The Dark Moment by Ann Bridge

Author:Ann Bridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448207091
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Chapter Thirteen

Long before the Battle of Inonü, which took place in January, winter marched in on Ankara. Winds from the east and north, Asiatic in their icy ferocity—the harsh bitter winds that blow across the greatest land-mass in the world, untempered by ocean moisture—swept over the bare plateau across which Féridé and Nilüfer had driven in the spring, to whistle through the aged window-joints and harem-shutters of the old houses up on the citadel, and chill the marrow of those who ventured abroad in the narrow draughty streets. All four—Ahmet, Orhan, and their two young wives—suffered cruelly from the unaccustomed cold. There was no fuel for the cylindrical iron stoves which stood in each room but wood—when wood was to be had; freshly stoked they blazed up furiously at first, making the room insufferably hot, but as the fire died down the insidious cold came creeping in again, round the windows and under the doors, till the two girls, even in their fur coats, shuddered with it. When the man with the cart of small tree-trunks, one of which he dropped off outside the door of each house every so often, was heard approaching, Fatma and Kezban would run out with loud cries of joy— and then run in again to inform their mistresses of the glad tidings. But the girls could not wield a saw, and unless Demir or Temel was about they had to shiver till the batmen returned. As the evenings drew in light became a problem too. One paraffin lamp was allotted to each household, which the girls carried from room to room: to their bedrooms to wash and tidy, to the sitting-room to sew by—there always seemed to be so much mending to do! Féridé borrowed a tiny fairy-lamp affair from her landlady, Sitaré Hanim, for the kitchen, but really it did little more than cast huge shadows about the cavernous walls and ceiling, in the end she took to cooking all she could by daylight, and warming it up for the evening—which made Orhan grumble: “Light of my Eyes, is not this rice very dry?” [It was dry, of course.]

During that long harsh winter Féridé gained her first experience of the problems and troubles that sooner or later beset all young married women, whether western or Turkish. Her husband—young, brilliant, passionately absorbed in his official duties and grotesquely overworked— was often unreasonable in his demands, and she saw this, and was troubled and vexed by it; it disturbed her conception of him as nearly perfect. Actually the Turkish tradition of obedience and subordination from wife to husband made things easier for her than our western ideas of equality could have done; the proper, the customary thing was to accept—and as the old copy-book saw says: “Custom Commonly Makes Things Easy.” It was tiresome and sad that Orhan was unreasonable, but she had no moral sense of grievance, which is what really eats into one. All the same Féridé had a high spirit and temper,

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