A Light Still Burns E-Book

Selim Özdogan

• Herausgeber: V&Q Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 495

Beschreibung

'There are three ways to face life: put up with it, fight or flee.' After eight years in Turkey, Gül leaves her native Anatolia and returns to Germany. Reunited with her husband Fuat, she observes life there from the margins. As age gives her ever deeper insight, she sees society change rapidly, and yet her ability to connect to the people around her remains constant. Gül's life is shaped by the melancholy of separation, but with her warm-hearted and accepting outlook she has learned to endure homesickness and longing. Full of emotions and poetry but told without sentimentality, Selim Özdoğan's account of Gül's journey is a tender and moving novel about home, cultural identity and a life between two worlds.

Leseprobe

Selim Özdoğan was born in Germany in 1971 and has been publishing books since 1995. Apart from writing he likes being on stage, practicing yoga and drinking coffee, and is constantly trying to find ways to express the life within him.

Ayça Türkoğlu is a literary translator from German and Turkish. Her work has been shortlisted for the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize. She lives in North London.

Katy Derbyshire translates contemporary German writers including Olga Grjasnowa, Clemens Meyer and Heike Geissler. She teaches literary translation and also heads the V&Q Books imprint.

A Light Still Burns

Selim Ozdoğan

Translated by Ayça Türkoğlu and Katy Derbyshire

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

V&Q Books, Berlin 2023

An imprint of Verlag Voland & Quist GmbH

First published in the German language as Wo noch Licht brennt by Selim Ozdoğan

© Selim Ozdoğan and Haymon Verlag Ges.m.b.H., 2017

Translation © Ayça Türkoğlu and Katy Derbyshire

Editing: Isabel Adey

Copy editing: Angela Hirons

Cover photo: Unsplash

Cover design: pingundpong

Typesetting: Fred Uhde

Printing and binding: PBtisk, Příbram, Czech Republic

ISBN: 978-3-86391-366-3

eISBN: 978-3-86391-367-0

www.vq-books.eu

Inhalt

Kapitel I

Kapitel II

Kapitel III

Thank you

Translators’ Notes

I

Light glimmers under the door. Gül stops and listens. In the night’s silence, she thinks she can hear someone smoking, and she opens the door without pausing to knock. Ceyda is sitting at the table, and her cigarette snaps in the ashtray as she hurries to stub it out. Gül looks at the clock on the wall. Half three.

‘What are you doing up?’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Sleeplessness is worse than longing.’

‘Really?’

‘Longing disappears when you sleep, or at least it subsides. But when you can’t sleep, everything chases after you and there’s nowhere to catch your breath. When you don’t sleep at night, your worries grow so big that there’s no space for them in the day.’

Gül has been here for a week now. She doesn’t need to ask how her daughter is doing; she’s had enough time to see for herself.

‘Sorry for waking you up. I was trying to be quiet,’ Ceyda says.

‘I got up to go to the toilet and saw the light on.’

‘Go back to bed. No point in you losing sleep too.’

Gül shakes her head and sits down. She hopes it makes a difference. She’s been sleeping badly too, ever since she came back to Germany, but she hasn’t said anything to her daughter. If sleep could be shared, she’d give all of hers to Ceyda.

When Gül came to this country for the first time, over twenty years ago, she only knew a couple of words of German; she felt helpless, lost in another world. The people, the language, the food, the rhythm of daily life were all alien to her. She had come from a small Turkish town and kept getting lost on the way to work. When Fuat was on nights, she used to sit in their tiny kitchen, her heart bleeding for the two little daughters she’d left behind in Turkey.

Now, having returned to Germany after almost eight years in Turkey, she has a much better idea of what to expect. She doesn’t have to bear that same pain of separation, and yet she sleeps worse than she did back then – much worse. She reaches for the pack of cigarettes and holds it out to Ceyda.

‘I can’t.’

‘You’re a grown woman with two children; you can smoke in front of your mum if you want to. Look, I’ll have one myself. Let’s smoke one together and then get to bed.’

Ceyda gives her mother a light first, then sees to her own.

‘Do you remember the time,’ says Gül, ‘when your dad found your cigarettes and put them on the table without saying a thing?’

‘Of course I do. He didn’t say a single word. Not even later. I went hot all over. I had no idea what to do; I didn’t know if all hell was about to break loose. I was so frightened that I didn’t smoke for three weeks.’

Fuat still likes telling the story now, to show how easy parenting is. ‘You just need to know when to keep your mouth shut,’ he says. Fuat, who likes to talk tough. Fuat, who loves to boast. The same man who, for months now, has failed to find a flat big enough for the two of them in Bremen. Fuat, who now lives in a flat that’s even smaller than the one-bedroom flat Gül found herself in when she first arrived in Germany. Fuat, who for years has been putting her off every time she’s asked him when he’ll be joining her in Turkey, and who doesn’t seem pleased that Ceyda has helped her mum come back to Germany now. Gül was a stranger the first time she moved to Germany, but she didn’t feel unwanted, and she didn’t sleep on a sofa bed in the living room; she slept in the same bed as her husband.

Gül hears a familiar scuttling sound coming from the hallway. It’s the sound little Timur makes when he shuffles out of the bedroom in his baby sleeping bag at night. Ceyda gets up, and Gül hopes her daughter will manage another couple of hours’ sleep if she takes her son to bed with her.

Gül sits at the kitchen table and writes letters, like she did in her first days in Germany. Back then they didn’t have a telephone, and when they got one later on, her father still didn’t have one in Turkey. When the blacksmith finally got a telephone of his own, you had to register a long-distance call at the post office and wait for hours, which often led to groggy phone calls in the middle of the night.

