It was our favourite activity, my brother’s and mine, to go and watch the puppet show every year during the sultan of the eleven months. Whenever Ramadan happened to fall in the summer, the old sages of the village would set up their canvas outside on the dirt fields where the decrepit wooden houses crackled in the heat, and perform the Hacivat Karagoz until sundown. At the firing of the cannon the entire village would rattle with excitement – time to break fast. My childhood is back-lit, and shadows of the bearded puppet-people dance against my skin.

On the first morning of the first Ramadan I can remember, Baba’s bullets shook the house as he fired his drunken victory shots into the rousing sky. This usual warning was usually meant for us, the little ones. It told us to run and take refuge under our bedsheets – the tattered mattresses laying limp on our rotting wooden floor. We weren’t meant to see Baba enter our space and tear it apart as he would mother from her own bed. But even her sobs couldn’t drown out the thuds of her body against the hands of Baba the giant, Baba the drunk, baba the man.

All things come in pairs – I learned this as a child. It always made me wonder, what it is about two that makes the number so mercurially perfect. Whether a trilogy was ever justifiable, whether the smallest even number was perfect in the first place. I scrutinised in my head the perfection in the coupledom of day and night; of short and long; a perfect pair of eyes; a perfect pair. Baba and my mother were not a perfect pair.

She was intelligent and strong. She projected a fierce defiance from her eyes and her papery palms. Her hands, work-worn and swollen, would smooth over my hair as she hummed me to sleep. Sometimes she would simply sit by my side, sewing or folding what little clothing we had to wash, humming or singing as she worked. The motif is that her hands were never idle.

Despite the vibrancy of her spirit, there would come points, most often in front of the hulking, swaggering form of my drunken father, when she would contract like a wilting flower. Baba the sun, my mother the ripe fruit. Baba the salt, my mother the dewy slug. Baba the torch, Baba the oven, the sponge of a human being.

You see, Baba was a catalyst. He carried around him a cloud of commotion – anything that ever happened to us beyond the narrow spectrum of everyday occurrences, the cloud was responsible for. It would extend its smoky fists and send shattering blows to all that Baba laid his glazed eyes upon: our home, our toys, our mother, our spirits. Thankfully, we come from a line of spiritual leaders, or so my grandmother would tell me.

You carry the blood of healers in your veins.

I suppose healing was also on mother’s mind when Baba’s debts finally caught up with him. 40 days and nights had hardly passed since his burial when we left our dusty village and our Ramadan traditions with the urgency of canon fire. To Istanbul, she had rasped, to grandmother.

1953

I shot up as though my bed had coughed me out of its lungs. A warm September morning had spilled into my room through the lace curtains, releasing the fragrance of the aging wood of our home. Already covered in a sweaty film from my dream, I found my mother hyperventilating before me, latched onto the doorframe for support. Shukur ya Rabbi, she kept saying in between gasps. Thank you, my God, thank you.

It wasn’t until I ventured a glance downwards that I realised what the commotion was about.

I happened to be sitting in a crimson sea. My legs and feet stuck to the damp, bloody sheets as I recoiled in fear. To an unassuming onlooker, it would have appeared an assailant had crept into my room in the middle of the night, butchering an unconscious me. I looked up at my mother, terrorised. “Mum?”

Here began the first day of the penultimate year of school. I was 16 and menstruating for the first time. It seemed, at the time, as though I was making up for a handful of years spent in anticipation with the grandest overture to womanhood my sex had ever seen. I wondered whether unnecessary blood had been collecting in me before I simply couldn’t carry any more. I certainly felt lighter, given how worried my mother had sounded when she took me to the doctor about a year before.

She’s getting old – I mean, she should have bled by now, she’s 14. I had had my first menses two years younger than she is… What can we do? Is she… normal?

The women of my family, I was told, experienced life at extremes. My grandmother, despite the norms of the turn of the 20th century married three times, bearing children from each of her husbands. Her late sister, my great-aunt, on the other hand, was poached by a member of the Persian royal family after being spotted by him on her way to the market one day. My grandmother only learned of her passing in Tehran two months after the fact, when notice got to her by post. Those are times I struggle to imagine, when women were practically auctioned to the highest bidder. If they refused, as my grandmother had, they were “strange,” at the very least. At worst, they were as good as infertile.

Bleeding for the first time brought with it a peculiar sort of relief. A few months before, I had had this lurid dream that I gave birth to the most wretched baby boy, despite being a virgin. I had woken up in the middle of the night, gasping and terrorised, as the baby was truly the ugliest thing I had ever seen. Naturally, I rationalised that his image could only have occurred to me through divine inspiration; I didn’t think myself creative enough to piece together such a horrific face. Ever since that dream, I had been occupying the bathroom for an extra 15 minutes every day, standing naked in front of the mirror and pressing hard into my lower abdomen to see if a ghost child would poke back. If it had happened to Mother Mary, who was to say that it was impossible for an ether-child to blossom in my tummy? Or perhaps it was the pent-up blood that had been fashioning itself into a shadow-version of me – a poisonous excess coagulating into a poisonous being, ready for expulsion in 9 months’ time.

