Bjørn came with the spring, when the dwarf snowdrops of the north were beginning to bloom, seagulls were sitting on their eggs and wolves were happily suckling their cubs. The days were growing longer, the darkness was getting shorter, and the sun was preparing to visit the north. Ulla pressed her son to her huge breasts and nursed him. Deniz carefully took his son in his arms and cuddled him as though he were the world’s most precious object; afraid of hurting him, looking at him as though he had seen a miraculous creature. Both felt the joy of having a living thing that belonged only to them, one they would love and who would love them back.
‘So how are you?’ asked my strange mother who wore masks on her face and over her heart to conceal her feelings and who tried to hide the trembling in her voice behind her brisk impersonal tone. Good question! How am I, really? How am I on this small, remote, solitary island, one among thousands of Norwegian islands, big and small, facing the North Sea; Ulla’s island, Ulla, who was scattered into pieces with the happiness of red tulips reflected in her eyes?
Elif is looking at the stranger in front of her, as though she is trying to recognize him, afraid of recognizing him, hoping she is wrong … If only the stranger would say, ‘You are mistaken’ or ‘You must have mistaken me for someone else’ or ‘I don’t understand your language’ and then turn around and go. But there he stands with an astonished, questioning look shadowed by sadness; a look that had already settled in his eyes when he was a small infant.
Is this my son? This thick-set ageing Norwegian villager with a long beard who looks like a fisherman. Is he my son? This is a nightmare that has dragged on! A nightmare that I haven’t been able to wake up from for years, one I can’t forget, that follows me and adheres to my heart, my mind, my emotions … ‘Will you be seeing the boy, too?’ you asked during your phone call at dawn. Well, the boy is standing in front of me. No, I won’t tell you everything. I’ll say his poor health is not in evidence. I’ll say he’s fine; he’s happy. And perhaps he is.
My son, our son, is standing in front of me, and I can’t put my arms around him and breathe in his smell, feel his warmth. I love him like an animal loves her young, so naturally, so sensually and instinctively it’s more than I can bear. However, I can’t express it in words. I can’t show it. The son we lost is standing in front of me, and I can’t bring him back to life — to our life, to the place where he should be. I can’t even reach him.
Deniz hugs his mother. He feels her trembling in his arms. Then the little boy, his eyes wide with excitement, approaches them with a strange crab-like walk. Stroking the boy’s straw-coloured hair that shines under the wan yellow lights, and trying to make his voice sound as natural as possible, Deniz says, ‘This is Bjørn, Mother.’ Then in Norwegian, ‘This lady is my mother, Bjørn.’
The child stares at the woman with eyes full of wonder and surprise. ‘What did you say to her, Daddy? How did you speak like that?’
‘I introduced you to her. I spoke Turkish.’
‘Doesn’t she speak our language? Is she a foreigner, too?’
‘Yes, she’s a foreigner as well — but a good foreigner. She doesn’t know our language. Why should she?’
‘Yes, but how will I speak to her?’
‘Grandsons and grandmothers get along in any language.’
As they walk along the road with the sea on one side and the row of pastel-coloured houses on the other, Elif says, ‘It’s been more than twenty years since we came here. Who would have guessed?’
Who would have guessed that we … That we what? That we would lose our son? Does the word ‘lose’ fit here? ‘Bury’? No, no…
The little boy with curly hair the colour of straw and huge blue eyes pulls her by the hand and tries to tell her something.
‘He says that he was waiting for Princess Ulla, but, all the same, he’s happy that you came.’
‘And who is Princess Ulla? Is she the heroine of a fairytale? Do children still read classic children’s stories here? That’s nice!’ She pulls herself together. ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I didn’t remember. I’m so sorry.’
‘There’s no need to apologize, Mother.’
There is a need to apologize. Elif knows there is, even if nobody else does. She must apologize for her lack of love and understanding, for her self-absorption. I would have understood if he had just said ‘Ulla’. I didn’t understand because I couldn’t think of her as a princess; she was far from resembling the beautiful princesses in fairytales. When we met for the first time I was full of such strange feelings that I didn’t know what to do, how to act. She was a plump Nordic girl, far from elegant, with straw-coloured hair and eyes that were a lighter blue than the boy’s, almost grey. When I put my hand on her shoulder out of politeness — instead of hugging and kissing her — I realized that she was trembling. We were at the door of our apartment in Bebek. We hadn’t gone out to the airport to meet out son and daughter-in-law. I had watched them from the balcony as they emerged from a taxi and crossed the road to the apartment building, both walking with the same awkward turkey-like gait. I saw their their unfashionable casual clothes, their old rucksacks and their neglected appearance. I didn’t open the door before the bell rang. I took my time, partly out of anger — a reaction — but also because I didn’t know how to act.
Instead of hugging and kissing, Elif settles for a distant touch, a pat on the shoulder, and she feels the girl trembling like a trapped rabbit, a mouse petrified with fear. The girl is trembling with emotion, the fear of not being able to please, of being disliked. She is overwhelmed by the magnificent door of the apartment and the entrance with its marble floors, brass decorations and house plants; and she is frightened of the reaction that will be shown by the famous writer Ömer Eren and the respected woman of science Professor Elif Eren. She feels alone and powerless in this world of assured adults, in this foreign country to which Deniz has dragged her. The expression on her homely doll’s face shows that she is about to burst into tears at any moment.
Elif feels the girl’s fear, panic and loneliness at the tips of her fingers. When I take them into my hand laboratory animals tremble like this, too, from helplessness and the fear of death. And I end their tremors with a death blow, a thin needle or sometimes with a scalpel that doesn’t kill immediately, and the tremors continue for minutes. That subtle feeling of guilt hits her every time; that imminent death smell, the senseless regret … They say one gets used to it, that it becomes a routine procedure, like swatting flies, but I haven’t been able to get used to it. I still carry on though. I kill them lovingly, gently stroking the soft fur of my dear little animals, without letting on to anyone, even to myself.
She suddenly hugs the girl and kisses her on both cheeks. She is surprised at what she has done.
Ulla dissolves into tears. She shakes with small sobs as they trickle down her cheeks. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she repeats in the little English she knows.
Apologetically Deniz says, ‘She’s exhausted from the journey with all the excitement … Ulla has been extremely tense. It’ll pass when she’s rested.’ Elif notices that her son is pale, too. With his careless growth of beard, his cheekbones pink with excitement and his lustreless eyes that seem to have sunk with the weight he’s gained, his is a familiar face from far away and long ago. A bad caricature of her son’s comely fine features…
If the poor girl hadn’t trembled like that at their first meeting Elif wouldn’t have felt so guilty. After all, she is the most innocent among us, she thought to herself. Two scarred children who have escaped the cruel world of adults and taken refuge in each other, awkward, vulnerable, craving love and recognition … That was why Elif’s heart melted and she wanted to console them, take them under her wing. The reason for her excessive sentimentality was the heart-rending ill-defined remorse she felt when she asked herself if she hadn’t played a part in what had happened. Yet her affection and her understanding had lasted only for a short time. The anger she felt towards her son for his lack of courage and success, for causing them so many disappointments and making them feel they had lost him, got the upper hand. He had disappeared into another world, condemned himself to a life of misery, buried himself alive and turned down the bright future they had prepared for him. Ulla’s presence — and now also a child — was tightening the chains on his shackles, making the situation irresolvable.