no one to tell me what to do. I was at the beginning of a new life, and it did not have a user’s manual. What had to be done was obvious. What’s more, it was the same for everyone.
Each of us was one of those ordinary women: volunteers who promised to make a comfortable home so that our husbands would be successful and buy us more.
If you didn’t question too much, watched what others were doing, and followed the right example, the same system continued onas if it were a secret scroll transferred from one to another.
But that kind of life bored me to death.
After Turgut went to bed, I used to lie on the big sofa in the living room and read novels that transported me to different worlds. After watching a film, I used to live in that film for many days.
It almost felt as if a different person dwelled inside of me: that good old friend of mine. The friend inside my mind who had talked to me when I was a child, shared my lonely moments, come with me wherever I went, shared my happiness and sadness, known when my heart was broken when no one else did, and given me advice. My imaginary friend had grown up, too, but stayed with me.
Most of you have known such a friend. The friend in you who shared your deepest secrets. Yet, one day you discovered that your friend, your confidant, had gone away quietly and secretly, without even leaving a letter of farewell, as if she had known that she had to go.
What can I say? My friend didn’t leave me.
My friend is still here, by my side, sitting in that chair across from me and laughing about my situation.
Strange, but after a while, I began to confuse our identities: who’s she and who am I?
I used to wake up one day thinking life was beautiful with all the small things that were part of it.
When I woke up the next day, I thought I had made a real mess of my life and hated myself for being like one of those women stuck in their small worlds.
We were still at the beginning of everything, a whole life that would be spent in the same way. Slowly but surely, joy would fade away, and all the new images would age and wear out.
Sometimes I would think I had married a very nice person and that even though we were not having a great romance like in the movies or in novels, such romances always ended in disaster. Real life consisted of the framed photographs of children.
Then, unbearable anguish would overwhelm me, and I would ponder the impossible prospect of spending my whole life with a man who had no idea about who I was and would never understand even a tiny bit of what I thought or felt.
I had once seen a machine at the hospital. When the thin line on the screen no longer moved, people understood the patient had died.
I felt the same way. Our machine neither emitted a sound nor indicated the slightest stir.
Our life was a straight, thin line.
How bizarre! We often do not tell the most noteworthy things to the ones we love, and when we finally do, they cannot hear us anymore.
Some mornings one wakes up with a strange feeling of distress for no reason at all. Something obscure, a vague uneasy feeling, a kind of worry eats your heart, yet you do not know why.
It was such a morning. A cold morning in March. In the garden next door, children wearing colorful hats were dressing a giant snowman with a long red scarf with tassels. They stuck a carrot in the middle of its face. I listened to their merry giggles as they threw snowballs at each other and rolled on the snow-covered ground. Peggy Lee was singing on the radio: “There’s a small hotel with a wishing well. I wish that we were there together. Not a sign of people. Who wants people.” I was sitting back comfortably and sipping my morning tea on a light yellow armchair with a strange elongated form. We had bought it from the big furniture store that had recently opened on the outskirts of town, but Turgut had somehow come not to like this piece of furniture.
A photo of Audrey Hepburn receiving an award was on the first page of the daily paper. She had been given it for her role in that film where she played the part of a princess who fooled all the news reporters in Rome, strolled alone on the streets, and met a journalist.
The paper also reported on the cancerous effect of cigarettes, as well as that the tobacco companies objected to this news.
It was a morning in March.
The doorbell rang just as I was scrutinizing Audrey’s necklace. As soon as I saw Turgut on our doorstep, I sensed that something was wrong.
“I’ve just received some news. Your father has fallen ill and been hospitalized. But don’t worry, he’s okay.”
It was obvious he was lying, but I wanted to believe him. He had already made arrangements for me to fly to Turkey early the next day.
That odd distress in the morning, the way my heart had been clenched, was apparently not irrelevant.
When I arrived in Ankara, my brother picked me up at the airport, and we went directly to the hospital. On the way there, he told me my father was temporarily unconscious but was expected to regain consciousness any time. Everything had happened late at night, without warning.
When we got to the hospital, my mother cried for a long while, embracing me tightly. My father was all alone in a room, lying on a bed. A silent, white, plain room.
Like a helpless child, he lay there with his eyes closed, his long white eyebrows curling upward, his luxuriant gray hair spread out on the pillow. His face was very pale.
I stood beside his bed and held his hand. I waited for him to open his eyes, to chat with me like in the old days, or at least to smile with his eyes. In fact, I wanted nothing more than to hear him say my name.
Nights passed. And mornings, too.
In that cold, gloomy hospital room—purgatory opening to the land of the dead—I watched that old man waste away, day by day. Sitting there and holding his hand only made me realize that all was in vain and that we were in desperate straits against this relentless blow of life.
It was unbelievable. I couldn’t understand. Even though I lived far away and did not see him, I had never thought my father would leave us all alone and go away. I believed he would stay with us forever. He would remain intact as the pillar of our home who ensured the order of our lives.
I had never seen him become ill, complain, or get tired and rest at home.
My father had always been the same. Like a rock. He had always been a lively, strong, healthy man, with a deep, loud voice, who was active all the time.
It was a nightmare to watch him lie there without stirring, without even moving his eyelids, as if he were cross with all of us. I felt like screaming, but I couldn’t make a sound. I wanted to wake up from that nightmarish sleep, fluttering like a bird.
I would wake up and they would tell me it had all been a bad dream. Everything would return to its usual course. I would get out of bed and start a brand new day full of happiness and joy, hastening to tell everyone about my nightmare.
I wish it had happened like that: just like in a bad dream.
People came and left. They stuck needles into his feet and hands and studied those machines that we watched too, hoping they would give us good news any moment. In the end, all people said was, “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
During those long days and nights, I found out there is but one very short moment between life and death, a moment we can never perceive.
That unknown moment would come one day and this promenade would end. That was all that would happen.
I wished so much that he would wake up suddenly, just for a short while, say his last words like in films, and that we could tell each other the things we had not been able to say in a lifetime.
A few hours before I had