Far away from home.
Years had passed, but every spring the town was still decorated with flags to commemorate the day those boys had been wished a safe journey, and the photographs and medals were placed in the windows of every home, where a silent acrid pain would prevail forever.
On that spring day, when a wonderful outing had turned into an unexpected shock, I asked myself which moment of happiness could ever veil the deep anguish of those mothers.
In those years, everyone used to go around with babies in their arms, and everything was arranged to accommodate families with many children.
Everyone we knew asked us when we would have our first child. People who did not have a child within the first few years of marriage were considered strange.
This thought, which had excited me now and then, turned to fear as I passed by those houses decorated with flags and photographs.
Tell me: what happiness that came from living with the children whose pictures now hung on those window was worth endless pain?
The war had passed right through my childhood, like a storm that horrifies you even when you are in a sheltered and secure home. I don’t remember much, except what my father used to tell us now and then, and that we often had to turn off all the lights in the house.
Later, I happened to meet a woman in London, who was only a couple of years older than I was.
She told me that one day she and the other Jewish people were brought to one of those death camps where they were stripped naked, and she explained what they felt at the terrifying moment when they expected gas from the shower heads to fill the room.
In those horrifying minutes, they expected death instantly.
Then, all of a sudden, water instead of gas poured from the showers. Sheer fortune. Unexpected luck had saved them from the incredible nightmare that had cost the lives of millions.
She was only a little girl when they were picked up and put into trains where they shivered in the cold: they knew they were being taken to their death. She was talking about the years I used to play hopscotch in our backyard. Maybe it had happened on one of those tranquil spring days in Ankara, on one of those afternoons when my mother had called me into the house, combed my hair, and given me cookies and tea. Or perhaps I was in Kandilli, enjoying the warm summer days at my grandmother’s house, when that girl set off on her bitter journey, trembling in a train that passed somewhere just a few hundred miles away from where I was.
That is how it was.
Just a few hundred miles.
Just a few hours away.
You just can’t comprehend what really happened even when you see the traces of those mass graves, watch those films, or read those books.
When we were in the united States, the diary of a young girl was published.
The diary of a girl who managed to hide with her family in a house in Amsterdam for two years, but who was eventually caught, sent to a concentration camp, and about whom nothing was ever heard again.
I read that book and studied the girl’s smiling face.
I read what she wrote in a tiny den where she lived for two long years without getting any fresh air, what she felt and experienced day by day, and how she grew up while sharing a whole life in her diary.
I was not able to discern the truth when I saw the faces of mothers and fathers in that town decorated with flags, but only years later, when I sat opposite that woman in the café and listened to her story as she gulped down her cream-filled cake.
The human being is the only creature capable of genocide.
As she told me her story, with tears rolling down her cheeks every now and then, I listened in rage and bitterness, mortified and remorseful, promising myself that I would never forget how this woman—who was my age but looked different by light-years—was still able to cling to life.
Thank God that I had not been busy with collecting memories, making photo albums, or carrying all the petty stuff that I had accumulated over the years.
If I had created a photo album, perhaps most of the photos would have shown me packing my suitcases.
Whether because of packing up, being dragged from one place to another or, as my mother says, of having rushed even at the time of my birth, I was not able to become a real part of this world.
We, the images and I (what does it matter anyway), have passed each other by.
Yet, that morning, when I put the beautiful new dolls for the neighbors (there were even small closets and tiny tea cups for a dollhouse), the small things I had bought for my mother, my brother Nihat, and Ayla, and my records into my suitcase, I remember that the radio announced the Russians had made a bomb that was stronger than the atom bomb. I can still visualize that day. I walk on the wet autumn leaves in the garden and step into the car. As the car moves, I turn back and look at the charming house I’m leaving behind.
We were returning to Ankara. I was overcome by an incomprehensible sense of excitement. Turgut was surprised. “Let’s see how you’ll get used to Ankara again, after such a long time,” he said.
“Let us in fact see how people in Ankara will get used to me!” I answered, chuckling.
He and I always had an invisible, unmentioned wall between us. Neither of us attempted to break down that wall. Strange, but we succeeded in living like two not-so-close friends sharing a house.
He was one of those people who managed not to show any sign of emotion.
For him, life was a simple mechanism that was predetermined, confined, and clearly defined by rules.
Great happiness, joy, excitement, and non-conforming acts had no place in his life.
Maybe that is why he didn’t experience great disappointments, frustrations or destruction.
Who knows, maybe his way is the right way. I confess that sometimes when I found myself swirled into maelstroms, I secretly envied his way of constructing a life.
Life was a duty for him. Responsibilities towards everyone had to be fulfilled, work had to have priority above everything else, a certain distance had to be kept in relationships with other people, all rules had to be followed, and in his little free time, he had to do things to develop himself.
For him, even having fun was a duty to be fulfilled.
Acting on impulse and knocking at someone’s door one evening without planning beforehand, seeing someone you miss, going somewhere you have never been and spending the whole night there . . .
No, none of these things were acceptable to him. Waking up on the weekends, mowing the grass, dusting the books and placing them in their exact place on the shelves, organizing the drawers, tearing scrap paper first into four and then into eight exact pieces and then throwing them in the garbage can, separating the clothes that had to be taken to the dry cleaner, washing the car, strolling in the afternoon, shopping, visiting places that had to be seen, and going to the cinema and the theater were all arranged according to a fixed program.
I used to watch in amazement as he wrote the greeting cards that had his name printed with his beautiful handwriting and carefully placed them one by one into envelopes long before each religious holiday and New Year’s Eve.
He did not call his mother on impulse all those years he spent away from her. The exact day and the time to call