Yıldız Ramazanoğlu

My father looked through the key hole. Tuncer Bey was standing across the hall in his pajamas. Right at the threshold. “Our son is calling us at a late hour again, embarrassing us like that,” my mother said. A bunch of wildflowers in the shape of a crown, hanging on the door, welcomed us. This ornament, which was peculiar to our neighbors, was a small sign of their being slightly different than us. We rushed into their house.

We were summoned to our neighbor’s apartment by the first phone call; the second call would be soon. We would wait for it in Alissas’ livingroom. There was nothing to do but wait to hear my brother’s voice.

My mother raised her weepy voice to a high pitch. “Son! I don’t want any foreign daughter-in-law.

There are girls here each one more beautiful than the other. We don’t need anyone Swiss. Her manners cannot fit with ours. Come back in June, and choose someone here to marry.” My mother lost control of herself again. She didn’t regulate the volume of her voice. Alas! My mother was implacable whenever she talked on the phone to my brother.

While waiting ourselves to talk to him, my sister and I glanced shyly at Alissa. She was from Paris, or rather Marseille, married with two children–a foreigner. She knitted quietly, impervious to our conversation. She was working on an intricate pattern from a fashion magazine. She had engaged all her attention in her work even at night time. She couldn’t speak Turkish fluently, but she understood it very well. But we could never tell how she felt about my mother’s impetuousness. Alissa was a reticent woman.

We moved into the building two days after them. Both our families were first-time homeowners. And next door neighbours. We applied for a phone line at the same time, but back then it sometimes took years to get one. Since Tuncer Bey was a university professor he had preferential status. Therefore, they got the line before we did. My brother was in Sweden at that time getting his degree in infantile diseases, but had he been here we would have benefited from his privilege as a future doctor. He hadn’t even been to Turkey for two years. It seemed like it wasn’t enough for him to speak five different languages. He would stay in Lozan that summer in order to learn the sixth one, and in his words give it the finishing blow. When my mother heard this, she was blind with fury.

I had just finished the first year in high school. Moving from Yukarı Ayrancı to Kavaklıdere had been difficult enough as all my childhood friends, and our close neighbours, were far away now. The time I met Alissa coincides with the time in which our neighbourhood, the city, and the people around began to leave marks on me, and shape my understanding.

I hadn’t been to Europe. It turned out that Europe came to our feet; disguised as a tall, slim and always similing attractive woman who never gave away her age. She had two girls who hadn’t started school yet. Even though they were born and raised in Turkey, the distinct nature of their expressions, looks, and their relation to their mother clearly stood out. Even their smell were different because Alissa’s father would send many things from Paris, including shampoo.

Alissa had destroyed the image that I had in my mind of the powerful and ambitious European woman, fearlessly following her passions and goals, tracing her unique existence in this world. There were plenty of reasons for me to think of her as being obedient to her husband’s dominant character, submitting to his demands and career. My Uncle Tuncer always said the last words on every issue. I would hear him whispering to my father that Alissa was useless and he had to oversee everything. Distinguished people and professionals frequently visited their house and Alissa hosted them flawlessly as they discussed business. The other day she told my mother that she fried some fish and made soup for dinner and couldn’t care less about her family’s appetite for these dishes. We knew that Alissas would visit to those who visited them. She would tell us about some of the house parties they attended. Tuncer Bey would give her a little money and he would not allow her to use gas stove. Besides, he forced her to tell him wherever she went. He told her to ask my mother to join her when she felt like going to the park to sunbathe or read a book. It was obvious that she was a foreigner. Unfortunately even back then there were people who were mean to any woman whose appearance was slightly different from the majority.

It was unacceptable for me that Alissa had given up her education in order to get married. It seemed to me that the myth of meeting Mr Right was perhaps shared by women around the world. Then she sacrifices her whole existence, and this is supposed to glorify her. Then children. Soon she realizes how much she likes being in the kitchen and that she is a natural-born cook. She masters the art of dusting and learns to get pleasure out of it. Inevitably she turns into a woman who feels responsible for the happiness and well-being of the household and takes her work seriously. Moreover, she believes that she is the guarantor of peace in the family. When I looked at Alissa, I saw that her happiness was rooted in all these things.

My mother would first hear from Alissa about the latest kitchen utensils which were finally available in Turkey. Carrot squeezer, special cutlery for eggs, a garlic crusher. New ways to make better foam for the cappuccino, and a new device that removed dust through magnetic attraction. When I saw Alissa moping the floor with a satisfied expression on her face, I realized the difference between her and the elite women: she would never escape from the requirements of daily life no matter how demanding they were whereas the elite found these domestic duties tedious and burdensome. But she knew how to get pleasure out of them. She would clean the house after visitors left and was baffled by the fact that we only did the reverse. She would never wear herself out. Cleaning the windows of two rooms, she would take a break and drink her coffee. It wasn’t a big deal to leave the other rooms for some other time. On the other hand, some of our neighbors would wait until late at night to clean the windows that hadn’t been cleaned for a long time because of the absence of the regular cleaning lady. For them it was a source of embarassment and they did not want to be seen doing it. Having a house-cleaner was not as widespread as it is nowadays. Against the complexities of Turkish women, Alissa would turn on the music and view her work as a kind of exercise. She was adept at pinning down the worthwhile parts of every malicious-looking thing she was busy with. Her husband could have helped out but she would never ask him to. That is what most annoyed me about Alissa. As a European woman, I expected her to assert her rights. But the bitter truth seemed to be that even a European woman could not escape from the daily routine. Is it all that she could do to seek the quickest way to finish the housework in the shortest time possible? Let’s look for this, some way to escape from being taken over by children and housework, a way to make the entire household share the duties of housework. At least there must be a way to teach the family how to clean and tidy up after itself.

