Without a Country Read online

  “Mother, I’m Atatürk’s daughter,” Susy said in Turkish.

  “All right, then, we’ll change your last name to Atatürk.”

  “We can’t do that! There’s only one Atatürk. Only one!”

  “That’s true,” Elsa said.

  While the people of Turkey fervently prayed for their sick leader, Elsa was preoccupied with her daughter and her questions of identity. The girl was only five years old. Was it too late or too early to have a serious talk? Who was putting ideas in her head? Elsa was certain that Fatma had taught Susy Islamic prayers, but this notion of being Atatürk’s daughter couldn’t have come from her. Susy hadn’t even started school yet. What would happen when she grew up and got more independent?

  When Elsa brought the subject up with Gerhard that evening, he dismissed her concerns. The prayer mat was a passing fancy. It was endearing of the girl to imagine she was a daughter of Atatürk. And the ticket collector’s health update was simply an indication of the people’s reverence for the president. He’d be fine. Elsa should stop blowing things out of proportion.

  One morning a week later, Madame came running upstairs. Atatürk had passed away. Front doors opened and closed throughout the apartment building. Neighbors visited each other to exchange condolences. Everyone, regardless of race or religion, was grief-stricken. Women and men sobbed openly. Elsa gathered around the radio with her neighbors in the Atalays’ apartment. The body of Atatürk, who had taken his final breath at five minutes past nine in the morning, would be laid in the Ethnography Museum in Ankara while his final resting place was readied. The people of Istanbul were invited to pay their last respects in Dolmabahçe Palace, where the Father would lie in repose until he was conveyed to the capital city.

  Elsa dressed the self-proclaimed daughter of Atatürk in her nicest outfit and sent her to the palace with a bouquet of flowers in her hand and her father at her side. Susy, who had hoped to place the bouquet on Atatürk’s chest, returned home terribly disappointed. After waiting for over an hour to get inside, she had been taken home without so much as a glimpse of Atatürk’s face. The flowers had been placed on his sealed coffin.

  On the morning of November 19, 1938, nine days after his death, Atatürk’s casket was sent off from Istanbul on the battleship Yavuz with a hundred-gun salute. A funeral train then carried the body from İzmit to Ankara. Susy and the other children in the building spent most of the day listening to live radio broadcasts of the formalities.

  Atatürk, who had always been greeted with cheers when he arrived at the station in Ankara, was met this time by tears and funeral marches. His casket, wrapped in the Turkish flag, was placed on a catafalque in front of the Grand National Assembly. It would be guarded by four officers wearing swords. Tens of thousands flocked there, all day and night, to pay their respects.

  The following day, Susy, along with a few other children and their mothers and Madame, gathered again in front of the Atalays’ radio. The cortege of dignitaries named by the speaker included foreign officers who had battled the Turks not so many years earlier. Yet now, heads bowed, they followed the horse-drawn caisson conveying the Father. Field Marshal Birdwood, the British general who lost a leg in Gallipoli, raised his baton in respectful salute. Farther back walked students and teachers, workers and peasants, shopkeepers and housewives. The caisson came to a halt and . . .

  As the speaker’s voice cracked with emotion, Susy rested her head on little Demir Atalay’s shoulder and started sobbing.

  “What’s gotten into her?” Madame asked.

  “Not only does she think she’s a Turk,” Elsa said, “she thinks she’s Atatürk’s daughter.”

  The Late-Night Telegram

  The sound of a doorbell cut through Gerhard’s dreams. He turned over and kept sleeping. They’d been to Büyükada and spent the entire day out on the island enjoying the sun, the sea, and the fresh air. But the shrill sound persisted. Surfacing at last, he switched on the bedside lamp. Elsa was sitting up next to him, rubbing her eyes.

  “Someone’s here? At this hour?”

  They both leapt out of bed and were running toward the door when Elsa went back into the bedroom and grabbed her bathrobe. In the pale light of the stairwell, Gerhard read the telegram.

  Your father had heart attack stop in hospital stop come urgently stop your mother

  Elsa ran to Gerhard’s side. Her left eye was twitching. “Who died?” she asked.

