I used to trace the panoramic mosaic of the city, square by square, and the strategic points that seemed to be waiting their turn for a march past of history. Despite the barricade of mist, a Byzantine residue, I would flirt with the towers of Topkapı Palace, and when a lazy breeze drifted over the stone wall it would carry a fresh smell of garden herbs into the drawing room and die away in a sigh. She said she chose Çamlıca, which draws the morning ezan from the 3,000 city mosques like a magnet, because ‘there’s no neighbourhood left that hasn’t lost its flavour’. She made her father buy her a wedding present of the Ottoman mansion with its symmetrical façade and ornate carvings. ‘As soon as I saw Mürsel I was determined to have him as my lord and master,’ she would eagerly confide. ‘As he walked around the campus biting his lower lip, hands in the pockets of his crumpled trousers, even the left-wing girl students trembled. He played hard to get alright, but those condescending little smiles of his were enough to charm people, and despite his oily hair and his unseemly scratching at certain organs, even the women cleaners admired him ...’ Unfortunately my mother was an attractive woman with her abundant blonde hair, eyes blue as the sea, her turned-up nose and her shapely figure.
What do You think about Songs My Mother Never Taught Me?