Now she can just call him; she has the numbers for her father, her three sisters, her brother. It costs a fortune, but she could pick any one of the numbers and, with a few words, she’d be connected; she could bask in the sound of their voices, ease that sense of longing for a few moments, hear the melody that plays when they’re together.

Ceren is the only one who doesn’t have a number she can call. Ceren, who wasn’t yet three when Gül left her with her mother-in-law; the same little girl who pulled her hair and scratched her face at the foot of the stairs when they said goodbye, as if she knew she wasn’t going to see her mother for the next eighteen months. She’s living in Erzurum now because her husband has to complete his first two-year teaching post in a province in the East.

Ceren had moved back to Turkey with her mother back then, and she’d struggled with her new surroundings for the first year. She’s happy with Mecnun now though; at least one of the girls has found a good man, thanks be to God.

Gül is sitting at the kitchen table, but she doesn’t know what to write. Worries, all that spring to mind are worries. The rift between her and Fuat, Ceyda’s problems with her husband Adem, his indifference towards her. Gül’s own fears for the future, her sorrow at having left Turkey again.

She wanted to return to Germany because she’d felt lost in her hometown when Ceren moved away and Fuat still hadn’t come back to protect her from other men and their lewd remarks. She wanted to return to Germany so that she could live with Fuat and be there for Ceyda, but now she misses her father, misses her sister Sibel, misses the summer house, misses the distance from Germany. Ceren might feel bad about her own happiness if Gül were to write all this to her.

The pen in her hand has worries; the paper in front of her has worries; the envelope has worries; the stamps have worries. Nothing has that easiness, or so it seems to Gül; how is she supposed to write something for Ceren to carry with her, how is she supposed to find the words to forge a connection? Half an hour passes and she’s barely finished the first paragraph, so she gives up, goes into the living room and turns on the television. On the German channel – they still can’t get Turkish stations – there’s an interview with a woman whose accent Gül recognises instantly. Tanja used to speak just like her. Tanja, the only German who lived on Factory Lane back then, who took on some of her neighbours’ customs and was happy among all the foreigners. The old lady everyone knew as Auntie Tanja died shortly before Gül moved back to Turkey. Gül thinks about Factory Lane, where they lived for years before the wool factory closed and she and Fuat lost their jobs. That was before Fuat found a position at Mercedes in Bremen and Gül decided to move to Turkey, with Fuat planning to follow her a few years later. Ceyda was already married at the time and stayed in Germany; Ceren was still at school and moved back to Turkey with her mum.

They had troubles, even on Factory Lane, but looking back, Gül thinks, it seems they were happy there. When the children were too young to translate for her, she would often go to Auntie Tanja whenever she received official letters she didn’t understand, and Tanja would patiently try to explain what the writing said. Tanja spoke differently to the other Germans, but Gül never wondered why that might be. Now she recognises the accent on TV and listens to this woman, who says she’s glad to finally be allowed to travel, glad that those at the top are being made to pay for not taking their own people seriously.

Gül never asked Tanja where she came from. All she knew was that her marriage had been childless, and her husband had died before she moved into Factory Lane. She was amazed by how few Germans there were at Auntie Tanja’s funeral; she thought it was because family was less important to the Germans, but now she thinks she understands better. All Tanja’s loved ones had been left behind in the East.

Death is God’s will; if only there were no separation. Gül murmurs these lines of Orhan Veli to herself. Separation finds people. It found her father, the blacksmith, when he was a young boy and his father died. Later, it found him again when it took his wife Fatma from him. It found Gül when she was almost six and her mother died.

But separation finds people without death, too. It found Gül when her husband was in the army, it found her two daughters when she moved to Germany without them, and it found all of Gül’s siblings, who only see one another once or twice a year. Separation has followed Gül almost all her life. But it doesn’t just follow those who lose their parents, and those who move away, it follows others too. It settled over all of Germany when the country was divided.

We are connected, Gül thinks. The Lord’s servants are all connected by separation, which follows us like a faithful friend. It’s just the same for those who move away as for those who stay at home. And those who don’t know it have drawn the lot of loneliness and are not to be envied either. Oh Lord, I shoulder the weight of separation a thousand times, and I thank you for my two healthy daughters, who can stand on their own two feet. Thank you for my hands, which can write letters, and for my eyes, which can still see.

She turns off the television and goes back into the kitchen. She lights a cigarette and picks up the pen.

Her bookish son-in-law will like the quote too. ‘Death is God’s will; if only there were no separation,’ the poem says. But separation is life, she writes. If you’re no longer separated from anyone, you’re dead.

Another poem springs to mind: a poem about wishing for an end to all the fighting, the hunger, the weariness, the needs of the body, the pain; a poem in which the person is basically wishing for death. It’s only separation, she writes, and it doesn’t last forever. God loves his creations, and even if he has them endure separation, only after death does it last forever.

Gül writes a letter full of melancholy and heavy thoughts, but not sorrows; she writes a letter in which there is a place for love amid the melancholy, a letter to warm a heart in springtime after a harsh Erzurum winter.

Fuat was already limping when he picked Gül up from the airport; he’d bumped his knee, he said. That was almost three weeks ago now. Three weeks in which Gül has been staying with Ceyda in a Hamburg suburb and only seeing her husband on the weekends because he lives and works in Bremen. Three weeks in which Fuat’s limp has got worse and worse. Now, he calls to tell his wife he’s in hospital and they’re keeping him in. He’s got an abscess on his knee that has needed surgery.

‘He’s never taken care of you, but still you want to rush straight over the moment he calls?’

‘He’s my husband.’

Ceyda looks at her mother. Her husband. The man Ceyda calls Dad, the man she and her mother often had to carry in from the car at night so that the next morning, their neighbours on Factory Lane wouldn’t see that he’d been too drunk to make it inside.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘If you want to, we’ll go. We’ll take the car and leave the kids with Adem’s mum.’

