Portrait of a Turkish Family (34 page)

Subsequently, father compiled a voluminous tome of rice recipes but no one wanted it. He contemplated a life of Muhammed but it was never more than an idea. With me he researched and wrote some chapters for a biography of Hayrettin Barbarossa, Süleyman’s admiral: had it been completed, it might have been his most definitive work. Fresh from
Lawrence of Arabia
, Omar Sharif fancied filming
Atatürk
, with himself, an ideal cut of a man, in the title rôle. He paid us a handsome option fee (£1,500 [£24,000]). But this, too, came to nothing.

Spike Island gave father comfort of mind. It was the next best thing to that boyhood dream of ending his days fishing by the Golden Horn. But it also gave him time to think. He saw almost nobody, visitors were few. He felt he had no status or authority nor class. Materially he was totally dependent on mother. His life in England, he would confide to me in a mixture of temper and tears, had long been celibate. Her flirtations, her falling for an RAF wing-commander, tortured him. By then in her
mid-forties
– perfumed, rouged and henna-haired, marcasite earrings and a slim black cigarette-holder deciding her fashion look – she was senior editor at W. H. Allen off the Strand, daily taking the late breakfast-car train to Cannon Street. Flighty and extravagant, she led a lifestyle coloured by literary lunches, cocktail parties, and – from what she would tell me – more than an innocent embrace or two. Rows, moods, hours, days of silence … Mother no longer used to walk out on us (as she had so often done in London). But she knew exactly how to punish father, even in his final hours. Our house may have resounded to our fun, but it trembled with our tension, too.

Father’s regime revolved around gardening (which he’d acquired a taste for in Diyarbakır) and the kitchen, learning to live with footpath laws, and watching television (from
The Forsyte Saga, The Prisoner
and
Here’s Harry
to Saturday afternoon wrestling, Wimbledon and the 1966 World Cup. He liked nothing better than to grow artichokes and asparagus or tend to his grapes. He enjoyed bringing us eggs still warm from the Rhode Island Reds and White Sussexes clucking away in their coop in between sparring with İnci and Pamuk, our blue-eyed white-and-orange Van cats acquired from a wealthy acquaintance in London. On summer mornings he would collect the scented dew-washed pink petals of old-fashioned
cottage-ramblers
to make pots of sugary rose jam, diaphanously veined. Following the Great Freeze of 1962–3, when we were snowed in for a week and neither buses nor trains moved, we formed a literary agency, International Authors. We ran this from home. Father did the typing and filing, mother did the advising, and I went after contracts and commissions. Our stable was small but respectable, even occasionally newsworthy. None of us, I think, ever thought we really had the ‘middle man’ mentality, but it was a way of creating an occupation and bringing in some money.

Music was increasingly important to father. Having once in Pembridge Square heatedly opposed my aspirations, only giving way on condition that I prove myself within two years, he did everything in the 60s (once I’d fulfilled my side of the bargain) to nurture me, to buy music and books, and (in my late teens, early twenties) to support my nascent steps into journalism and criticism. Occasionally he’d reminisce. Waking up as a cadet to
réveillé
and scratched 78s of
Light Cavalry
. Stumbling across a ruined organ, pipes and keys open to the elements. Falling for a slip of a girl playing the piano across a mulberried Bosphorus garden. Casino songs. Midnight tangos.

Our concert-going in the 50s had been sparodic but not unknown. Vaughan Williams’s
Sinfonia Antartica
, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky evenings at the Royal Albert Hall, Shostakovich attending the Leningrad Philharmonic under Mravinsky. In the 60s we’d cross the park, past the Albert Memorial and its Parnassian frieze, to the Royal College of Music to hear their brightest and best students play every Wednesday evening at 5.30. The Goethe Institute nearby was another haunt, where we could get concerts, a reception and food, and a chance to chat informally with artists (Elly Ney, Friedrich Wührer, the Kontarsky brothers) – all for nothing. I even got to turn pages.

