A few days ago, Sermet introduced me to a young European at the Tokatlıyan. A friend from the Sorbonne! Brown haired, with cobalt blue eyes; a comely, slender, polite young man! A passionate lover of “the Orient”! This was the first thing he said:
“My good man, you don’t know yourselves. You think of Europe as something special, but you don’t see your own charms or experience your own mysteries…”
I smiled at this lecture, unsure at first whether he had a point.
“What do you know of what we see or experience?”
“I’ve seen this myself,” he said, now excited. “I’ve stayed at Sermet’s home for three days. Everything is in the European style: the dining room, the bedroom, the clothes of his wife and his siblings, their gestures; indeed, even their attitudes and views are completely European! Oh, where is Loti’s Turkey?”[1]
“Loti’s Turkey is on the opposite side!” I said.
“Yes, that’s what they say. But it’s an inaccessible world! It’s a shame that you don’t care for this picturesque world!”
“Some of us do…” I said.
“Are you one of those who do?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding with an exaggerated zeal. These Westerners are so innocent, constrained as they are by their “fixed ideas”! This young European was one of those. We began to speak of Turkey. He claimed that we do not know ourselves; we describe our loveliest, our most abundant, our most exquisite streets as filthy; we now value charmless European buildings, grandiose avenues, and geometrical eyesores that destroy nature… and his anger at the Rum[2] was beyond spiteful. How he hated Beyoğlu;[3] “What a hideous caricature of the West, yarabbi!”[4] he said, almost blanching with disgust. His head was full of the illusions of Loti. Where we spoke of the scourges of misery, savageness, and ignorance, he would say “wonderful!” He was baffled that these endless cesspools and owl-inhabited ruins did not overwhelm us with excitement. Eventually, he asked me to take him to a Turkish home that had not been Europeanized. I immediately thought of my aging wet nurse in Karagümrük. She was a strictly devout and stoic lady and very conservative. She shared her home with a long-serving older Arab maid, and she lived comfortably from the small income left by her husband.
“In that case, I’ll take you to the home of an old widow with nothing Europeanized about her!” I said. Gladdened, he thanked me.
“When?”
“Today. In fact now, if you want.”
“Is that possible?”
“Yes, it’s possible, but we’ll get a fez for your head,” I said. By leaving so suddenly, we would forestall any formal preparation, and this European lover of the Orient would see a Turkish home in its natural, unembellished state. Sermet, laughing, shared in this poor fellow’s delight. The European and I bade him farewell and jumped into a carriage. We went down to Beyazit. We bought our little European a fez, red as a liver, from a shop. We had it molded. He did not want to take the tram.
“From here on, are the neighborhoods all Turkish?” he said.
“Yes, they’re all Turkish neighborhoods.”
“In that case, if you don’t mind, let’s go on foot.”
“All right!” I said.
We walked through the disarray. The air was foggy, and the sky clouded and overcast, which seemed to add a painful melancholy to the tranquility of the dilapidated homes and the uninhabited ruins. I gave him instructions on the way. We would tell my wet nurse he was a Circassian.
To be fair, she was not a woman who avoided associating with men. But she might not have wanted to fraternize with a Christian. This simple scheme only fanned the flames of our young European’s imagination. He stood rooted before the ramshackle, black wooden houses that leaned to one side, before the ruined walls and the stripped roofs. “Oh, what a sight, what a sight!” he cried. It took us two hours to arrive at the house. It was a three-story home, wooden and slightly run down. I knocked on the door. The old Arab lady opened.
“Is my wet nurse not here?” I asked.
“She’s at the neighbor’s. Please come in.”
“Run along now, Nanny Karanfil, hurry up, tell her I’m here. I have a guest with me as well. We’ll be staying with you this evening,” I said. We entered. We passed through the courtyard, clean but dark, and climbed a huge staircase. The young European was thrilled with the guest room. A beautiful Persian rug was spread out on the floor. The walls had been decorated with inscribed panels that my wet nurse’s late husband, a calligrapher, had left as keepsakes.
The divans were covered with thick red blankets, and fez-colored curtains draped over the cushions. We sat across from each other. He was captivated by the latticework.
“I feel as though I’m in a dream!” he said.
When my wet nurse arrived, he kissed her hand, just as I did. From time to time, he would forget the fez on his head and proffer an involuntary bow. My wet nurse did not really notice this, although she did make an observation: “What you’re speaking doesn’t sound like Circassian.”
I managed to convince her. “Mama, this isn’t the Circassian you know. It’s a new Circassian, mixed with Russian and Chechen; it emerged after the emigration!” Our supposedly Circassian guest had come to Istanbul to go on the Hajj. When my wet nurse pointed out that it wasn’t the time for Hajj, I found an excuse for that as well. His goal was to begin early by coming to Istanbul to learn some Turkish.
