“Who were they?” “We… Turkish women…”
The grandmother thought. She was now looking at her granddaughter’s granddaughter who was arranging her black and shining hair with her left hand. This girl was exactly like a poor wretch who had gone through great mourning, seen disasters. She never smiled and was eternally sad. Ah, it was all these books that were poisoning them, withering them. Making them strangers to spring, to happiness. Suddenly she felt pain in her heart. She pitied this young and beautiful girl. She propped her trembling old hands on the sides of her armchair. She rose a bit as if angered.
“Women deprived of joy and happiness—Turkish women?” she said. “No, no, no. Turkish women were never deprived of joy and happiness. Those deprived of joy and happiness are you. Today’s women… You’ve been corrupted. You didn’t resemble your grandmothers. Ah, we… How happy we were when young. Our entire occupation was amusement and joy. Spring—that spring behind you—would drive us mad with joy. Now you don’t see these things; you brood over these poisonous books, swell, wither, wither, become irritable, ruined, unbearable creatures…”
The young girl smiled. She would always listen to her grandmother’s angry sermons like this, sometimes debate with her.
“Didn’t you ever read, dear grandmother?” she asked.
“We read. Genteel and wealthy gentlemen would teach their daughters Persian, show them mosque lessons. They’d have us read Tuhfe-i Vehbi. We’d memorize Fuzuli’s, Baki’s ghazals. We understood the Masnavi. We’d compose perfect rhymed prose, rhymes, engage in poetry contests with our husbands, make them admire our memory, intelligence, wit. The greatest praise for a woman then was ‘virtuous, literate, poetess, intelligent…’ Now you’re raised in the hands of French governesses, you don’t know the beauties of your own language; you’re learning things from other countries. The more you want to resemble them, the more you distance yourself from your own identity, hate your surroundings, and truly become deprived of joy and happiness. Ah… Throw away that book!”
The dark and beautiful girl smiled again. “Fine, dear grandmother,” she said. “Let me throw away this book. Not read. Then shall I go mad in this boring house, an eternal and indestructible prison for us, in the solitude of this boring confinement? I read, amuse myself, find some consolation.”
“No, my girl, you read but you don’t amuse yourself. If you could see your eyes… As if in a cloud, a fog! You’re getting completely worse. These books are all poison, all sorrow…”
“But tell me, if I don’t read, what should I do?”
The grandmother began to think; yes, what should she do? Now truly everything had turned into a prison. She suddenly remembered the scene from eighty years ago; back then there was a women’s world separate from men that had now completely disintegrated. This world was very wide. Thousands of women would talk together, meet, amuse themselves. They had their own amusements and pleasures. There was no fashion… Girls would wear their mothers’ clothes, granddaughters would wear their grandmothers’ jewels. Gold-embroidered, pointed shoes, red outer cloaks… Ah, especially the red cloaks… On spring’s green grass, at promenade places, women would shine like poppy flowers. There were no ugly ones among them—that is, no thin or sickly ones. Men would only know their wives, after their work they’d come home early, perform insatiable scenes of love and affection for their spouses… There were no coffeehouses, cafés, beer halls, clubs, theaters, Café Chantants, bachelor apartments—all these disaster places that separated Turkish men from their spouses, leaving poor Turkish women in lonely houses like a forgotten watchman. Women lived with their men without distress, then gathered in the large halls of those large houses with lime paint, in gardens with pools and glass pavilions, in vegetable gardens, by the seaside, in massive and rare waterside mansions, amusing themselves, being happy. What games, what customs, what pleasures there were that today had all been completely forgotten. Today there was nothing but the madness of reading French, constantly changing clothes, following fashion, from their coldness, from empty arrogance, from meaningless and inappropriate claims of superiority… Frankishness had entered us like a plague, erasing the rouge of our cheeks, the smile of our lips, tearing our cloaks, throwing away our shoes, even removing our henna that made our fingers shine beautifully like delicate coral. While changing our possessions, our clothes, our houses, it had also changed our souls. Everything became lies, everything fake, everything imitation. Our traditions died. Happiness transformed into a distant fantasy, an unreachable dream… With our customs, our joys also extinguished. Now a confused and suffering generation… A generation that hates everything, sees everything as bad, sees everything as dark, ruined, sick, beyond possibility of treatment… Ah, this current sick and consumptive environment…
The grandmother’s eyes were closing. The quick and sudden comparison of the happiness of eighty years ago with today’s sufferings was creating violent fatigue in her mind, making her regret that she was still alive. The young dark girl, looking distractedly at this mother of her mother’s mother’s mother, her repeated great-grandmother who had only a few steps left to enter her hundredth year, was trying to imagine what the happiness of women in her time could be. But she couldn’t find it.