It’s the first time Gül has seen Ceyda drive, and she’s pleased for her daughter. She wanted her children to get a better education than she did, wanted them to be independent. She always admired her friend Saniye, who did a lot of the driving when their two families made the long trip to Turkey together. To Gül, driving seems like freedom, but even in the passenger’s seat she’s scared; she can’t imagine ever having the courage to drive herself.

The first half hour passes in silence. Ceyda has never been much of a talker, and most of the time Gül doesn’t know what’s going on in her daughter’s head. She doesn’t know why she decided to train as a hairdresser after school, why she married Adem, or whether she still resents her mother for leaving her behind in Turkey as a child.

It’s unusual for Gül to be quiet for so long, but she enjoys the first part of the trip. She enjoys it because the car is a private space, a space with only the two of them in it – no phone to ring, no one there to open the door unexpectedly, no children clamouring for attention. In the car with her daughter, Gül feels less troubled than she does in the kitchen at night.

‘I didn’t mean to be a burden. Maybe I can stay in the flat in Bremen while your dad’s in the hospital.’

‘You’re not a burden, Mum. The kids are happy, and I haven’t cooked a meal since you’ve been here, thanks be to your hands. And you know what Dad’s like: he puts things off, but he’ll find a nice flat for you both, maybe even from his hospital bed. He just needs a bit of a nudge. I’ll take care of that. You probably won’t be staying with us for much longer anyway, so I want us to enjoy the time we’ve got together.’

‘Do you think Adem minds?’

Ceyda hesitates; lights a cigarette. In front of her mother. Gives a tortured smile.

‘Honestly? To be honest, I don’t know. I’d tell you if it annoyed him, I’d tell you and I’d be glad I could. I’d be glad of any sign of emotion. Sometimes he gets annoyed with the kids, but other than that he’s the most apathetic person you can imagine. You’ve seen him, haven’t you? All these years we’ve been married, and he’s still a mystery to me. I didn’t want a man like Dad; I didn’t want a man who drinks, and now I’ve got one like the men Dad used to complain about, a man who lives like a plant. He doesn’t hit me, he doesn’t swear, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t overeat; he doesn’t take pleasure in anything, doesn’t help with the housework, doesn’t care how I am, and he can’t remember a thing I tell him. It wouldn’t bother him if I upped and left. It’s enough to drive me mad. Every time he comes home and the curtains are closed, he asks: Why did you close the curtains? It’s the middle of the day. Every single time. And once I’ve answered, he opens them and says to me: What am I supposed to do in the dark? But he never loses his temper. Never.’

Ceyda looks at her mother. ‘I don’t think you being here bothers him. I think it bothers him more when the batteries run out in the remote control.’

What is Gül supposed to say? I’m your mother, you can count on me. Do what you think is right – you’re a new generation, you’ll spend your whole life here in Germany, I’ll stand by you and support every choice you make. But would she really stand by her daughter? Wouldn’t she voice her motherly concerns? Gül only has a sofa to sleep on; she doesn’t earn a penny, and she couldn’t get her husband to find a flat big enough for the two of them in time. But she found her place in Germany once before, and she vows she’ll find it this time too. She’ll stand upright so Ceyda has someone to lean on. She will. Eventually.

When Ceyda has found out which ward her father is on, they take the lift from reception to the fourth floor. As the two of them are leaving the lift, Gül notices a woman closing the door to a room and walking towards them. It’s not until the woman has gone past and they’re approaching Fuat’s door that Gül realises the woman has just left his room.

Fuat is lying on his bed with the TV on and has a slight grin on his face as he sits up. He’s been using a sunbed in winter for a few years, and now he looks a picture of health against the white hospital sheets. The young man in the next bed, a redhead, is reading a tabloid newspaper. Gül knows the Germans don’t have words for this situation. They don’t just walk into a hospital room and say get well soon. Ceren had to stay in hospital for a few days as a child after an accident, and that was where she met her friend Gesine; Gül spent a lot of time on the ward back then.

‘May it pass,’ she says.

‘Thank you, thank you.’

‘What exactly happened?’

‘I just scraped my knee on the corner of my locker at work, I told you, remember? I thought it’d get better on its own, but it kept getting worse, and yesterday on my shift I couldn’t put any weight on it, let alone work. They had to open up my knee to get all the pus out. I could have ended up with blood poisoning, the doctor said. It beggars belief, and of course it had to happen right when production’s at full stretch. The amount of overtime I’m missing out on just because I have to stay in here.’

‘How long are they keeping you in? Did they tell you anything?’

‘A week. A week; it’s almost like waiting for death.’

‘Now that doesn’t sound like you,’ says Ceyda. ‘You’re hardly the type to lie around for a week, are you Dad? I bet you get all sorts of things done while you’re here.’

‘My daughter knows me well,’ says Fuat, flattered.

There are all sorts of things you can say about him, but he’s not lazy, and it’s important to him to be seen as the crafty kind.

‘I bet you’ll even manage to find a flat for you and Mum from in here. It wouldn’t surprise me.’

‘We’ll see, we’ll see. It’s not easy to find a cheap flat in this town. And I can’t exactly go and look at anywhere in this state, can I? I can hardly make it to the smoking room with my leg in this state.’

‘Do you want to give me the keys for your flat? Then Ceyda won’t have to keep driving me back and forth.’

‘What would you do all on your own in the flat? You don’t know anyone in Bremen. Will you just sit in that tiny room twiddling your thumbs the whole time? Or worse still: spend all day here in the hospital? This is no place for healthy people. I’ll be fine in here, just fine. Wouldn’t you be better off with your daughter? First you want to come to Germany, then you can’t think of anything better to do than keep going back and forth between a flat and a hospital? Get yourself a job if you’ve got that much time on your hands.’

