A Midlife Dream

FERIDE

I. YOUTH AND THE PAST

YOUTH AND THE PAST

FERHAT

Stepdaughter

The child’s red slippers, no longer than an adult’s forefinger, lay beside the bed, tiny and abandoned. One was turned over, face down. A little while ago, the child had wrapped her thin arms around her father’s neck and flown towards his sturdy chest. She let her sleepy head, its hair cut short, rest on his shoulder. She had no idea that she was being taken to have her tonsils out. Her defenceless, yielding little feet dangled as if merely pinned to the ends of her skinny legs. How small her toes and toenails were.

For Şirin’s stepmother, the empty slippers and dangling feet became a lasting memory that made her throat burn each time she remembered it. If she had told her husband how she felt on that day, he would have shrugged and walked away. Feride thought that they had deceived Şirin. They made her believe she was going somewhere where she would have lots of ice-cream. The things we conceal from children! Everyone deceived them, lied to them, to stop them from getting hurt.

While waiting in the hospital for Şirin to wake up from the anaesthetic, Feride stood apart from her husband’s family. Ferhat paid no attention to her when he was with them. Şirin was the apple of their eyes. Grandfather, Grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, they were all there. When she was with her in-laws, Feride shared that sense of guilt that the middle classes feel when confronted with the dispossessed: city people with poor villagers; people raised in large, sedate houses with those whose families squeezed into cramped spaces. She knew they had not taken to her. And she did not like them either. They put up with each other. Together the family made a silent demand on her: they expected her to look after the child as if she were her own. But they did not expect her to love the child and did not believe that she did. They would never believe she loved Şirin. Loving Şirin was the blood relatives’ right, and theirs alone!

Oh, God! And next thing I know my daughter-in-law’s calling for help! ‘Mother, quick!’ she shouted. So I rushed over to her. And what did I see? Her waters had broken! Poor girl. She didn’t realise what was happening. The young! They’re so inexperienced.

Feride’s mother-in-law was busy relating the story of Şirin’s birth to her other daughters-in-law as she had done who knows how many times before. Did she do it on purpose? Did she deliberately refer to Şirin’s dead mother and to a birth that Feride had not witnessed just out of spite? Feride could never be sure; she did not know what to make of her mother-in-law. Birth and death were such commonplace occurrences for this peasant woman, this aged daughter of the earth. Her rebellious grey hair, gushing out from under the scarf she wrapped casually around her head, had long lost its sheen. Her round face bore the marks of a tough life. Burnt by the fields, it sagged, making her look older than she was. Perhaps her inappropriate, hurtful behaviour was merely a result of her being a woman of the land who accidentally found herself in the concrete city.

When she married Ferhat, Feride had wanted to be close to his family, but she had not been able to. She had longed to be part of a big, crowded family during her joyless childhood without brothers and sisters. And here she was, a daughter-in-law to a big family. How sad to yearn for something that seems unattainable, only to be disillusioned once united with it. She felt that in her in-laws’ household there were more areas untouched by words than there was silence in her past, and these unbroachable subjects collected like tight, knotty masses: wherever you turned, something was off-limits. And the hierarchy of respect was a ladder that newcomers were forbidden to climb. She had lost hope of ever being truly accepted. She knew her place and that was why she stood by herself, apart.

There was one sister-in-law Feride did feel closer to. At that moment, she was listening to the mother-in-law with a clearly frustrated expression on her face and darting fugitive, apologetic glances at Feride. She worked in a bank and dressed soberly with neither make-up nor headscarf.

It was impossible to discern any expression on the other sister-inlaw’s silent face, coated in a shiny film of cold sweat. Her hair was fully covered, in accordance with the strict, detailed orders of one of the religious groups that had become prominent recently. She too glanced over at the stepmother from time to time, but it was an idly curious glance designed to gauge Feride’s reactions.

It was not the family Feride felt estranged from, it was Ferhat, her husband. Every day, she understood a little less why and how she had fallen so madly in love with him. Every day, the memory of having loved him grew a little dimmer, even though it had been only a few years since she had stopped. Really, who was this stranger? Şirin’s father. That would be Ferhat’s identity from then on.

Was it all a dream, a figment of her imagination, that irrepressible desire she had felt for him? The desire that weighed on her flesh and scratched at her heart with its painful longing? She wished that she had not been so fragile; her husband was rough and domineering, but she knew his heart was pure, affectionate even. He was raised to be tough and did not know how to express the affection bottled up inside him. She always forgave him. If she had not suppressed and smothered her anger, if she had poured out her rage, would her womanly geography have left the cold season behind?