“You’ve gone quiet, dear grandmother,” she said. The old woman opened her wrinkled eyes: “Ah… I was thinking about the old days, old happiness.”
“In the old times, in your time, what was there more than today, grandmother?”
“Much… many things…”
The grandmother sat up completely. She thought for a moment as if gathering what she would say in her mind. Then she began again. The young girl was looking at the deep and pointed darkness inside her mouth with broken teeth, as if watching rather than listening to the words coming from there.
“Yes, my dear, there were many things. Everything was pleasure and amusement for us, everything! Childhood, starting school, entering the cloak, going to a husband, giving birth, even aging… These all had their ceremonies. Each woman’s these periods would be an occasion of pleasure, amusement for many other women. Our entire life would pass in amusement. Not a week would pass without seeing a school-starting ceremony, a circumcision, a wedding, visiting a new mother. Even our clothes, our henna would be occasions for amusement. We had our quatrains, our songs. We’d gather, have poetry contests among ourselves, draw omens from divans on winter nights. Even the seasons were an amusement. Each season had its own custom, amusement, tradition. We’d place white jars at the base of rose trees that hadn’t yet bloomed, were one year old, in the evening, put our rings and thimbles inside, the next morning at sunrise we’d take them out again singing quatrains. There were women who knew a thousand different quatrains, who could find thousands of rhymes for everyone’s words all winter, never repeating what they said once…”
The grandmother was continuing with that tireless activity peculiar only to the jaws of old people who had gotten heated, prolonging her words. Meanwhile, a flock of birds had perched on the branches of a tree near the window. They were chirping violently, mixing their sharp cries with the old woman’s light and trembling voice.
“Yes, my dear, we didn’t think ‘what should we do?’ like you. There was no need for that. We didn’t know what boredom was. In short, everything was an occasion to laugh, to amuse ourselves. For example, spring… Ah! You sit closed in rooms. When spring came, we’d all pour into the gardens. Spring had its own amusements, traditions.”
“What kind, dear grandmother?”
“What kind—spring was an occasion for amusement like every season. We’d divine a year of our life in spring, laugh, amuse ourselves, play. Ah, this divination… Very poetic, very pleasant, very sensitive. It would always come true. We all believed.”
“How?”
“When spring came, when trees began to flower, leaves to green, grass to show—our eyes could no longer stay in rooms. We’d run to the garden, walk in the midst of spring. The first butterfly we’d see was our fortune for a year. We’d seek it. We’d wait for it. We’d sing quatrains for the first butterfly to be white or pink, throw white and pink fabric pieces on the branches. How we’d fear seeing a yellow or black butterfly, what excitements we’d go through.”
“Why?”