  “Nobody died. Your father is ill, though. He’s in the hospital.”

  Elsa snatched the telegram out of his hand, then sank to her knees. Gerhard crouched down and put his arms around her. There must be something he could say. Why couldn’t he find the words? He kept a reassuring arm around her as she cried.

  “I have to see my father. I’m leaving for Zurich right away.”

  “Tomorrow morning, I’ll book you a ticket. Come back to bed, dear, and try to get some sleep.” Gerhard pulled Elsa to her feet.

  “I can’t sleep at a time like this!”

  “Let’s go to the kitchen and have some herbal tea.”

  “No. I need to pack my bags.”

  “At this hour?”

  “I have to get ready.”

  Gerhard surrendered. He followed Elsa into the bedroom and pulled her suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe. She started rummaging through the chest of drawers. It was hard to follow what she was saying, but Gerhard patiently listened.

  Susy was still young and could come with her, but Peter couldn’t miss school. He’d worked so hard to do well and had even taken private lessons over the summer. Fatma would have to be persuaded to live in for twice the pay. Until Elsa returned, she would have to prepare meals, do the ironing . . . Madame, too, could be enlisted when need be.

  “I’ll be here,” Gerhard finally said. “I can take care of Peter.”

  “I know you can,” Elsa said. “But you bring so much work home with you. Papers to grade. Exams to prepare. Fatma will need to spend nights here. You don’t have time to do all the cooking and cleaning on top of everything else.”

  “Come to bed, darling. Rest a little. We’ll figure it out.”

  Elsa was climbing into bed with her husband when Susy came into the room. She looked at the suitcase on the floor and then at her father.

  “What are you doing up?” Gerhard asked.

  “I had to pee.”

  “How many times have I told you not to drink so much water before bed?”

  Susy shrugged her shoulders.

  “Susy, dear, you and I are going to Zurich tomorrow. To see your grandad.”

  “I don’t want to! I’m staying here. I have a recital this weekend. Take Peter.”

  “Susy!” Gerhard said. “Go back to bed. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

  Susy started crying.

  “Go cry in your room!” Elsa snapped. Then she got into bed and pulled the duvet over her head. She didn’t even see her husband tiptoe out of the room with Susy in his arms, and had fallen asleep by the time he got back.

  Gerhard and Elsa got up early the next morning and explained to Peter that he would be staying in Istanbul with his father while his mother and Susy traveled to Zurich for a week.

  “A week without Susy! Great!”

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Elsa said.

  Susy was still fast asleep. Gerhard had sat on the foot of her bed the night before as she kicked, screamed, pleaded, and threatened. Once she had sobbed herself to exhaustion, he’d tucked her in and kissed her on the forehead. She would miss that weekend’s ballet recital, for which she had been practicing for months. As young as she was, she knew that her instructor, a White Russian who had jumped ship in the Bosphorus and claimed asylum in Turkey, was likely to throw her out of the troupe. Madame Lydia Arzumanova was of the old school, the sort who left no doubt that the show must go on.

  Elsa packed Susy’s bag, dreading the tantrum she’d surely throw when she woke up. She went into the kitchen, where Pet
er had made himself breakfast, and thanked the stars for giving her such a mature son. Anxious to get his wife and daughter tickets to Zurich, Gerhard ate his slice of toast while standing up and then reached for his briefcase. The doorbell rang.

  “I wonder who that could be?” Elsa said.

  Dreading the arrival of a second telegram, Gerhard hesitated. Peter ran into the sitting room.

  “Mutti! Look who it is!” he yelled.

  Gerhard and Elsa walked over to the window and looked down at the street. Meekly standing in front of the door, suitcase in hand, was Hanna.