My mother was a dominant woman compared to Alissa. My father would not make a single decision without taking into account my mother’s opinion. At dinnertime, he would make the salad. On weekends he broiled fish. In short, he did his best to be helpful around the house. However, it was never enough to satisfy my mother, who also tried to control his work and even his friendships. She implied that he could not make sound investments and that he might drive us into financial ruin. I did not empathize much with my mother. In our house, the dynamics of power were different than they were in patriarchal families. Sometimes I saw my father as an innocent victim. My mother was dear to me, but I did not want to emulate her. When I heard her footsteps echoing “all things are under control”, I would feel that every woman had her own way. In time I realized that my father pretended to cede control over most things to my mother, but in fact always secretly asserted his will. Like every child I witnessed many things going on between grownup men and women, but I couldn’t distinguish fake things from genuine ones and especially after I met Alissa, I almost lost my wonder and started to think that all women were unique with their own experiences. I certainly detest the idea of “typical woman.”

When I started high school I had already solved the puzzle: Everybody should do whatever she wants to do. All women in the world struggle to find a man and then want to mold him into the way they want him to be. But they don’t really know what they are following, so they don’t usually recognize what they find. If someone chooses a lifestyle with her husband in the center, let her do it. One shouldn’t remind her of her very existence. If somebody else is yearning to run away, let her do it. I didn’t want to mold a man, but wanted to find one who was already molded. There should not be anything more important than our devotion to God. The only way to build a healthy relationship is to stop clawing the other person and let him be himself.

One day Alissa told her husband that she could convert to Islam. After all, her French friends who got married and settled in Turkey converted. Tuncer Bey argued that she had already had her own religion. There was no need to change religions. It didn’t take long for Alissa to give up. For her, Tuncer Bey was always right. She didn’t want to go against her husband’s will. In fact, I heard that she complained to my mother, asking many questions such as what she was supposed to do in the case of religious conversion. Alas, my mother didn’t know much about the religion. She said that we could throw a party for her with the neighbors and present her with gifts. However, our neighbors were non-practicing Muslims and reticent about religion. I am sure it would have been an interesting party if it had ever taken place, for we had strong ties with our neighbors.

We didn’t know whether Alissa would go to the church or not. She once attended a religious gathering organized by my mother at our place. She was pleased to be there. During Ramadan, she would offer us homemade pastries and have dinner with us at least a few times. She and my uncle Tuncer did not fast, but they were fascinated the table set perfectly ready for dinner. When they heard the ezan, they would get exited. Nobody brought up the question of Alissa’s religious conversion again. Instead, for years we honored Alissa’s Christmas. We always sent a present to Alissa for the birth of Jesus Christ. During Christmas time, they would host a lot of people if they were not visiting friends.

One day I had forgotten my keys at home. After school, I stayed at Alissa’s until my mother came home. She had been reading a book. I was very curious about it. It was The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. What a thick book! What was it about? Those days I was quite a bookworm. She summarized the book in a few words: the endless discussions of intellectuals during Second World War, their protests against the war, the encounter of art and politics, and so on. My interest in French writers and thinkers flourished during that period. What were they discussing? What was it that they suggested for humanity? Why and how did they write? My thoughts about Alissa changed after I learnt what she was reading. I realized she might have another identity deep inside her. Maybe her head was full of marvelous ideas. Since she didn’t have anyone with whom to exchange ideas, and maybe hers were rotting away.

After that day whenever we came across one another she asked me what I had been reading lately. I realized that she was a profound woman with many worries and ideas in her mind. Besides, she was still trying hard to cope with the alienation of being a foreigner. I tried to feel empathy with her. We talked about how World War II left her whole family wounded back in France. I didn’t know much of her life story, which prevented us from being close to each other. She had been our neighbor for ten years, yet we had just started to get to know one another. I would constantly invent new personalities for her in my mind; I would try to carve a different woman out of Alissa, a European and mildly literate woman, in accordance with the patchworks of various characters I read in European novels.

When Uncle Tuncer started to make more money they bought a larger house and moved out. We kept in touch but saw each other rarely and as mere acquaintances. We completely fell out of touch when I moved to Istanbul. For me, Alissa was a woman who demolished the prejudices in my mind about all women, and I will consequently remember her for the rest of my life.

From Amargi- Issue 10