January 1st, 320 [1905]
Oh, how cold it was this morning. When I left the warmth of my bed, as I put my bare feet into the cold slippers that had absorbed all the coldness of the night that passed with howling mad storms and threatening winds beating on the windows, I felt a remnant shiver of night trembling within me. My servant was naturally sleeping; I pitied waking her from her warm bed in this burning cold. I opened the door of my room. Outside, the rapacious cold of cutting and tearing winter slapped my face and hands. Under these merciless slaps, I rolled up my sleeves. I performed my ablution. When I returned to my room, a false warmth, like a breath of consolation, was touching my arms, my face, my wet hair from under the towel. The true dawn had not yet awakened. The pale red silence of false dawn was growing and expanding, tearing through the cold dark crevices of night. I leaned against the window. Before me, beneath me, all the houses stood lifeless and inanimate, as if completing the unawakable nightmares of an eternal sleep. The sea was sleeping with a boundless indigo stillness and drawing an endless line of demarcation with its white waves to the distant and misty shores trembling with the fading shadows of dawn.
Among the houses, poor and humble but rising toward the sky with a spiritual majesty, the small and aged minaret of the old mosque was still empty. Then… In this eternal moment, while all those endless squirrel-colored darknesses were crystallizing like a red transparent blueness, the weak shadow of the young muezzin moved on the minaret’s balcony. I wrapped myself completely in my robe. Hunched and contemplative from the cold, while listening to the call to prayer—whose echo from the depths like a call of divinity unforgettable to this melancholy and dark universe made my soul tremble with awe—I was thinking of the first of these great, spiritually saturated mornings that I had been able to rise for in fifteen years. Ah, fifteen years ago…
**
My mother, now so far from her comforting presence, this revered being I loved most in the world, the only one I worshipped in the world—I remember now, fifteen years ago she had woken me for my first morning prayer. I think it was a winter like this too. While I was sleeping in the small cot in my small room adjacent to her room, with her delicate hand caressing my forehead like a warm, captivating kiss, combing my hair with her delicate, thin fingers, she had said, “Come on, little Ömer, get up, get up, my little one.”
I had opened my eyes. The small night lamp burning on top of my small desk in the corner—ah, I cannot forget this, it was a cat’s head—was illuminating the blackness of the white oilcloth curtains of my two-windowed room and looking at me with green, lifeless eyes.
“But mother,” I had said, “it’s still night…”
Kissing me again from where she always kissed, from the tip of my left eyebrow, she lifted me by the armpits, saying, “No, my little one, it’s twelve o’clock, then the time will pass.”
Putting on my small flannel underwear and rubbing my eyes with my fists, I followed her. We passed through the dark hallway in a moment and entered her room. The black and low stove, resembling a cross-legged African woman, was burning with a rumble.
“Ah… Pervin has also gotten up…”
Pervin—our maid—was taking down the yellow pitcher from on top of the stove. I couldn’t believe at all that she would get up. My mother had said: “Pervin gets up every morning.”
Though I never got up, I was surprised that she got up every morning. They took off my robe, rolled up my sleeves, I squatted next to the ablution basin. My mother said “You’ll get tired like that” and put a small stool under me, I sat on it: “Come on, say bismillah…”
Pervin was pouring lukewarm water on my hands, my mother was whispering at my head “Your face… now your arms, three times again…” and when I forgot, she would make me repeat my mistakes with warnings like “Ah! Where’s the wiping of your head?…” When the ablution was finished, drying my arms and face while reciting the prayer verses with my mother in a soft voice. Pervin also dried my feet and put on my socks. I had gone in front of the stove to warm up; when I turned around I saw my mother opening the Iraqi prayer rug… Then, covering her head with her green headscarf, she had called me: “Come…”
I went. Tiny me, oh with her on one prayer rug, with a pure sincerity and happiness of a child, I stood next to that sacred, sensitive maternal body. She repeated to me in two words what I would do, what she had taught me before: “Two rakats of sunnah… Remember what you learned at night, you didn’t forget, did you?…”
“No…”
“Come on…”
When she made the opening takbir raising her hands to her shoulders like a woman, I had involuntarily imitated her. After finishing the sunnah, she had said to me, smiling with the sweet and penetrating smile of her eyes, “My child, are you a woman?… Women start like that, you’re a man, you’ll take your hands to your ears.”