  She looked up, and they heard her say, “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

  Part Two

  Without a Country

  From Susy Schliemann to Suzi Şiliman

  Susy Esther Miriam Schliemann was only six years old when she became Suzi Şiliman, the name transcribed in Turkish characters on her new national identity card. It was official. She was a Turk. The implications of this momentous change were lost on Suzi, who already thought that living in Turkey made her a Turk. Nor did the new ID card stop her big brother, Peter, from continuing to insist that she and her family were in fact German. As for the boxes denoting “religion” on the children’s ID cards, Gerhard had left them blank. Here again, it was Peter who took it upon himself to remind his little sister, repeatedly, that they were Jewish.

  The little that Suzi knew about being Jewish she had picked up from her upstairs neighbors in the building on Grenadier Street. It was with the Elliman family that Suzi had experienced her first Passover seder, had feasted until her stomach hurt after the Yom Kippur fast, and had attended Bar Mitzvahs and weddings at the synagogue. Peter had had a Bar Mitzvah, too, but his wasn’t the one she would remember for the rest of her life, even if she lived to be a hundred. It was the day of Simon’s Bar Mitzvah that Demir had gasped as Suzi stepped into the street, her hair a mass of ringlets magically created with Mutti’s curling iron and her dress a beautiful blue, the organza tulle falling several inches below the knee, just as she’d requested of Eleni the seamstress.

  “You—you’re pretty,” Demir had stammered. “You look so different!”

  She still had that dress.

  It was Madame Saryan who introduced Suzi to another set of beliefs and customs. Making the sign of the cross, they would tiptoe together into a hushed space, domed and dimly lit, the swirling clouds of incense tickling her nose as Madame knelt, her lips silently moving, in front of a stern saint. Sometimes, Madame even let her light a candle and make a wish. In the wintertime, she would help Madame decorate the fir tree, and began counting down the days until she found a present under it. In the springtime, there were eggs dyed dark red, sweet bread, and chocolates wrapped in shiny foil hiding in the oddest places in Madame’s sitting room.

  Fatma, who had been a presence in Suzi’s life for as long as she could remember, followed a different religion still. For the whole month of Ramadan, you couldn’t eat or drink while the sun was up. Why? So rich people would understand what it meant to go hungry. You had to get down on your rug and pray all the time. Why? Because you could only get into paradise if you remembered Allah five times every day. And what was paradise? An endless green garden where Muslims went after they died, a place of flowing streams and tree branches heavy with ripe fruit, even in the middle of the winter.

  “I want to do prayers, too,” Suzi had said.

  As soon as Fatma had shown her how to perform namaz, Suzi said, “But you don’t do your prayers five times a day.” And that was when Fatma explained that honest labor was also a form of prayer. During Ramadan, Suzi would do the so-called child’s fast for as many days as Mutti allowed her, rising in the predawn hours for the sahur meal before going back to bed, then not eating again until noon. Perhaps the religious instruction she received so early in life helped make Suzi the industrious and empathetic woman she would one day become. While still a little girl, Suzi would recite the mysterious prayers before bed. What drew her to Fatma’s religion was the mysticism, the sense that she could talk directly to God without an intermediary, wherever she was. Perhaps it was the product of an overactive imagination, but there were nights when Suzi could swear she heard divine whispers offering her guidance and promises of a happy future. And when she grew older and prayed that the boy she loved would love her in return, she didn’t hear the words of the Torah or picture Jesus on the cross, but turned toward Mecca, reciting the same prayers as her beloved.

  But it was Demir, the son of the family living on the top floor, who taught her to love Atatürk even before she became a Turkish citizen. And it was Demir who revealed to Suzi her true roots.

  Every day after school, Suzi would spend the afternoon out in the street with the neighborhood kids. One day, when the boys had scaled a high wall and jumped into a neighboring garden, Demir had goaded Suzi to do the same.

  “I can’t jump that far. I’m scared,” she’d said from her perch on the wall.

  “You’re Atatürk’s daughter. Be brave! Jump!”

  “I’m sick of you pressuring me! And Atatürk’s not even alive anymore. Besides, I already have a father. And what’s more, Peter says we’re German.”

  “Then why aren’t you in Germany?”

  “Because my dad teaches at the university here.”

  “Why doesn’t he teach in his own country?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “I’ll tell you. When Germany threw you out, Atatürk invited you here. That’s why.”