Whichever the case, I was happy for two reasons. The first, that I was indeed not growing an evil baby boy as appendage; and the second, that I was not, apparently, infertile. I would never have fathomed the idea myself, of course – I happened upon it after eavesdropping on a conversation my mother and grandmother were having one afternoon over the summer. I was just about to enter skip into the living room, when their murmuring pushed me back against the wall. I stood entirely still, hair sticking to my clammy neck, reining back my breath to catch every single word that curved around the doorway.

“Stop worrying so much, it’ll wrinkle your face – it runs in the family, you know that. Your grandmother -”

“Yes, mother, but this old? Yildiz is of marrying age – we could give her away to a soliciting family and still wouldn’t know whether she’d be able to produce a child.”

“Don’t you dare. Elhamdulillah, no woman of our ancestry has ever been known to be barren.”

“Yes, but what if someone’s envy has struck her? It’s not infrequent, my friends sighing about how beautiful and dark her eyes are. What if she’s under some spell? Should I call a hodja?”

“Perhaps… Look, my friend’s sister is traveling to Mecca in two weeks; I don’t know the woman but we grew up in the same neighbourhood. I’m sure she would oblige if I asked her to make an offering and pray for our sake over there. Allah wouldn’t turn away from us.”

Since I was a child, I’ve had this awful reaction to intense fear. My ears start ringing and it feels like my head is about to detach from my body because my brain is dissolving into a swarm of flies. I once told my grandma about the ringing when I felt a wobbly tooth for the first time. She laughed and said that angels were whispering in my ears, telling me not to fret.

Barren, she had said. The word appeared in my mind like a scorched field, the horizon darkening with the approach of a dust storm. I stood stuck between two lifeless and threating expanses, between two planes of heat. The dust storm brought on a violent sneeze, and though I could have sworn I glimpsed specks of earth escaping my lungs, I bolted back up the stairs for fear of being caught eavesdropping. The maestro angel tapped his baton before the chorale.

In 1953, the best schools in the country were foreign and gender-segregated. Most of them strived to raise a generation of Turkish ladies and gentlemen who held European cultural imperialism in high regard. This came in the form of confused moral affiliations and intellectual snobbery, especially in the face of those who didn’t speak at least one European tongue. Youngsters such as myself were taught to admire the hollowed marble of the century-old stairs, the masonic tiles the first missionaries laid when building the school, thereby abandoning our nationalistic predilections for a sensitivity for aesthetics. Though such schools were technically attached to the Ministry of Education, we still had to kiss the hands of the prunish Vaters and sœurs whenever we happened across them in the corridor. Sometimes we would run into them five minutes after singing the national anthem on Monday mornings, our lips dry, their hands expectantly held in the air before our mouths.

My school, Le Lycée Français Notre Dame de Sion, was one of the progressive ones, allowing for us to excuse ourselves from religious education classes for those whose families preferred their Muslim children not to learn about the impending resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our headmistress, Madame Esen Gezmis, was also an alumna of Dame de Sion, and had pursued a divergent path to the scores of lycée-educated girls who saw their diploma as part of their dowry.

Madame Gezmis was a fair-minded and relatively liberal woman who had, after attending university in Paris, experienced virtually all of Anatolia as a traveling teacher. She had met her industrialist husband in the prospering city of Bursa, her final stop before returning to Istanbul. Despite her husband’s family’s wealth, the couple lived a relatively humble life in the bohemian districts of Istanbul, leaving for a different European capital every summer holiday. She spoke French, Italian, and some English; he spoke German and better English than his wife. Ignoring the intense pressure for grandchildren on both sides (they were both only children), the pair had yet to think about conceiving.

I knew such a volume of details regarding Mme Gezmis’s life, because she also happened to use the same Turkish bath the women of my family frequented. I had therefore on regular occasion found myself stuck in the mortifying position of having to listen to my high school headmistress and my grandmother converse while the washwoman scrubbed dirty skin off my glistening bottom. As the child in the situation, I was not allowed to keep my towel on, since, as my zealously hygienic grandma declared, “we all share the same parts,” and that “I could worry about being embarrassed by my own body when I got to Mme Gezmis’s age.” My headmistress often smirked and looked away as Grandmother bucketed water brought to infernal temperatures down my head.

In my embarrassment on one occasion, I let my mind wander to the words that were the overture of my every day.

I am a Turk. I am righteous, I am hardworking.

My tenets are to protect those who are younger than me, to respect my elders, and to love my country and my people. My ideal is to excel and progress.

Oh, Great Atatürk! I vow to walk without cease along the path you have opened, towards the objective you have shown.

May my existence be a gift to the existence all Turks.

Happy is the one who says “I am a Turk!”

In the incantatory trance of these words, I found myself growing accustomed to the shock of the water. They burned into my flesh and soaked my hair. Happy is the one who says “I am a Turk!”

I am the daughter of a miserable pair.

I come from a line of spiritual healers.

I am not barren.

I am a Turk, I am a Turk, I am a Turk.