Young Turk (16 page)

A good start, don’t you think, Mami and Papi?

You may well ask: why I am writing this? And why secretly, in the middle of the night, when you’re both fast asleep?

I really don’t know.

I imagine I’m writing it for you – even though it’s really for me and, in any case, much of what I might write won’t be unknown to you.

Then again maybe I’m writing it for my friends. Waving them good-bye, as it were ...

I have a fear that keeps tearing at my innards. I’m trying not to look at it. I don’t want to recognize it. Or give it a name. The mother of my English – sorry, Scottish – friend, Robbie, a very sad woman since the death of her younger brother in the war, once told me that the moment you put a name to a fear it takes on substance.

And yet, I want to leave something like a testimonial behind me – just in case. I want to leave an impression of who we are, what we do, how our life is and has been, how blessed I am to be your son, how your love for me means everything to me, how it gives me strength, how I keep wanting to love you more, but don’t know how. And, yes, also how unhappy you make me – and, of course, yourselves – when you keep quarrelling.

Anyway, I’m writing down some of the things I want to say in case they prove to be my last words.

My father, Pepo, treats both accounts of our origins deferentially. His eyes, which always reflect wonderment, shine all the more whenever elders embark on a retelling of one or the other version. But he refuses to subscribe to either – or so he admitted to me on a number of occasions when instructing me on the sensitivity one must acquire towards other people’s beliefs and fantasies. Myths are fine, he says; in all likelihood, they reflect the divinity that all humankind possesses, but it is not right that existence should acquire meaning only when embedded in legends; reality, too, is meaningful; moreover, reality is immediate and demands prompt attention. (Actually, the first version, as I eventually found out, if not a fantasy, certainly lacks historical accuracy: if Barbaros Hayrettin had indeed plucked our ancestors off a beach, it would have been some forty-odd years after the Reconquista; and the beach itself would have been in North Africa, not in Andalusia.)

And so, whenever my father finds himself in less atavistic gatherings, he maintains that our family, like most families, is mongrel and that, if we think about it, this is a blessing because mongrels seldom suffer the hypersensitivity, not to mention the paranoia – indeed, the insanity – which are the bane of thoroughbreds. Moreover, since our pedigree derives from a variety of good stock – Jewish, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Gypsy, Armenian, Arab, Persian, to name but a few – we contain as much colour as the rainbow.

On the origins of the family’s last two generations, however, some solid facts exist.

My great-grandfather on my father’s side can be traced to Burgaz, Bulgaria. A barely legible document states that he had served there as an Ottoman functionary. Since he had also spent spells in Varna – like Burgaz, a Black Sea port – and in Rusçuk – also known as Ruse – Bulgaria’s border town with Romania on the Danube, it is assumed that he had been employed by the Imperial Customs Department. Late in his life, probably around 1878, when Bulgaria became an autonomous province of the Ottoman empire, he emigrated to Izmir, the Ottoman port on the Aegean. There, he married my great-grandmother. Of her nothing is known save that, having given birth only to my father’s father, she had not distinguished herself as a bounteous womb. (Nevertheless, one child was all a woman needed to produce in order to triumph, as the saying goes, over Satan.)

Since, in Ottoman times, the registration of births and deaths was an arbitrary procedure, it is assumed that my grandfather was born in the early 1880s. This date was calculated on the basis that he had sustained a disability around the turn of the century, while serving in the army, and had died in 1915, still in his thirties, leaving behind a wife and three children of whom my father, aged thirteen, was the oldest. My grandfather’s death, I have often heard said, exemplified the suffering endured by countless Turkish civilians at the time of the First World War: worn out by the effort to keep his family alive during the interminable food shortages, he had been swiftly struck down by an unspecified illness. The family survived only because my father had been lucky enough to find work as a child labourer. My grandmother, by all accounts fit as ten ewes, remarried and was widowed – at least twice – and lives to this day what my parents call ‘an interesting autumn in an existentialist milieu’ in Alexandria, Egypt. Fatma, the Gypsy, who periodically visits our neighbourhood to read fortunes, attributes my grandmother’s endless regeneration to her lustful disposition, specifically to her predilection for swarthy men. (I surmise – if I have rightly deciphered the whispers and winks – that her enviable life is that of a worldly-wise socialite popular with the non-commissioned officers of the British army.)

By contrast, my mother, Ester, a native of Salonica, the port city in Thrace, belongs to the so-called ‘Jewish aristocracy’. This term, I have been told, can be traced to a tsarist monk, one of those White Russians who took refuge in Istanbul after the Bolshevik revolution. This mule, preaching in the Balkans in his acolyte years the demented message of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, had observed in horror that, as a result of the education provided by the French-based Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Jews in Ottoman lands, unlike their brethren in
shtetls
beyond the Pale of Settlement, were fast attaining emancipation; that this emancipation was at its most dangerous in Salonica, where autonomy in community affairs and the pursuit of culture, wealth and cosmopolitanism had virtually transformed the city’s Jews to an aristocracy; and that, therefore, the long-feared Jewish domination of the world could be expected to start in that fiendish waterhole.