Gül doesn’t know why Fuat is so worked up about it. Her old friend Saniye lives in Bremen, though they haven’t seen each other since Gül moved back to Turkey; they’ve only written letters and talked on the phone three or four times. She was going to mention Saniye, but after Fuat’s outburst, she doesn’t know whether the feeling in her stomach will want out in the form of tears, so she holds her tongue instead.

Get yourself a job. All the times she heard that same thing when she lived in Germany before. It wasn’t her fault they closed the wool factory down, and it wasn’t her fault the employment market was so tough. They were lucky enough that Fuat managed to find a new job. Fuat kept complaining about having to feed three mouths on one wage; he’d never be able to secure a future for them in Turkey. Money, money was what they needed to secure a future for themselves. The repatriation money was 10,500 marks for Gül and 1500 marks for Ceren. Who could have known, back then, that Fuat would keep putting off his own return again and again, or that Ceren would marry and move to Erzurum? Who could have known that Ceyda would move heaven and earth to help her mother get back to Germany? And who can know, now, that Ceren will live in Germany again one day, too?

Get yourself a job. It’s like when he used to say he preferred slim women. It hurts. It dampens the light inside her. One time she retorted that she preferred men with hair on their heads, and he hasn’t said a word about her figure since. Get yourself a job. There’s nothing she can say in response. Get yourself a job – as if it were as easy as that.

‘She’s been here less than a month; you haven’t even got a flat together yet. We’ll find something, don’t you worry,’ says Ceyda.

Gül is surprised by her daughter’s sharp tone. She’s no longer the girl who could hardly tell left from right when there was a pack of cigarettes on the table.

‘I can’t wait to see how that turns out,’ Fuat answers. ‘A job doesn’t mean sitting by a nice warm stove and getting 400 marks a month in the bank, not having to pay rent, and wasting the whole day on gossip and women’s nonsense.’

‘We came here to visit you and wish you a speedy recovery,’ Ceyda says.

‘Well, you’ve done that now. Thanks be to your feet.’

Gül sees Ceyda’s hands trembling when she presses the button in the lift. She knows how much self-control it takes her daughter not to burst into tears when she closes the car door behind her.

‘Don’t let it get to you. You know what he’s like,’ Gül says, wondering what on earth she’s doing in Germany.

Gül is amazed by how much Saniye has aged over the past eight years; there are lines around her eyes, her red hair has lost its lustre. She’s still as slim as when Gül first met her, though, and despite the shadows under her eyes she doesn’t look exhausted – she’s radiant as she hugs Gül.

‘What luck,’ she says. ‘Life is bringing us back together. I didn’t think we’d ever see each other again. Though the Lord has shown me often enough in my life that we always meet the ones we love, again and again.’

Saniye’s feelings are like water, they always find a way; but they never get dammed up. Gül is amazed all over again, every time, by how happy this petite woman can be and how much space grief takes up inside her.

Gül’s heart grows lighter when she sees her friend. It’s as if they last saw each other yesterday and Saniye has aged overnight. Their connection is there, immediately. Gül remembers it wasn’t like that with her sisters when she moved back to Turkey. Perhaps because she was almost a child when she married Fuat and moved out of the house, and because she was a young woman when she met Saniye.

Saniye will be nearby. Now that her father is so far away, now that she no longer has her sister Sibel nearby and can’t sit snuggled up by the stove with Ceren, Saniye will be the one with whom she can share everything.

Gül’s second visit to Fuat was calmer, although she was much more upset. But she was more careful, too, because she wanted to get out of the hospital without hearing hurtful words. And because, after the visit with Ceyda, she was looking forward to going to see Saniye, who lives on a high-rise estate and is working at a bakery these days. She’s had so many different jobs over the years that Gül can barely remember them all. Saniye doesn’t mind stopping somewhere and starting all over again somewhere else. She gets used to new things quickly.

When Gül first came to Germany, she worked in a chicken slaughterhouse, sewed bras in a factory, and worked in an industrial bakery, albeit only briefly and without a permit. Her first proper job was at the wool factory, where she stayed until she was let go.

In Saniye’s living room, there is a large bookcase full of Turkish books and another unit, almost as big, full of records and CDs. It’s the first time Gül has seen a CD. The television is enormous. Fuat would be overjoyed to have such a huge TV, but it would hardly fit into his flat, and even if the flat were bigger, he probably wouldn’t buy it. There are huge, expensive-looking speakers, and on the wall is a picture filled with everyday objects in strange, flowing shapes. But there’s a blue eye hanging over the door, to keep away the evil eye, as well as a samovar, tulip-shaped glasses, little crocheted coverlets – all familiar sights to Gül.

Saniye’s husband, Yılmaz, didn’t come to Germany for work; he came after being kicked out of university for his political activities. That explains all the books, Gül thinks, but she doesn’t know why anyone who reads so much would need such a big TV.

Gül stirs two sugars into her tea and is tempted to explain her anguish, but then thinks better of it. Ceyda has already gone home, and it’s just her and Saniye now, but why drape a blanket of grief over their happy reunion? Why think back to those sad melodies? The two women light their cigarettes. That late afternoon, in a living room full of books and records and CDs, it all blends together: the sweet tea, the words, the stories from the past, the early days they shared in Germany, Saniye’s silvery laugh, Gül’s contented sighs – it all creates a bubble, lifting them both out of their everyday lives. They simply share what’s moved them in recent years, who’s had children, who’s died, who’s out of a job, and who fate has treated with particular kindness or cruelty.