“Because butterflies had meanings. Ah, you don’t know these things, don’t believe in them. White butterfly meant happiness, fortune… Pink butterfly meant health and wellbeing… Yellow butterfly meant sorrow and illness… Black butterfly indicated disaster, mourning and death. When we saw a white butterfly, we’d believe our fortune that year would be open, that we’d be happy, and under spring flowers we’d sing hymns in honor of the white butterfly…”
The grandmother was continuing, explaining the general meanings of butterflies seen in flocks for the first time, saying that white butterfly flocks meant wealth, pink butterfly flocks abundance, yellow butterfly flocks famine, the ominous flocks composed of red butterflies—very rarely seen—definitely indicated a bloody war, black butterfly flocks meant darkness, that the sultan would die, she was prolonging it, narrating how women of that time would observe these flocks before great events and inform their men. The young dark girl was no longer listening; she had fixed her large black eyes on the blue-white brightness of the April sky visible from the window behind her grandmother, imagining. Indeed, eighty years ago women had to be happy. As they, the new generation, read, understood, approached men, they were distancing themselves from primitive womanhood, from femaleness; a rebellion, a revolution was igniting in their souls; the female restrictions that old womanhood considered occasions of happy pleasure were coming to them like chains of fire and iron. They were looking at their houses standing silent and unknown like a private temple as prisons, considering their black wraps, thick veils as crushing, withering, savage, merciless slavery covers. But were they wrong? Since avoiding “progress” wasn’t possible and progress meant definitely changing, definitely not resembling the old, then Turkish womanhood from centuries ago couldn’t remain in primitive and basic form either. They would emerge from puppet-hood, doll-hood, innocence—in short, femaleness—become real women, if not superior to men at least equal, in every sense human, human, human… Like her grandmother’s “sacred history” stories, she was no longer hearing the strange delusions, innocent lies, illogical and abstract beliefs in her prolonged words. In her imagination passed the noises, joys, speeches, theaters, conferences of the proclamation of the Constitution a year ago; she seemed to still hear the eternal inexhaustible hand clappings, applause nightmares. How happy those days were for them. For a moment, they had hoped to be freed from this black and tight slavery, to attain the right of humanity. Ah, how quickly this hope was extinguished, put out; how and in what tragic way this dream was broken… She was thinking, wanting to cry, trembling. But… But couldn’t they hope for something from the future? Wouldn’t Turkish womanhood one day, with its high perception, with its beauty that had become miraculous thanks to six centuries of accidental and natural selection, with its intelligence, rise before respect and worship by appearing on the stage of humanity?… How much longer could today’s resignation continue? The grandmother was continuing her endless story; the young dark girl was imagining, unable to answer the gloomy questions mixed with vague fantasies in her mind. She suddenly smiled. Fortune-telling with butterflies… This would be very nice. What judgment would the old Turkish womanhood’s beliefs give to the new Turkish womanhood’s fortune? She was curious. She sat up from the chaise longue she was lying on. She stood up. The grandmother had fallen silent. She was looking with astonishment at her granddaughter’s sudden rising. She asked: “What is it, my girl, why did you get up?”
The beautiful dark girl, laughing: “I haven’t seen any butterflies this spring either. I’ll look not for myself, but for those like me, for all Turkish girls, for the fortune of all Turkish girls,” she said, approaching the window. The grandmother rose trembling from her armchair.
“My eyes don’t see that well, but,” she was saying, “I’ll look too… for you…”
Both of them were at the edge of the window. On the right the young girl was rising with her magnificent and handsome figure; on the left the tiny and hunched grandmother stood like a rotten wax block, silent and frozen. They were looking outside. All nature was shining with a sweet and warm brightness that dazzled the eyes. The sun had reflected on the sea, resembling an eternal and endless silver river flowing to other worlds. The trees’ small and dark green leaves were trembling with pleasure and life; white flowers were falling on the paths. The opposite shore with its lush mountains, purple groves, white waterside mansions resembled a mirage country, a fairy capital. They were silent and watching. They hadn’t yet seen a butterfly. Small fly clusters appeared over the flower beds and suddenly disappeared. A single seagull was passing quickly as if fleeing from a nearby danger, an unknown calamity, and crying out. Birds whose locations couldn’t be seen were continuously singing; their chirping seemed to be raining from the sky like a living and resounding rain of light.
