the common language of falling in love.
In fact, it is quite simple: you are in love if you feel as if you’re rocking on a swing when you kiss someone.
You see, I am unable to arrange my thoughts and am struggling to tell you this without confusing you.
It is as though I’ve entered the attic of a haunted house, packed with old, dusty furniture. I rummage through everything I happen to come across, bewildered, like a small child who picks up something, opens and plays with it, only to immediately pick up something else—something that attracts his attention more.
A box, cast aside and forgotten; a broken wooden horse with its red paint scraped off; a wooden puppet (the one whose nose gets longer when he lies); a bunch of old letters—who knows what lines they contain—tightly bound by an old piece of ribbon; photographs of people whose names I can hardly remember; dusty books; dolls with missing legs; broken alarm clocks; tin boxes; cracked ceramic trinkets whose polish is worn away . . .
Isn’t this the oldest thing I remember from my childhood: my brother’s steel train set painted in red and green? I used to admire how smoke blew from the locomotive as it moved along the rails. At the station, a woman dressed in a coat and a hat and carrying a chic handbag, a man in uniform—the stationmaster perhaps—and a few passengers holding their suitcases were waiting. A door on the train opened, and someone got out. When the train left again, it switched to another track, leading to either a bridge or a tunnel. It was my brother, in his short brown overalls and suspenders that never stayed in their place, who did all of this by moving the rails spread across the floor and by pulling various levers. I was stretched out on our old Erzurum carpet with its intricate and colorful design, with my head between my hands and my elbows on the floor. I kept telling my brother, “Come on, let the whistle blow, let the smoke come out.”
The music begins when the crank of the old phonograph is turned, carrying me away as if I have suddenly come across an ex-love.
Did I say “ex-love?” I do not have an ex-love. I only have one love.
Among all of the pieces of furniture, I find a red bicycle with its paint scraped away and its metal parts rusted. I wipe off the dust and manage to ring the bell. I get on the bike and let myself loose in time. Suddenly, I am racing downhill at full speed.
On a matchless winter day.
In Ankara, when I was fourteen.
On a cool, happy morning of my carefree days.
The slope goes down to the road where our home is located. I used to climb all the way up, huffing and puffing, and then come down like the wind, scared and with beating heart, yet enjoying every moment. (Many years later, I saw a film in which a little boy riding his bicycle as fast as I used to, took off and flew over the clouds. I felt exactly the same thing on that slope.)
As I speed down the hill as usual, I see my brother at the corner of the road. He is talking to a tall man I have never seen before.
I am wearing a big cap so that my hair does not fly in the wind. My father’s cap. (I usually throw away everything, but it seems I had not been able to let go of that cap. Recently, I found it at home, hidden in a corner. I couldn’t decide whether I should be happy or sad. I just sat there and cried, with the cap on my lap.)
Clouds are moving high above in the sky. White round clouds that make me think I could climb up on them and float far away, to distant unknown lands.
In the blink of an eye, I reach where my brother and the tall man are standing. Frightened that I will hit them, I quickly turn the bike and plunge to the ground.
As I stand up, trying to tidy myself, my brother laughs and says to the man, “And this is my little sister.” I blush and stare at the ground.
The man looks like an actor. His slightly graying sideburns are in pleasing harmony with his dark blue eyes. He’s wearing a khaki brown jacket with a leather collar. Underneath, he has a thick turtleneck sweater. I lift my head to look at him. His eyes glow in the wintry light. I can’t tell whether they are harsh or soft, or if they are looking at me or far into the distance. He turns to my brother and says with a mocking smile, “Your little sister is a bit mischievous, it seems.”
Is it funny that the first word I heard from him was about my “mischievousness”?
Well, that was how it happened.
Who would have known?
As we were walking home, I said to my brother, “What a cold man!”
“Cold?” he laughed. “Mr. Fuat? What do you know! All the women in Ankara are in love with him.”
I remember that the same night, in the dark, I thought about him as I slowly fell asleep.
I fantasized that one day I would suddenly appear in front of him, and he would be surprised and not know how to react when I told him that I was that boyish, mischievous girl who had not caught even a bit of his attention in the past.
My beauty would astonish him, and he would be unable to decide what to do or how to act.
If you wonder whether I really fantasized that, let me tell you the truth: I did, imagining it like a movie in my mind’s eye. The scene is still vivid in my memory.
However, the strange thing was not a fourteen-year-old girl’s daydreaming, but what was to happen afterwards.
I pulled the blanket all the way over my head.
So, he is the man with whom all the women are in love?
But of course, this was just a dream to last a single night. It was nothing more than a young girl’s fantasy no one knew about, a tale she wrote, or a film she created in her own mind.
Now we should put the pieces in their places and draw back a little so that we can see the whole picture better.
During my school years, my father used to tell me that I “walked on air.” My friends were always amazed at the things I did. It was true that I was walking on air. I still do the same. All I lacked was a couple of wings. I really don’t understand why I didn’t care a bit about all the rules people thought important and tried hard to comply with.
I have always admired the heroines in novels who do things others can’t. If you don’t do what others cannot, you can’t be a heroine in the first place, can you? You can only be one of those people who read about the life of a heroine in a book.
But no, I was sure I wanted to be one those women: someone who does not read about another’s life and daydreams, but is the heroine of an adventure who can make her dreams come true.
I thought so when I was just a little girl. Since the nights I imagined those dreams.
Can a human change his destiny? I decided to create my own destiny. That’s why I did things no one thought I would. I tried to build a future for myself that I desired. Maybe everything has happened just because of this. Sometimes I suspect it. Maybe that great power I challenged wanted to tell me that only He was capable of determining human destiny.
In fact, life was difficult.
I realized
