Two-The Photographs in the Dark Museum House(3)

  Never having seen them put to any other use, I assumed pianos were stands for exhibiting photographs. There was not a single surface in my grandmother's sitting room that wasn't covered with frames of all sizes. The most imposing were two enormous portraits that hung over the never-used fireplace; one was a retouched photograph of my grandmother, the other of my grandfather, who died in 1934. From the way the pictures were positioned on the wall and the way my grandparents had been posed (turned slightly toward each other in the manner still favored by European kings and queens on stamps), anyone walking into this museum room to meet their haughty gaze would know at once that the story began with them.

  They were both from a town near Manisa called Gordes; their family was known as Pamuk (cotton) because of their pale skin and white hair. My paternal grandmother was Circassian (Circassian girls, famous for being tall and beautiful, were very popular in Ottoman harems). My grandmother's father had immigrated to Anatolia during the Russian-Ottoman War (1877-78), setting first in Izmir (from time to time there was talk of an empty house there) and later in Istanbul, where my grandfather had studied civil engineering. Having made a great deal of money during the early 1930s, when the new Turkish Republic was investing heavily in railroad building, he built a large factory that made everything from rope to a sort of twine to dry tobacco; the factory was located on the banks of the Goksu, a stream that fed into the Bosphorous. When he died in 1934 at the age of fifty-two, he left a fortune so large that my father and uncle never managed to find their way to the end of it, in spite of a long succession of failed business ventures.

  Moving on to the library, we find large portraits of the new generation arranged in careful symmetry along the walls; from their pastel coloring we can take them to be the work of the same photographer. on the far wall is my fat but robust Uncle Ozhan, who went to America to study medicine without return to Turkey, thus paving the way for my grandmother to spend the rest of her life assuming mournful airs. There is his bespectacled younger brother Aydin, who lived on the ground floor. Like my father, he studied civil engineering and spent most of his life involved in big engineering projects that never quite got off the ground. on the fourth wall is my father's sister, whho spent time in Paris studying piano. Her husband was an assistant in the law faculty and they lived in the penthouse apartment, to which I would move many years later and where I am now writing this book.

  Living the library to return the main room of the museum, stopping briefly by the crystal lamps that only add to the gloom, we find a crowd of untouched black-and-white photograph that tell us life is gaining momentum. Here we see all the children posing at their betrothals, their weddings, and the other great moments of their lives. Next to the first color photographs that my uncle sent from America are snapshots of the extended family enjoying holiday meals in various city parks, in Taksim Square, and on the shores of the Bosphorus; next to a picture of me

 

 

and my brother with our parents at a wedding is one of my grandfather, posing with his new car in the garden of the old house, and another of my uncle, posing with his new car outside the entrance to the Pamuk Apartments. Except for extraordinary events like the day my grandmother removed the picture of my American uncle's first wife and replaced it with a picture of his second, the old protocols prevailed: once assigned its place in the museum, a photograph was never moved; although I had looked at each one hundreds of times, I could never go into that cluttered room without examining all of them again.