Exchanging Bayswater for Wadhurst didn’t lessen
baba
’s desire to keep up our concert life. From the young Tamás Vásáry there was a 150th anniversary Liszt recital at the Royal Festival Hall, with five dazzling encores including the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody (the oriental rhetoric of which father found appealing). We savoured war-horse concertos given class by Rubinstein and Giulini (the old
seigneur
with an eye for mother). We discovered the Proms, we confronted the twentieth century no less than the past. Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, Solti, Boulez, Copland, Ozawa, Penderecki, Xenakis, Havergal Brian, Horenstein, Ormandy, Oistrakh, Arrau, Barbirolli, Boult, Ashkenazy fresh from his win in the Tchaikovsky Competition, modern music at the ICA … Long after father’s death it seemed unimaginable to go to a concert without him. He taught me how to love and share music. He could never
understand
, he resented, the mentality, the attitude, the apparent disinterest and lack of respect he witnessed among so many professional critics. Why, he would ask? I had no answer. I still don’t.

Father lived at Spike Island for nine years. He saw mother succeed but become remote. He saw me off on my own future. He saw himself with nothing to live for. I know of no one who cried for death to come more than he. One crisp November morning in 1970 a card dropped through the letter-box for an unplanned hospital visit. Walking his garden, content to have been given a clean bill of health days earlier, he touched the trees he’d planted, pausing here to prune, there to commune with the queenly cherry veiling the kitchen window. Honouring the appointment, forgotten by a world he’d once fancied to command, speared by the arrows off mother’s tongue, he slipped away from us with a beatific smile, his brow at rest, his pallor no longer flushed by the heat of fever. That
heart-attacked
, gout-ridden, medicated summer had been one of pain, of blue eyes darkened with anxiety and sickness,
War and Peace
at his bedside. Not that night. Unconscious, he just wanted to go. Those moonless hours, the phone call from the Kent and Sussex, Ward 14, the walk home through the woods, branches dripping, mother never having had time to say goodbye, his faithful old labrador, Lâle, black as coal, howling in her loneliness, the aura of light trembling behind the trees, I have remembered all my life. Sunday the 29th, the first morning hour. Brought home for one last adieu, his coffin shrouded with a red Turkish flag crossed by his sword, that same sword we’d brought back from Ireland, he was, at his wish, cremated. A simple service. Some music – the Intermezzo from
Cavalleria Rusticana
, Chopin’s
Funeral March
. Flames. His ashes we cast to the winds around the place he had come to love so much. A few I kept aside. I buried them with my mother.

Ateş Orga
Guildford, Surrey, England
16 August 1988
revised 2008–11

1988, Monday 21 March. Blackrock. A rain-and-sunshine afternoon. There the house stands, 82 St George’s Avenue, atmospheric in its late Georgian lines. New faces live there now, and the once wild garden has been tamed. Searching for anyone who remembers, I get into conversation with a man who points me towards a run-down area, Booterstown Avenue. I find Lillian Higgins, last of the Mooney daughters – the one who’d scalded father into hospital. Ignorant of who I am, she brews a cup of tea and talks, defensively at first, then more freely. She remembers a couple, with a child. Turkish. Nice lady, very protective. But a stern man with broken English, a tough disciplinarian, too tough. A man of good taste. The boy? Yes, quite a rascal, spent his days in their garden up the pear tree at the end talking to Miss Fitzharris and her Rhode Islanders next door at No 80. Never played with other children. In bed by seven. The couple, they used to have their evening meal with a bottle of wine – or was it Martini? There was always a pot of marrow bones on the boil – because marrow and soup, the man said, did you good. Lots of packing cases and strapped trunks, fine books, Oriental carpets … A short name the child had. ‘A – tesh?’ …? Faded eyes stare. The October fire, the fire the whole street knew about, she’d blanked from her consciousness. But not the strangers from across the sea.

2000, June. İstanbul. Metaphorically ‘taking’ father home, crossing the Rumelian lands of his maternal forebears. The jet from Heathrow swings out over the Black Sea before banking to sweep in low over ochrous,
pantiled
houses and heat-baked concrete strips, then out again, this time across the Marmara, before folding back for the approach to the marble, tubular and stainless steel splendours of Atatürk Airport. A high adrenalin cocktail. Here is a city and its place-names I’ve always known – yet never known. And not seen in over fifty years.

Seventy-two hours, kept company by Emre Aracı,
5
stay with me. Past the suspension bridges, past red-roofed Kuleli, the wooded grounds of the old American Robert College for Boys, past the romantic natural marina and landing stage at İstinye, we take the ferry to Sarıyer. The ‘gracious’ rose-scented, magnolia and grapevine paradise of father’s childhood, along with the tumbled-down, weed-choked garden he went back to find as a young officer, is no more, we can only imagine. But the dark, balconied, curvaciously carved, three-storey wooden house that had formerly belonged to Emre’s family still stands, now padlocked and up for sale, in a bad state of repair, a depository for the flotsam and jetsam of the fishing boats tied up nearby, suffocated by take-aways and tenement washing-lines. Sad and forsaken maybe – but it suggests what things must once have been like here.

