Rather than marry a Turk

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Opinion by Elif ŞAFAK

  (Nadia Onissimovna, a dedicated and diligent yet jobless scientist, met a good-for-nothing Turkish macho in a shabby discotheque in Ukraine… His name was Metin Chetinceviz. She fell in love with him. Her case proved the old saying about love being blind…)

  Metin Chetinceviz was a total nuisance. One of the last types a woman would like to fall in love with. But Nadia Onissimovna was so inexperienced with men that even after spending hours with him, she had still not realized being with one of the last types a woman would like to fall in love with. Anyhow that night, she was so dazed by the incomprehensible hugeness and the ceaseless booming of the discotheque she had stepped into for the first time that she was in no condition to realize anything. She was there by chance; being dragged by one of her girlfriends from whom she hoped to borrow money by the end of the night. Metin Chetinceviz was among a group of businessmen coming from Istanbul. By the tenth minute of their encounter, before Nadia Onissimovna could comprehend what was going on, the tables were joined, women she was not acquainted with were added on to these men she did not know, and a deluge of drinks ordered. While the rest of the table rejoiced laughing at everything, she shrunk at one corner and drunk as never before in her life. A little later, when everyone else scampered to the dance floor in pairs, she would see a swarthy man sitting still, distressed and lonely just like her. She smiled. So did he. Encouraged by these smiles they exchanged a few words. Both spoke English terribly. Yet English is the only language in the world capable of giving the impression that it might be spoken with a little push, even when one has barely any knowledge of it. Thus in the following hours, rolling their eyes as if hoping for the words they sought to descend from the ceiling, snapping their fingers and drawing imaginary pictures in the air with their hands, doodling on napkins, drawing symbols on each other s palms, giggling whenever they paused, opening up whenever they giggled, and continuously nodding their heads up and down Nadia Onissimovna and Metin Chetinceviz plunged into one long, deep conversation.

   *  *  *

  “Rather than marry a Turk, I d lick a crammed-full ashtray on an empty stomach every morning.”

  “You can lick whatever you want,” Nadia Onissimovna replied impishly. “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

  “Do not recklessly scatter in my kitchen the teachings of Jesus as if they were epigrams of that untrustworthy professor of yours,” her aunt bellowed, as she blew on the ladle she had been stirring for the last fifteen minutes in a greenish soup.

  “You know nothing about him,” Nadia Onissimovna muttered shrugging her shoulders. “Only prejudices…”

  “I can assure you that I do know what I need to know, honey,” her aunt pontificated, sprinkling salt in concentric circles onto the pot. “And if you had not wasted your most beautiful years chasing ants with a good-for-nothing nuts, you too would know what I know.” She pulled a stool by the oven and, jangling her bracelets, kept stirring the soup. Due to varicose pains, she could not stand up for more than ten minutes. “At least you must know that Turks don t drink wine,” she said with a distraught expression. But it was hard to determine what distressed her more -the subject matter or the soup s still refusing to boil.

  Desperate to object, Nadia Onissimovna started to recount, though with a dash of exaggeration, the whiskies, beers and vodkas her future husband had consumed at the discotheque, refraining from mentioning how he had jumbled them all and the outcome.

  “Whisky is another story. Do they drink wine, tell me about that. No, they don t! If they did, they wouldn t have destroyed the fountain of Leon the Sage when they captured Zavegorod. The fountain gushing wine for three hundred years was razed to the ground when the Turks got hold of it. Why did they destroy that gorgeous fountain? Because it gushed wine instead of water! The Turks tore down its wall with axes. Idiots! They thought they would find a cellar crammed with barrels of wine somewhere down there. But you know what they found instead? A bunch of grapes! Hear me well, Nadia, I say a bunch of grapes! And only three among them had been squeezed. Apparently with only one grape, wine flowed out of the fountain for a century. What did the Turks do when they saw this miracle? Did they appreciate it? No way! They demolished the walls, broke the fountain and even destroyed the grape bunches. They don t honor wine, don t honor things sacred and don t honor the sage.” She shook the ladle toward her niece. “Women they don t honor anyhow.”

  * * *

  When coming to Istanbul, Nadia Onissimovna had not at all fantasized about the milieu that would be awaiting her. In spite of this, she couldn t help feeling disappointed when she saw Bonbon Palace for the first time. Not that the apartment building she was going to live in from now on was more dilapidated than the ones she had lived in so far. If anything, it was more or less the same. That was the issue anyhow, this sameness. For moving somewhere brand new only to encounter there the pale replica of your old life is a good reason to be disappointed. To top it all, there was neither a sandy beach nearby nor a job for an entomologist. But the gravest problem was Metin Chetinceviz himself. For one thing, he had lied. He did not even have a proper job. He made a living by doing minor voiceovers at irregular intervals for TV channels. In addition, he occasionally went to weddings, circumcision ceremonies or birthday parties of the well-off to perform the shadow theater Karagoz. He kept his reeking leather puppets in his amber-colored briefcase. But lately Bonbon Palace had started to stink so awfully that the smell of the leather puppets was nothing compared to the smell of garbage surrounding the apartment building.

  To cap it all, HisWifeNadia would soon realize how badly mistaken had her aunt been. Metin Chetinceviz downed low-price low-quality wine at a rate even the miraculous grapes of Leon the Sage could not compensate. When drunk he lost not only temper, but also the ability to work. If doing a voiceover, he forgot the text; if performing the shadow theater, he stirred up a ruckus by making his puppets talk gobbledygook, peppered with slang and slander. At the weddings he attended, as he played the puppets, behind the shadow screen he gobbled down every drink in his reach, causing a disgrace by the end of the day. Once he had been kicked out for hurling from the mouth of the puppet Hacivat, lascivious jokes and loutish insinuations about the groom in front of the guests. Since those witnessing his scandals never gave him work again, he incessantly had to set up new job contacts.

  Still Nadia Onissimovna did not go back. She stayed here at Bonbon Palace. Even she herself could not fathom when and how she had internalized the role of a housewife she had started performing temporarily, only until finding an appropriate job. One day the writing on a wedding invitation captivated her attention. We wish Metin Chetinceviz and His Wife Nadia to join us on our happiest day. She stared at the letter blankly, there and then realizing she was not Nadia Onissimovna anymore, not Nadia Chetinceviz either, but HisWifeNadia.

  (Excerpt from The Flea Palace)

  APOLOGY - Due to an editing error, Elif Şafak s article last Sunday titled "When silences speak" mistakenly included the term "allegedly" when the author directly referred to the atrocities in the past. The term "allegedly" was not used by the author. We apologize.