Towards The Summit

Beginning

I knocked the door to get a pinch of a story without knowing how the word “pinch" is defined in my neighbours spiritual dictionary. She gave me a potential novel, even though she knew about the other potential novels gathering dust in my mind.

The thing about my neighbour is she is my neighbour not my mother’s, as other people interpret our relationship when they find out  she is 54 years old. Her name is Sema and I already knew her story without realising she had a story since she was a professional storyteller who tells stories as a hobby. This time, while I was listening, I was going to be critical, search a moral, or motives maybe.That is a homework after all. I have to learn from it just like I have to learn from my lab reports which, unfortunately, have always been a burden than a method. With the nerve-wrecking reality of having a math exam on Friday and the Lise Live auditions that kills something inside me each second I thought about them, I sat on the sofa in Sema’s living room and waited for her to bring some snacks. I tried to observe this place, which I had been at least a thousand times, to give a detailed description of it in my homework paper. The room was colder than our living room. Sema's apartment was in the north of the building therefore, it didn’t get much day light. The floor being just above the entrance of the building made it even colder.  You wouldn’t be aware of the cold unless you measure the temperature, though. Everything in this room was taking an action against the concrete cold. The soft light coming from the two night-lamps, each standing in the opposite corners of the room, was the strongest rival to the cold. The pink roses on the beige fabric which was covering the sofa and the arm chair were almost more alive than real roses that are nourished by sunlight. And all of those decoration: porcelain angels, small picture frames of mountain views, plastic flowers of warm colors, traditional coffee cups and liquor glasses in the showcase, wooden toys and the sweet smell of old cherry wood… Everything was always soft and cuddly, a secret summer air is circulated in the room all the time.

She didn’t bring any snacks this time. She was  nervous. She came and stood in the middle of the room and looked at me like a school kid who is supposed to answer a simple question but doesn’t even know what is going on. She wiped her hands on her Hello Kitty pyjamas. We were both feeling uneasy. Something was wrong with the beginning of the beginning of the story of my story. It always seemed to me that a story comes from an ambiguous beginning like our dreams have but tonight İ chained the beginning and the story that was going to be released from it.

She sat on the armchair and asked me how the school was going. I said it was going. I asked about her school and her students. She said it was better than “going”. We talked about a bunch of funny kids in her classroom. Than we discussed the reasons why I always tend to ask about funny kids but not successful kids, because that’s what I used to ask about before. We couldn’t make a resolution at the end.

Sema had always been successful as a student. She was ambitious. Her filed, in high school, was Math and Applied sciences. She was going to study Medicine in college even if she knew that she wanted to be an English teacher since she was four. “But it was common sense, and still is, that successful kids choose to be doctors or engineers while people who studied social sciences or literature were not clever enough to be doctors. And I see lots of students who avoid choosing these fields just because of the title the they are called by people  who have no idea about the importance of idea.” she said as she dropped two cubes of sugar in my tea.

Sema was born in a mansion in the Anatolian side of Istanbul to a rich family on the fifth of January, 1960. While she was busy playing with her dolls, in the mansion right across the street lived a middle aged woman who was an English teacher at Robert College of Istanbul. Her name was Suzan and one of her greatest hobbies, rather than inviting her students to her house and baking for them, was photography. She had a camera which she bought from the States. “It was a magic box to me. In Turkey very few people had camera, then. And those people were usually members of press or the wives of the politicians” Sema told me.

As a little cute girl gravitated by the camera, she managed to grab the attention of her neighbour. Suzan took a lot of pictures of four year old Sema in various places. Sema has been to her house a couple times where she had a chance to meet Suzan’s students and listen to them speaking English all the time. She didn’t know a single word and that was another magic to her.

After spending some time with Suzan, Sema decided to be an English teacher. Her toys were her first students and she went around speaking English that she reinvented by herself.

Suzan moved out one day. Sema doesn’t remember why or where she went. She doesn’t remember how she felt about it, either. She kept playing her game and never stopped dreaming of being an English teacher.

When she finished high school with a degree, she was rewarded by her father with the best gift she would ever receive in her life: a year of journey. She was going to visit 20 different countries around the world. Starting from  Russia, she went to Greece, Germany, Italia, Austria, Spain Switzerland, Denmark, U.K, North and South America, Australia, Far East countries… After taking a year of her education, in 1978, she surprised her parents and decided to study English Philology at Istanbul University. Both of us knew that she wouldn’t make the same decision if she didn’t take that year-off to travel around the world.

A couple months after she went to the US in 1981 to study at NYU, a propaganda made by T.C. Ministry of Education to encourage foreign language training was appearing on the billboards, newspaper ads and even on the TV. This famous sentence is recited today by Turkish Literature teachers on Language Days and politicians who aim at their less educated colleagues. “Bir lisan, bir insan”  means a man who speaks one language is a person, a man who speaks two languages is two people. It might also mean that this man has multiple-identity disorders which is an argument supported by politicians who aim at their more educated colleagues.

I remembered the half-eaten cucumber in my hand while I was trying to have a conversation with my sister’s boyfriend/husband/whatever. He told me that the translation of “hıyar” is cucumber. As a kid who only knew how to tell her name and age in English, it illuminated me more than it should. The single object that I thought to be a “hıyar” was actually two things: “hıyar “ and “cucumber”. It now had two different tastes, scents and two different textures. It was a little awkward.