“Oh, to be a hajji at your age, what a joy, what a joy. May the same befall you!” she said.
“Amin, amin!”[5]
The European immediately recognized our utterance. In a show of familiarity, he repeated it with his own pronunciation.
“Amen, amen!”
“…”
My wet nurse got it into her head that I should go on the Hajj with this Circassian. That meant that until we ate, we spent our time speaking of Hajjes and hodjas. I rattled off translations of my wet nurse’s sermonizing into Circassian. When we sat at the table, our European was beside himself, animated by a thoroughly uncommon zeal. The silver tray reserved for visits from strangers practically drove the poor fellow mad. He dropped his fork and tried to eat with his hand, like my wet nurse. I succeeded in dissuading him. I told him that eating by hand was only for old ladies. As he launched into a claim that sitting cross-legged was the most comfortable position in the world, we rose from the table. We drank our coffees. I showed my guest books written in old-fashioned script, kept like relics in my wet nurse’s husband’s library. He was amazed by the illustrations, the binding, and the miniatures. When it came time to sleep, Karanfil and I brought him to the top floor. His bed had been made in the room above the garden. I showed him the water closet and the like. “Bonsoir,” I said. I retired to the room on the middle floor. At night, a storm broke out. The rain fell in torrents. By the morning, the weather had cleared nicely. I found the European awake and dressed. He had sat square on the bed and was writing something.
“Bonjour…”
“Bonjour, mon ami!”
“What are you writing?”
“Oh, about my emotions!”
“Are you that moved?”
“I cannot describe it! I cannot describe it to you!”
“…”
We went downstairs and drank our morning coffees. We kissed my wet nurse’s hands. Intending to sink this European even deeper into the Oriental picturesque, I took him by foot to Fatih. We sat at the coffee house opposite the mosque. I ordered a hookah. With great care, I began by teaching him the process so that he wouldn’t blow outwards. Our mood began to brighten. I set about stoking up the poor fellow’s keenness once again.
“My good man, take a look at that place of worship across the street,” I said. “What charm, what majesty, don’t you think?”
“…”
The European smiled. He did not appear particularly enthused. Only yesterday, this fellow had been hopping like a madman before ruined fountains and buckled walls, and I found his indifference strange.
“Out of curiosity, don’t you like this monument?”
“This, this place is not…” He narrowed his blue eyes and smiled again.
“What do you mean, is not? This monument is as splendid as any in Istanbul…”
“This is not… this place is not…”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ve seen one much greater than this!”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “When did you see that?”
“Last night…”
“In your dream?”
“No…”
“Then where?”
“In the house…”
“Which house?”
“The house where we slept…”
I was baffled.
“Dear chap, what did you see?”
“Something Pierre Loti never saw! A secret unknown to any European!”
“…”
I was smiling.
“Yes, I saw your hidden shrine,” he said.
“Dear chap, what do you mean ‘a hidden shrine?’”
“You’re hiding it in vain; I saw it, you see! Your secret shrine, your private shrine, which you’ve hidden from the eyes of Europeans for centuries. I saw it last night.”
“…”
“But you can be sure of this; I will keep this secret. When I go to Paris, I won’t write to the papers, and this memory will remain concealed in my notebook, like something sacred.”
“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Don’t insist. I saw it, I saw it…”
“Saw what, dear chap?”
“Your hidden shrine!”
“We don’t have anything like a hidden shrine.”
“You’re denying it in vain, I saw it.”
“This is strange, very strange!” I said, shaking my head. Our little European could bear it no longer. He took from his pocket a notebook, bound in Morocco leather.
“Look at this, have I seen it or have I not?” he asked. He began to read the final pages.
“… The morning! I write these lines in great excitement, in great joy. Yesterday, I came to this most unknown corner of Istanbul with a Turk introduced to me by Sermet. I gather that Jacques Casanova, Pierre Loti, and their kind thought they had seen the Orient by drinking a coffee in the selamliks[6] of some mansions and waterfront residences. The true Orient is at the unseen levels… and I have seen something that no European has seen. This place is the home of an elderly widow. She is a very religious woman. The interior of the home, the cutlery, the rituals, the presentation—in short, everything is completely unadulterated… It is entirely in the Turkish style. They put me up for the night in a room on the very top floor. In the morning, I awoke very early. I got up from the bed. I was consumed by a strange curiosity. I tiptoed out. There was a room opposite. The door was ajar. I gently pushed it. And what should I see? A hidden family shrine!
