the night-watchman and, after what had seemed an eternity, had finally contacted my mother at her lodging. Though she had sounded fine, my father thought she had been perturbed by the call.

Gül made no comment. She withdrew further into herself.

We dragged ourselves to bed.

At about 2
AM
Gül started screaming again. ‘She’s dead! Crushed! Dead! Dead!’

We jumped out of bed in panic.

My grandmother, always calm under pressure, switched on the radio.

And after many torturous hours of shuttling between hope and despair, we started hearing about the Erzincan earthquake. Eight on the Richter scale – a mere one degree less than the maximum. Striking at 1:57
AM
. Lasting for fifty-two seconds – an eternity for those caught in it. One survivor described it as the Devil shaking the earth as if it were a die in a heated game of backgammon. All of Erzincan and many surrounding villages razed to the ground. Telephone and telegraph lines destroyed – hence the length of time for the news to get through. Regions stretching hundreds of kilometres from the epicentre also affected. (In Ankara, a relative’s son, aged four, squealed with joy as his cot was shunted from wall to wall, believing that the tremors were a new game.)

The death toll reached 33,000. Approximately 120,000 homes had been destroyed.

My mother’s body was never recovered. The earth where her lodging was located had opened up, swallowing all the buildings; then, as if contrite at what it had done, it had closed up again, barely showing a fissure.

I only saw Gül once in the weeks that followed. She came to show me some newspaper clippings which reported that broadcasts from Nazi Germany were calling the Erzincan disaster divine retribution; perhaps now Turkey would agree to join the Axis forces and cut off relations with Britain and France. Though I could see that Gül, as a Jew, was extremely disturbed by these demented rantings from the Nazis, I did not have the sensitivity to soothe her. I was too involved with my own grief, too much in pursuit of the desperate efforts children make in order to accept life without a parent.

Then, on Saturday 3 February 1940, I received a brief letter from Gül: ‘
God be praised! I know how to stop seeing.
’

I rushed to her house. Her mother told me she was spending the weekend with her friend, Handan. They intended to go on a film binge.

I went to Handan’s apartment. Gül had not spent the night there. In fact, Handan had not seen her for a couple of days.

On an impulse, I went to the park where the summer fair takes place. Like a sleepwalker I went to the bench where we had sat and had ice-creams.

Gül was there. Stretched out. Like Snow White. Peaceful. Seemingly asleep. But preserved in hoary ice. She had frozen to death.

She had died smiling. Or did I imagine that?

Paradise was Sofi’s gift to Selim and me. She took us there frequently. I, Musa, was about seven; Selim a year or so older. Paradise was the women’s
hamam
, or Turkish baths, in Ankara.

I can still see Sofi watching out of the corner of her eye as Selim and I surrendered to ecstasy – smiling, I’m convinced, under the scar that ran diagonally across her mouth. (Years later, Eleftheria, my Greek lover – her name means ‘freedom’ – who took great pride in being many women all at once, called our ecstatic state ‘the sorcery of ten dances’, a heavy Hellenic pun on ‘decadence’.)

Sofi cherished us as if we were her own; and we loved her just as much. In fact, I can now admit, we loved her more than we loved our mothers. We reasoned that since she was under no obligation to hold us dear, the fact that she did meant we were worthy of affection. Consequently, we never believed the loose talk from parents and neighbours that, given the law of nature whereby every woman is ruled by the maternal instinct, Sofi, destined to remain unmarried and barren, needed, perforce, to treasure every child that came her way, even curs like Selim and me. (I remember a neighbour’s refrain: ‘A virgin she may be, but who’d take a lass with a scarred face?’ And the curs, Selim and I, shouting in unison – prudently, out of earshot – ‘Us! As soon as we’re older!’)

Sofi was one of those young women from the Anatolian backwoods who, having ended up with no relatives and no home, found salvation in domestic service in the cities. Often payment for such work amounted to no more than the person’s keep and a bed in a corner of a hallway; wages, if they existed, seldom exceeded a miserable lira or two a month. But in the early 1940s, when Turkey’s policy of neutrality in the Second World War had brought on severe economic problems, even this sort of employment was hard to find; the sizeable metropolises, Istanbul, Izmir, Adana and the new capital, Ankara, were rife with chilling stories of the misadventures that had befallen many maidens from the countryside who had failed to find just such a job.

My parents, I’m glad to say, paid a decent wage despite the constant struggle to make ends meet. For Sofi was an Armenian, a member of a people that, like the Jews, had seen more than its share of troubles. Sofi herself, as her premature white hair and deep scar testified, was a survivor of the Passion suffered by the Armenians under the Ottoman regime during the First World War.

Selim and I never accepted the distinction that Sofi was a servant. With the wisdom of young minds we dismissed the term as derogatory. We called her
abla
, ‘elder sister’. At first – since Selim was not my brother, but my friend who lived next door – I insisted that she should be known as
my abla
, but Sofi, who introduced us to everything that is noble in humankind, took this opportunity to teach us about true justice. Stroking my forehead gently – while Selim, recycling some doorbells we had found in a dump, rigged up a telegraph system with which we planned to disseminate her supreme message to the whole world – she impressed upon us that since Selim and I had been inseparable since our toddling days, we should have acquired the wisdom to expel from our souls such petty impulses as greed and possessiveness. She belonged to both of us, what was more natural than that? Which meant ‘all for one and one for all’. So hear, hear, everybody! Follow our example! And, naturally, share all you have. Amen.