第 93 页

In the summer of 1947, two years before I was born, my mother and father—who had separated for a time—reunited in Marseille. My mother was finally able to persuade my father that they should live in Mingheria for a period. (I owe my Mingherian birth to her success in this endeavor.) Before the summer was over, they had traveled to Arkaz via Crete and settled in the Splendid Palace, in the very room—according to the stories my mother told me, and to the letters my grandmother’s mother wrote—where the Commander and Zeynep had died of the plague forty-six years before. A plaque at the entrance of the Splendid Palace notes that the father of the nation had been staying in this hotel the day he declared the island’s freedom and independence, but anyone wishing to find out more will be taken to the second-floor meeting hall and be shown a set of photographs taken by Vanyas and by the anonymous photographer of the Arkata Times, as well as the desk at which Mazhar Effendi had sat when he was acting as the Commander’s deputy.

My father bought my mother a large house with a view of the sea in the neighborhood of Filizler (formerly Flizvos), and throughout the 1950s, my mother—thoroughly bored with sitting at home all day—would take me out on late summer afternoons to the Splendid Palace’s Rome gelateria. Sometimes we would sit at a table in the cool shade of linden trees in the garden of the ice-cream shop. At the end of these visits, once we had finished eating our ice cream and I had wiped my hands on my mother’s napkin, I would often beg her to take me again to that tiny museum on the hotel’s second floor. (This fondness for museums is another interest I share with the novelist Pamuk.)

Those photographs of the day of the revolution, of the people gathered on the Governor’s balcony, of the figures who had secured the island’s independence, had all bewitched me, as had the inkpot and the set of pens that had belonged to the Commander—whose portrait hung in Arkaz everywhere I looked. Perhaps I could already feel in my child’s heart the presence of the profound and mysterious links that exist between history and objects, and nations and writing.

I was born in Mingheria, and even when I have been away from the island, it has never faded from my imagination. If anything, my memories have only been sharpened by distance. After our trips to the Hotel Splendid’s ice-cream shop, my mother and I would sometimes walk all the way back home along Commander Kâmil Boulevard (the former Hamidiye Avenue), looking at the storefronts we passed and doing a little shopping as we went. Or we would turn into Istanbul Street and stroll through its refreshingly shady porticoes—past the London Toy Shop, the Island Bookstore, and the Bank of Mingheria—until we reached the shore.

I preferred this second route, for I would always get ten minutes to examine the ships moored to the docks or anchored in the open sea, and read and think about their names, and on the way back home, we would always take a carriage. Sometimes I would walk a little farther to the slipway near the coffee shop next to the new jetty and try to touch the water with my hand, and my mother would say, “Be careful, you’ll get your shoes wet!” My shoes, my socks, the skirt and blazer I wore to school, and the rest of my clothes were all well made and came from Europe. Before I had even started going to school, I had already realized that my mother took greater care over my clothes than the other children’s mothers did, and I could also see that this was related to some romantic, idealized vision of Ottoman family life.

Then as now, I loved walking among the crowds in the docks, and feeling the bustle of people running to catch the ferry, the elation of arriving passengers coming through customs, and the shadow of the White Mountain spanning the length of the bay, and like every other Mingherian child, I was afraid of the Castle, and convinced that it was populated by bandits, murderers, and all manner of bloodcurdling creatures. Like most Mingherians who can’t really picture the Castle as anything but a sinister, tenebrous void, I have only ever been inside it once, and even then for a very short time. More than the Castle itself, I liked the image of its reflection in the still waters of the bay.

My mother might have enjoyed acting like a princess, but even so, as we climbed onto the carriage on our way back home, she would always ask, “How much to Filizler?” addressing the coachman in Mingherian (though all the coachmen spoke at least a little bit of Turkish). If she thought the price was acceptable, she would say no more, but if it was a lot higher than the usual amount, my mother would point out the fare chart written in Mingherian, and while some of the more impertinent coachmen would argue back, most of them would quickly agree to the fare on the chart.