“The white curtains were pulled down. A faint light passed into the room between them. A few large panels hung on the walls. In the corners were tombs made of thick walnut wood and hooped with iron. Without doubt, these tombs contained the mummies of departed loved ones. I tried to open one. Impossible, it was locked! And then there were a few vessels of various sizes on the ground. Some were made of copper, and some of porcelain! Their valuables were within; for example, the one that was level with the door in front of the first tomb was a highly valuable vessel with gilded edges. The one in the corner was a green vase, who knows what kind of ceramic it was made from, and inside the shrine, some string had been stretched into a number of edges and angles in some sort of arrangement, the meaning of which I did not understand. There were a few relics, clearly of the dead, hanging above these sacred angles. Holy water was kept in the vessels. Some of them were full to overflowing. I tasted some of these mysterious and holy waters, brought from who knows which unknown sacred pockets of Mecca and Medina. There was a bitterness to them… At the bottom of the vessels was the thinnest layer of sediment. I drank from every vessel. The taste of each was the same. My heart began to pound. I returned outside, filled with the thrill of a blasphemer, a traitor, an unbeliever who has entered a forbidden sanctuary. I felt as though the tombs would suddenly open and the aged Turks, dead for centuries, would rise and come for me with their turbans and their sabers. I felt as though the panels on the wall were shaking. The water in the sacred vessels sloshed from side to side. I felt as though a sea would form at that moment and drown me. I almost sense the fury, the silence, the eminence of these holy waters within me now.
“A mysterious, vague lethargy, a fever is suffusing my veins. In my mind, I hear the deep reverberations of a lightless, undiscovered vault. The excitement I feel is indescribable…”
“…”
I could not stop myself. The European dropped the hookah tube at my roar of laughter. His water pipe came within a whisker of being knocked over. I’d infuriated the customers, who were there to enjoy their morning. They were glowering at me.
“Why are you laughing?” the European asked.
“Look now, you did not enter a hidden shrine!” I said.
“Then what did I enter?”
“My wet nurse’s box room!”
“What’s a box room?”
“In our homes, we don’t have chests of drawers or wardrobes with mirrors. We keep our belongings in boxes, and the boxes are in a room. Those walnut wood coffins with the iron hoops, the ones you thought were tombs, are boxes for our clothes.”
“What about the panels on the walls?”
“The work of my wet nurse’s husband! They’re keepsakes, so my wet nurse doesn’t sell them.”
The European could not believe it. I was still laughing.
“What about the geometric shapes made of string? Those ‘relics’?”
“That’s string for hanging laundry in rainy weather. The corners and triangles formed accidentally; what you thought were relics were actually unused clothes…”
The European remained incredulous. His blue eyes had suddenly clouded over. He gestured with his head, as though he had exposed my lie.
“What about those holy waters? What will you say to those, my good man?” he asked.
“It rained at night. My wet nurse’s box room has been leaking for as long as I can remember. Karanfil must have lined up those vessels in the room overnight so the rainfall dripping from the ceiling wouldn’t wet the floor…” I said. The European stopped to think, like his compatriot who famously mistook the “Mashallah”[7] inscriptions on our homes for an insurance company’s symbol and thought the shoes hanging as talismans from our eaves were left by thieves escaping from roof to roof. He drew deeply on his hookah. He hesitated. He took the notebook, still open in his hand, and placed it in his pocket. My laughter continued unabated.
“Don’t laugh, my good man, even your box rooms seem so mysterious, so incomprehensible, so cryptic, so spiritual, that…”
“That what?”
“It’s as though… you are blind… you cannot see it, and that’s all there is to it…” he said. But he simply could not say what it was that we could not see and only he could.
As we know, the Turks are very considerate in their dispensations! “If we are blind, then you are plainly mute!” was the answer playing on the very edge of my lips, yet I remained silent. I kept my thoughts entirely to myself.
Notes:
[1] Pierre Loti (1850–1923) was a French author who lived and traveled extensively in the Ottoman Empire. A keen admirer of Turkish culture, he adopted many Turkish customs and habits, and depictions of Istanbul frequently appear in his writing.
[2] Greek-speaking Ottoman subjects.
[3] A cosmopolitan Istanbul neighborhood popular with European diplomats and merchants.
[4] An Arabic exclamation roughly corresponding to “Oh, my Lord”!
[5] The Arabic pronunciation of “Amen,” used by Muslims to respond to religious invocations.
[6] The area in an Ottoman home in which guests were received.
[7] An Islamic invocation believed to ward off the evil eye. According to popular legend, one Ottoman minister, obliged to deliver an impromptu explanation to a visiting foreign delegation, described these signs as belonging to the Ottoman Empire’s largest insurance company.