When she married him, she was aware that desire had already worn out. Ferhat had kept on abandoning her. He had abandoned her and returned; returned and abandoned her. That was the bitter truth of being in love with a married man. Then all of a sudden, Ferhat’s wife had died. She had been crossing some road when a driver without a licence ran her down. Poor woman … she had been killed instantly.

The unexpected tragedy had corroded Feride’s feelings for Ferhat like a powerful acid. It had sterilised and dried out her heart. She did not see him for quite a long time. Then suddenly one day he appeared and proposed to her. She should have said no. She was almost thirty and wanted to become a mother … She could not turn him down.

She had an unfortunate habit. She could not stop reading a book even if she did not enjoy it, she could not walk out of a cinema even when the movie bored her, and she could not desert a man. With a peculiar sense of duty, she thought that she had to bear things until the bitter end. So she rolled up her sleeves, girded her loins and plunged into married life with an earnest heart.

If it had not been for Şirin, would she have married Ferhat? She remembered one day Ferhat was with Şirin. She was only three and a half years old and thoroughly bored of the adults around her. It had been almost a year since her mother had died. She came hesitantly up to Feride and touched her, still hesitant, and then snuggled up to her. Feride gave her a hug. The child tried to wrap her small, thin arms around her and buried her head in Feride’s breast whispering, I miss my mummy. At that moment, Feride had an epiphany. Later, when she would tell Şirin about it, she would say, A door opened from my heart into my body and you filtered into my being.

Ferhat watched his child and his new wife bonding from a distance, complacently but somewhat aloofly. He would not come down from his pedestal and join them in their games. In the past, Feride thought that she liked that type of man, the patriarchs of large families she used to envy as a child. She thought she admired their self-confident, serene and detached bearings that soared above the tumultuous world of women and children.

But now she felt deceived and she doubted how genuine the position attributed to her husband was. The role of head of the family was like an inherited ceremonial robe, tailored rather loose on purpose so that it could cover and conceal all the petty insecurities, fears and failures. She was no fool; she could see it … None of the women of the family, not her mother-in-law or her sisters-in-law, was a fool either. They all knew what was going on. They knew their menfolk inside out and kept up the pretence. This Feride could not bear! She was ready to embrace like a mother all those things she could sense in her husband that others might have called weaknesses, but that was not what was required of her. She was expected to act as if life was a charade. She tried, but it did not work. The ground slipped from under her feet; there was no air left to breathe. It was as if she stopped being human and was transformed into a pale, shadowy product of her own imagination. Right then, thoughts of giving up or committing suicide, thoughts that had had no place in her own family’s life experiences, began to scurry like dark spiders across the continuously eroded surface of her patience and soon turned into narrow but deep fissures. Was it possible to give up being married? Being a woman?

Being alive? She had had two miscarriages and it seemed as if she would never be able to have a baby. All she had was Şirin. That was all.

She lived with her dreams. That was how she had always lived. When she was young, she had dreamt of loving a man; now she dreamt of getting rid of him.

She would be rescued, in an unexpected way … or perhaps in a way that she had always expected … Her strange freedom would be overcast with searing, piercing pain.

Ferhat’s voice, weighed down with apprehension about recent events in their country, could be heard in the hospital corridor, drowning out the story of Şirin’s birth. He was talking to his brother, the husband of the bank clerk, who on this June day in 1977, was filled with hopes for the future of their country. He was destroying his brother’s optimism with calm but firm words.

Did he change the subject deliberately, to spare Feride’s feelings? She could never be sure. Similar things had happened before, and when Feride, touched, had wanted to thank him, she had been met with a blank look that silently asked her what she was talking about, and the words of gratitude on her lips were torn into broken, piercing syllables that would silently penetrate her heart. She felt humiliated for mistakenly assuming she had some value in her husband’s eyes.

The hospital corridor awakened bitter memories and strange premonitions within her. She remembered her dead parents. She could not see into the future. Tightly packed into this dark corridor, time seemed to have stopped. She kept on telling herself that Şirin was only here for a minor operation and that everything would be OK. Deep in her heart, though, a slight but persistent intimation that nothing was ever completely certain palpitated with menace.

Ferhat was telling his brothers—one a left-winger, the other a dyed-in-the-wool right-winger—that the newly formed coalition with a Social Democrat majority could not be relied on to last. The left-winger was a bank clerk like his wife. The right-winger was a grocer. The women did not attempt to join in the political discussion with their menfolk. They just listened quietly and refrained from talking about anything else.