The tourists who would start thronging Arkaz in the 1990s and make summers in the city unbearable had not yet arrived thirty years before, so the coachmen hadn’t become quite so “presumptuous” (as my mother would say), and most of the island’s population took pleasure—though they might not speak as openly of it as we are doing now—in the pungent smell of horse dung that hung in the air and especially near carriage stops, perhaps even missing it a little whenever they were away from the island. In 2008, despite being a major tourist attraction, these horse carriages were banned from Arkaz by government decree, as it was too difficult to clean the mess they left behind, and the coachmen had become too numerous and ill disciplined.

My mother and I spoke Turkish at home. My parents spoke to each other in English, but my father was away most of the time, either in London or elsewhere. We addressed the maids, the gardeners, and the watchmen in Mingherian (except for one servant we spoke to in Turkish). Over the course of repeated stays on the island, my mother had managed to teach herself the same language her grandmother had not spoken a word of when she had first arrived on the island, and although I had picked up some Mingherian myself from hearing it spoken at home or outside (mainly in the shops), my mother still wanted to make sure I learned it properly, so when I was four years old, she bought me copies of The Mingherian Alphabet and Zeynep’s Reading Book, taught me how to read and write, and helped me with my Mingherian vocabulary.

Finally, when I was five years old, I began spending time with another little girl called Rina, who was my age, spoke fluent Mingherian, and had my mother’s approval (meaning, in other words, that she was from a respectable family). But these plans to have me learn Mingherian through conversation had to be interrupted when Rina started asking what my father did for a living, if he was a spy, which desk he worked at, and whether its drawers were locked—making my mother feel understandably rather uncomfortable. My father had opened a large haberdashery, furniture, and home appliances store on Istanbul Street (he was the first person to bring British refrigerators to the island), and after countless hours whiled away across various government offices, he had also managed to set up a trading company to start buying and selling rosewater, but as neither of these ventures had proven to be particularly successful (and perhaps because he also happened to be a British citizen who had come to the island after the British had withdrawn their troops), he was often suspected of being a spy.

I will take this opportunity to note that at my mother’s insistence, my father’s housewares store also stocked Consul George’s book on Mingheria (finally published in 1932), though no one apart from the occasional tourist paid much attention to this volume, which had been a true labor of love. For sixty years, George Cunningham’s Mingherian History: From Antiquity to the Present—partly responsible for my decision to become a historian—was shamelessly plundered by the Mingherian state and its historians, usually without any acknowledgment of the source. Having thus been savagely exploited for six decades with the calculated aim of crafting a sense of national identity (based on clothing, cuisine, landscapes, and history), this balanced, informative, and elegant volume was belittled, over the next fifteen years, by a new generation of readers for being too “Orientalist,” in Edward Said’s negatively inflected sense of the word, and its author—who had made such significant contributions to Mingherian culture—was accused of working for the cause of British imperialism, and harboring all sorts of exotic prejudices. Had the archaeological artifacts, ancient figurines, Mingherian rocks, fossils, jugs, oil landscapes, watercolors, seashells, maps, and books that filled Monsieur George’s house not been put on a British warship and smuggled off the island at some point during the chaotic, embattled years that followed the publication of his book, all of these items—like so many other similar collections and historic homes upon the island—would have been lost, and rather than being safely preserved at the British Museum as they currently are, a whole host of old Mingherian objects and landscapes would have disappeared. Today, the lovely house where Monsieur George used to live with his Mingherian wife is a branch of an international restaurant chain specializing in fried chicken, and its small botanic garden devoted to Mingherian flora has been turned into a parking lot.

Until I started primary school in 1956, I learned most of my Mingherian from playing with the other children on the sands of Flizvos Beach (whose name hadn’t changed) down the road from our house. In Mingheria, beach season and plague season both run from late April to late October, and during these months, one of my mother’s favorite activities was to go down to the beach in her chic, black, and very demure one-piece bathing suit, and lie like a movie star or a wealthy European lady on a towel draped over the sand and in the shade of an umbrella, where she would spend hours poring over old film magazines my father sent from London (we would collect the parcels from the Post Office together). Her elegant straw bag contained the Nivea sunscreen she would occasionally take out and apply, a pair of black sunglasses she never wore, and a pink bonnet for when she finally decided, hours later, to go into the water, and in which she would meticulously gather every strand of her hair so as not to spoil her hairdresser Flatros’s work.

