ZEYNEB’S GIRLHOOD
FONTAINEBLEAU, _Sept._ 1906.
When I was quite young I loved to read the history of my country told
in the Arabian Nights style. The stories are so vivid and picturesque,
that even to-day, I remember the impression my readings made on me.
[Alas! the profession of _conteur_ or _raconteur_ is one which has
been left behind in the march of time.] Formerly every Pasha had a
_conteur_, who dwelt in the house, and friends were invited from all
around to come and listen to his Arabian Nights stories. The tales that
were most appreciated were those which touched on tragic events. But
the stories contained also a certain amount of moral reflection, and
were told in a style which, if ever I write, I will try to adopt. The
sentences are long, but the rhythm of the well-chosen language is so
perfect that it is almost like a song.
What a powerful imagination had these men! And how their stories
delighted me! There were stories of Sultans who poisoned, Ministers
who were strangled, Palace intrigues which ended in bloodshed, and
descriptions of battles where conqueror and conquered were both crowned
with the laurels of a hero. But I never for a moment thought of these
tales but as fiction! Could the history of any country be so awful! Yet
was not the story of the reign in which I was living even worse, only
I was too young to know it? Were not the awful Armenian massacres more
dreadful than anything the _conteurs_ had ever described? Was not the
bare awful truth around us more ghastly than any fiction? Indeed, it
was.
How can I impress upon your mind the anguish of our everyday life; our
continual and haunting dread of what was coming; no one could imagine
what it means except those Turkish women who, like ourselves, have
experienced that life.
Had we possessed the blind fatalism of our grandmothers, we should
probably have suffered less, but with culture, as so often happens,
we began to doubt the wisdom of the Faith which should have been our
consolation.
[Illustration: A TURKISH CHILD WITH A SLAVE
Until a Turkish girl is veiled, she leads the life of an ordinary
European child. She even goes to Embassy balls. This is a great
mistake, as it gives her a taste for a life which after she is veiled
must cease.]
[Illustration: A TURKISH HOUSE
The Harem windows are on the top floor to the right.]
You will say, that I am sad—morbid even; but how can I be otherwise
when the best years of my life have been poisoned by the horrors of the
Hamidian régime. There are some sentiments which, when transplanted,
make me suffer even as they did in the land of my birth. I am thinking
particularly of the agony of waiting.
Do you think there is in any language a sentence stronger and more
beautiful than that which terminates in Loti’s _Pêcheurs d’Islande_—the
tragedy of waiting—with these words, “Il ne revint jamais”?
I mention this to you because my whole youth had been so closely allied
with this very anguish of waiting.
Imagine for a moment a little Turkish Yali[1] on the shores of the
Bosphorus. It is dark, it is still, and for hours the capital of Turkey
has been deep in slumber. Scarcely a star is in the sky, scarcely a
light can be seen in the narrow and badly-paved streets of the town.
I had been reading until very late—reading and thinking, thinking and
reading to deaden the uneasiness I always felt when something was going
to happen. What was coming this time?
By a curious irony of fate, I had been reading in the Bible[2] of
Christ’s apostles whose eyes were heavy with sleep. But I could not
sleep, and after a time I could not even read. This weary, weary
waiting!
So I rose from my bed and looked through my latticed windows at the
beautiful Bosphorus, so calm and still, whilst my very soul was being
torn with anguish. But what is that noise? What is that dim light
slowly sailing up the Bosphorus? My heart begins to beat quickly, I try
to call out, my voice chokes me. The caïque has stopped at our Yali.
Now I know what it is. Four discreet taps at my father’s window, and
his answer “I am coming.” Like a physician called to a dying patient,
he dresses and hastily leaves the house. It is three o’clock in the
morning _à la Franque_,[3] but his master is not sleeping. Away yonder,
in his fortress of Yildiz, the dreaded Sultan trembles even more than
I. What does he want with my father? Will he be pacified this time as
he has often been before? What if my father should have incurred the
wrath of this terrible Sultan? The caïque moves away as silently as it
came. Will my beloved father ever return? There is nothing to do but to
go on waiting, waiting.
* * * * *
Let us change the scene. A Turkish official has arrived at our house,
he has dared to come as far as the very door of the harem. He is
speaking to my mother.
“I am only doing my duty in seeing if your husband is here? I have
every right to go up those harem stairs which you are guarding so
carefully, look in all your rooms and cupboards. My duty is to find out
where your husband is, and to report to his Majesty at once.”
This little incident may sound insignificant to you, yet what a tragedy
to us! What was to happen to the bread-winner of our family? What had
my beloved father done?
The explanation of it was simple enough. A certain Pasha had maligned
him to the Sultan in a most disgraceful manner. And the Sultan might
have believed it, had he not, by the merest chance, discovered that my
father was at the Palace when the Pasha so emphatically said he was
elsewhere. On such slender evidence, the fate of our family was to be
weighed! Would it mean exile for our father? Would we ever see him any
more? Again I say, there was nothing to do but wait.
* * * * *
As we told you on Sunday, we Turkish women read a great deal of foreign
literature, and this does not tend to make us any more satisfied with
our lot.
Amongst my favourite English books were Beatrice Harraden’s _Ships that
Pass in the Night_,[4] passages of which I know by heart, and Lady
Mary Montagu’s _Letters_. Over and over again, and always with fresh
interest, I read those charming and clever letters. Although they are
the letters of another century, there is nothing in them to shock or
surprise a Turkish woman of to-day in their criticism of our life. It
is curious to notice, when reading Lady Mary’s _Letters_, how little
the Turkey of to-day differs from the Turkey of her time; only, Turkey,
the child that Lady Mary knew, has grown into a big person.
