My bladder taut as
drum, my left pinkie wrapped inside the fist of Nil, I am unable to turn in
bed. We spend the nights like this; she needs to append herself to me before
she can doze off. This is not entirely surprising, considering that she dropped
her umbilical cord on the twentieth day of her life, no complication
whatsoever, simply because she was completely oblivious to her new place of
residence. Or perhaps, she just can’t live without me. A friend of mine at work
gave birth to a baby boy eight months ago; she dashed into a doctor’s office in
nothing flat every time a zit popped on her arm, fearing that her poor little
Rüzgar might end up an orphan. She then started to see a therapist instead.
Anyway, I don’t know what to do with my pelvis now. I had mastered Kegel
exercises, practicing every day of the three months before our wedding day,
skipping only the first days of my period; but I feel hopeless right now, at
two a.m. in the morning, unable to unclasp these vermicular fingers. Sometimes
during her sleep, she suddenly gasps and tightens her grip on my pinkie. That’s
how I woke up tonight. She is a light sleeper like me- a part of her is always
wakeful, always on the watch in case you
might change something in her life when she is in her most useless state.
But sometimes I
lose sleep completely. Like the night and several more nights that followed
when I bought that designer purse for seven hundred and eighty liras. I was
dumb enough to pay it in just two installments but I felt worse for not using
the bag more than once. I went on a blind date in a figure-hugging blue frock
and this matching purse. I tried to walk towards the taxi after dinner, my
thighs pressing against each other like bruised vegetables, stuck my stiletto
heel in a pave and tripped. I never saw him again. I hated both the shoes and
the purse but I kept its cotton drawstring bag to stuff Nil’s socks and napkins
into.
When the nurse
placed Nil inside my lap for the first time after she was born, well, after I
restored my consciousness, my grandmother in the corner of the room was
thunderously blowing her nose into her blue mitered-corner napkin and wiped her
tears with it too. My mom was smiling at me awkwardly, making all possible
effort to hide how she pitied me. I didn’t cry like my cousin. I don’t think my
tear ducts are capable of producing such torrent under any emotional
circumstance. When the doctor told her that her baby had jaundice and needed to
be given phototherapy in another unit, she immediately sought comfort in my aunt’s
face which of course proved pointless; my aunt was already pink in the nose and
eyes. She sobbed uncontrollably and begged the doctor not to take away her
baby. My aunt stood beside her, holding and stroking her hand like she was
mourning the baby’s death and then ushered all of us out of the room to leave
her daughter alone in this especially delicate time.
They must have
placed her baby in a cot for phototherapy. I think it is perfectly easy to mix
up babies in those cots. They look exactly the same: excess skin on their
bodies like rumpled cloth, faces bright red, mouths opening into toothless
little caverns, eye-colors undecided, so much hair on the head for such a
handful of a human being. Nil is seven months old now. Her eyes grow into a
notch toward her tear glands, like her father’s; her cheeks are so plump that
squeeze her lips into a tiny button, also like her father’s. She has my hair.
Black.
As we walked by
the Swarovski store in Vienna under a soft, white sky in December, jewels
scintillating from around icicles and on snow-powdered pine trees, I pulled
Asım closer to me and said: “You’re one lucky bastard. Your bride never asked
for any diamonds.” Then we entered a large souvenir shop. I found this magnet,
a baby tortoise cupped on the back of mother tortoise. I never particularly
liked tortoises but this one looked cute. Asım snuck behind me and put his chin
on my shoulder: “Let’s dye your hair red and buy you stilettos. I’ll take you
to dinner tonight.” I immediately scanned the shop to spot a cold-skinned
redhead, hair glowing on her back like furnace fire. She was nowhere around. He
must have seen her elsewhere before we entered. I said no, paid for the magnet
and rushed out.
When he yelled my
name in the street, I turned around and warned him against following me. I
spent the next two hours in the nearby Café Leopold Hawelka, the only place
where I knew he could find me. I perched into a nook and ordered hot chocolate.
