Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

Author:Tezer Özlü
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

4

The Aegean Again

i’m sitting on the top step of the ancient theatre. I’m waiting for the flood of colours that the sun will bring up from behind the Taurus Mountains. It will paint them every shade of purple, brown, green and blue. It will be born into the reflection of its own colours. Mist will rise from the valleys to climb up and up until the sun burns it away. Unless it drapes itself over the peaks of the Taurus Mountains, above the cotton fields, ancient cities and steaming meadows.

Silence in the coves along the shore. The village is still struggling to wake up. Dawn has always been like this in these parts. At the end of the day, the sun has always sunk into the blue-green sea without losing any of its red fire. Those warm Aegean evenings. On evenings past and future. In ancient times and times yet to be born. It’s heating up the sky, this sun. And the sand along the shore. The fertile earth. The night sky studded with stars. In ancient times people must have made love on these shores. Must have embraced the Aegean, felt its waves lapping against their legs. As I have done. As others have, too. As we must all. I am waiting for the sun, as others have done for many thousands of years before me. It’s almost morning. I’m sitting on the stone steps of a theatre, breathing nature in. In a few hours, I’ll be leaving the village. To go back to the big city. I would have liked to have stayed here longer, just to watch the sun rise and set, and the clouds race across the sky with the wind, and those rare rainbows that come with the rain or just after, turning the sea to a deep purple. Even though I am a city person through and through. I shall be leaving nature behind to return to concrete fields and asphalt roads lined with buildings made of stone.

At the tail end of a June day, I am watching the clouds nestling over the Bosphorus hills. The radio is playing. An Italian, singing a love song. Not ‘la luna es o es’, probably. Another song. My child is jumping over a piece of elastic she has strung between two chairs. Another Sunday, soon to end. Every now and again, I hear my husband cough. A little white motorboat moves slowly over the waters whose dirt has been obscured by darkness. Water swirling like a river around Akıntı Burnu just ahead. On the other side, there are people sitting on balconies of apartments half hidden by pine trees. Slightly to the left, a lamppost, a slice of a small apartment building and green trees fading into the night.

Approaching Arnavutköy Iskele, alongside the meyhane whose green lights play upon the water, the pale red lights of a little ferry with a tall chimney.

Returning from the south, I found a city immersed in summer heat. Waking up and walking out on to the balcony, the light so dazzled me that I’d go straight back inside.

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