Gül has already drunk six whole glasses of tea by the time she hears the key in the door. The sound pulls her back; there’s still a world outside, and from it, Yılmaz appears. Once he’s said a hearty welcome to Gül, he glances at his wife with a question in his eyes. She shakes her head gently. The smile disappears from his lips, and Gül feels out of place.

‘We’ve run out of butter,’ says Saniye. ‘Could you pop back out to the supermarket for some?’

Yılmaz nods. Their daughter, Sevgi, arrives home while he’s out.

‘You remember who this is, don’t you?’ says Saniye.

‘How could I ever forget Auntie Gül?’ says the girl. ‘I always loved visiting you on Factory Lane, even though Ceyda and Ceren were so much older than me.’

Gül has tears in her eyes. Sevgi must have been about five when they last saw each other. Without hesitation, the girl walks up to Gül, hugs her, gives her a kiss and lays her head on Gül’s shoulder.

‘That scent,’ she says. ‘You don’t smell the same any more.’

‘Sevgi—’ says Saniye with a note of caution in her voice as they hear the key in the door again.

The smell will come back, Gül thinks, I’ll make a home for myself again, one where everyone will feel good again, one we’ll remember, just like Factory Lane. If only our good dreams could come true and the bad ones be forgotten.

Yılmaz comes back in, and his eyes are shining; he smiles.

‘That scent lives with you now,’ says Gül.

Saniye looks at Gül as if her comment were innuendo rather than a compliment, though Gül has no idea what she might mean.

Gül sleeps on another sofa that night, she sleeps as if sleep were the stuff of courage and not something you wake from to find your daughter smoking in the kitchen.

Gül is afraid of getting lost, she’s afraid of finding herself in a situation she doesn’t have the German for, she’s afraid of words that wound, she’s afraid of landing herself in unfamiliar situations – but she’s not afraid of work. No matter how high the mountain in front of her, she won’t hesitate to start climbing. Her father used to hammer away in the blazing heat of the fire. Gül remembers the sound of his sweat dripping onto hot iron. He never complained about his work, but he often griped about his itchy calves. Gül is not afraid of work; she and Fuat are alike in this regard. That said, Fuat is a keen skiver – not because he’s lazy, but because he feels smart when he does less than he’s supposed to without suffering any consequences.

Gül isn’t afraid of work, and as far as she knows, her daughter is the same. So when Ceyda calls in sick to the salon one morning, Gül is surprised. Ceyda notices the astonishment on her mother’s face and says: ‘They know I have to call in sick now and then.’

‘Sick? You look perfectly healthy to me.’

‘I’m already getting little spots in the corners of my eyes, like the colours are running and turning spiky. And my fingers are numb. It won’t be long before the headache comes on.’

Gül still can’t believe it. Her daughter, calling in sick because of a headache? She looks more than able to turn up for work. Ceyda draws the curtains, and Gül thinks back, trying to remember if her daughter ever complained of headaches when she still lived at home.

‘So how long have you been getting these headaches?’

‘They started about a year after Duygu was born.’

‘What did the doctor say about it?’

‘They’re migraines, there’s not much you can do.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about it when they started?’

‘Oh, Mum, what difference would it have made?’

Ceyda has turned pale in the past few minutes, even in the half-light of the drawn curtains it was clear to see. Now she gets up and goes to the toilet, where she throws up. Gül still doesn’t know what’s in store for Ceyda today. Soon after she’s been sick, Ceyda slumps onto the sofa and can’t bring herself to do much more than lie there. She asks her mother to tread quietly, though the carpet is thick and swallows every sound. Ceyda turns down the offer of aspirin, saying they don’t do any good; she won’t take a coffee with lemon juice or a cold compress either.

Gül watches helplessly as her daughter writhes about on the sofa – only slowly, because moving hurts. She hears Ceyda whimpering and can see the agony in her face. If she stares at her for long enough, she gets an idea of how a migraine must feel: a hammering pain from inside, pressing against one side of your skull and one side of your eye, your stomach feeling like it wants to travel all the way up to your mouth, every move your body makes echoing with pain that resounds long afterwards. Gül wishes she could take Ceyda in her arms and comfort her, caress and support her, but Ceyda can’t bear the slightest touch. She doesn’t even want to hear her mother’s voice.

‘Mum, please don’t say anything else. There’s nothing anyone can do. Just be quiet, and with a little luck I’ll be back on my feet by the time the kids get home.’

As usual, the children are with their cousins at their other grandmother’s house. Their grandfather died before he got the chance to meet a single one of them, and his wife, now a widow, runs a strict but loving regime for the little hooligans, as she calls them. ‘I raised seven children,’ she says, ‘I’m more than a match for these four.’ But in two years’ time, she’ll feel too old for it all and will want her peace.

Gül goes into the kitchen to cook; she has to distract herself somehow.

‘Mum,’ Ceyda cries, and her voice sounds desperate, weak, broken. A little like it sounded all those summers ago, when she saw her mother again after eighteen months apart. Mum, those three letters form a sound that holds such pain, blame, despair, powerlessness and longing all at once.

Gül ventures into the living room as quietly as she can.

‘Mum, please don’t cook. I can’t abide the smell.’

A few hours later, Adem arrives home from his early shift at the glass factory.

‘Why have you closed the curtains?’ he asks. ‘It’s the middle of the day.’

‘I’ve got a migraine, Adem.’

‘Don’t you want to go to bed? I’d like to watch the telly.’

Gül struggles to keep a lid on her anger.

‘I’m grateful, to be honest,’ Ceyda says later. ‘At one time he would’ve just picked up the remote and turned on the TV. It’s not like there’s anything I can do to help, he’d say, and as far as he was concerned, that was that.’

