Bozuk

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  In the electronic versions of this book

  blank pages that appear in the paperback

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  BOZUK

  LINDA ROGERS

  Publishers of Singular

  Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction, Drama, Translations and Graphic

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Rogers, Linda, 1944-, author

  Bozuk / Linda Rogers.

  ISBN 978-1-55096-597-1

  I. Title

  PS8585.O392B69 2016 C813'.54 C2016-904878-0

  C2016-904879-9

  eBooks

  ISBN 978-1-55096-602-2 (pdf)

  ISBN 978-1-55096-598-8 (epub)

  ISBN 978-1-55096-600-8 (mobi)

  Copyright © Linda Rogers, 2016

  Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

  144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0

  PDF, ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil

  Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2016. All rights reserved

  We gratefully acknowledge, for their support toward our publishing activities, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights – or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: info@exileeditions.com

  For Olive: peace, deep roots, and laughter.

  For Mandoturk, Jack and Eva,

  Sweet Papa Lowdown and the Pinks

  (Naomi, Hannah and Françoise):

  Ne mutlu Türküm diyene

  and our Turkish family, especially Luisa Galata Dinc,

  born in the shade of Gezi Parki:

  There’s a blaze of light

  in every word.

  It doesn’t matter which you heard,

  the holy or the broken hallelujah.

  —LEONARD COHEN, “Hallelujah”

  The visionary is the only true realist.

  —FEDERICO FELLINI

  Contents

  Foreword: Sende Anta/ Tell Your Story

  Once I Played God

  Why on Earth

  The Prostitute

  Aiman’s Mother

  Snow

  The Harem

  Kadiköy

  Christmas

  Sevmek

  Apple Tea

  Canada

  Chocolate Sunday

  Cheese

  Mostly Light

  Five Hundred Metres

  Home Sweet Home

  Onion

  Tugrul

  In the House of God

  Fairy Tales

  Beatified

  Baba

  If

  Mother Superior

  Byzantine Latrine

  Coon’s Bottle Tree

  The Cesme Hamam

  Unholy Matrimony

  Ephesus

  Paper Horses

  Shooting Stars

  One Last Thing

  Mustafa Laughs

  Almost Midnight

  Gone for Good

  Rose-coloured Glasses

  Baba Dagi

  Victoria

  Acknowledgments

  FOREWORD

  SENDE ANTA / TELL YOUR STORY

  Madeleine, sometimes known as Maddy, but more often as Mad, travels to Turkey during the Arab Spring and finds Pamuk’s snow, which had promised wisdom, the voice of God, has frozen the green shoots and modern conversations about inclusion and secular democracy.

  Moderate Turks have since risen up, like the angel mosaics emerging from plaster shrouds in the Aya Sofia, to protect trees filled with singing birds in Gesi Park and the rights of women – some of them marching in skirts. Now that Equinox has transitioned to a winter of real discontent, what started as peaceful debate has exploded in horrible statistics. Women in Turkey are now ten times more likely to endure violence.

  The key word is “permission” and it began with the terrorism defined as government repression of human rights. Some Turkish men who had given hard glances to women who uncovered their heads or those who carried schoolbooks now believe they have permission to rape and murder anyone who transgresses their brutal medievalist interpretation of Islam.

  Imam, the Libyan lawyer who was gang-raped by Gaddafi’s soldiers, and Malala, the child advocate, are no longer exceptional examples of religion gone wrong.

  We have heard of the brutal murders at the Ankara train station and Sultanahmet, and of Ozgecan Aslan, a nineteen-year-old Turkish university student whose crimes were going to school and resisting rape. She was stabbed and beaten, her head broken, bozuk,* and burned, her charred remains left in a riverbed.

  Ozgecan’s blackened remains dissolve in music. Millions of mourning women exchanging photos on social media sing like blackbirds. Will the world listen to the unacceptability of cruelty and plant an olive tree for every martyr, fill every woman-shaped grave with hope?

  * A Glossary of Turkish words appears on pages 234 and 235

  ONCE I PLAYEDGOD

  We had a dog. His name was Fred but I called him Frend. I told him all my troubles, for example, my parents wouldn’t let me wear nail polish until I quit sucking my thumb. I didn’t get pie and ice cream until I finished my cold and lumpy mashed potatoes.

  Once, when my father sent me to my room for some small transgression of the dad laws, I yelled at my door, “I hope the sky falls down on you!” – never thinking it would. Sometimes, before our life changed forever, I imagined them both struck by lightning, but God decides.

  It is wrong to take a life. I have never done that on purpose, even though people keep dying on me like the grasshopper I kept in a glass jar with breathing holes and a dandelion bed. I got a needle and thread and made him the tiniest pair of pants and a little shirt.

  Since Frend was officially my parents’ dog, he slept in their bed not mine. The grasshopper was mine exclusively. He rubbed his leg against his belly and talked to me. When I took him out of his jar and he tried to escape, I took the sewing scissors and cut off his leg. Good idea, I thought, but the next morning he was dead.