I played with the magnet and warmed my hands around the cup. It must have been
a tourist, probably a Nordic one, hot-blooded and careless. Austrian women
looked more regular. But we were leaving in two days and he’d be back in
Ümraniye among swarthy women with saggy breasts, cloth over cloth draping down
their heels. I wondered how I would look like in red hair. But that wouldn’t
work with curls. Not long after, Asım appeared at the door, nose red and
breathing out white air. I slid down in my couch. I always loved how he looked
less hunky when he was nervous. When he found me, my bust rather, he took off
his gloves and rubbed the soft skin between my thumb and my index finger. I let
him pay for my hot chocolate and then we left. We took a longer route and
walked through the park and passed by the river covered with patches of brittle
ice. The mist of the air seemed to cast a silence on all motion in life, the
buildings far ahead looked like crinkle-edged, pale postcards of late Ottoman
times. Just before we walked past the gilded statue of a composer, clumps of
snow on his violin; Asım stopped and touched the locks fluffing from under my
knit cap: “Snowflakes look good only on black curls. What a fool I was today.
Forgive me.” My heart no firmer than the slush under our feet, I pulled my
scarf down and kissed his warm breath. We grabbed a fast schnitzel on our way
back and then headed to the hotel when the day was turning blue in the streets.
When we were up in our room, he didn’t let me turn the lights on and left my
face in shade. He pulled me against him towards the window and kissed me; a
slow, savoring kiss that he gave me when he wanted me so much. Behind us, the
city was just wearing its nocturnal glitter. Two months later I had found out
that I was pregnant.
Back in college,
on a leaden morning in our south campus office, the humming teapot and tall
windows wiped in steam, board members of the Kemalist Ideology Club had
presented their best arguments to wring a yes out of me but I vetoed their
every decision and caused an impasse at a crucial time before we set the yearly
plan. Asım said that we needed to shift our attention to current philosophical
trends and insisted that we read more Zizek. I looked right into his eyes: “He
might be the sexiest philosopher on earth, but he spends millions in yacht
clubs in Dubai while still insolently calling himself a Marxist.” And someone
else mentioned Sunay Akın. A loveable poet in his own right, nostalgic about
toys and stuff, but how the hell was he entitled to make a speech on national identity?
The meeting ended, but the bickering went on into the evening. When we finally
decided to hold an extra meeting the next day, I scuttled to the canteen to
grab a sandwich. Asım called my name.
“I know you went to Zizek’s conference at Bilgi
University.”
I tried little to hide my satisfaction.
“Well of course I did. He’s really good to look
at. But that doesn’t make his works eligible for discussion at our meetings.”
“I see. Do you want a little bit of mustard?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“So tell me, Miss President, would you be so kind
as to give me the exact same answer if I asked you to let me buy you this late
dinner?”
I studied his face for a moment. I wanted to
touch his stubbly Adam’s apple. I mumbled a “No”, found all the coins I needed
for the sandwich in the bottom of my backpack and said I’ll see you soon.
The day after I
threw the bouquet of rosebuds he gave to me into the dumpster and walked away
to the library, I spent almost half a day hanging posters and distributing
fliers for the conference on national identity. I was just about to step down
to Hülya Atelier and finish with the south campus. The atelier sits at the edge
of the winding asphalt road that takes you to the Bebek gate. The road is
bowered by a group of black locust trees and a linear set of narrow, stone
stairs for lazy pedestrians. There is always an autumnal intimacy in that part
of the campus. Even on the
warmest days of summer, sunlight can only seep through swaying leaves in thin
shafts. I was just about to push the gate when I heard hurried steps down the
slope. It was him. Rustling leaves under his feet, he searched my eyes for a
moment and gulped his words. I didn’t know that he had stood behind the taxi
rank that day and watched me, and the rosebuds, disappear. He said that he was
in love with me. I felt chills in my legs, I was scared. But he looked like he needed
more comfort. “Will you help me sort out these fliers first?” He beamed with delight;
I smiled and let him kiss me on the cheek, chills dissolving into a sweet lightness.
He loved me. He
loved my gait, he loved me when I frowned; he loved me when I laughed. He loved
me when I jumped on the chair after downing my third glass of rakı and joined
the singers at the tavern on our Friday night outs. He always made sure the
chair was steady. He loved my hair. He loved my hair most when I tossed my
braid back and put my elbows on the fat, pirated textbooks, palms on my
temples, ahead of a white night in the study hall. He loved me when I lied to
my mom about the Labor Day march; he wiped my eyes first with cotton balls
dabbed in apple vinegar when we got teargassed and held my hand so tight when I
was gasping back to normal breath that I thought my finger bones were crushing.