With those dark eyes, those bushy eyebrows and that head of hers – long despite her chubby cheeks – baby Fatma resembles her father in every way. Gül sits in Ceyda’s kitchen with the photo of her granddaughter and can feel the force that connects her to the child, named after Gül’s beloved mother. She only knows Ceren’s daughter from this photo taken three months ago. Fatma is seven months old now and much bigger than in the picture; she’s starting to crawl. Mecnun had to go into town to get the film developed, but the streets were snowed under for weeks. The temperature dropped to minus thirty over the winter, Ceren writes; she can count on one hand how many times she left the house in the first few months after Fatma was born. What would she do outside anyway? Mecnun didn’t work for three weeks because there wasn’t enough wood to heat the classroom.

So much time has passed since Gül’s childhood. There’s a telephone in every post office, though not in every house yet; people have their own cameras, and technology is making progress in every area of their lives. Gül wonders if all those things – telephones, televisions, cameras – came about out of longing: were they all invented because one person wanted to feel closer to another? Is longing the force behind it all? So much has changed since her childhood, but schools in Turkey still close for want of heating fuel. She used to shiver at school, Ceren shivered, and perhaps Fatma will shiver too one day. There is no way Gül could know that Fatma will go to school in the south of the country, where the winters are milder.

It’s springtime now, Ceren is doing well, the school holidays are coming up for Mecnun, and in the summer they’ll be heading to Gül’s hometown, where they’ll all be reunited for a while. Gül’s sisters and brother will come with their children, Ceyda will be there, and the blacksmith will sit smiling again, his eyes welling with joy. Gül remembers how much she always used to enjoy the summers, how much life there was in those six weeks of holidays, how she blossomed, how those summers filled her up, how long they nourished her.

When Ceren told her she was pregnant, Gül was happy. Only a mother knows how a mother feels, she said. A person who doesn’t have children can’t understand what it’s like to have them. People who’ve read and heard about it, studied and understood it, they don’t know what it’s like; only those who’ve lived it can know. Gül was happy. I’ve set these girls on their paths, and now they’re standing on their own two feet, having children of their own. I could die in peace, even though I’m only forty, she thought. And yet she knew then that Ceyda was having problems in her marriage, and she wanted to make sure she was still around for her daughters.

Gül would like a photo of herself and her brother and sisters standing under the big mulberry tree in the garden as children. A photo that was never taken. A photo like a door to another world, which will always look beautiful because it’s in the past, and because you can never be driven out of your own memories. A photo that reminds you that you felt whole, safe and sound. A note in a melody you heard every day. The melody they’re all a part of, no matter where they are right now; a tune sung over and over, on and on, the melody to which every new child in the family adds a new note.

Photos can quench the longing of our eyes, a telephone can quench the longing of our ears, but it’s letters that quench the longings of the heart. Reading the words over and over again, we come closer to something, as the words come from one heart, traveling through hands onto paper, and stream into our hearts through our eyes. They flow through hands and arms, which are extensions of the heart because the heart is nourished by touch, by fingers stroking cheeks, by hands transferring warmth, by arms laid around others, by shoulders leaning on other shoulders.

Letters quench the longing of the heart, but only for a while; longing can only be stopped if the skin’s thirst is quenched too.

Fuat has had a fall and has broken his heel.

‘You’d think everything would be done properly in a country like this,’ he complains. ‘I’d have taken the bleeding lift instead of the stairs with my bad knee, but one of them was out of order, the other one was reserved for porters, and I could have had a smoke in the time I spent waiting for the third one. It beggars belief – this is a hospital, but they practically force you to take the stairs. That Marlboro cost me a lot, I can tell you – now I can’t even move without a wheelchair. All the overtime I’m missing out on, the muck they call food here, the life you’re expected to live here, like you’re not even an animal, just a weed by the side of the road. Smoking has its price – those non-smokers tell you how much a pack costs and how that adds up over the years – but do they want me to do my sums right here? What’s the point in me giving up smoking now? The overtime’s gone and I’m still stuck here.’

‘How long?’

‘At least another week, the doctor says, but I still won’t be able to walk after that.’

‘You need clean clothes,’ Gül says.

‘No… it’s just a week… What I’ve got here’s still clean. What do you think I get up to here? And I don’t spill my food; I’m not an old man.’

‘It’s not right,’ says Gül. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll go and pick up a few clean things for you.’ Gül doesn’t have any ulterior motive when she says this. Or at least, that’s what she thinks afterwards, that there was no motive behind it. But was there a force driving her that was stronger than her mind?

The flat’s not as far from the hospital as she thought; it’s only a walk away really. Gül unlocks the door, walks into Fuat’s little bachelor flat and sees a pack of Lord cigarettes on the kitchen worktop.

The heat seems to be coming from two directions. As if someone were pouring boiling water over her, and at the same time, molten lava were shooting out of the roots of her hair.

‘I’ll just have a drink of water – you have a look in the wardrobe for some clothes,’ she says to Ceyda, who’s come in behind her.

She’s amazed you can’t hear the heat in her voice. She pockets the cigarettes; the ashtray next to them has been emptied. Once she’s taken a glass out of the cupboard she bends down, looks in the bin under the sink, and finds what she suspected. She gets even hotter. It’s only when she straightens up that she spots the postcard leaning against the microwave. Welcome, it says, under a picture of a house that looks like it was drawn for children. As she runs the tap, she turns over the card, reads the first two words. Her mouth is dry; she’d like to gulp down the glass of water, but she feels like her throat has closed up. With an effort, she forces two mouthfuls down.

‘What’s the matter?’ Ceyda asks.

‘I don’t know, I just got really hot,’ Gül says. ‘Maybe it’s the menopause already.’

‘Do you want to have a sit down?’

‘No, no, I’m alright.’

