Young Turk (7 page)

Now, some of you might have begun pulling faces. (Eleftheria did when I first recounted these things to her. ‘Pig’, she shouted, ‘clitorises have hoods. Even if you find a clitoris the size of an Easter egg, you’ll have a tough time seeing it! You’ve got to, one: be lucky enough to have your face across your lover; two: know how to peek past the hood; three: have the sang-froid to keep your eyes open; and four: seduce the bean or the hazel nut or whatever you call it into believing that, for you, she is the only reality in life and everything else is an illusion.’)

So, let me confess before you take me for a liar that, in all likelihood, neither Selim nor I ever saw a single clitoris. We just believed we did. Not only the odd one but, by that unique luck that favours curs, hundreds of them. And the more we believed, the more we contorted ourselves into weird positions, peeked and squinted from crazy angles, moved hither and thither to fetch this and that for one matron or another. We behaved, in effect, like bear cubs around a honey pot.

Of course, I admit, with hindsight, that what we kept seeing must have been beauty spots or freckles or moles or birthmarks and, no doubt, on occasion, the odd pimple or wart or razor nick.

Naturally, when we described to our friends, particularly our Gypsy friends, all that we had feasted on with our eyes, they believed us. And so we felt important. And when we went to sleep counting not sheep but clitorises, we felt sublime. And when we woke up and felt our genitals humming as happily as the night before, we basked in ultimate bliss.

An aside here, if I may. Inconceivable as it may sound, we never investigated Sofi’s features. But she was, after all, family, therefore immaculate, therefore non-sexual. Now, looking back on old pictures, I note that she was rather attractive. She had the silky olive-coloured skin that makes Armenians such a handsome people. Moreover, she had not had children, hence, had not enjoyed, in
hamam
parlance, ‘usage’. Consequently, though in her mid-thirties, she was still firm-fleshed and robust, still a woman in her prime.

When my family moved from Ankara, soon after my bar mitzvah, Sofi went to work as a chambermaid in a resort hotel. We kept in touch. Then, in 1976, she suddenly left her job and disappeared. Her boss, who had been very attached to her, disclosed that she had been seriously ill and presumed that she had gone to die in her birthplace, in the company of ancestral ghosts. Since neither of us knew which particular village in Kars province she had originally come from, our efforts to trace her soon foundered.

But I never gave up hope of finding her. Whenever I met Armenians, I always asked them whether they had ever come across Sofi or, better still, whether they could inquire about her within their own circles of relatives, friends and acquaintances.

Then, one day, a friend in Canada wrote to me about Kirkor Hovanesyan, a sickly sixty-year-old Armenian immigrant from Turkey who, on becoming a widower, had decided to go back to the old country and spend the remainder of his days drinking raki and eating
mezes
by the Bosporus. But no sooner had he arrived on our shores than he fell prey to our notorious bureaucracy and was conscripted into the army for the military service he had avoided as a young man. He was duly sent to the east, to Kars; but, because of his age, had served as an orderly in an officers’ mess. During his time there, he had not only regained his health, but had also formed a liaison with a distant relative. After his discharge, he and this woman had married and, moving back to Istanbul, had bought and rebuilt a famous Romanian restaurant which had been destroyed in a fire.

Armed with this information, I rushed to the said restaurant.

And there, to my great joy, was Sofi.

Her husband, Kirkor, has long since died, but Sofi is still alive – though pretty old. She is well looked-after by Kirkor’s children from his first marriage and, of course, by her true sons – Selim and me.

Alas, our time in paradise did not fill a year.

Expulsion, when it came, was as sudden and as unexpected as from Eden. And just as brutal.

It happened on 5 July. The date is engraved in my mind because it happens to be my birthday. In fact, the visit to the
hamam
on that occasion was meant to be Sofi’s present to me. A few days earlier she had asked me what treat I would most like, meaning what special dish or cake she could cook for me, and had been amused by my resolute preference for the
hamam
. But she had readily agreed, even approved of my choice; after all, she cooked my favourite dishes all the time.