I had snot and slobber copiously running down my chin onto my t-shirt; he was
only red in the eyes, a redness I had seen before when he told me he loved me
so much and that when I threw that bouquet into the dumpster I had splintered
his heart like tender glass.
Perhaps there is
only so much pain you can take. When you feel so close to death, it loses all
horror. There is a ceiling of some sort you hit where pain dissolves into a silly
concussion and goes away. The morning Nil was born, I woke up with intermittent
contractions and went to the bathroom to find that my water had broken. I sat
down by the window. Rain seemed to have cleared the thick air from yesterday
and the grass glinted in early dew. When I was about twenty, I had found out
why I was always at least half an hour early to any appointment. My grandfather
died from an asthma attack and the doctors said that he could have been saved
if he had come ten minutes earlier. Asım never quite realized this. I would say
to him “Find me at the Üsküdar port at six.” He would arrive early and start
looking for me through the turnstiles. He would squint as if to spot me faster
but he squinted also when he wanted to appear nonchalant. When he saw that I
was nowhere among the passengers of the latest ferry, he would start fidgeting
about the sidewalk. At precisely six, he would walk away towards the maritime
museum, sit and pretend to read the newspaper he rolled up inside his jacket.
Throughout the entire time, I would watch him from among the whirring busses
right across the port and carefully disappear. There was beauty in waiting for
him, but beauty was also in knowing that he would wait. That he would
eventually do anything to find me.
My back felt
stiff. I got up and took out the mother and baby tortoise magnet from inside a
cloth bag that I had tucked away in the wardrobe. I put it in front of the
windowsill and walked back to bed to pat on my mother’s shoulder: “Mom, it’s
time.”
She was startled
like she was awake just a second ago, mumbled a few prayers into the sky,
hurried to tidy up the living room while grumbling about not finding her
slippers. I told her that she had shoved them back under the bed when she rose
up in haste and I was half-frustrated that I couldn’t kneel to help her out. I
had to tour the house about five times before she swept the rooms and polished
the tables because flocks of relatives would care about fingering furniture to
spot dust and not about the mother or the baby. By the time we got to the
hospital, the contractions had become more frequent. I wasn’t supposed to eat
or drink anything, they fed me intravenously and when they wetted my mouth with
cotton balls, I licked my lips like a thirsty cat. The doctor told me that my
cervix was dilating one centimeter every hour and the birthing would start when
it reached ten centimeters. I ambled up and down the room for the following
three hours; chill of sterility tightened around my body like winter air. A
huge, hard something kept pushing down inside between my legs, so unable to get
out and making me suffer so bestially that all I could feel was a foul
constipation. On the fifth hourly examination, I lied down on the delivery bed;
they placed my feet on these stirrups and snapped my ankles. The doctor said
that my cervix was now eight centimeters open and asked me if I consented to
let her slit the rest. I said: “Do whatever the fuck you want.” She numbed my
groins and the birthing began. From then on, I have only fluid sensations –
those that I don’t remember having felt but were told by the doctor when it was
all over. She told me that at some point she dug her nails into my palms
because poking on that acupunctural treatment area would help my cervix dilate
more. I vaguely remember the nurse jumping upon my upper body to help push
further. Then a lot of blood. But when I think of blood, I think of gallons of
it. I think of gallons of blood wiped on all the pictures of that day, from the
cloth bag to the slow, few steps at the hospital gate, my hand in my mother’s
tremble; Asım’s sudden face at the emergency desk that made me tremble more,
the umbilical cord that seemed to roll out forever, my mom counting the toes of
the baby, the IV pole that I wheeled with me when I kept rotating in the room. The
most ridiculous thing in all this was that just a few minutes after I bellowed
“Kill me!” in plain honesty, the doctor was holding the purple, little thing in
her hand and I just said “What! She’s hairy like a seal!” Her hair was stuck
together in clot and her forehead looked squeezed towards her eyebrows. It
disappeared only last month. Apparently, she gravitated downward and crushed
her soft head against my cervix while I was constantly on my feet during the
last few hours she spent inside me.
