ANÉ

GRANDMOTHER

Island of Pringipos, Sea of Marmara, Autumn 1875

‘I was born one cold November night. The snowflakes swirled in heavy clouds for most of the day and by nightfall, everything was covered in white. The North wind howled through the palace rooms like a demon anxious for a sacrifice. It lashed out at whoever crossed its path, slashing at their faces and arms like a metallic whip. It was cold, you see, too cold for November. Unusually cold.’
      My grandmother Safyie momentarily closed her eyelids.
      ‘Are you going to tell me about your life?’ I whispered. ‘Are you finally going to tell me?’ I could scarcely dare to hope; I’d waited almost eighteen years for this.
      She cleared her throat, pulled her black, woollen shawl tighter round her curved shoulders and blinked. A slight shudder ran through her body.
     ‘I can no longer look at you without feeling the weight of the burden I carry.’
     ‘What burden, Ané?’
     ‘And I can no longer ignore her stare.’
     ‘Whose stare? Whose stare can’t you ignore?’
     ‘My mother’s,’ she said, and her voice broke off.
     I stared at my grandmother unable to understand what she was telling me. She had never spoken of her mother to me before, and whenever I’d asked, she had avoided my questions. So what had possessed her now?
     ‘Your mother?’
     My grandmother glanced towards the balcony door, then looked down at her hands.
     ‘She has been coming to me for months now.’
     ‘Coming to you? What do you mean, Ané?’
     ‘Her spirit. She stays with me, stands a few steps away and watches me in silence, keeps me company. I’ve missed her so much, Mihrişah, so much, but her presence has made me remember everything I have tried to forget all these years. Her visits have become more frequent and her gaze more persistent, and I know she’s here to make me remember. But remembering is the heaviest burden to carry.’
     ‘Please, Ané, I don’t understand? Is your mother here now? Why can’t I see her?’
     My grandmother nodded and pointed towards the balcony door.
     ‘She’s there, right there, and there’s an urgent look on her face. This burden’s unbearable. But I must tell you. I must finally release it. I have no choice. The more I hold it in, the more I feel it’s killing me. If I die without telling you, then I will have erased everything that ever meant anything to me. My soul could never be at peace. And you…you would have nothing, no roots, no knowledge. Nothing.’
     ‘Please don’t talk like that, Ané. You’re not going anywhere.’
     ‘Ah, my Mihrişah,’ she said, and glanced towards the window one more time.
     The sun was pale. The trees in front of our house swayed back and forth, dancing to their own unheard rhythms. Autumn rushed towards us in gigantic strides, billowing the lace curtains with its hurried breath.
     I followed her glance and caught a wisp of light on the wooden floor which was quickly swallowed up by a passing cloud. I shivered.
     ‘I wish I could spare you the pain of telling you this. I wish I could spare myself the pain of remembering. But it is the right thing to do. I have to do it for her. And not only her.’ Her eyes met mine for a fraction of a moment. ‘Yet in telling you, I risk losing everything.’
     ‘I still don’t understand,’ I said, glancing around me. A strange cold crept up my body making me uneasy, nervous. I rubbed my palms on my dress; they felt clammy.
     My grandmother smiled and patted the blue pillow closest to her on the divan, depressing its centre with her hand, the velvet so worn it was as smooth as an aubergine.
     ‘Just sit by me a while,’ she murmured, and poured apple tea into her small hourglass-shaped tea cup; she stirred a spoonful of honey with a small spoon, raised it to her puckered lips and sipped.
     ‘What is it, Ané,’ I coaxed her.
     I could see her struggling to tell me. Her eyes looked wild. My grandmother placed her tea cup down and took hold of my hand. It was frozen and dry, frailer than usual.
     ‘You call me Ané; you call me ‘mother’. Yet what do you really know about me, Mihrişah?’ She shook her head before I had time to answer.
     And the truth was, what did I really know about her? I knew she was my grandmother, that she had arrived on the island of Pringipos years earlier with her daughter, Ayesha, my mother, and had lived with the Greek Orthodox nuns up on the hill. I also knew that the hamam she owned was hers, and this was quite unusual. She worked hard every day, although she had two younger girls working for her now, and she had never been ill – at least, I had never noticed her being ill. I had been born on the island and my mother had died giving birth to me. For seventeen years, almost eighteen, this is all I knew.  I had never left the island, had never gone to the big city, or Stamboul, as my grandmother called Constantinople, not even for a day.
     In the past, when I was younger, I would ask her questions, especially about my mother. What was she like? What was her favourite food? Did she talk much, was she pretty, what colour were her eyes? I would ask her questions like these all the time. But she’d never answer. She would only smile, a withdrawn internal smile making her look more sad than happy, and would answer the same thing, “All in good time, my little Mihrişah. You will know everything when the time is right.”
     This always left me wanting. I couldn’t understand her secrecy and unwillingness to tell me anything at all about her own life or even my own mother’s; especially my own mother’s.
     I stopped asking as I grew older. But the questions remained, and with each year that they stayed thus unanswered, I felt them grow larger, like huge chasms between mountains. The answers to the questions I had, haunted me, like the black, menacing waves in the sea during winter. I’d make up scenarios in my mind, would imagine my grandmother telling me everything I’d ever wanted to know. But come nightfall, I would climb into bed a little bit more cheated, and the disillusionment would colour my dreams, making them dark and murky as if they’d been smeared by blue-black ink.
     My grandmother’s voice jolted me out of my thoughts.
     ‘I notice you looking at me sometimes. You have too many questions in your youthful eyes. Your eyelashes gather together like an oncoming storm, your nose trembles. I have seen this and sense your disappointment when you realise I will not tell you anything more than you already know, nothing more than pieces, never the whole. But the time has come to tell you that which you long to hear, to complete the mosaic, to hand you your roots.’
     She paused, fingered the gold-gilded rim of the glass with her thumb.
     ‘And I hope that you will be able to forgive me once you’ve heard everything.’
     ‘Forgive you? Why should I forgive you? What have you done?’ My voice evaporated into the air. 
     ‘Hear me out, Mihrişah. Please, hear me out. Then you can decide whether there is anything to forgive, or not.’
     She held my gaze with her piercing black eyes, and I nodded in silence.
      ‘This may sound like a tale but it isn’t. It’s my life woven into a tapestry of words, although I should more rightly say that this is not only about me.’ She smiled, took another sip of her tea. ‘This is also about you, Mihrişah.’
     ‘About me?’
      ‘Yes, don’t look so surprised. This secret belongs to you, too. Only you can be its keeper. No one else must ever know other than your daughter, when the Almighty Allah blesses you with one. So remember every detail well. Memorise it. Scratch it into your skin. Do whatever it takes for you to never forget. Do you understand?’
     Once again I nodded, but I must admit I didn’t understand anything. I was scared, feared at what I’d hear, yet I couldn’t have stopped my grandmother from telling me. Her creased brow relaxed as she closed her eyes.
     ‘Good. Now, where was I? I had just told you about how cold it was when I was born. Nobody could warm up that night. The old women present at my birth thought it was a bad omen. They said that a child born on a day like this would be full of woe, that it would bring bad luck.’

