Chapter 8 "Istanbul" Various things that disappear

Mother, Father, and Various Vanishing Things Father often travels to distant places.We won't see him for months at a time.Oddly enough, we didn't find out he wasn't home until after he'd been away for quite some time.By then, we'd grown accustomed to his absence—quite a bit like the belated discovery that a rare bike is lost or stolen, or that a classmate who hasn't been to school for a while doesn't come back.No one ever explained why Dad wasn't with us, or when he expected to be back.We didn't bother to ask for information: we lived in a crowded apartment complex, surrounded by uncles, grandmothers, cooks, maids, so it was easy to ignore his absence without asking, and it was almost easy to forget that he wasn't there here.Sometimes from the overly warm hugs from our maid Hanim, the overinterpretation of what we said by my grandmother's cook Begiel, and the Sunday morning drive of Uncle Aiden along the Bosporus in his 1952 Dodge. Excessive bravado in circles can feel sad about situations we haven't quite forgotten.Sometimes I knew something was wrong from my mother's long early-morning phone conversations with my aunts, her friends, and my grandmother.My mother, in her cream-yellow gown printed with blossoming red carnations, sat with her legs crossed, the folds of her gown cascading across the floor, bewildering me.I could see her pajamas and her beautiful skin, and I could see her beautiful neck, and I wanted to climb up on her lap, to be next to her, to be close to the beautiful triangle between her hair, her neck and her breasts.My mother herself told me years later that I really enjoyed the apocalyptic atmosphere that enveloped our home after a big fight at the dinner table with my father.

Waiting for my mother to notice me, I sat at her dresser fiddling with her perfume bottles, lipstick, nail polish, cologne, rosewater, and almond oil.I would rummage through drawers, playing with tweezers, scissors, nail files, brow pencils, brushes, combs, and other pointed objects.I stare at the baby photo of me and my brother tucked under the glass on my desk.There is a picture of me sitting in a high chair while she in the same gown feeds me a mouthful of "mama" and we both have the kind of smiles you see in commercials as I watch I thought about the photo, but unfortunately no one can hear my happy shouts now.

When I was bored, I would entertain myself by playing a game very similar to the one I later played in the novel.I'd push the bottles and jars and assorted brushes into the center of the dresser, and the locked floral silver box I'd never seen my mother open, and I'd tilt my head forward so I could see my own head in the triple mirror. On the central mirror plate, I pushed the wings of the mirrors in and out until the mirrors on either side reflected each other, and I saw thousands of orhans shining in a deep, cold, glass-colored infinity.As I looked at my nearest reflection in the mirror, I was struck by the unfamiliar back of my head, my ears first—their tips rounded at the back, one protruding more than the other, just like my father.Even more interesting was the back of the neck, which made me feel as if my body was a stranger accompanying me—a thought that still sends chills down my spine.The thousands of orhans trapped between the three mirrors change each time I change the position of the mirror plates a little; although each new successor is different, seeing each link of the chain Huandu imitated my posture in the same way, I am proud.I experiment with positions until I am sure they are the perfect slaves for me.Sometimes I seek the furthest Orhan in the green immensity of the mirror, and sometimes some hand or head among my faithful imitators seems to move not at the same time as mine, but half a beat behind.The scariest moment was when I grimaced—puffed my cheeks, raised my eyebrows, stuck out my tongue, picked eight corners out of thousands of orhans, and then (not noticing that I had moved my hand) saw what I thought Another group of traitors who were very small and far away directly made gestures.

Losing myself in my own reflection has gradually become the "disappearing game", perhaps I am playing this game to prepare for my worst fear: although I don't know what my mother said on the phone, I don't know where my father is Or when I come back, but I am sure that one day my mother will disappear forever. Sometimes she does disappear.But when she disappeared, people would give us reasons, like "your mother is sick and recuperating at Aunt Neriman's house".I look at these explanations like I look at my reflection in a mirror: knowing they are phantoms, I believe them anyway and let myself be fooled.After a few days, we were placed in the care of Bajir, the cook, or Ismail, the housekeeper.We followed them all the way across Istanbul by boat and bus—to relatives who lived in Erenkoy in the Asian quarter or other relatives in the town of Istinye on the Bosphorus—to visit my mother.These visits are not sad: they feel like adventures.With my brother for company, I think he can handle all dangers.The houses or Yali villas we visited were inhabited by my mother's relatives, these benevolent old aunts and hairy, horrible uncles who kissed us, pinched our cheeks, and showed us anything weird in their house that caught our attention. — the German barometer I thought every Westernized home in town had (a couple in Bavarian costumes entering and leaving their home according to the weather), or the pivoting, sudden indenting every half hour A cuckoo clock chiming automatically in a cage, or a real canary singing loudly in response to a mechanical bird—then we went to Mother's room.