The doctor said,
with a fulfilled smile that she probably thought would reassure me, that she
had to “clean up the mess down there”. She would anesthetize me again, now
blocking my consciousness too because that would help me relax. After a while,
or so it seemed, as I was recovering my senses unsteadily, feeling a hand on my
forehead but hearing her voice as if it blew through a tunnel, my eyelids fell
again. I was in the green hills of Rize. I was in the waves of dewy tea my
grandmother was about to pick. I was five and no longer fit inside the wicker
basket she strapped on her back; so we now carried a large, canvas sack along
with a smaller one attached to a hand shear. When my grandmother shrank into a
hunch and vanished among the leaves, leaving the large sack behind to fill it
up gradually, I spread it over the shrub and sprung upon it face-up. All the
buds broke and I fell into a puddle on the dirt road. Then it started raining.
I coiled up and laid the sack on my body. By the time my grandmother could climb
up, dig my head under her breasts and take me home, I had shivered long enough
to catch fever. That night, she folded a white napkin, soaked it in water and
put it on my forehead. She occasionally cupped her palm over my head and
stroked my hair. “My lovely honeycomb, your baby will be here soon. Washed
clean of blood and all.” I touched my deflated belly. I was feeling weightless;
perched safe on the shrub, able to fly anytime into the smoking hills. Up there
was a pine tree, my tree; I rode on the swing back and forth and clouds passed
under my feet.
My grandmother was
gently clearing my still moist nape off my hair when I opened my eyes. Soon
after, mom appeared at the doorway, radiating, and pushed the door back to let
the nurse in. She was shushing the baby with soft pats on its back; a wriggly
little thing enveloped in an oversized pink blanket. Mom scampered toward my
bedside and said “She’ll recognize your heartbeat.” Indeed, when the nurse
nestled the baby in my arms, her head against my left breast, she stopped
crying. When I looked at my mom, I nudged myself into a smile. I didn’t know
what to feel.
Later I did. I
learned, rather. I learned to worry, I learned to love. My mom says that a
mother’s instinct is the only lighthouse that will guide your ship in black
storms. I think I had to fumble my way through the storm before the lighthouse
started beaming. Here she was, going red in spasms of tearless cries, flinging
her head back from my ugly, browned nipples; scratching my face with her impossibly
fast-growing nails, crying and crying and not knowing any less miserable way of
communicating herself to me- what does she need now? Poop, burp, milk, sleep?
Mom talked about that lighthouse a little before she left me with no choice but
to send her away. My girlfriends from college came over when Nil was almost
four and a half months old. They had brought Nil a onesie and a teether, a
perfume for mama and of course her favorite pistachio baklava. Mom took care of
Nil and made tea for us too. When I started grumbling about how I grew body
hair like monkey during my pregnancy, Sibel said that I should forgive my legs
and love the hair too and shifted the topic to her own limbs. In Fethiye last
summer, she fell for this paragliding instructor the moment she saw him
strapping himself to the harness and put on his shield sunglasses. Her friend
checked out his ring finger and did a little bit of small talk with him before
arranging their flight. In half an hour, Sibel and this sun-kissed Adonis were
flying tandem in the cloudless sky that seemed so near to she that she thought
she could swallow it. She didn’t feel her legs until sometime after they
landed. Later that day, she was supposed to pass him a note that said “Beer
tonight?” but was distracted by the way he dusted off his hands as he emerged
from under a straw umbrella on the beach. Instead she said she was in love with
him to which he responded with a “You’re such a sweetheart but I’m leaving for
Nepal in two weeks.” Sibel again fell weak in the legs and teetered back to the
nearest bar immediately; called her friends from the beach who brimmed her with
alcohol well into the night. At one point she ran out of the bar and threw up
on the sidewalk before reaching the gate of the paragliding office. Gözde was
adrift in her love life as usual, trying to make the decision of a lifetime. She
kept squirming on the tip of the couch and talked on and on about how she would
tell Nedim that she wants to break up. This was her fourth attempt, doomed to
fail like the previous ones because every time she dumps him, he pops up like a
clown with a giant bouquet of roses, a Bourgogne Chardonnay or an outright
engagement ring. Then they spend the rest of the night in her apartment,
whining and weeping endlessly.
When they started
checking their watches and cell phones, I asked them to stay for dinner which I
wanted so much as our conversation was just going deeper into college-day
gossips Ayça had dug up recently. Apparently, that married Sociology professor
who lectured in a perpetually husky voice, postured on her left hip and pencil
skirt, was sleeping with Emre, the brawny Political Science guy with acid blue
eyes who played in Boğaziçi Sultans and who looked like his life was based
solely on American football, eating and fucking. Ayça had hooked up with him
only once during which the condom broke and I had to tour the entire Hisarüstü
with her to find the pharmacy on duty on a Sunday morning. The girls didn’t
know about this.
