8
I feel compelled to add 'or so I've been told.' In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsy from what we've seen with our own eyes; when we are relating dreams, fairy tales, or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense. It is a useful distinction to make as we 'remember' our earliest life experiences, our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, as reported by our parents, stories to which we listen with the same rapt attention we might pay some brilliant tale that happened to concern some other person. It's a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dream, but we pay a heavy price for it. Once imprinted in our minds, other people's reports of what we've done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember. And just as we learn about our lives from others, so, too, do we let others shape our understanding of the city in which we live.
13
In time I would come to dread those long festive lunches, those endless evening celebrations, those New Years' feasts when the whole family would linger after the meal to play lotto; every year, I would swear it was the last time I'd go, but somehow I never managed to break the habit. When I was little, though, I loved these meals. As I watched the jokes travel around the crowded table and my uncles laugh (under the influenc of vodka or raki) and my grandmother smilimg (under the influence of the tiny glass of beer she allowed herself) - I could not help but notice how much more fun life was outside the picture frame. I felt security of belonging to a large and happy family and could bask in the illusion that we were put on earth to take pleasure in it, though I had been long aware that these relatives of mine who could laugh, dine and joke together on holidays were also merciless and unforgiving in quarrels over money and property. By ourselves, in the privacy of our own apartment, my mother was always complaining to my brother and me about the cruelties of 'your aunt','your uncle','your grandmother'. In the evnet of a disagreement over who owned what, or the division of shares of the rope factory, or who would live on which floor of the apartment block, the only certainty was that there would never be a resolution. These rifts may faded for holiday meals, but from an early age I was aware that, behind the gaiety, these was a mounting pile of unsettled scores and a sea of recriminations.
16
God had chosen not to bind us to the city's fate, I thought, simply because we were rich. But as my father and my uncle stumbled from one bankruptcy to the next, as our fortune dwindled and our family disintegrated and the quarrels over money grew more intense, every visit to my grandmother's apartment brought me sorrow and a step closer to a realisation: it was a long time coming, arriving by a circuitous route, but the cloud of gloom and loss that the fall of the Ottoman Empire had spread over Istanbul finally claimed my family, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment