"A Family Project" by Mina Hamedi
I miss the Marmara coast, the stray cats that follow you along the breakwater rocks. I miss the small, white lighthouse on one end of the path, and the hazy views of the teardrop window of the Armenian church on the other end.
I miss watching the cargo ships in the distance, waiting for passage through the Bosphorus. There are lines of navy, red, and white, and they always anchor a good distance away from each other. This shore twists so much that you can see it clearly from above. I can always recognize the shape on maps. I then trace a specific point to the second row of houses from the seaside and find the contours of my house.
I miss the families camped out on the grass, grilling spicy meats and brewing tea. I miss spotting my grandparents’ house that stands just a few feet away from the water, behind a short ivy-covered gate. The mint tip of the adjacent greenhouse is visible when I walk by at dusk.
I miss sitting with my cousins on the balcony overlooking the shore, sipping cold drinks and eating green plums. Sometimes we can hear screams and silhouettes of people wading through the shallows.
I haven’t been back to Turkey in almost two years. I wonder who I’ll be when I finally return.
I imagine all the places I want to visit. The Basilica Cistern with the Medusa columns; the Grand Bazaar with the dusty shop run by a father and son full of antique silver jewelry from Anatolia, Yemen, or Egypt; my mother’s office on Istiklal Avenue, with a view of the busy street just a few blocks away from the Church of St. Anthony.
This is the first time I’ve been able to write in a long while. Perhaps it is thanks to the nature of this form and the freedom it gives me or perhaps I’ve been waiting for someone else to tell me that I could still write, even at a time when nothing I say feels like it carries any weight or solace.
What do I do when I need solace? When I lose the sense of wonder I can only get by physically being with the people I love, experiencing the places I love, and everything in between? I do what I’ve always done: I write about family.
***
In late March of last year, my father unearthed his mother’s memoirs: a compilation of interviews, notes, and my grandmother’s own writings about her life. Her name was Faranak but everyone called her Sheri, from the French word, cheri. Beloved.
What I knew about her:
Revlon Red lips and nails, hair dyed jet black and always in molded curls. When she walked, her feet would splay outwards like a ballerina at the barre. She spoke to me in English, her words accented by her first language, Farsi, but unmistakably articulate. When I was little, I berated her for not taking her medicine after a doctor’s visit. It is a story she recounted to every friend--proof of her youngest granddaughter’s devotion to her. She would visit us in Turkey when I was a child, but those trips became scarce near the end of her life especially after my grandfather, Baba Amir’s death.
My father decided to translate these notes and interviews from Farsi to English and asked my older sister, Leyla and me, to handle the editing and to form a narrative from the collection of memories. For months, he translated and sent us the work as I compiled it all together. It was a family project across the ocean. I didn’t actually read Sheri’s words until they were all assembled.
What I know about her:
She was raised by her grandparents in the Ein Doleh neighborhood of Tehran. Two (out of five) uncles lived in the same house. The uncles spoke fluent French, and one tutored Sheri in French day and night, for several years. At age twelve, Sheri went back to live with her parents and siblings.
Her father’s home, inherited from his father, General Mahmoud Agha, was decorated with rare ceramics and mosaics depicting ancient shahs, princes, and Persian mythical characters. Sheri’s father served as a junior officer by the Caspian Sea and brought back knowledge of various plants and flowers. He planted yellow and purple jasmine flowers that snaked up the sides of the house. He grew mandarin and pear trees in the garden. My grandmother remembers the scent.
With each new assignment, her father would move the family to a different province of Iran. They moved back to Tehran when Sheri began high school. When she graduated, her father was pleased with her decision to continue studying and attend university; she was sixteen-years-old when she began studying at Tehran University. Her class was the first group of female students and she read French novels under the constant threat of air raids. Warning alarms would sound throughout the city as the family sought refuge underground in the water reservoir, while people around them screamed in prayer.
I stop and re-read the next few paragraphs.
I cannot discount the story of my first son Feridun, who did not have a chance at the life he should have. His story belongs here along with the rest of my children.
Feridun was the name of a Persian king in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. King Feridun’s mother’s name was Faranak. Feridun, who died before my father was born.
Life keeps going, my grandmother writes.
***
I excavate an enormous book from my closet. A few of my mother’s clothes are folded neatly on a shelf; remainders from the last visit.
The book is called, “Yeşilköy, Aya Stefanos,” both the Turkish and Greek name for the seaside town where I grew up.
The book is in Turkish, which means it takes me longer to read. The name Yeşilköy, which translates to green village, was proposed by the Turkish poet Halid Ziya Uşaklıgil in 1926 when new laws to give Turkish names to communities were imposed by Ataturk.
Yeşilköy was a fishing village seventeen kilometers west of Constantinople. The original name stems from Saint Stephen, the first martyr of Christianity. A legend states that in the early 13th century, the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade, the same army that would conquer Istanbul in 1204, raided a ship carrying Saint Stephen’s relics to Rome. The relics were placed in a church until the sea had calmed and the threat was over.
I flip through the pages and find a section on the Armenian church with the teardrop window. It has been standing since 1826. On Easter, everyone in the village would gather by its walls to celebrate. The book has a collection of first-hand accounts from various residents of the town spanning many, many years.
A man by the name of Vahram Gesaryan writes about catching two enormous sting rays in the shallows with his father. He and the other children run away, frightened by the odd looking fish.
I spot a photo of Vahram’s garden, instantly recognizing the small stone tiles, the fence, and the view of the Marmara just beyond. My grandparents’ home. Below Vahram’s words is a picture of his daughter, Beatris, posing beside a marble planter that casts a shadow over her face. The same planters I tried to climb as a child, slipping on the grooves and divots.
I can still feel how the stone tiles scraped my knees when I fell off my bike. I can smell the jasmines that snake up the side of the house, by the edge where my grandmother fell a few years ago.
What do you do if you cannot go back?
***
At a virtual event, when asked how we can experience and create when we are so distant from things that inspire us, the writer Ben Okri says that we cannot. We cannot stand in a gallery or a museum and see individual brushstrokes or the way the light plays off the oils. We cannot see the sweat off the actor’s face during a play. We cannot commune with a crowd as music plays.
I recall a painting I fell in love with at the Uffizi: Giorgione’s Portrait of Warrior with His Equerry (1509). The knight, or the warrior, is dressed in black armor with gold accents. He holds a gilded sword against a black background and his equerry is to the left, dressed in red. Most of the painting is swathed in darkness, but there is a lightness to the knight’s face.
Okri is right though, and though I can look up images of the painting, there is a chance I may never see it again. When I return home, the strays might be gone, the teardrop window plastered up, the Grand Bazaar turned into something cruel like the Hagia Sophia’s reversion to a mosque.
But, I can tell you, and I can write. Like my father before me, and grandmother before him, that is all I will have in the end. Only words are left.
Mina Hamedi grew up in Istanbul, Turkey and is of Turkish/Iranian descent. She works at the literary agency, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, where she is building her own list focusing on literary fiction and experimental non-fiction. She is writing a collection about her grandfather, the family company he founded 75 years ago, and the nature of legacies.
