The Longing
They say he never married. Some say that he killed his wife. They say he lives alone from a broken heart. My grandmother had often murmured the village speculations, whilst tugging at her colourful cotton skirts, pottering around, fetching, mending, or restoring objects that looked like they had long lost there way . I somehow always knew however, that there were things she never spoke of. I never knew my father, I had not even set eyes on him once. I spent endless hours often lying on the grass or on the sun baked wood of the veranda peering up at the skies wandering where he was and who he had become.
"They say she ran off with a younger man, some say it was his own brother!" She said. "Don't you listen to them, what do they know; silly folk who gossip all day, nothing more!" She smiled warmly, knowingly, with a glint in her eye and mischief on her lips, just as she had done on the last day I saw her. It had been fifteen years since I had returned. Returned to the rich soil that bore such wondrous vegetation and fruits with their lingering sweet and bitter nectars. Every taste and smell still resonated with me. I wished the scents of my mother had stayed with me too, but they hadn't. I just remembered her soft hands and deep brown eyes that let me know how much she loved me, and I spent a lifetime pretending to be content with that. Home was no longer home without her. I could not stay in a place that reminded me of her in every breath and every glance, so I never returned. I preferred to long for her from afar, at least I would be blind , and only feel.
The endless sunshine of the summer months of my youth, played before my eyes. The warmth of the heat caressing every pore of my skin, turning it a delicious deep brown, lightening my hair to golden spirals. I remember being washed on the balcony, in an iron basin, my grandmother pouring water on me from an iron Ottoman Surahiye. Eating 'Tak Tak', (my word creation; for juicy black olives). My grandfather, allowing me to hold the frogs he kept inside the hollows of a tree. The excitement of going to sleep in Ramadan, knowing that I along with everyone else on our neighbouring streets would soon be woken up by the drum beats of the drummer boy walking through our compound.
My grandmother would heat up a feast in preparation for a day of fasting that would follow. Spicy bean stew, and rice would boil on the coal stove that was also used to heat the kitchen. We would eat with our fingers, Bazlama nan bread wrapping around the beans, to be placed in our eager mouths, raw onion dipped in tiny crystals of salt to accompany it. I remember overhearing my mother telling my grandmother off for teaching me to eat with my hands; I remember being so cross with her.
Salty air, fragrant with hints of rose petals and bluebells enveloped my senses. The whispering of the sea nearby; the winds power on cold winter nights; turning the sea and air into one, a united hurricane force, that made me realise quite early on the wonders of nature. I had to return. Most of all I had to return to see him. I had seen him once before. I couldn't have been a little more than four. He walked delicately through the streets of the compound, his head bowed; a straw hat covering his face, his skin was ripened by the sun. He never looked at me but I knew it was him, the man who lived alone on a tiny unoccupied island, at the bottom of our compound. I along with the village folk, never stopped being curious about him. I never forgot the man who had abandoned all luxury, all practices that were deemed contemporary or modern, and chose to lead his life amidst remoteness and isolation. In my years apart from were I had come from, I thought about the man on the island often and wandered what it was that he was running away from.
The ancient city of Izmir was once known as Smyrna by the Greeks, but in 1930 the Turkish Postal Services Law allowed the name to change to its current form. Today, it bustled and heaved. In the sweltering heat; people young and old filled the narrow streets of the historic bazaar Kemer Alti. Despite the heat, I loved being here, immersed in its history, and culture, one I sometimes wondered if I'd forgotten. Kemer Alti, its meaning was 'underneath the belt'. A fitting name really, because it was originally constructed in the years between 1650-1670 around the streets which were at the shallowest inner bay of the city. I wondered what life would have been like back then and how the wife's and the concubines of the sultans lived.