Summers in Ankara are suffocating; and that particular 5 July was exceptionally stifling; hardly the sort of day, one might think, to induce people to seek shelter in the Turkish baths. Not so. For a start, it felt fresher inside the
hamam
than anywhere else; there was, at least, refuge from a sun that seemed determined to boil people’s brains. Secondly, it was in the hot season that the Temperate Room earned its keep by turning into an oasis. Thirdly, according to those who claimed to have scientific minds, a thorough scrub – so thorough that it could only be achieved after a few hours in the baths – improved a person’s cooling mechanism by opening up all the body’s pores.

And so, on that 5 July, the women’s
hamam
was exceptionally full. (Maybe I had known or heard or intuited that it would be.) Selim and I were having an awfully hard time trying to look in many directions all at once. Such was our excitement that we never blinked once. (Today, when we concentrate on something that fascinates us, we still contort into that goggle-eyed look). It was, in effect, the most bounteous time we had ever had in the baths. (Given the fact that it was also our last, I might be exaggerating. Nostalgia does that.)

We must have been there for some time when, to our dismay, we saw one of the women grab hold of an attendant and command her, while pointing at us, to fetch Lady Aunt. It took us an eternity to realize that this nymph of strident fortissimo was the very goddess whom Selim and I adored and worshipped, whose body we had judged to be perfect and voluptuous – we never used one adjective where two could be accommodated – and whom, as a result, we had named ‘Nilüfer’ after the water-lily, which, in those days, we believed to be the most beautiful flower in the world.

And before we could summon the wits to direct our gaze elsewhere – or even to lower our eyes – Nilüfer and Lady Aunt were upon us, both screaming at lovely Sofi, who had been dozing by the
kurna
.

Now I should point out that Selim and I, having riveted our eyes on Nilüfer for months on end, knew very well that she was of a turbulent nature. We had seen her provoke innumerable quarrels, not only with Lady Aunt and the attendants, but also with many of the patrons. The old women, comparing her to a Barbary mare – and, given the ease with which she moved her fleshy but athletic limbs, a particularly lusty one at that – attributed her volatility to her recent marriage and summed up her caprices as the dying embers of a female surrendering her existence to her husband, as females should; one day, a week hence or months later, when she felt that sudden jolt which annunciates conception, she would become as docile as the next woman.

And on that 5 July, Selim and I had been expecting an outburst from Nilüfer – though not against us, of course. (The curious fact that she had never before turned against us – nor had ever bothered to act modestly before our eyes – meant, we had decided, that she liked us and wanted to please us.) In fact, we had noted that she was troubled the moment she arrived: she could not sit and relax with the women who had come with her, nor even stay for any length of time in the Temperate Room to which she kept going every few minutes. And she kept complaining of being pummelled by a terrible migraine, courtesy of the accursed heat outside. (The migraine, Sofi wisely informed us later, shed light on the real reasons for Nilüfer’s temper: for some women migraines heralded the commencement of their flow; what might have made matters worse for Nilüfer – remember she was not long married - could have been the disappointment of having failed to conceive for yet another month.)

It took us a while to register Nilüfer’s accusations. She was reproving us for playing with our genitals, touching them the way men do. (I’m sure we did, but I’m equally sure we did it surreptitiously. Had she been watching us the way we had been watching the women, seemingly through closed eyes?)

Sofi, bless her dear heart, defended us like a lioness. ‘My boys’, she said, ‘know how to read and write. They don’t need to play with themselves.’

This
non sequitur
enraged Nilüfer all the more. Stooping upon us, she took hold of our penises, one in each hand, and showed them to Lady Aunt. ‘Look,’ she yelled, ‘they’re almost hard. You can see they’re almost hard!’

(Were they? I don’t know. But, as Selim agreed with me later, the feeling of being tightly held by her hand was sensational.)