Ferhat looked and sounded too categorical for it to be a discussion. No, he was haranguing his younger brothers! Was it out of respect for him that they were saying nothing?

Mark my words, he said, the second Nationalist Front government is just biding its time.

Feride wanted to be hopeful: the Social Democrats had won the elections, and it was spring … And even if the worst came to the worst, they were in no imminent danger. Every morning when they woke up, revolutionary slogans had been freshly graffitied in their street the night before. In the high school where she and Ferhat taught, the headmaster and most of their colleagues and students were left-wingers. In spite of the pessimism emanating from her husband’s analysis, a ray of light shone in her darkened inner world. An expression that she rarely saw had settled on Ferhat’s face: modest courage and solemn responsibility. The narrow corridor had suddenly become wide for her. Now she could remember why she had fallen so madly in love with him. It was for those singular expressions that completely altered his face.

She had fallen in love with him for his childishly innocent smile that appeared when everyone else was anxious with the weight of foreboding, for his grim thoughts that cut into his features when everyone else was carried away with an irrepressible joy in a break from the interminable lessons sorrowful experiences taught. She remembered the April day two years ago when the first Nationalist Front government was formed. The teachers’ room was in mourning. All of a sudden, Ferhat’s smile entered: We few, he said jokingly, we happy few, we band of brothers. He was rubbing his hands with glee and there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye. When Feride would think back on that day, in the distant future, she would suspect that Ferhat’s enthusiasm came from him having found in the leftist movement a way out of the impasse of his private life. It was a means to satisfy his thirst for life and an outlet for the vital energy pent up inside him from his frustrated childhood and youth.

Ferhat had been right. It was the beginning of a battle.

Ferhat looked like a determined victim. There was a sad courage etched on his face. She felt her inner being melt and flow towards him. She wanted to reach out and hold his hand. But she could not do it in front of the family. The feeling of intimacy did not last long and had already disappeared before it could take root. The hospital corridor had become narrow again, even narrower than before. Her whole being, physical and emotional, felt like a wound. The nagging problems that never seemed to be solved flocked into her mind again.

She thought Şirin was why she would never bring up the subject of divorce with her husband. She would not be able to keep a child who was not her own flesh and blood. There was no way they would ever give Şirin to her. The family might even stop her from seeing Şirin. She was in a dilemma.

Once she was sure what her dilemma was, a guilty hope appeared in her heart. She wished Ferhat would die! A sudden, painless death … She wished him dead and herself delivered. It was not as if he enjoyed life anyway. Why? He shouldered his responsibilities as if they were onerous chores, and he made himself and everyone around him suffer as he performed them. If he were to die, nobody would try to wrest Şirin from her grasp. During her short time as the daughter-in-law, she had worked out the family’s secret. It was only because they did not know what else to do that the they clung tightly to old niceties which were actually dead, empty forms, like a tunic worn threadbare that would disintegrate if touched. For in spite of appearances, the family had rapidly shrunk, scattered even, after moving to the city. It had happened so quickly that they had not even had time for it to sink in. The uncles and aunts would never willingly agree to take Şirin. They would pretend that was what they wanted. They would give loud, excited speeches, wipe a tear from their eyes and declare that they did not have the heart to leave their sister-in-law all alone, so, reluctantly, they would let her keep their beloved niece Şirin, and they would be content just to keep an eye on things. Then gradually their interest would wane. Family ties would grow weaker. They would only gather from Bayram to Bayram. Then as the Bayram holidays became longer and longer, family members would disappear off on trips to remote corners of their country, and Bayrams too would lose their meaning. In the end, uncles and aunts and cousins would only play their role at weddings and funerals.

Feride waited patiently for her turn to give Şirin a hug. After the family had finished, she held the child tightly. The anaesthetic was wearing off and the child’s throat was beginning to ache. She was in tears. Feride tried to amuse her, to soothe her. Feride’s throat was aching too. She remembered a time when there used to be a similar bond between her body and Ferhat’s. That memory was vivid but distant.

I’ll sleep with Şirin tonight, she said to her husband. A look of great disappointment appeared on Ferhat’s face. He had clearly been looking forward to being rewarded with sex after their tiring, anxious day, but he did not object. The sour expression melted into an affectionate smile. If it was for his daughter, Daddy would willingly sacrifice anything.