Her brain feels numb, like it’s been rubbed with ice. Her ears don’t seem to be hearing properly and the picture around her is starting to go blurry, but there are scraps in her mind’s eye, coming together. As if she’d known it all along but had run away from that knowledge. As though she’d only ever looked into the light so as not to see anything around it. Now she’ll have to get used to the dark.

But perhaps she wasn’t running away at all; perhaps she was heading straight towards it, her eyes shut tight.

We all need someone to talk to. When you don’t want to tell anyone how you feel, that’s when you need someone to talk to most of all.

She holds it in on the drive back to the hospital, when she sees Fuat, on the drive home, over dinner, while she loads the dishwasher and watches TV. She holds it all in until she’s lying on the couch with the light off. How can she let go when all that will come is tears? She can’t get up, go into the kitchen and smoke, smoke all night long until her heart can no longer feel through all the fumes in her lungs. She can’t smoke until everything’s fogged up. She can’t even keep the light off and just take solace in the dark – what would she say if the door opened and Ceyda wanted to know what she was doing?

She lies awake, thinking the same thoughts over and over again. Why would he do this? She asked him once – when he was plastered after they got home from Ceren’s wedding, she said: ‘We married young, we weren’t much more than children. Lots of things can happen in this world. Is there something you want to tell me?’ She gathered up her courage and asked him plainly. And he said no.

Is this why he kept putting off joining her in Turkey? How could he do something like this to her? Do his friends know? Who knows about it? What did she do to deserve it? Didn’t she do everything to make a home for him? And with a German! The woman who came out of his hospital room looked like a German. What’s he doing with a German woman? Isn’t it enough, all the separation and longing this country has brought her? Does it have to take her husband away from her as well? Has Ceyda guessed? Why doesn’t he make more of an effort to hide it? Does he think she’s stupid? How does he imagine things are going to go from here? How could he betray her like this? How could he abuse her trust like this? Why does it hurt so much? Why did she shut her eyes to it for so long?

She keeps seeing the woman in the hospital corridor, and she goes over the same thoughts and questions again and again, turning round and round in circles. But that’s not all. The thoughts stay the same, but the feelings change as the night wears on. The questions change colour. At first there’s only black, a liquid black that threatens to drown her, but soon the black is joined by violet. Violet like the rings under Gül’s mother’s eyes before she died. The violet gradually turns to red, and new thoughts appear. It was important for me to come here. This is where she belongs. What is he thinking? Why should that numbskull get to be so free? Where’s his honour, his decency? As morning comes, her thoughts are tinged red; as morning comes, she feels like getting up, going to the hospital and giving that man a piece of her mind. As morning comes, the fire of rage burns so brightly inside her that she feels she could walk all the way to Bremen, never fearing she might lose her way. If only she knew how to get there. As morning comes, she gets up and reads the postcard again in the first light of the day. Sweetie pie, it says, welcome home. I’m so glad you’re back on your feet. Karen – Kiss, kiss, kiss.

Gül feels like ripping the card into a thousand pieces, but she’s not that stupid. After reading it another ten times over, she goes outside to smoke two or three cigarettes without anyone disturbing her. Agitated, she takes puff after puff and feels the fresh air cool her wrath a little.

‘I hope you’re up early for a good reason,’ says Ceyda.

‘Like I said, I think it’s the menopause; it brings all sorts of changes,’ Gül answers.

She smiles. She knows the smile is fragile. She knows her thoughts will take on many different colours yet, before they fade. But she feels a force, a strength. Perhaps it’s the same one that brought her back to Germany. A force that doesn’t come from inside of her, but that belongs to everyone: the force that is passed on in our blood, the strength of our ancestors.

II

It’s hot inside the flat, and Gül often stands by the open window, looking down onto the street. The attic flat in Bremen is her seventh home. First she lived with her parents, in the village and then in town, and later she moved into her in-laws’ house; then she moved to Germany, where she lived in a little flat with Fuat before they moved to Factory Lane, an unpaved street, home mainly to other Turks. Happy days on Factory Lane were followed by years in her own house in Turkey, and now, after weeks on Ceyda’s couch, she finds herself in a flat in an old building from before the war. Out the window, she can see a street with lots of shops, takeaways and restaurants, young people with brightly coloured hair, students, homeless people, and people who seem absent, moving a little too slowly, seemingly unaware of where they’re going. She sees and hears Germans, Turks, Kurds, Italians, and she notices there aren’t any children playing in the street here.

An old German couple who don’t say hello live below them, and she still hasn’t seen anyone in the flat two floors down. The first person she gets to know here is Herr Bender, who owns the bookshop on the ground floor. He’s about fifty, with silver-grey hair – he wears dark-coloured shirts, and his blue eyes seem to smile kindly behind his glasses. He always acknowledges Gül and speaks to her a few times too. These are the first conversations Gül’s had in German since she’s been back. She’s heard lots of German in the last few weeks and has been getting used to the language again, but when she starts to speak, she realises she exhausts her limits quicker than before. It makes her uncomfortable, but she smiles because she doesn’t want to discourage Herr Bender. She explains, as best she can, that she lived nearby for many years, that she’s spent a few years in Turkey, that she’s now moved to Germany for a second time, that she has two married daughters, and that she’s unemployed for the time being. Herr Bender is currently looking for a new cleaning lady. Gül has been living in the attic flat for two weeks when she starts work cleaning the bookshop after closing time.

If Fuat knew about this, he might be pleased to know his wife is so shrewd. But when he gets home after his shift, he picks up his dinner without saying a word, pours himself a whiskey and Coke, and plonks himself down in front of the TV. He watches German quiz shows, American action series, the news; he’ll watch anything, but he seems grateful that there’s more choice now and he can switch between channels at his leisure. But still, when a quiz contestant wins the jackpot, Fuat will open his mouth and say, ‘It beggars belief.’