  “Why’d they throw us out?”

  “Because you’re Jewish. You know who Hitler is, right? He hates Jews.”

  “Stop making things up. You always do that,” Suzi said, but it was a troubled little girl who waited for her father to come home that evening. When Suzi saw him rounding the corner, she ran to the front door and waited for him to step inside.

  “Dad, why do you teach here, not in Germany? Did the Germans throw us out? Who’s Hitler? Why does he hate Jews?”

  “Suzi! Leave your father alone. Can’t you see how tired he is? Go straight to your room,” said Hanna, wagging her finger.

  “Come along, Suzi,” her father said. “Let’s have a talk in my study. I’ll answer all your questions there.”

  Suzi stuck her tongue out at Hanna and followed her father.

  Gerhard Schliemann believed that an honest question deserved an honest answer, especially when it came from his daughter, who was perceptive beyond her years. It was time to tell her the truth.

  He’d hoped to have this talk with his wife at his side, but Elsa had been gone for weeks now, stranded in Zurich as border crossings were closed and train timetables and routes were changed. He wished she’d never gone.

  His daughter, who loathed Hanna, spent most of her time out in the street or in the neighbors’ apartments. But his teenage son never left Hanna’s side. Increasingly resentful of the woman’s interference, Fatma had started going home early, and Gerhard was anxious about leaving the children with Hanna instead.

  When Hanna had reappeared the morning Elsa was leaving for Zurich, it had seemed like miraculous timing. Elsa, who for the past few years had been crossing the street to avoid the young woman, found herself drawing up a kitchen chair and listening to her tale of woe. Poor Hanna had bridled under a sanctimonious mother-in-law, had pleaded with her husband for a place of their own, and, when he refused and she rebelled, had been smacked in the face.

  “I’m leaving you,” Hanna had cried.

  “Good riddance!” her husband had replied.

  Hanna, whose failure to produce an heir had already disgraced her in the eyes of her husband’s large, conservative family, had been shown the door. Now, she needed to save up for a ticket to Zurich, so she’d come back to see the Schliemanns, hoping to be introduced to a German family in need of a nanny.

  “Actually, Hanna, my father’s in the hospital. I’m traveling to Zurich today,” Elsa said. “Until I get back, you can stay here and take c
are of the children and the housework. Then we’ll sort something out.” She was quick to add, “There won’t be much for you to do, though. Fatma is responsible for the cleaning and the cooking during the week. I’d like you to iron Herr Schliemann’s shirts, mind the children, do the dinner dishes, and make yourself useful on the weekends, when needed.”

  Suzi came into the kitchen rubbing her eyes and chanting, “I don’t want to go.”

  Elsa smiled. “I have some good news for you, Suzi. Hanna’s back. She’s going to stay here until I get home from Zurich. If you promise to listen to her, I won’t make you come with me. You’ll be able to perform in your recital after all.”

  “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” Suzi leapt into her mother’s arms and covered her face with kisses.

  That first day, Suzi kept her promise to be obedient, if only because Hanna had saved her from the trip to Zurich. But by the second day, she had started despising Hanna, both for her clumsy attempts to play the role of mother and for the wolfish glances she attracted from Peter. “Hanna the Worm,” Suzi called her. Demir thought it was hilarious.

  Gerhard sat down behind his desk and motioned for his daughter to sit in the chair across from him. She looked at him expectantly.

  “It seems you have some questions. One at a time, please.”

  “What are we?”

  “Humans . . . I didn’t say that to make you laugh. I’m serious. Being human is a serious business. We have ID cards because we’re human. We used to have German ID cards because that’s where we were born. When the German government took away our ID cards, we got new ones from the country where we live.”

  “So now we’re Turkish! Dad, you should tell Peter. He thinks we’re German.”

  “Suzi, even if they took away our ID cards, that doesn’t change who we are. We’re still German. I mean, I still consider myself to be German.”

  “Did Hitler take our ID cards?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Are we Jews? Is that why our cards got taken away?”

  “Yes—you could say that.”