Feride felt herself softening towards her husband for the second time that day. For a moment, she thought of taking Şirin in her arms and carrying her to their marital bed. All three of them together would give Feride a far warmer sense of security than just she and Ferhat. But she was too late. Ferhat had already closed the bedroom door behind him. She took a deep breath. The short tremblings of longing for Ferhat and the mild regret she felt at being without him were exhaled along with her breath. In fact, she had escaped from the suffocating pressure of his body for at least one night.

She went into Şirin’s room. She warmed the child’s tiny cold feet in her hands. She put the child’s tiny socks on her. She would never lie to Şirin again, never deceive her.

So, what was she going to tell her? Feride could not even remember her own youth properly. It was as if her life began during the troubled years of the early 1970s when she fell in love with Ferhat. Everything before that was colourless monotony, like black-and-white photographs before a film that bleeding passions and aching bodies had dyed with a strange vitality.

Sometimes a weak pulse beat in remembrance in some parts of this long, bleak, misty prelude, a throb of youth and its passions, like a narrow artery becoming transparent as it flowed around lands shrouded in mist.

She would listen to that pulse in the future. Now …

She waited for the child to fall asleep.

Pages from the Past I

The first time I came to Istanbul, Şirin, I was a student. My university used to arrange trips to Istanbul for the mid-term holidays. Back then, there were motor trains. I suppose they ran on diesel. They were considered luxurious compared to the other trains, which we called black trains, because they spewed out coal-black fumes. No one went by plane in those days unless there was an emergency. Not many people had cars. Most people’s houses were heated by wood-burning stoves. It was our first time in Istanbul. We were excited. Everything was interesting for us: the worn-out marble steps of Haydarpaşa station, crossing to the European side by boat, seagulls circling overhead, everything.

We girls stayed in halls; the boys stayed in cheap hotels nearby. We were very close to Beyazıt with its famous university gate. The city was quite different in those days. There were no buildings taller than the minarets. A mist of pure water vapour enveloped the city. The minarets were as graceful as if they had been drawn by a thin-nibbed pen. The waters of the Bosporus were of the colour of turquoise. The steel suspension bridges hadn’t been built yet. To cut a long story short, Şirin, Byzantine walls, Ottoman domes and centuries-old plane trees lived side by side in harmony.

Old people waited silently in the shade of great trees and in the courtyards of mosques. Ambitious people chased their dreams down elegant streets. Young lovers flirted awkwardly in sweet shops with marble tables that shone like mirrors. Misery, wealth and hedonism rubbed shoulders with each other. We noticed a veiled but savage struggle taking place. A woman with too much make-up was bargaining with a man, brashly, loudly … We weren’t used to seeing things like that in the orderly streets of the capital. We stared in amazement. Still, everything was softer, more graceful and gentler than how it became two or three decades later.

You could hear seagulls everywhere. The wind smelt of seaweed and under the bridges smelt of fried fish.

No, no, it’s not nostalgia. It’s more … I don’t know … The shocking impact of uncertainty. That’s where the city made itself felt!

To cut a long story short, nature was about to awaken, the city was bewitching and we were young. Life in our country was quiet, or so we thought. We were born after the Second World War. We were far from being rich, though we hadn’t known crushing poverty. We were in primary school in September 1955 when the Istanbul Pogrom happened. We couldn’t remember it clearly. It was something no one talked about. Like a family secret, it was best swept under the carpet. When the 1960 coup came, we were in secondary school, and there was still time before the 1968 tornado appeared on the horizon. To cut a long story short, Şirin, we were innocent, poor and happy.

Were we happy? We must have been. Looking back, nine out of ten people would say so. But they would be lying, taken in by an illusion. Why is human memory hampered with forgetting? I won’t lie to you, Şirin. We were unhappy … Exceedingly so … Inside us there was a maelstrom of aimless desires that kept searching for a target without being able to choose one.

There were three of us. We were very close. We were inseparable and we loved each other dearly. We studied together; we went to movies together. And we longed for men to love us. Groups of three are always dangerous, always on the verge of crisis, always fraught. It’s easy for two to gang up against one. Confrontation is born out of love. What or who is so difficult to share with a third person? Do we take malicious pleasure in ostracising the third person? Why doesn’t the odd one out just walk away, tearing the triangle apart? The arresting power of love. I was usually, if not always, the odd one out. So I was exceedingly unhappy. I don’t know if I was always in the right or not, but I certainly felt the bitterness of being wronged.