  WHY ON EARTH

  After the sky fell, I asked my bereaved mother why she was in such a hurry to get to the end of every last jug of gin in the western world. She told me an angel, aka Dad, left messages in the heels of her bottles. You had to tip the sucker right up to the sun to see. You had to swallow the in-between, whether you liked the taste of it or not. I didn’t believe her about the messages, but I do have the same need not only to get to the bottom of things but also to the top, the Olympian summits where gods and holy choirs hang out.

  My mother and I both believed that my father had become one of them. A long time ago, I asked him to teach me the names of all the stars and all the planets. “That’s my Earth,” I told him when he showed me a map of our solar system. “You can’t have The Earth,” he said. “No one can have the whole world; but we can catch you some fallen stars that’ll be all your own.”

  The next Saturday, it rained. He went out to the garden and hung bottles on our monkey tree. My mother and I stood in the living-room window and watched him.

  “Your father’s gone loco,” she said, but I already knew monkey trees were sacred.

  “Monkey
trees are for wishing,” he told me when he’d planted it. “Whenever you see one, pinch the person closest to you and say a prayer.”

  The closest person was my mother. Her real name was Estelle but my dad called her Stella, which means “star” in Italian. Sometimes he pinched her and said he’d already got his wish. That was true and not true, as it turned out, the usual bullshit. My father had big soft lips. When he kissed my eyes goodnight, he said he was spitting stardust on them; and I believed him.

  Sunday morning, the sun was out. My father blindfolded me and led me down the front stairs. He stood me right by the monkey tree and uncovered my eyes. I saw sparkle and swirling blues, yellows, purples and greens. I heard tinkling, and Daddy said it was angels speaking in the bottles hanging from the branches of the monkey tree.

  “This is your galaxy,” he said. “Wish on these stars. Make all the wishes you want.”

  He said the bottles would catch the bad spirits before they came in our house, but he was wrong. Some bad spirits took my daddy away and my mother invited the rest to stay. After he was gone she insisted that gin lifted her spirits. That was wishful thinking. Hers were as heavy as lead.

  Stella never did find a message from Daddy or any other angel in one of her bottles. When the gin fairies finally got her, I put on the jet choker she’d worn after he died. She told me the necklace had belonged to my great-great granny. “It’s my consolation,” she’d said, touching the shiny black beads as if they were her rosary. “Jet’s made from petrified monkey tree.” Maybe she pinched it all night long, wishing my dad back after the pinch fairies carried him off.

  The spirit tree was my consolation. When I heard my bottles banging in the wind, I knew he was speaking to me. The problem was I was too grief-shocked to understand what he was saying. Now I have hung bottles from the branches of every tree in our garden. That’s my hunger. I can’t stop doing it. I have to believe that someday my father will tell me why on earth my life in this world has turned out this way.

  THE PROSTITUTE

  At least fifteen men raped her, she all eges. Then they pissed and shat on her. The Libyan government does not agree. The military does not agree.

  The local press does not agree. Her family does not agree with the government, the military or the local press. Her mother says Iman wanted to study journalism but there is no freedom of expression in Libya. Instead she studied law. That way, maybe she could join the struggle for human rights.

  Does a Muslim lawyer wear red nail polish, the world is left to wonder. Does a lawyer belly dance, they infer from a photo of someone else, a young woman with all ten fingers.

  Somehow Iman managed to be born with only nine or else she’d lost one in an accident, perhaps chopping vegetables for her family or tilting a windmil . Do they have windmil s in Libya? Did the winds of change bring Iman into the light so we would witness what happens when we don’t pay attention to the lives of girls and women?

  Avaraz is collecting a million signatures on a petition to free Iman, who is under house arrest in Tripoli for the crime of being raped. They are going to present the list to president Erdog˘an of Turkey and ask him to intervene since he was able to negotiate the release of four New York Times journalists held in Libyan jails. I signed the petition and bought a ticket to Istanbul because I need to understand why women suffer, or, more to the point, to understand if God is responsible for all owing us to take the rap for mankind’s inevitable failures. Is this the snake biting our heels, another variation on original sin, the story at the root of everything wrong with this world? It is just a story, isn’t it, the story of mankind and my own family, which all egedly came from the ancient city of Smyrna, the source of myrrh taken by a wise man to celebrate the birth of the son of God so that he might die for our sins?

  I always thought God was incredibly stupid to go to all the trouble of making a child just so he could suffer. I am against war and gods who ask for the sacrifice of children. I am against scriptures that degrade women and men who would be women. I always thought Jesus was gay and had an extraordinary sympathy for women. Is that why they nailed him to a tree?

  AIMAN’S MOTHER

  I saw Iman’s mother on television this morning She had that coiled furious look snakes have when “resting,” their half-shut eyes glittering, the muscle that holds the jawbone to the head bone twitching, waiting for an opportunity to bite and swallow. Given the chance, Iman’s mother will tear the heads off the soldiers who abducted and abused her daughter in Tripoli. She threatened to strangle Gaddafi.

