Chapter 12 "Istanbul" My Grandmother

If asked, she would say she favors Kemal's Westernization policies, but the truth is - and she shares this with everyone in the city - neither the East nor the West interest her.After all, she rarely goes out.Like someone who lives a comfortable life in the city, she has little interest in monuments, history, or "beauties," even though she was studying history.After she got engaged to my grandfather, but before she married, she did something rather brave in Istanbul in 1917: dined with him in a restaurant.Since they were sitting at tables facing each other with drinks served, I assumed they were at a restaurant in Pella.My grandfather asked her what she would like to drink (meaning tea or lemonade) and she thought he was offering her something alcoholic and snapped:

"I must let you know, sir, that I never drink." Forty years later, when she got slightly tipsy from drinking beer at New Year's dinners, someone would always tell the story and she would laugh out loud with embarrassment.On an ordinary day, she would sit in her usual chair in the living room, laugh for a while, and then cry sadly over the untimely death of the "extraordinary" man I knew only from photo albums.When she was crying, I tried to imagine my grandparents strolling down the street, but it was difficult to imagine this plump and comfortable woman in Renoir's painting as the tall, thin and nervous woman painted by Modigliani.

After my grandfather made a fortune and died of leukemia, my grandmother became the "head" of our large family.It was the slightly sarcastic phrase her cook and close friend Baguier used every time he got tired of her endless orders and complaints: "As you please, boss!" But my grandmother's authority did not exceed The house she inspects with a large bunch of keys.When my father and uncle ruined the factory they had inherited at a young age, when they got involved in construction projects and invested recklessly and failed, forcing our boss to sell off the family property one by one, my almost homeless grandmother was on the move again. She burst into tears, and then told them to be more careful next time.

She spent her mornings in bed, under the heavy quilt, on a pile of large down pillows.Every morning, Bazier served her soft-boiled eggs, feta cheese, and toast on a large tray, carefully placed on the pillows she folded above the quilt (if practical, the embroidered pillows and silver trays with an old newspaper in between, which was a spoiler), my grandmother ate her breakfast slowly, read the paper, and received the first guests of the day. (I learned from her to enjoy drinking sweet tea with a piece of goat cheese in my mouth.) My uncle, who cuddled my grandmother before going to work, visited her early in the morning.My aunt also came grabbing the handbag after dropping him off at work.For a short period of time before I went to school, everyone thought that I should be able to read, so I did what my brother did. Every morning, I came over with a notebook, leaned on my grandmother’s quilt, and learned the mysteries of the alphabet from her.After I went to school, I found that it was boring to learn from other people. When I saw a blank paper, my first thought was not to write, but to draw black pictures on the paper.In the middle of these literacy lessons, the cook, Baguier, came in and asked the same question in the same words:

"What shall we treat these people to eat today?" He asked this question with a serious face, as if he were in charge of the catering of some large hospital or barracks.My grandmother discussed with her cook who was coming from which apartment to eat and what to cook, and then my grandmother produced her amazing almanac, full of mysterious information and pictures of clocks.They look to the "menu of the day" for inspiration while I watch a crow fly over a cypress tree in the back garden. Despite his heavy workload, Basil the cook never lost his sense of humor, and he had nicknames for everyone in his family, from his grandmother to her youngest grandson.My nickname was "The Crow," he said to me years later, because I used to watch the crows on the roof next door, and because I was so small.The older brother was very close to his teddy bear and carried it everywhere, so he was a "nanny" to Bajer.One squinting-eyed cousin is called "Japan" and another stubborn one is called "Goat."A premature cousin named "June".That's what he's called us for years, gentle mockery tempered by compassion.

In Grandma's room—like in Mother's—there's a double-mirror dressing table.I'd love to open the mirror panels and get lost in the reflection, but I'm not allowed to touch this mirror.Grandma, who stayed in bed most of the day and didn't get up, set the table so that she could look all the way along the long corridor, through the kitchen passage, the hallway, through the living room, and all the way to the window overlooking the street, monitoring everything that happened in the house-in and out. People coming out, conversations in the corner, children and grandchildren bickering in the distance—without getting out of bed.Because it was always dark in the room, certain activities in the mirror were often too dark to see, so Grandma would have to yell and ask, say, what happened at the intarsia table in the living room, and Baguier would come running in to report who did it. what.

In the afternoons when she wasn't reading the newspaper or (occasionally) embroidering pillowcases, my grandmother would smoke cigarettes and play Bizique with other ladies of her age in Nishantashi.I remember they sometimes played poker too.The soft bright red velvet bag she holds her poker chips in is also the Ottoman pierced ancient coins with jagged edges and imperial letters, which I like to take to the corner to play with. There was a lady at the poker table from the sultan's harem, and after the collapse of the empire, the Ottoman family -- I can't bear to use the word dynastic -- was forced to leave Istanbul, the harem closed, and this lady came out of the harem to marry a colleague of my grandfather's.My brother and I used to tease her for being too polite: even though she was a friend of her grandmother's, they called each other "Madame" and she still looked at her when Bajer brought them greasy croissants and cheese toast from the oven. Will jump on it with glee.Both are fat, but because they lived in a time and culture that did not regard this as disobedient, they took it lightly.If—like it happens every forty years—my fat grandmother has to go out or is invited out, the preparations go on for days—until the last step, when my grandmother asks Mrs. Carme, the housekeeper, to go upstairs to pull her corset straps tight with all her might.The corset-tying scene takes place behind a screen, and it creeps me out—twitching, yelling, "Take it easy, girl, take it easy!" The manicurist confuses me, too.The woman had visited a few days earlier and had sat there for hours with basins of soapy water and odd paraphernalia gathered around her.I stood transfixed as she painted my beloved grandmother's bright red toenail polish, fascinated and disgusted to see her place cotton balls between my grandmother's fat toes.

Twenty years later, when we moved into houses in other parts of Istanbul, I often visited my grandmother in the Pamuk apartment.If I went in the morning, I'd find her in the same bed, surrounded by the same bags, newspapers, pillows, and shadows, and the smell of the room—a mixture of soap, cologne, and wood—had never changed.My grandmother always kept a thin-leather notebook by her side, and wrote something in it every day.The book in which she recorded bills, memories, meals, expenses, plans, and weather changes was like a strange and special etiquette book.Perhaps because she reads history, she sometimes likes to act according to "official decorum", but her tone is always sarcasm.Her interest in etiquette and Ottoman manners had another practical consequence—each of her grandchildren was named after a victorious sultan.Every time I saw her, I kissed her hand, and she gave me money, which I shyly (but also gladly) put in my pocket, and after I told her how my mother, father, and brother were doing, my grandmother sometimes Read to me what she wrote in her notebook.

"My grandson Orhan came to visit. He is very smart and well-behaved. He is studying architecture at university. I gave him ten lire. God bless him, one day he will be successful and the name of the Pamuk family will be respected again , as in the days of his grandfather." When she finished, she stared at me through her glasses, her cataract eyes looking even more menacing, and gave me a cold, mocking smile that made me wonder if she was laughing at herself, or because she now understood the absurdity of life , and I tried to make the same smile.