FICTION

Mulberry Spot

—SHORT STORY by Selma Aydin

(Translated from Turkish by Yağmur Pesen & İlayda Zeynep Kalender)

We were supposedly urban children of a large family living in two rooms.

I say this because we were born and raised in the city; otherwise we are very much in love with our village, which our ancestors called home.

While we were living on our own as a small family, our house was frequented by those who came from our village in this mining city, sometimes to see the doctor and sometimes to satisfy their longing for the city. Those comings and goings usually happened in the winter months. The decrease in in the intensity of village work would create an opportunity for them.

When we consider the conditions in Turkey, we have a standard of living that was at the middle class, which is often mentioned in society. And of course I am saying this for those days. My father had a good job, but a free and rebellious spirit. My mother had free dreams, but a captive and cowardly heart… 

We used to dream of going to our village, which we secretly missed and was waiting for us far away, during the summer school holidays. Almost every summer, we would go to our village, partly for a change of scenery and partly because my father wanted to please his parents. It was debatable how much my father could please my grandparents. His addiction to alcohol, not coming home for days and losing everything he had gambling made the family sad enough. 

With the school holidays, an indescribable joy had filled our hearts. Preparations were made and it was time to set off for the village. We did not have a private vehicle. A bus would leave our village once a week on Thursdays. It would return in the evening of the same day. A market would be set up in Bozkurt district on Thursdays. That was the reason why intercity transportation would also coincide with the same day. 

The last stop of the bus was the Rüzgârlımeşe neighborhood. There was no such thing as going to the bus station, those arriving at the same time were greeted and those leaving were bid farewell with a crowded passenger ceremony. It would take us to our village and thanks to it, we would achieve our dreams. My mother would be our superhero on our hour-long journeys alone with her five children. I am one of those who knows very well what it means to travel with six people in a double seat. 

My mother had immediately made a seating plan. Two on her lap, one between the seats, and the rest squeezed into the other seat. This journey, which was very important to us, was like a kind of compulsory service to my mother. She would set off under duress because there were five children and many more responsibilities to add to their responsibilities. 

For us, our village was like Paris, no matter how my mother felt. It was our window to the world after our cramped house in the city. Bus journeys also had their own characteristics. 

A concept called bus picnics, like the open-air picnics we know, must have developed in those years. The landscape I saw reminded me of that. If they had a camping gas cylinder, they would light it up and brew some nice tea on it and drink it with pleasure. 

The preparations for a journey were made so pleasurable before. The food eaten with gusto, the smell of cigarettes and the smell of feet would become my nightmare. Especially that smell of boiled eggs, years later, had become something I could not stand, I could not even taste it. 

As the bus approached our village, the sun was about to rise. With our childish hearts and excitement that could not contain us, we would wake up from our semi-conscious state and try to look around. In case our stomachs started to turn again, we would have the vomit bags that the bus conductor had tired of handing out ready so as not to make a mess. As if the assistant’s warnings were not enough, my mother would repeat the same things like a parrot. Don’t ever throw up on the ground. “Look ahead,” she would say, “and then your stomach won’t turn.” I would look around for a while and then get lost in endless dreams. I never gave up on following my dreams: “No matter how old I am”. 

After a long journey, we arrived at our village at the first light of day. Our captain driver would drop off his passengers one by one on the side of the main road. They would drop us off wherever we wanted. First, we would look around a bit; we looked in awe at the mountains, the greenery, and the deep blue sea far away. It would be the first awakening of a long and dizzying journey, the fresh air filling our lungs and the oxygen we breathed. We were like migrating travelers with our suitcases, sacks and bags of clothes and food lined up on the side of the road. 

It would still take us a while to go down the hill to the village; we would scream of joy and get up and down with all those loads in our hands before reuniting with our elders. They would hear our voices from below and call out with cries of longing. At the first moment of reunion, hands would be kissed and longing would be relieved, then the village surroundings we entered would make us adapt to itself. 

The mountains, the streams, the fields were truly a reward, and being away from my father made us feel much more alive. My mother knew that she would add more to the burden on her. She had suffered the whims of my grandmother and grandfather before. She would carry wood from the mountains, spread the wheat ears with the field harvest on the threshing floor, then thresh the floor, wash the laundry by hand, and also keep up with the animals in the barn. 

My mother’s father, my other grandfather, also had oxen and he would drive them to the fields and threshing floors. He had a considerable reputation both in our village and in the surrounding villages. 