There are two great ways, however, in which we have become too modern
for Lady Mary’s book. In costume we are on a level with Paris, seeing
we buy our clothes there; and as regards culture, we are perhaps more
advanced than is the West, since we have so much leisure for study, and
are not hampered with your Western methods. And yet how little we are
known by the European critics!
The people of the West still think of us women as requiring the
services of the public letter-writer! They think of us also—we, who
have so great an admiration for them, and interest ourselves in all
they are doing—as one amongst many wives. Yet Polygamy (and here I say
a _Bismillah_[5] or prayer of thankfulness) has almost ceased to exist
in Turkey.
I know even you are longing to make the acquaintance of a harem,
where there is more than one wife, but to-day the number of these
establishments can be counted on five fingers. We knew intimately the
wife of a Pasha who had more than one wife. He was forty years old, a
well-known and important personage, and in his Palace beside his first
wife were many slave-wives; the number increased from year to year.
But again I repeat this is an exception.
We used often to visit the poor wife, who since her marriage had never
left her home, her husband being jealous of her, as he was of all the
others; they were _his possessions_, and in order to err on the safe
side, he never let them out.
Our friend, the first wife, was very beautiful, though always ailing.
Every time we went to see her, she was so grateful to us for coming,
thanked us over and over again for our visit, and offered us flowers
and presents of no mean value. And she looked so happy, continually
smiling, and was so gentle and kind to all her _entourage_.
She told our mother, however, of the sorrow that was gnawing at her
heart-strings, and when she spoke of the Pasha she owned how much she
had suffered from not being the favourite. She treated her rivals with
the greatest courtesy. “It would be easy to forgive,” she said, “the
physical empire that each in turn has over my husband, but what I feel
most is that he does not consult me in preference to the others.”
She had a son fifteen years old, whom she loved very dearly, but she
seemed to care for the fourteen other children of the Pasha quite as
much, and spoke of them all as “our children.” Although her husband had
bought her as a slave, she had a certain amount of knowledge too, and
she read a great deal in the evenings when she was alone, alas! only
too often.
The view of the Bosphorus, with the ships coming and going, was a great
consolation to her, as it has been to many a captive. And she thanked
Allah over and over again that she at least had this pleasure in life.
I have often thought of this dear, sweet woman in my many moments of
revolt, as one admires and reverences a saint, but I have never been
able to imitate her calm resignation.
Unlike our grandmothers, who accepted without criticism their “written
fate,” we analysed our life, and discovered nothing but injustice and
cruel, unnecessary sorrow. Resignation and culture cannot go together.
Resignation has been the ruin of our country. There never would have
been all this suffering, this perpetual injustice, but for resignation;
and resignation was no longer possible for us, for our Faith was
tottering.
But I am not really pitying women more than men under the Hamidian
régime. A man’s life is always in danger. Do you know, the Sultan was
informed when your friend Kathleen came to see us? Every time our
mother invited guests to the house, she was obliged to send the list
to his Majesty, who, by every means, tried to prevent friends from
meeting. Two or three Turks meeting together in a café were eyed with
suspicion, and reported at head-quarters, so that rather than run risks
they spent the evenings in the harems with their wives. One result,
however, of this awful tyranny, was that it made the bonds which unite
a Turkish family together stronger than anywhere else in the world.
Can you imagine what it is to have detectives watching your house day
and night? Can you imagine the exasperation one feels to think that
one’s life is at the mercy of a wretched individual who has only to
invent any story he likes and you are lost? Every calumny, however
stupid and impossible, is listened to at head-quarters. The Sultan’s
life-work (what a glorious record for posterity!) has been to have
his poor subjects watched and punished. What his spies tell him he
believes. No trial is necessary, he passes sentence according to his
temper at the moment—either he has the culprit poisoned, or exiles him
to the most unhealthy part of Arabia, or far away into the desert of
Tripoli, and often the unfortunate being who is thus punished has no
idea why he has been condemned.
I shall always remember the awful impression I felt, when told with
great caution that a certain family had disappeared. The family
consisted of the father, the mother, son and daughter, and a valet.
They were my neighbours—quiet, unobtrusive people—and I thought all the
more of them for that reason.
One morning, when I looked out of my window, I saw my neighbour’s house
was closed as if no one lived there. Without knowing what had happened
to them, I became anxious, and discreetly questioned my eunuch, who
advised me not to speak about them. It appeared, however, that in
the night the police had made an inspection of the house, and no one
has since then heard of its occupants, or dared to ask, for fear of
themselves becoming “suspect.”
I found out long after, from a cutting sent me from a foreign friend
in Constantinople, that H. Bey’s house had been searched, and the
police—and this in spite of the fact that he had been forbidden to
write—had found there several volumes of verses, and he was condemned
to ten years’ seclusion in a fortified castle at Bassarah.
This will perhaps give you some idea of the conditions under which we
were living. Constant fear, anguish without hope of compensation, or
little chance of ever having anything better.
That we preferred to escape from this life, in spite of the terrible
risks we were running, and the most tragic consequences of our action,
is surely comprehensible.
If we had been captured it would only have meant death, and was the
life we were leading worth while? We had taken loaded revolvers with
us, to end our lives if necessary, remembering the example of one of
our childhood friends, who tried to escape, but was captured and taken
back to her husband, who shut her up till the end of her days in a
house on the shores of the Marmora.
You have paid a very pretty compliment to our courage. Yet, after all,
does it require very much to risk one’s life when life is of so little
value? In Turkey our existence is so long, so intolerably long, that
the temptation to drop a little deadly poison in our coffee is often
too great to withstand. Death cannot be worse than life, let us try
death.—Your affectionate
ZEYNEB.