Portrait of a Turkish Family by Irfan Orga

house was found and bought, at a higher price than had been anticipated. The prices of everything had risen and many of the shops remained closed for long periods of each day. More and more men were taken to be soldiers and presently one saw mainly women in the streets. Servants and mistresses and prostitutes, they all had to eat and would spend their days tramping the streets in search of an open shop. Bewilderment, resignation was to be seen in all their faces but no resentment. That came later.
    The new house seemed very small after the large, rambling old Konak where I was born. No longer had I a room to myself but shared one with Mehmet. There was no playroom and we children had to use the dining-room if our parents required the salon to themselves.
    The garden was large and had many fruit trees and a pocket- handkerchief -lawn, with a lime tree standing in the middle of it. When my grandmother first saw it she snorted with disgust – if one may use such an inelegant term in connection with my grandmother. She demanded how she could be expected to live in a house that size and wanted to know where all her furniture would go. She made it quite clear that she had no intention of selling any of it.
    When I first saw the house my father said to me: ‘I hope I shall see you here as a grown man, my son, and myself as an old man. But if anything happens to me, then you will have to take my place. Perhaps many times it will be difficult for you but it will be your duty to look after your mother and your grandmother.’
    I could not bear to hear my kindly father talk like this and I threw myself on him, weeping as if my heart would break. The house stood on a hill and from the upper windows we could see the Marmara, but faintly from this distance and more grey than blue. A laundry had been built on the side of the house by a previous owner, a haphazard afterthought. And a fig tree grew in the middle of it. There was no proper roof on the laundry, only a sort of terrace built of wood with a hole left for the fig tree to triumphantly emerge, so that in summer it could spread its glory outside the bedroom windows. In winter rain must often have come through but because it was only a laundry no one seemed to care. Only in İstanbul could such a lovely, enchanting thing be found. Later on, after we moved there, İnci would spread a carpet across the terrace and my mother would lie there with us on cushions, watching the sun through the leaves of the fig tree, now and again stretching upwards to pull the ripe, purple figs with a stick which had been specially made for that purpose.
    But before we moved in, men erected chicken-coops at the end of the garden and furniture was arranged, to the satisfaction of none, for the smaller, darker rooms looked unbearably overcrowded with my grandmother ’s unwieldy furniture. She never liked that house and seemed a different person for the short while she lived there. The day before we moved in my father bought a ram, for this is a tradition still observed in Turkey today. Its horns were painted gold, its woolly coat red and gold and a large red ribbon was tied about its neck, the bow sitting coquettishly under one ear. That night I could not sleep for I was excited and at the same time sad for the poor beautiful ram which would be killed on the morrow. Next morning a butcher was called and, with my father reading extracts from the Koran, the ram’s throat was slit and as the blood poured down into the street, a great shout went up from the watching crowd.
    ‘ Hayırlı olsun! ’ they cried, meaning, ‘let this house be lucky for you!’
    My father turned to us and said: ‘ Bismillahir rahmaner rahim ,’ which can be very roughly translated as ‘I go into this house in the name of God.’
    Then the little ceremony was over and the ram taken away to be cut up for distribution amongst the poor people. The same evening after sundown my father went to the mosque to give thanks for the new