The responsibilities my mother was burdened with in the village never ended. It didn’t seem like they would end, to be honest. The gardens would still be wet, the corn would be hoed, and many more things like these would await my mother, who was a bride. In addition to all this, there was the responsibility of taking care of five children. Eating, drinking, washing, and of course the complaints of tiredness that would fall on the next day! We actually saw in those days that we could not make anyone happy. Not even my grandmother, grandfather, or even my mother who employed us as child laborers.

We were still children, and instead of playing, we spent our summer vacation by – grudgingly – working. We were also burdened with as much as we could carry. If we could do nothing else, we would water the garden with a hose. The girls did the housework, and since our brother was young, we also took responsibility for him and helped my mother.

Our biggest problem was the care and responsibility of our disabled brother. In villages, great importance was given to sons. It was the same for my father. He had a son after five children, including our stillborn brother. That’s why my brother was important. That’s why he said to my mother as he was getting on the bus, “If anything happens to him, I’ll kill you.”

It’s impossible for me to forget that my father died of grief because of his son’s big mistake, divine providence. When my father took his last breaths, only his daughters were at his bedside and he was confessing the bitter truths with his hands in mine.

I can’t believe how my mother carried the tiredness in her soul. I don’t know how she managed to stay on her feet and how she carried all this weight.

We were children, of course, unaware of nothing. However, instead of enjoying our two-story wooden village house with a barn underneath, we spent our vacation by working.

The abundance and prosperity of our village with orchards were pleasing to our eyes and stomachs. My mother was an interesting woman, intelligent, but she was also too helpless to stop the violence she was subjected to. My grandmother lived with my grandfather and even my uncle, but my mother was alone! She would constantly say that there was no one to stand behind her. This loneliness stemmed from my father intimidating my mother and her family. They were afraid because my father used all kinds of violence on us. It is impossible for us to forget that he beat my mother in front of us. Especially the violence he used on our disabled brother and us was heartbreaking. My mother still chose to endure all the pain and could not dare to leave. 

Very rarely, when I was calmer, I would hear her say to my mother, “The world is bad, I do it to protect them.” I wished we could have learned how bad the world was without experiencing how bad our father was. The greatest evil he did to us, second only to his violence, was of course taking away our right to education, but his son was educated. In addition to the abundance and prosperity of our village, I would like to talk about the house we rented in the city.

There was a fountain in front of our house, the Inebolu fountain… Vehicles would pass in front of it on both sides; there were also minibuses operating as public transportation. They were slang-talking, dirty-eyed men, according to my father. What can I say; it takes one to know one. 

When it comes to the day I can never forget…

My mother, who had mixed up my father’s shift, had sent me to the mulberry tree in our common garden to pick mulberries, she would advise me, “Not to fall, I had work to do at home, be careful.” I went up to the mulberry tree with the basket in my hand; I would lean on its branches to secure myself so as not to fall.

First, I carefully put the mulberry leaves in the basket; I would pick the ripest ones, eat some of them, and put some of them back in the basket. After a lot of effort, the basket was almost full. I was fulfilling a given task, and it was a rewarding task that I had eaten mulberries until I was full. Then my father suddenly arrived. He was angry and furious. The curses he threw around were resonating throughout the neighbourhood. The neighbours suddenly came to the window. 

I was so scared that I get down from the tree with difficulty, my legs shaking and the basket in my hand. My hands and lips were stained with black mulberries, and as soon as my feet touched the ground, the mulberry basket flew out of my hands and fell in front of a minibus passing by. The car had to stop; the driver looked at us and grumbled a little, got angry and continued on his way. My father was even angrier, thinking that I had embarrassed him, he slapped me again. I wasn’t thinking about the pain of the beatings I had received, I was thinking about the mulberry basket on the road. 

Iran home of course, we had nowhere else to go. My father came home after me. My mother couldn’t protect me because my father had beaten her very badly and then slammed the doors and left. My mother and I hugged and cried and tried to heal each other’s hurting places by kissing them for a while. Then? The mulberry stains on my hands came out a few days later, but the mulberry stains on my body were constantly hurting. My mother felt guilty blaming herself for it, while my father was proud of his manhood. In his mind, he was protecting his daughters from minibus drivers and dogs. He couldn’t…

Look at the irony of fate, one night when he was drunk, he gave his daughter to a driver in a tavern beyond her knowledge. When he came home in the middle of the night, he woke his daughter up from sleep and said, “I gave you to a husband; they will come tomorrow to ask for your hand.” That little girl and her mother hugged and cried until morning… 

A driver as a husband? As the most moral and conscientious man I have ever known, he never left my side!

….

(Translated from Turkish by Yağmur Pesen & İlayda Zeynep Kalender)

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