MOTHER

Constantinople, 1820

‘The midwives predicted some misfortune. Halide, the sultan’s first wife, called me ill-fated, said that I was going to die. And she may have been right. Maybe I did bring bad luck, especially to the people closest to me.
     ‘You see, Mihrişah, I arrived amidst ominous portents and heavy coldness. Not the warmest of welcomes, wouldn’t you agree? I was not born innocent. With me I carried the guilt and fury of every misfortune that had happened and of any misfortune that was about to come, at least, that’s what I was made to believe by the women in the palace. I suppose it was inevitable. I was always made aware of the turmoil that my unfortunate arrival caused. And I was never allowed to forget it. 
     ‘Usually the birth of a child was a memorable and happy event – but not my birth. My mother told me that they had the usual celebrations, but there was no warmth or merriment in them. No honesty.
     ‘All the women in the harem wore clothes as light as a wispy summer’s breeze, fine silky veils that used to brush their skin as noiselessly and effortlessly as a drop of water rolling off the steaming hamam walls. They draped heavy furs over their shoulders. But even the fur stoles they wore were barely warm enough to keep out that hungry cold. For all their finery, they were as cold and miserable as the lowliest of beggars in the streets of Stamboul.
     ‘To keep warm, the odalisques huddled closely in their rooms indulging themselves in their favourite pastime, dreaming into the night, losing themselves in their lost lives before they were taken as eternal prisoners in that deceiving golden cage.’
     As mesmerising as my grandmother’s voice was, I was getting confused. What palace? What harem? I didn’t understand, and yet I didn’t want to interrupt her lest she change her mind and stop talking.
     ‘Their favourite pastime?’ my grandmother went on, as if repeating an unasked question. ‘Opium. Mixed with hints of ambergris and musk. They all ate it. They all lived by it. Even my mother. Its sweet, earthy aroma reminded me of the forest floor after a heavy rain – pungent, sugary yet musky, like nothing I’ve ever smelt before. If I close my eyes, I can still remember its odour even after all these years.’
     She paused, raising her head towards the ceiling, her chest expanding, as if smelling what she had described. All I could smell was a faint scent of garlic, lamb and peppers from our lunch.
     ‘I caused her a great deal of pain. Her insides tore and, I am told, she lost her senses for a while, but the midwife gave her some of that dream concoction to eat and my mother’s world lost its sharp edges. And in this way, I slipped out onto the cold bed.
     ‘Nobody, other than the servants, ventured out of their oda unless they had to. Or unless they were summoned by the sultan,’ my grandmother paused. ‘I see you look perplexed.’
     ‘Yes, Ané, I don’t understand. You keep mentioning the palace and the sultan. And the odalisques, and…were your parents the palace cooks? Was your father one of the sultan’s vezirs?’ I stared at my grandmother for a long moment. The side of her lips curled up into the tiniest of smiles.
     ‘No, Mihrişah, my parents were not cooks and my father was not a vezir.’ She looked back in the direction of the balcony, her eyes remaining transfixed there, no tears, no strain, just an empty stare as if she were in a trance. ‘My mother, your great-grandmother Muazzez, was an odalisque in sultan Mahmut II’s harem.’
     My mouth opened but no sound came out. All my life I had wanted to find out about my grandmother’s past. I had dreamt up all sorts of things, but this had never once featured in my imaginings. Not once!
      ‘You seem surprised, but it is true. Your great-grandmother was an ikbal, a royal concubine. She was a young Caucasian girl kept solely as the sultan’s plaything. He had another seventeen girls ready to satisfy his every whim and desire, but your great-grandmother Muazzez, was Mahmut’s favourite ikbal. She was his haseki. At least for a while.’
     ‘Are you telling me the truth? You mean to say that you were the sultan’s… daughter?’
     ‘Yes, my child. I tell no lies.’
     ‘Then,’ I paused. My lungs restricted. ‘Then, that would make me a sultan’s great-granddaughter?’
     My grandmother nodded.