Lady Aunt glanced at the exhibits dubiously. ‘Can’t be. Their testicles haven’t dropped yet ...’

‘Yes. Thanks for reminding me,’ howled Sofi. ‘Their testicles haven’t dropped yet!’

‘No, they haven’t!’ Selim interjected bravely. ‘We’d know, wouldn’t we?’

Nilüfer, waving our penises, shrilled another decibel at Lady Aunt. ‘See for yourself! Touch them! Touch them!’

Shrugging like a long-suffering servant, Lady Aunt knelt by our side. Nilüfer handed over our penises like batons. Lady Aunt must have had greater expertise in inspecting the male member; for as her fingers enveloped us softly and warmly and oh so amiably, we did get hard – or felt as if we did.

We expected Lady Aunt to scream the place down. Instead, she rose from her haunches with a smile and turned to Sofi. ‘They are hard. See for yourself.’

Sofi shook her head in disbelief.

Nilüfer celebrated her triumph by striding up and down the baths, shouting, ‘They’re not boys! They’re men!’

Sofi continued to shake her head in disbelief.

Lady Aunt patted her on the shoulder, then shuffled away. ‘Take them home. They shouldn’t be here.’

Sofi, suddenly at a loss, stared at the bathers. She noted that some of them were already covering themselves.

Still confused, she turned round to us; then, impulsively, she held our penises. As if that had been the cue, our members shrank instantly and disappeared within their folds.

Sofi, feeling vindicated, shouted at the patrons, ‘They’re not hard! They’re not!’

Her voice echoed from the marble walls. But no one paid her any attention.

She remained defiant even as Lady Aunt saw us off the premises. ‘I’ll be bringing them along – next time! We’ll be back!’

Lady Aunt roared with laughter. ‘Sure! Bring their fathers, too, why don’t you?’

And the doors clanged shut behind us.

And though Sofi determinedly took us back several times, we were never again granted admission.

This July of 1942, the people of Istanbul were insisting, was the hottest in living memory. Around Sultan Ahmet Square, where the Blue Mosque and the Byzantine monuments faced each other in historical debate, the traditional
çayhanes
had appropriated every patch of shade. The patrons of these tea-houses blamed the heat on
Şeytan
: the land was fragrant with the verses and compositions of the young bards, and the Arch-demon, jealous of the Turk’s ability to turn all matter into poetry or music, was venting his resentment. The narghile-smokers, mostly pious men revered as guardians of the faith, disagreed: such temperatures occurred only when sainted imams lamented the profanation of Koranic law; and, under this heathen administration called a ‘republic’, they had much to lament, not least the growing number of women who were securing employment – as well as equal status with men – in all walks of life. But down the hill, along the seaside
meyhanes
, where the solemn imbibing of raki engendered enlightenment far superior to that of tea or opium, the elders, veterans of the First World War, offered a more cogent reason. Pointing at the dried blood from Europe’s latest battlefields settling as dust on this city, which Allah had created as a pleasure garden for every race and creed, they affirmed that man, that worshipper of desolation, was once again broiling the atmosphere with guns.

We believed the drinkers. Well, we either had just reached our teens or, like Bilâl, were at the threshold and knew, with the wisdom of that age, that old soldiers, particularly those who open their tongues with alcohol, never lie. Besides, Bilâl – actually, his mother, Ester – had kept us apprised, with first-hand information, of the carnage devastating Europe. In Greece, where she had been born, Death was reaping a bumper harvest. Letters from Fortuna, Ester’s sister in Salonica, were chronicling the atrocities. Though these accounts often verged on hysteria – and tended to be dismissed as exaggerated, even by some Jews – they were corroborated, in prosaic detail, by the family’s lawyer. When, about fifteen years before, Ester had left Greece to get married in Turkey, this gentleman, Sotirios Kasapoglou by name, had promised to report regularly on her family’s situation.