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 Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 11:16 am Post subject: Gambling Turks |
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WELCOME!
Gambling Turks:
Birds Without Wings
Hardcover
By Louis de Bernieres
'
| Quote: | In those days we came to hear of many other countries that had never figured in our lives before. It was a rapid education, and many of us are still confused. We knew that our Christians were sometimes called 'Greeks', although we often called them 'dogs' or 'infidels', but in a manner that was a formality, or said with a smile, just as were their deprecatory terms for us. They would call us 'Turks' in order to insult us, at the time when we called ourselves 'Ottomans' or 'Osmanlis'. Later on it turned out that we really are 'Turks', and we bcame proud of it, as one does of new boots that are uncomfortable at first, but then settle into the feet and look exceedingly smart. Be that as it may, one day we discovered that there actually existed a country called 'Greece' that wanted to own this place, and do away with us, and take away our land. We knew of Russians before, because of other wars, but who were these Italians? Who were these other Frankish people? Suddenly we heard of people called 'German', and people called 'French', and of a place called Britain that had governed half the world without us knowing of it, but it was never explained to us why they had chosen to come and bring us hardship, starvation, bloodshed and lamentation, why they played with us and martyred our tranquility.
I blame these Frankish peoples, and I blame potentates and pashas whose names I will probably never know, and I blame men of God of both faiths, and I blame all those who gave their soldiers permission to behave like wolves and told them that it was necessary and noble. Because of what I accidentally did to my son Karatavuk, I was in my own small way one of these wolves, and I am now burned up by shame. In the long years of those wars here were too many who learned how to make their hearts boil with hatred, how to betray their neighbours, how to violate women, how to steal and dispossess, how to call upon God when they did the Devil's work, how to enrage and embitter themselves, and how to commit outrages even against children. Much of what was done was simply in revenge for identical atrocities, but I tell you now that even if guilt were a coat of sable, and the ground were deep in snow, I would rather freeze than wear it.
But I do not blame merely myself, or the powerful, or my fellow Anatolians, or the savage Greeks. I also blame mischance. Destiny caresses the few, but molests the many, and finally every sheep will hang by its own foot on the butcher's hook, just as every grain of wheat arrives at the millstone, no matter where it grew. (From Part I, The Prologue of Iskander the Potter, at pgs. 4-5) |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Tue Sep 29, 2009 7:21 am Post subject: |
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From Omens and Lucky Charms:
The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
Distant Relations
Fiction
By Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk
Sept. 7/09
| Quote: | The proprietress of the Sanzelize (its name a transliteration of the legendary Parisian avenue), Senay Hanim, was a very distant relation on my mother’s side, but she wasn’t there when I walked into the boutique at around twelve and the small bronze double-knobbed camel bell jingled two notes that can still make my heart pound. It was a warm day, but inside the shop it was cool and dark. At first I thought that there was no one there, my eyes still adjusting to the gloom after the noonday sunlight. Then I felt my heart rise into my throat, with the force of an immense wave about to crash against the shore. ...
“They were desperately poor,” my mother said. And, lest she exaggerate, she added, “Though they were hardly the only ones, my son—all of Turkey was poor in those days.” My mother had recommended Aunt Nesibe to all her friends, and once a year (sometimes twice) she herself would call her to our house to sew a dress for some party or wedding.
Because these sewing visits almost always took place during school hours, I didn’t see her much. But in 1957, at the end of August, my mother, urgently needing a dress for a wedding, had called Nesibe to our summer home, in Suadiye. Retiring to the back room on the second floor, overlooking the sea, she and Nesibe set themselves up next to the window, from which, peering between the fronds of the palm trees, they might see the rowboats and motorboats and the boys jumping off the pier. When Nesibe had unpacked her sewing box, whose lid was adorned with a view of Istanbul, they sat surrounded by her scissors, pins, measuring tape, thimbles, and swatches of lace and other material, complaining of the heat, the mosquitoes, and the strain of sewing under such pressure, joking like sisters, and staying up half the night to slave away on my mother’s Singer sewing machine. I remember Bekri, the cook, bringing one glass of lemonade after another into that room (the hot air thick with the dust of velvet), because Nesibe, who was twenty and pregnant, was prone to cravings; when we all sat down to lunch, my mother would tell Bekri, half joking, “Whatever a pregnant woman desires, you must let her have, or else the child will turn out ugly!” And, with that in mind, I remember looking at Nesibe’s small bump with a certain interest. That must have been my first awareness of Füsun’s existence, though no one knew yet whether she was a girl or a boy. |
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