Next day our journey is different, this time across the ‘Bosphor’ (father’s idiosyncratic spelling), then east along the arid, bumpy road through İzmit to Karamürsel. This is 1999 earthquake country.
Everywhere
there is devastation – broken houses, cracked walls no more than a brick wide, mound upon mound of rubble, tottering apartment blocks leering like sightless corpses, their windows torn out, their flimsy floors and shells bared to the elements, their distorted fragments of rooms and kitchens pathetic echoes that people had once lived here. Whatever the sense of drugged sleep, of resignation, life continues even so. Old men sit around politicising and smoking, drinking tea from delicate glasses. Tanned, compact, short-cropped, barefoot boys play in the dust. Ramshackle open-front shops lurk beneath tall, uninhabitable buildings. Fruit sellers water their produce. Satellite dishes sprout from unlikely corners. Karamürsel is where aunt Bedia and cousin Oya live. Mehmet’s house. I cannot recall ever having met them – though they assure me I have. We communicate falteringly, silently, a lifetime of different experiences between us. Effectively we’re strangers linked only by name and blood, strangers known to each other only through dated, faded images. Yet they open their house and arms to me. Here are the foods and smells of my childhood. Photographs from when we were young. A shrine to father’s books, still pristine. The telegram I sent in 1970 telling of his death. Carefully pressed memorabilia of other times, another land. We touch, we sense, we drink the moment. The evening bus comes. My aunt gazes after me, matriarchally impassive but her eyes piercing deep, wanting perhaps to see something again of the men into whose family she had married. My cousin busies herself. Her niece and nephew come to say their goodbyes, pictures of eau-de-Cologne grace and discrete modesty. As we pull away I look back, uncaring for time, lingering to remember better this spot where the earth gasps and the sea comes so lazily to kiss.

In the 1890s Pierre Loti called the fortress walls west of the city ‘the most solitary spot in the world where nothing seems to have stirred since the days of the last Byzantine Emperors […] always the same battlements, the same turrets, the same dark hues, laid on by the hand of time, the same regular lines, running straight and dreary, till they are lost on the far horizon … the surrounding country […] studded with clumps of lowering cypresses, as tall as cathedrals, beneath whose shade thousands of Osman sepulchres [lie] crowded together […] so many cemeteries, so many tombs, so many dead.’
6
Here Emre and I spend an afternoon, eventually finding what we’ve come for: Merkezefendi, a forgotten expanse of cool stillness and aromatically smoky sun-beamed shadows contrasting the noisy, once Roman, road that separates it from the ramparts. We come across Halide Edib’s grave, neglected and uncelebrated for so famous a mistress of letters. We stumble upon a rusty, long-ruined mausoleum to a Dervish cook. We disbelieve a small, roughly chiselled rock marking the resting place of the painter İbrahim Çallı. Suddenly she’s there. Şevkiye Orga, 1895–18 May 1940.
7
The rose-trees father and Mehmet planted have gone, the once shining marble headstone facing the walls is dull, everywhere is a brittle tangle of overgrown weeds and dusty brambles. Tidying what I can, I stoop to her dignity. Then, following her sons before us, ‘with the sun and the kindly rain and the eternal nights to come,’ we leave her to her sleep.

2001, Friday 23 March. Teşikiye, Nişantaşı. Across the park from Harbiye and Notre Dame de Sion … ghosts of marching men …
Old Comrades
… Ezgi Saydam
8
– responsible for intensifying sides of father’s city I might otherwise have viewed differently – from Eyüp to Topkapı, Taksim to Tünel, Çırağan Palas to Ortaköy, Sultan Ahmet to Ayasofya and the ‘Sunken Cistern’, Yeşil Ev to the ‘Pearl of İstanbul’ – has set up a meeting at the Işık Foundation. Sabiha Gökçen, whose burial this day makes national news, comes into the conversation. Someone phones a relative, an old Kuleli soldier, stirring memories. İrfan Orga? Yes … we were cadets together. He went to England … Threw everything away for a foreign woman. A girl from Ireland … Never came back.

Ateş Orga
Ambronay, Rhône Alps, France
Stambourne, North Essex, England
14 March 2011