If it’s a lot of money, he’ll go one step further: ‘All that moolah for twenty minutes’ work – the only thing quicker is filling out a lottery ticket. Probably doesn’t even need the money, just look at him. What a life – only the rich ever win. If only we could put that kind of money away without having to bow and scrape and sweat for it. That’s clean money, crisp notes that’ve never seen the muck of the factory floor. Just look at it; every penny we’ve put aside stinks of sweat and hard work. Every single penny.’

Gül doesn’t react. This is the second time she’s spent the summer in Germany instead of going to Turkey; it’s hot up on the top floor, she has no one to talk to, and when she takes the stairs up to the flat, she’s out of breath and drenched with sweat by the time she’s made it half way. She wonders if the stairs would be easier if she lost weight. She wonders if she should go to Turkey alone, if her daughters know what’s going on. She wonders where they go from here. She wonders, every day.

Gül dreams she’s in her father’s summer house and everyone’s together again. She dreams herself there without thinking of recent events; she dreams up that togetherness that they’ve only ever been able to enjoy for weeks at a time; she dreams herself to her daughters, who are spending the summer with their grandfather – she can call them now, because her father has a telephone at home. She regularly goes and stands in the stuffy phone booth over the road and calls them up. Some of the money she earns working for Herr Bender she collects in five-mark pieces, and she takes a handful of them in her bag when she goes over to make a call. They don’t have a telephone at home, but even if they did, she wouldn’t make calls from it; she wouldn’t know how much she was spending, and this way, at least she can slot one coin after another into the machine and Fuat is none the wiser.

Fatma has said her first words; Ceyda hasn’t had any migraines on holiday and has been staying in town with her children Duygu and Timur, while her husband Adem is off visiting his grandparents in their village. Gül’s brother, Emin, has given up his job as a teacher and is moving to Istanbul, where Nalan, the youngest of his four sisters, has lived for years. Melike, the second-eldest, doesn’t seem very happy about this for some reason. But of all the things Gül hears from her hometown that summer, what concerns her most is the news of Mecnun’s constant stomach pains. He can hardly eat a thing and has already lost nine kilos while they’ve been on holiday. Nine kilos? He was no fatter than Gül’s little finger to start with – he must be little more than skin and bone now. If only she could give him a few of the kilos she has to spare.

Gül can often be found standing in the stuffy little booth. She knows she mustn’t take it for granted that she can hear her daughters’ voices, and she knows she mustn’t take it for granted that, in those short phone calls, no one seems to notice that she tells them less than she used to.

It’s her second summer in Germany, a summer when Fuat comes home and can hardly wait for kick-off. When Gül sees the joy he takes in following the game, she boils with rage. How can he? His envy of other people’s money, his belief that happiness is all down to your bank balance has hardly bothered her before, but now she finds herself wondering how he can be so detached. Gül’s anger doesn’t escape Fuat’s notice, even though she bites her tongue. He says: ‘Surely you can’t begrudge me this game? I’m home on the dot every day, I don’t drink with my friends, I don’t gamble, I don’t do anything anymore; I just go to work and come straight home. I’m like a prisoner here, you could—’

‘Shut your mouth,’ says Gül, ‘or who knows what will happen. Just shut your bloody mouth.’

Fuat is so shocked, he falls silent.

Gül stands at the window, smoking and looking down at the street as it empties before the football starts. She looks down at the street and thinks every day about the words she’s heard so often: Leave home, no returning; come home, forever yearning.

So say the ancestors.

Perhaps the world was different then, Gül thinks. Perhaps it didn’t turn as quickly. In those days you could still go back, but that’s not possible now. She knows she hasn’t seen much of Germany – far less than she’s seen of Turkey, and she hardly knows Turkey either. Her friend Aysel in Turkey told her she used to work in German vineyards. Gül can’t imagine vineyards in Germany; she hardly knows this country, but the little she does know has changed. In the old days, you couldn’t get peppers or aubergines, watermelons or lamb. Now, out of her window, she sees a kebab shop across the road selling döner and lahmacun, which everyone here just calls ‘Turkish pizza’.

Germany has changed. She didn’t notice it while she was living on Factory Lane, she was too close up; but now she sees that the country she originally came to no longer exists. Just as Turkey is not the same country she once left. Those who leave can never return, because the places they knew disappear.

What on earth brought her to Germany, why did she marry a man who followed the call of money, why did God give Fuat eyes that could only ever see the riches on the horizon but not the worries on his wife and daughters’ minds?

And yet she’s back here now, and there may be no returning, but there are reunions with the people she loves. You’ll always see people again, as long as you’re still on this side of life.

You have to stay together, she thinks, you have to stay together, even if it means you have less than you once did. There’s no going back, and you can’t just up and leave and find a new homeland because you weren’t happy with the old one. The same way you can’t just go looking for a new woman because you’ve sent your wife ahead on her own, only to never follow her. Staying together takes willpower. And loyalty. Being loyal means not constantly looking out for something better and trying to gain an advantage.

Gül never chose for her mother to die so young; she never chose to be the oldest of five and to have to look after the others. But she did choose Fuat, and after several others had asked for her hand. She was young back then, and there are days when she can barely remember why she said yes to him, but she’s never turned away from him like this before.

What did that man ever learn, what does he know about loyalty and sticking together? He’s betrayed her. Betrayed her for what? What did he get out of it? What did all those years alone far from home give him? Fuat doesn’t know much – definitely less than her. He doesn’t know there can be no going back; he wasn’t the one who lived in Turkey for eight years. He doesn’t know what it is to hold fast, to have faith, to be sincere.

He must be lonely