I went to the
bedroom to ask mom if she could cook pasta and make salad for all five of us
while I took care of Nil. The girls heartily played with her, folding her arms
back and forth, making her giggle with their mouths agape, eyes squinted. When
I went to the kitchen to help mom with the food, she thumped the carrots on the
cutting board and said she refused to sin any longer by serving these godless
degenerates whose breath stank of wine, who walked all around the house with
slippers meant for the bathroom, who held the Quran below waistline with their
unabluted hands and who flashed their private parts when they sprawled on the
couch. Just as I was trying to shut her up, Gözde appeared right behind us to
ask if we needed any help, words dropping off her mouth in clumsy bits. Five
minutes later, she said that Nedim called and said he could give the girls a
lift if they planned to leave in half an hour. They all left in calculated
politeness, hugging me and telling me they’ll see me soon.
Choked on a rare
delight, embarrassed and agitated more about how they would pity my life than
having offended them, I flared up against mom and told her to pack her stuff
and get the hell out of my house. Actually, the only reason I still needed her
after the lace thong incident was that Nil’s poop became too runny for some
reason and I panicked. I was checking out these online dating websites -not
checking out actually, just a random click on the side-bar ad- and got curious.
A thirty year old loner living in Ulus, trimmed beard, pointed chin and pilot
glasses that say I spin girls on my fingers and I want you to know it. Even
though I had no plans of getting laid or anything, nothing of that sort really,
I wanted to feel how women; those fashion models and ordinary Western girls
sashayed in thongs and stilettos. The first time I had bought a thong was when
Asım implied his interest in lacy underwear. Wedged inside my buttocks, I felt
so self-conscious in it that I had to toss it away before we could even
properly make out. But I was determined to give it a full chance this time. I
bought this purple lace thong matched with my purple satin bra. I told mom that
I was going to a wedding reception and would be back in three hours. I laid the
frock, the designer purse and those damn shoes on my bed, thong slipped under
the dress. I heard mom’s huffing over the hair dryer’s sound before she dashed
into the bathroom waving the thong into my face. I told her that I had missed
wearing lingerie and that it was just a complementary garment, but she kept
fussing about why I was lying to her and what on earth I was going to do with
it if I had no plans of getting under someone’s sheets, which of course was a
one-way ticket to hell.
The color was slightly
different though. The woman in the Vogue magazine had a fluid, parliament blue
dress with a long slit that started just under the bump of her hipbone and bore
long, slender legs daubed in baby oil. They looked flawless under profuse
studio lights. And they were airbrushed. Definitely airbrushed. Asım had left
the magazine on the coffee table, spine almost cracked open to reveal page
eighty-five. I pulled off the page carefully, tore it into discernible pieces
and sandwiched them between his boxers in the drawer.
Sibel once said
that our navels had this chakra that worked on the matters of the ego. At
least, that’s how she explains my reflux. Perhaps she’s right. It’s impossible
to not hate yourself when you are punched in the gut. You start to crumble
inside, trying so hard to keep a firm belly.
It was an
unusually clear, dry afternoon in February. Half-raised shutters formed pores
of light on the curtains and on the wall. Cars droned and vanished into the
street. The shower tap was dripping in a persistent rhythm. Asım always left it
loose. “You never try. You never even try. You only shave regularly. Well,
thank you for that.” Suddenly, it was too cold inside the room. It was also too
bright. I stepped back to hold on to the radiator but I didn’t know how to
hide, how to run away from all light. In half breath, I said I was pregnant. He
got up from the chair, grabbed the water pitcher and dropped it before
smashing. He collapsed into a squat against the wall and his stare softened
into tears. I had never seen him so lonely. He kept saying “Don’t worry, we’ll
take care of that. Don’t worry.”
I left the shower tap loose every night until Nil was born. How sad it is
to believe that your life is love-locked. It slackens in the joints and you don’t
hear the squeaks. Or you think they come from elsewhere. Then, just as you
think everything has collapsed and your lungs are still full of dust, someone
needs to grab you by your pinkie at night. If you detach your finger, she will
be scared. You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to wet your bed either,
though.
