Two-The Photographs in the Dark Museum House(6)

  If evil ever encroached, if boredom loomed, my father's response was to turn his back on it and remain silent. My mother, who set the rules, was the one to raise her eyebrows and instruct us in life's darker side. If she was less fun to be with, I was still very dependent on her love and attention, for she gave us far more time than did our father, who seized every opportunity to escape from the apartment. My harshest lession in life was to learn I was in competition with my brother for my mother's affections.

  It was, perhaps, because my father exerted so little authority that relations woth my brother took on the significance they did: He was the rival for my mother's love. As we of course knew nothing of psychology, the war was initially dressed up as a game, and in the game we would both pretend to be other people. It was not Orhan and Sevket locked in deadly combat but my own favorite hero or soccer player versus my brother's. Convinced that we had become our heroes, we gave the game all we had; and when it ended in blood and tears, the anger and jealousy would make us forget we were brothers. 

 

 

   Whenever my mood dipped, whenever I became unhappy or bored, I'd leave our apartment without a word to anyone and go to my grandmother's. Although all the apartments looked very much alike, with chairs and dining sets, sugar bowls and ashtrays all bought from the same stores, every apartment seemed like a different country, a separate universe. And in the cluttered gloom of my grandmother's sitting room, particularly in the shadow of its coffee tables and glass cabinets, its vases and framed photographs, I could dream I was somewhere else.

  In the evenings when we gathered in this room as a family, I often played a game wherein my grandmother's apartment became the bridge of a large ship. This fantasy owed much to the traffic passing through the Bosphorus, those mournful horns making their way into my dreams as I lay in bed. As I streerd my imaginary craft through the storm, my crew and passengers ever more troubled by the rising waves, I took a captain's pride in knowing that our ship, our family--our fate--was in my hans.

  Although my brother's adventure comics may have inspired this dream, so too did my thoughts about God. God had chosen not to bind us to the city's fate, I thought, simply because we were rich. But as my family, and my uncle stumbled from one  bankruptcy  to the next, as our fortuned dwindled and our family disintegrated and the quarrels over money grew more intense, every visit to my grandmother's apartmant became a sorrow and  took me a step closer to a realization: It was a long time coming, arriving by a circuitous route, but the cloud of gloom and loss spread over Istanbul by the fall of the Ottoman Empire had finally claimed my family too.