At the time of my mother’s birth, in 1909 – eight years before the Great Fire which, like a portent of the burnings to come, destroyed so much of the city’s Jewish neighbourhoods – Salonica was still under Ottoman rule and had a population of about 180,000 souls, more than half of them Jews. In effect, as the tsarist monk had rightly stated, the Jewish majority, Europeanized in the main and economically vibrant, had earned the city the sobriquet of ‘the Sephardi capital’. This situation prevailed, even after the Ottoman empire yielded Salonica to the Greeks in 1912. It is only now, in 1942, with Greece under Nazi occupation, that the Jews there face annihilation. We know this from the desperate letters my mother receives from her sister, Fortuna, who still lives in Salonica.

My mother’s father, a lawyer, could trace his line – crammed with physicians, artists and merchants – to Cuenca in Castile, which, in its heyday, had competed with Toledo for the glories of the Spanish Golden Age. But during the Inquisition, between 1489 and 1492, Torquemada and his henchmen had set new standards of barbarism there. The few Jews to escape Cuenca’s
autos-da-fé
, including my mother’s ancestors, had adopted the name of the city, as their surname, in commemoration.

Given the differences in their backgrounds, not to mention a plethora of other considerations, I doubt whether even the Great Sybil could have foretold that my father and my mother were destined to marry each other. But then, if the books I’ve been reading are to be believed, marriages, in the main, are made in hell, not in heaven, and it is the demons who misdirect Cupid’s arrows, not the poor little urchin himself.

Hacι Hasan, the old cobbler – according to my father, the wisest man in our part of the city – dismisses that cynical remark as unworthy of my intelligence. He tells me it has become a habit with me to muse about events as if I were a European, seeking logic in everything, even in matters where there can be none, instead of accepting, as any sensible person in the Mediterranean basin would, the laws of fate that are the primary laws of existence.

Fate is unchangeable. Hacι Hasan, who, it is said, became a dervish in the wake of his pilgrimage to Mecca soon after the Balkan wars, is unequivocal about this. What is written on a person’s forehead will unfold come what may. No writing, not even a cursory scribble on the sand, can disappear, since Allah has witnessed its composition. (I wonder if Rιfat’s storyteller hero, Mahmut the Simurg, knows Hacι Hasan. They seem to speak the same language.)

My Scottish friend, Robbie, finds it difficult to understand the Turkish Jews’ perfunctory acceptance of Allah. He says divisions between sects, let alone religions, are so entrenched in the West that they are unassailable. I put the question to Eli, who taught me Hebrew for my bar mitzvah and who is working on his philosophy doctorate at Istanbul University under Professor Alexander Rüstow, a Jewish refugee from the Third Reich. Needless to say, Eli, who everybody says will become a professor in no time at all, rattled off the reasons without even pausing to think. In every culture where major religions rub shoulders – and, periodically, clash – the identities of the Ineffable One invariably commingle. Most Jews who have lived under Islam will admit, if they are honest, that, over the centuries, Elohim and Allah have become interchangeable – a solid journeyman who dresses now in a turban, now in a skullcap. Gods become uncompromising and merciless only when man, in pursuit of some utopia or other – like Hitler and his Nazis – alienates himself from Creation and kills the love that exists between the Creator and the Created.

Anyway, back to Fate, the irrevocable, as defined by Hacι Hasan. A strange and amazing force. It loves irony, paradox and perversity and has a great sense of the absurd. But, since it is itself a tool of Creation, it also has integrity. Thus, while it indulges in all sorts of liberties and wanders off on curious detours as it ambles its way towards its destination, it never loses sight of its position in the cosmic order. And though much of the time its meandering appears to be arbitrary, cruel, mysterious, it maintains an intimate, almost tactile relationship with the person under its charge. For most people, it has a real and continuous presence, like a once integral limb waiting, in the limbo of amputations, to reattach itself to the body.

And it is immensely inventive, immensely innovative.

And so, true to form, in June 1927, within a few days of each other, it brought two men of totally contrasting natures – one personifying sweetness, the other rage – both now my great-uncles – knocking on the door of a famous Istanbul matchmaker.

I believe the conventional image of a matchmaker, in Turkey as everywhere else, is that of a gnarled parasitic busybody. According to Uncle Jak – the good uncle – this particular woman, bearing the evocative name, Allegra, or ‘joyous’, was not only an exceptional beauty, but also a student of Rousseau. She saw marriage as the only arena where women in general, and Middle Eastern women in particular, had the opportunity of defending themselves against the inequalities imposed on them by the patriarchal societies that ruled the world. Not for her the prevailing custom whereby men would discard, as and when it pleased them, their used, but perfectly adequate, not to mention well-lubricated, scabbards for new ones. Thus she always made sure that the couples, behind closed doors, at least, would have parity.

The easiest equation, in her view, was to pitch a woman who rejoiced in the blessings of her loins with a pacific man who yearned for carnal delights; thus the woman would rule benevolently, the man would be invested with a permanent beatific smile and the two would live happily ever after. Other equations included matching strong men with timorous, dependent women – or vice versa – or joining men and women who were so inanimate that they would drift through life often unaware of each other while producing children with acts akin to pollination. Most intriguingly, Allegra had scored her greatest successes when matching authoritarian men with headstrong women. Notwithstanding the sense of identity such equipoise gave the woman, the strategy also ensured that battles between husband and wife in such circumstances invariably ended in stalemate. And as stalemate after stalemate would push the contestants obsessively to further battles for at least one meaningful victory – which, of course, could never be attained – the continuation of the marriage was guaranteed. And if, as had happened on a few occasions, the battles ended in violence, the blame could always be ascribed to the stars or to the sun’s spots.