The young girl suddenly brought her hand to her heart and in a low voice said “Ah, there…” A black butterfly was flying under the flowered branches of the tree near the window. She pointed. The grandmother with her terrible and skeletal finger: “But I saw that white one before you,” pointing to a butterfly circling over the marble pool.
The young girl looked at it too with a final effort: “Ah, dear grandmother, you can’t see well,” she said. “That’s not white, it’s a yellow butterfly…”
And suddenly an unknown sorrow attacked her soul, her eyes darkened. This bright fresh nature now seemed despairing to her; the marble pool resembled the tomb of a young and captive queen, the garden beds resembled the abandoned and flowered graves of consumptive and imprisoned girls. She withdrew. She lay down on the chaise longue again. The grandmother too, frightened by this spring with yellow and black butterflies that reminded her of death, had turned her back again. She was sitting hunched in her armchair, raising her hump well. The young girl opened her black morocco-bound book she hadn’t let go of; this book now like a black, massive and dead butterfly was completely covering her face. Not reading, with a hereditary and traditional delusion she seemed to be convinced that the butterflies didn’t lie; that the fate of the poor new generation, of today’s Turkish womanhood, was only disaster, sorrow, death; that they would never tear their black shroud, that behind the empty and lonely walls of houses, like unknown flowers, they would wither without blooming, die without being born… The past and superstitious beliefs were so strong and terrible that they were overcoming all perception, all knowledge, all science, all truth, breaking from its foundation the imaginary theoretical power of the law of transformation. She was thinking; but these superstitious beliefs, this harsh, stubborn, murderous tyranny of the past wasn’t peculiar only to Turks, only to Turkey. A few weeks ago, her brother studying in Paris had written that at the table d’hôte of the house where he stayed, there was no meat or fat due to fasting, and that it would be impossible to find even in Sudan, in the deserts, in the country of sand and boundless half-rivers, an example of the Catholic madness, religious fanaticism among families in Paris… She suddenly remembered that after mentioning to the disciple of a great Western writer—the novelist of deprived women who imagined other horizons, other happinesses, other lives like herself—that everything has a limit, he said “…but there’s no end to human bestiality!”
Through the window, a wind as sad and delicate as the last farewell kiss of a young consumptive lover who died without reaching his beloved was entering, bringing the smells of fresh wreaths left on fresh graves; invisible and mournful ghosts were undulating in the room’s shadows…
The grandmother’s eyes were closing. The fatigue this ominous divination created in the old brain had affected her like a sleeping pill. The young girl… the young and dark girl had fixed her eyes on the book, not reading, pressing her lily hands holding the book to her rebellious and anarchist breasts, trying to hold back the heart rebellion rising from inside to her lips, this violent and causeless sob. In the room’s soporific and shadowy silence, these two bodies were as if two despairing and inconsolable symbols of old and new Turkish womanhood. One, the last specimen of the generation from a century ago, a memory belonging more to death and oblivion than to life… The other was today’s, a delicate and unsatisfied flower of a century’s forced and ominous progress, change. As a result, the fate of both was this closed lonely room… this magnificent and ornate grave.
The bird flock coming near the window would sometimes create a violent chirping, a bright noise, then fall silent. The grandmother slept. Now she was snoring with a light and weak death rattle. The granddaughter’s granddaughter, the young girl, the beautiful girl, the dark girl was still controlling her sob, lying frozen on the chaise longue. The current of the fragrant and flowery spring wind entering through the wide window at irregular intervals suddenly brought the black butterfly they had seen earlier! This black butterfly in the paradise of bright and magnificent nature, flowery and compassionate spring, resembled the black soul of hell’s darkness and ignorance representative. Now this black soul had come with grass and flower scents, was fluttering before this wide window. Watching these living dead whom the tyrannical environment inside, the treacherous past, the cruel beliefs killed before birth, their eternal silence, seeming pleased, delighted; the birds whose locations weren’t clear suddenly began to chirp with all their strength as if attacked mercilessly and burningly, crying out bitterly with violent and tragic chirps invading all nature.
Ömer Seyfettin