On our way home from the docks, my mother would put her bags on the carriage seat opposite, and I would sit next to her and wait for her to put her hand on my shoulder, reminding her if she forgot. As the carriage climbed up Istanbul Street, my mother might break one of the biscuits she had bought from Zofiri’s shop in half, and we would eat it together as we watched pedestrians jostling along the pavements, the newsstands, the teahouses, and the people milling about in front of the travel agencies. One of the reasons I love Mingheria so much is that it is the kind of place where two Muslim women can sit in a carriage on their own and happily eat their biscuits without having to worry about what anyone might think.

When the carriage reached the top of the slope and turned right, following the row of government offices and palm and pine trees that lined Commander Kâmil Boulevard all the way to the Prime Minister’s offices, we would make sure to look away when we were about to pass in front of the Mingherian land registry and the Mingherian Ministry of Justice, where my parents had wasted so much of their time in their early years in Mingheria, only to be disappointed at every turn. At this point I should probably note the following: my mother’s love for Mingheria was genuine and true, but there was also a more pragmatic side to it relating to property and financial considerations.

My parents were in possession of a number of documents—some with maps and title plans attached—attesting my great-grandfather Doctor Nuri and my grandmother’s mother Princess Pakize’s ownership of several vast tracts of land which they had obtained during his service as quarantine minister and Chief Minister, and her three and a half months as queen of the island. Some of these deeds, signed by the Commander himself, were “gifts” he had handed out when he had founded the new state (much like new sultans upon their accession to the throne), while others were formal certificates bearing the seal of the state and the signature of Queen Pakize, drawn up by bureaucrats who had worked out precisely how much she was owed for her services as monarch, and presented to her as her rightful dues. As these documents bore the autograph of the father of the nation, as well as one of the earliest official seals of the state, the bureaucrats, department heads, judges, and ministers of Mingheria would always handle them with reverence, and never even think of questioning their authenticity or their validity.

But for my mother—and the various uncles and nephews and distant relations who had optimistically given her power of attorney on the matter—to truly possess this land, to be able to sell it or come and live on it if they wished to, they had to have the significance of those historical documents assessed by a judge, the judge’s ruling had to be conveyed to whichever land registry office held jurisdiction over a given plot, the responses received from these local departments had to be reviewed (usually, the land would turn out to have been registered under someone else’s name in the meantime), and the new owners as well as any previous owners each had to be told “It’s my land, actually!” and sued for the deed in the courts of the nearest Mingherian city.

The locals who had fought all sorts of gangs off of those lands forty years ago and taken up residence there themselves, obtaining official ownership under one of the state’s politically motivated property schemes and enlivening the area with the houses they built for their families, couldn’t just accept the claim that their land wasn’t theirs after all but supposedly belonged to a bunch of people the Great Commander had gifted it to around the time of the foundation of the state (and who didn’t even speak Mingherian), and so they fought the lawsuits tooth and nail, and the cases dragged on with no resolution. Moreover, before they could even file these kinds of lawsuits, the holders of those historical documents—which were sometimes referred to as “accession deeds” or as “licenses”—had to prove that they were the rightful heirs of the person named on the original license, and this could not be done through the courts of the country they lived in but only at their local Mingherian embassy (in what was inevitably a lengthy and laborious procedure), or by coming to the island in person and going through the Mingherian courts. One day in Nice, my great-uncle Prince Süleyman Effendi—who had spent a great deal of time thinking about these matters, and “squandered” a lot of money on the lawyers he’d hired to tackle the Istanbul courts—told my grandmother that “in the Republic of Turkey, forbidding the members of the Ottoman royal family from returning to the country has made it much easier to indirectly and surreptitiously seize their assets,” an argument which my grandmother had then relayed to my mother. “But in Mingheria, all the Ottomans except for our mother Princess Pakize had already been expelled. So they forgot they should probably ban one other person from returning to the island: you. I would suggest you utilize this fact to your advantage!”