We weren’t the only group of friends that hadn’t been affected by the obvious attraction that sparked between the girls and boys in our class. There were many single-sex groups of two, three or four. There were also groups of three or four girls and a boy whom they treated like a spoilt younger brother. This kind of group no longer had a place in students’ lives in later years. It was a pity though: they had their good points. There was something human about them. We accepted our male classmates as brothers. Why? Perhaps because of the dreadful memories. Yes, dreadful. We girls, even when we were just children or teenagers, would be harassed even in places that were supposed to be safe. I can’t think of any word other than frightening to describe the sexual urge that grown men and boys barely a few years older than ourselves levelled at us like a gun barrel. The memories of harassment were like a never-healing wound. In those days, women were brought up besieged by a deep sense of shame. That made it difficult for a girl to defend herself. I suppose realising that someone was male frightened us, and we refused to acknowledge them. And there was an altogether different demand that arose from our developing bodies. An irresistible wave-like motion agitating within us, which beat sometimes against one shore, sometimes against the other.

When we visited Istanbul, it was tough finding an empty bed in the girl’s dormitories. Ten years later, we would read in the newspapers that there had been a violent confrontation between groups of girls in the very same halls. Because of politics. When I was that age though, nothing like that existed yet. Our problem was to get hold of beds that had been evacuated by the students who’d gone home for the holidays.

Naturally, the three of us wanted to stay in the same room. It was a dormitory for ten. Although some of our hostesses were welcoming, most of the girls just ignored us. Walking into a dormitory for the first time is like a slap on the face if you’ve always lived with your family. You feel the panic of being all alone and the potential violence of the mass as two distinct senses intertwined. The dormitories were untidy and dirty. Supervision had probably been relaxed because of the holidays.

The girls used things from the kitchen without bothering to wash them up afterwards. They simply pushed them under their beds and let them build up there. The beds were narrow and hard. To cut a long story short, I missed my home and my parents. Then I saw the view of Istanbul through the fourth-floor window filtering into the dormitory. It was so beautiful I could forgive the ugliness inside.

There had been a falling out between the three of us. I don’t remember why. Are the reasons important? No, not very … What matters is the tension itself. You can always find a reason. This was the natural state of our friendship. We used to communicate in looks rather than words. We picked up on hurts and offences like electricity in the air, like a breeze, and immediately the bonds of friendship would grow tense. Then there’d be bitter squabbling. Then we’d stop talking to each other. Then we’d feel awful and make up with tearful reconciliations that would heal our wounds. Yes, we used to wound each other.

We’d had a row. The other two went off to wander round Istanbul. I stayed in the dorm with my broken heart and had an early night. The other girls talked and laughed without paying any attention to me. Two of them became very close to each other, started whispering in each other’s ears and sniffing each other. Yes, two girls. The others paid no attention and carried on as if nothing unusual was happening. I did the same, of course: I paid no attention.

The three of us used to put our arms around each other and kiss each other on the cheeks without giving it a second thought. We did sometimes casually touch each other on the arm or shoulder, but we never thought of laying our hands anywhere else. These girls were thrusting their hands into each other’s underwear. They laughed noisily and breathed strangely. I should have been outraged at what was happening. The way I’d been brought up demanded that I should have been shocked. But in all honesty, I didn’t think any worse of them. Of course, I was very surprised, but what’s the point in being shocked by something no one bats an eyelid at!

You just have to swallow your astonishment and digest it. That was what I did. And I think I envied them a little. They had sharp teeth and nails to defend themselves, so I thought, whereas my fingertips were covered by fragile skin ready to bleed any moment.

When my friends came back, I pretended to be asleep. They skulked in somewhat guiltily and slipped into their beds, quietly, so as not to disturb anyone. I pulled my blanket over my head. Inside me mingled an excited fluttering that I wasn’t used to and a sense of stability, the complete opposite of the first feeling.

I slept very little that night. Towards morning, I was awakened from my light sleep by the sound of a very soft call for morning prayers from the mosque, a moving voice in song that hovered in the mist like the spring smell I’d noticed on the boat crossing over to the European side. It filled me with an excitement that wasn’t religious. I had a strong sense of the freshness of the new day. I got up and walked to the window. Istanbul was lying before me, between slumber and waking, like a sleeping beauty under gauzy veils as she daintily opens her eyes. The melody transported me to another shore like a raft drifting slowly in the mist. The sleepiness was an illusion, an effect of the mist. Istanbul was reverberating with life. Sometimes the never-fading vitality of a big city imbues you with might. I was full of that power. For the first time I was aware of my own individuality and I liked it. Feeling happy, I put my arm around