  Iman’s mother will close her eyes and see a line of green uniforms, soldiers waiting their turn to violate her daughter. I know it, just as surely as I know I will see her face glowing in the dark when I turn out the light tonight. She will not blink until the last soldier is turned back at the gate to Paradise. Iman’s mother will stare down God to avenge her child.

  SNOW

  When I was an unhappy kid with an abdicated mother and no friends, I lost myself in books, reading all day and all night. I wasn’t interested in school, so my teachers gave up teaching me. They let me sit at the back of the class and read, the idea being, I suppose, that I was maybe an autodidact and something positive might come from doing classroom time so long as they left me alone to learn in my own way. No one signed my report cards. No one came to PTA meetings or teacher-parent interviews. I became invisible and silent except for the sound of turning pages. At night I sat up in bed and read until I fell asleep. No one came to tuck me in or turn out the lamp. No one warned me that I was hurting my eyes and missing my beauty sleep.

  I was a lump of white bread with dirty hair and fingernails. Beauty came later. My real life was and is fiction. Even after my metamorphosis from fat kid to real woman, a well-informed comforter on call to pleasure elders, reading is still my number one escape and pleasure. Riding the bus, waiting for clients, waiting for rest, I read. They should put a statue of me reading in front of the public library. I am their best customer.

  I read all of Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare. I walked right into the workhouses of Dickens’s London. Those poor kids were just like me – orphans and misfits, struggling to survive in a world of losers and drunks. I read Homer, my father’s illustrated Iliad and Odyssey, and mind-travelled to Asia Minor, imagining the spectacular rosy-fingered dawn I have just now seen rising out of the Aegean Sea. I laughed and I cried as Penelope, Portia, and Tiny Tim walked into my head and told their stories.

  I came to Asia Minor riding the magic carpet that carried me over the rough terrain of my childhood to lands beyond imagining. That ancestral carpet is a bit worn now, but it still lifts my spirits. It may lift me to the pinnacle of the steepest and highest mountain in this western Turkey. I have a fear of heights, but I have ridden the magic carpet all my life, so I trust it when there is nothing else to rely on.

  According to my mother, who read an article about Ephesus in a travel magazine, my father was not Italian as his family all eged, but Turkish. Our last name, Turka, is Italian for Turkish. I suppose I began to read Turkish poems and stories because digging for our roots would make up for losing him before I was ready to be transplanted to the land of alien mothers. I learned that famine and disease forced half the Lydian population to migrate. My ancestors may have been among them.

  Eventually my investigation brought me to Orhan Pamuk. His novel Snow took forever to read. Many times I almost stopped. The realities were painful, the politics frightening and divisive. His enigmatic characters frustrated me, especially the contradictory sisters who, I now understand, represent the secular and religious realities of a country besieged on every physical and ideological border and violated by countless external influences. I identified with both of them and would have given anything for a sibling.

  Ka, Pamuk’s fictitious poet, who embraces every reality, the saints and whores of his confused civilization, had his ta-dah! moment. He heard God in the silence of snow. I was dying to go and listen for whatever Turkey could
teach me, but I had no spare change, what the Turks call bozuk para.

  Then Mr. Good-one died and I got a sweet package deal.

  How did this happen? The short answer is that Mr. Gudewill (who came out with a surprised and happy “good one!” bless him, every time he came) was very good to me. In exchange for comfort, he insisted on paying me twice my usual charge of twenty bucks an hour, all services included. Because I wasn’t employed by his rest home, I hadn’t signed the “no tip” agreement.

  My good one gave me a big bonus at the end, but his greatest gift was friendship with a real person. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with the angel conversations my father started, but I have been lonely in the in-between.

  Every patient gets to bring a few of their favourite things to care facilities. The ladies usually chose a chair or family photos. Mr. Gudewill brought his library. Because he was so nice to the staff – peeling twenties they were required by law to return, off the stack in his drawer – the cleaners and nurses worked around his piles of books, leaving them undisturbed.

  I all owed extra time for my sessions with Mr. Gudewil; and afterward we drank tea and talked about the books I borrowed from him and read carefully because he kept his books in pristine condition. We debated whether or not dementia patients like Hagar in The Stone Angel should be allowed to wander, even at their peril, why Jane Austen failed to accuse the slave-trading sea captains preening in her drawing rooms, if Murasaki Shikibu was recognized as the first Japanese novelist because she wrote in her own dialect, unlike the men in her circle who imitated the Chinese style, and if Andre Aciman’s seder at the end of Out of Egypt wasn’t the pinnacle of post-Holocaust literature. No one had talked to me like that since my dad went to Heaven with all his special opinions.

  Mr. Gudewill agreed with me that women writers were underrated, and he always listened respectfully to my opinions. He was my university. Because I was introverted and passed as thick, no one else noticed I had a brain. Mr. Gudewill and I had a love affair with books. The sex part was purely functional, my rule and his preference.