MELISA GÜRPINAR (b. 1941)
The Bank Teller Tecelli Bey
Translated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat
The Bank Teller Tecelli Bey
The bank teller Tecelli Bey
greeted his mother-in-law,
who was sorting
string beans
under the chestnut tree,
with his head.
Only nodded his head
and, with his son,
walked past her.
His mother-in-law,
seeing her in-law, with a mysterious intuition
checked if her money was in its place
in her sock,
and her eyes caught the white roses
that kept blooming since the day she’d left
the Palace as a bride,
the white roses which had the look of a wandering
dervish, whose branches hadn’t
been pruned this year, and
the apricot tree
wasn’t lime-washed
this year, and thieves
were constantly stealing the gutters,
stealing the zinc falling from the roof in broad daylight…
lavenders, boxwoods had overspread their branches,
but her son-in-law didn’t care,
knew only how to go to soccer games with his son,
In his sixties the man was living in a globe of ice,
if one asked her
can he be of use to anyone a man who drinks
a bottle of Marmara wine every evening
to the tune of poached blue fish smoked in cardboard?
As the mother-in-law
sorted the string beans, first dividing them with her hand in half,
who knows what else she was sorting in her head as best as she could?
“I wouldn’t sell this villa in its time,
wouldn’t I to leave it to this awful man?
Oh, what a head!”
Every time she shook her head,
hairpins slipped from her white bun, fell on the flagstones….
The white roses shook gently to both sides with the offshore
breeze;
The garden gate with the bell opened and closed.
Two boys dove fast into the garden.
“Granny, give us sugar.”
In the mother-in-law’s pocket there were always a few caramel drops.
She made the children read the fortunes
wrapped around them.
“Eat the insides,” she told them, “they stick to my teeth”
anyway, her false teeth were ready to fall out,
nothing sticky pulling them down,
whereas in the cabinet next to her bed, always locked up,
she kept hard, Akide candies
(Akide Bey,
steward of the Sultan, licensed
producer of royal candies)
“but even if she didn’t lock the drawers
who would eat those old-fashioned slowly dreaming melting-in-your-mouth candies?”
she wandered….
The petals of the white roses
had tinges of yellow and pink,
the season for roses is past,
but even if they lose their scents and colors,
the seeds she brought from the Palace insist on blooming…
sprout under the snow,
the buds at the tips of naked branches stand erect and proud,
as for lilies, they are in the bud,
if the chestnut tree gives plenty of chestnuts this year,
the mother-in-law will hire extra hands
to haul the chestnuts inside the house
before the quilt-maker’s apprentices
swoop over the tree….
The bank teller Tecelli Bey
held the hand of his thirty-five-year-old son,
who was lame and stuttered,
injured at birth
people said,
that is also why
he’s retarded,
his father mistreated the indentured servant girl
of the house
other neighbors said,
and look what happened to him….
there was so little to talk about
and time was passing so quickly,
it had been forty years since Tecelli Bey walked in as a groom to this house,
his wife or mother-in-law
didn’t listen to him even for one day,
his father-in-law had long passed away,
he was a graceful civil servant from Istanbul,
who was appointed Secretary to the new parliament in Ankara,
and under a flag wrapped as gracefully around a coffin
he had returned to Istanbul in two years,
no more children necessary, his wife and mother-in-law said,
and Tecelli Bey poured all his love on this child,
went to soccer games with his child,
lay on mats on the floor and solved crossword puzzles…
and late Junes, in his pajamas
drank wine on the terrace,
watched glowworms,
loved beans with chopped scallions, meatballs steeped in vinegar, semolina cinnamon puddings,
it isn’t quite clear what he thought of Hitler….
His stocky and reedy-voiced wife
leaves the carafe with the ice water next to him
and walks away quietly….
Everyone seemed to talk silently,
is startled when they hear loud laughter from the tenant in the basement;
thank God,
mother-in-law never turns off the large voice box in the reception room,
radio is the voice of the house,
she says,
and at midnight, obviously, the rats in the attic are the voice of the house,
at noon the roosters, and the sound of the sucker-and-gusher pump is also a voice,
the windmill over the well creaks away….
Some days, setting his cart outside the garden gate,
the taffy vendor sang gazels*…
The rest was all soundlessness.
Tecelli Bey inspects what his son is wearing one last time.
Clothed with care, he should lack nothing,
his knickerbockers, his linen hat…perfect
In his loose and zippered jacket, Tecelli Bey
walked in a dream, dragging his feet….
and he always left something back in the house,
and this time his tobacco bag on the stool,
“ah,” he says, “ah,
retirement did this to me….”
if I leave these two women for a few days
and find my ancestral house in Kir
ehir,
maybe…
if one becomes the house groom in a rich man’s villa in Istanbul,
it’s like this, one loses everything in forty years…
the road was extending achingly…
his son is biting his own hand,
bitching all the way,
belly-aching
“Dad, buy me the Team Flag.”