And with her warm hands, raising my small hands to my ears, saying “Like this…” she taught me the male opening. I too took the takbir like that and finished the prayer, thinking about my difference from my mother, why I was male, what masculinity was, that being male would have other differences besides just beating little girls and dominating them.
While praying, I asked: “How shall I pray, mother?…”
She was praying and as her lips moved, her headscarf seemed to tremble. She shook her head; after finishing her prayer, still in my memory, “First, because I am Muslim, O presence of the Necessarily Existent, I praise you, say… Then I beseech you to destroy the enemies of our homeland, say… Then I wish from you the safety and health of all suffering, sick, disaster-stricken, poor Muslims, say… Finally, pray for yourself, for your own goodness and not to be deceived by the devil’s lies!” she had said. I said this simple Turkish prayer to myself, remembering the worn Arabic books with vowel marks stacked on top of each other in my mother’s closet, which I was always forbidden to touch with the warning “They are prayer books, don’t you dare touch them!”… then Fatiha…
My mother, folding up the prayer rug, asked me if I would sleep, whether I was sleepy, I didn’t know… I didn’t answer.
“Well then, go get your book, let me listen to your lesson.”
“Okay.”
Now I quickly passed through the hallway lit with a brown, smoke-like light. The curtains of my room had whitened a bit, the bright green eyes of the small night lamp had gone out, remaining like two black dots; as if this cat’s head I used to fall asleep looking at had died, departed from life. I grabbed my book lying open on top of my desk, ran to my mother’s side—not a single mistake came out.
My mother would say at night: “Before you sleep, read your lesson three times, my child, while you sleep the angels will teach it to you.”
Those angels had also taught me my lesson in my sleep tonight. My mother caressed my hair with compassionate compliments and put me in her own bed, saying “There’s still a lot of time before school.”
I wasn’t sleepy; I was looking at my mother. Her green headscarf on her head, in this luminous darkness, moving like a vision, she took her Quran and sat on the wide divan at the edge of the window, beginning to recite in her trembling and delicate voice. Listening to this beautiful voice that left an echo of poetic moaning in my soul… seeing her beautiful and noble face resembling my deceased sister under the large green headscarf… and watching the gentle harmony of supplication of her sacred head swaying slowly, I was drifting away. The smoky sky seen under the curtains was gradually brightening; a few late stars were growing like blue and pure diamonds fallen on a dark blue satin, shining spreading blue vapors. I was likening my mother to an angel, with this imagination thinking of angels… imagining that I was observing the angels that should now be gathering around my mother reading the Quran, I drifted off. On my face, on the tip of my left eyebrow where flowers would grow in the afterlife and which would definitely not burn if I were to enter hell, I was feeling a sweet shiver, then looking at the movement of my mother’s lips shining with an illuminated lily brightness… feeling as if those unseen angel wings were touching my hair, my blonde and abundant hair that my mother was now caressing with her thin fingers holding the Quran, and I was drifting away…
**
Ah, the happiness of fifteen years ago and the me of now… Life like winter, full of labor, passing emptier than an empty nothing, tasteless, joyless, loveless, passionless and emotionless, everything-less… Now my soul, my heart and my spirituality wounded by sullied ambitions, desires, actually worthless unreachable wishes, in short, with all their dazed summary, those causeless and unbearable restlessnesses… Now like a valuable spiritual dream seen as if just tonight, as if seen fifteen seconds ago, the happiness and memories that cannot be forgotten, that are not nightmares in this tumultuous and loss-filled dream that is this mortal life… Now I’m thinking, what a strange nothingness formed from the passing of these harmful and pitiless pasts into non-existence, what a decline-nurturing and dream-filled futility, what an ambiguous, what a mystery-laden speed there is in life!…
Ömer Seyfettin