The large expanse of brilliant ocean and the dazzling beauty of the light through the window (maybe this is why I always love Matisse’s south-facing windows), remind us sadly of our mother leaving us to this strange and beautiful place, but We were relieved to find familiar objects on her dresser—the same tweezers and perfume bottle, the same hairbrush with half-peeled paint on the back, and, wafting in the air, her incomparable scent.I remember every detail: how she put us in turns on her lap and embraced us warmly, how she gave my brother detailed instructions on how to Dealing with advances and retreats, where to find the things we brought her back next time--Mother always likes to give instructions.While she did this, I looked out the window, ignoring her instructions and waiting for my turn to sit on her lap.

One day when my mother disappeared, my father brought a nanny back one day.She was short, pale, not at all beautiful, fat, and always smiling.She took care of us and told us with what seemed to be a proud self-righteousness that we were to be as obedient as she was.Unlike the nanny we saw in other people's houses, she was Turkish, which to our great disappointment never treated her kindly.Most of the nannies we knew were Protestant Germans, and this nanny was not very powerful to us. She would say when we were fighting: "Be good, be quiet, please, be good, be quiet." We When imitating her in front of her father, her father always laughed.Soon, the nanny also disappeared.Years later, during my father's disappearances, when my brother and I were fighting to the death and my mother got really mad, she'd say things like "I'm leaving!" or "I'm going to jump out of the window!" words (and once even put one of her beautiful legs over the window sill), but it didn't help.But whenever she said, "Your dad can marry another woman!" I imagined that the new mother was not one of the women whose name she blurted out in a moment of anger, but the pale, plump, The kind, confused nanny.

Since these plays are all played out on the same little stage, and because (as I later guessed every real family is) we almost always say the same things and eat the same things, even arguments can be lifeless (daily life is happiness wellspring, assurance, and grave!), and so I began to welcome these sudden disappearances, thereby exorcising the dreaded curse of boredom.Like my mother's mirror, these disappearances were amusing, disorienting poisonous flowers that opened my way to another world.They took me into a dark place, reminded me of myself, and restored me to the loneliness I had tried to forget, so I didn't waste any tears for these disappearances.

Most of these spats start at the dinner table.Later, however, it was all the more convenient to quarrel in my father's 1959 Opel, because it was more difficult to get warring parties out of a fast-moving car than it was to get them off the dinner table.Sometimes we embark on a drive trip that's been planned for days, or just drive along the Bosphorus coast, and an argument erupts within minutes of leaving our house.That's when my brother and I made a bet: after the first bridge or gas station, my father would brake suddenly, turn the car around, and (like an angry captain steer the ship back to its place of origin) Send us home and drive elsewhere by ourselves.

There was a quarrel in our early years which had a profound effect on us because of its poetic solemnity.At dinner one evening at our summer retreat in Heberiada, both parents left the table (I like that this happens because it means I can eat as much as I want without having to obey Mother's rules).My brother and I sat at the kitchen table for a while staring at our plates, listening to our parents yell at each other from the top floor, and then, almost instinctively, we went upstairs to join them. (As if almost instinctively, I found myself opening the bracket, indicating that I didn't want to think about it at all.) Seeing that we wanted to join the melee, my mother herded us into the next room and closed the door.The room was dark, but a bright light streamed in through the Art Nouveau motifs of the two frosted glass doors.My brother and I watched through the bright glass as the shadows of our parents approached and parted from each other, walked forward to touch each other again, and formed a shadow when they roared.The shadow puppet show sometimes lost control and made the curtain (frosted glass) vibrate slightly - like when we went to the Karagoz Shadow Theater - and everything was performed in black and white video.