Souvenir

By S. E. Holland

Where are you from? What are you afraid of? Are you brave enough to determine your future? Does all that even matter? Should you let it all go? 

Everything that exists in our world serves the well-being of humankind. Every one of us is important and has a unique voice. Our thoughts, work, and struggles make a difference. T

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sevda Holland
• Release date: Dec 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985364705

Book preview

PART ONE

Chapter 1 

MULBERRY SHOWER

I am alone at home, sitting in front of our new fridge, cross-legged. We didn’t have a fridge in the first seven years of my life. In our tiny kitchen, the smell of food gone bad, the stink of mold, and underarm sweat would subside in the scent of garlic, onions, oregano, parsley, and the steam of pilaf with butter. Now we have a refrigerator, and now my mother and my sisters put everything in it, including the cherries, the big juicy ones with more flesh than all the other cherry types, sweet when fully ripe. Cherries with dark red skin spotted and fading into white.

Why do these cherries make me blush? They look erotic, like all rounded things in life, and eating them is a sensual act for me. I have never loved anyone physically yet, but I feel it; loving someone must be like eating cherries, a lot of cherries. And I am doing precisely that, devouring! The whole bottom drawer of the fridge looks like a treasure chest filled with red diamonds. I need to be quick. I don’t want them to be cold. I don’t like them chilled.

One cherry at a time, or maybe two rolling into my mouth, biting into it, I feel the sweet sensational taste filling my cheeks, my whole mouth, and traveling down to my throat, sliding down below and landing in my stomach, feeling the joy in my body. I am full; the fridge’s bottom drawer is empty. The mound of cherry pits, sticks, and some beautiful green leaves on my skirt, the pinkish cherry juice stains and stickiness on my hands and face, and my round belly are evidence of my vice. I think I am going to get a tummy ache from this! But I don’t mind... I am happy!

These cherries would magically appear every year at the same time in May and in June. They would hang in pairs, ripe, in glory, shamelessly naked on that one cherry tree I loved climbing to show off my acrobatic skills. Although it seemed enormous when I think about it, the tree itself was probably only 9 or 10 feet tall. We had more than one cherry tree, 2, 3, maybe 6 of them, but this one was the most fruitful of all, selfless. Just like some of us people do, this one gave it all tirelessly.

Oh yes, I had acrobatic skills, I was thin (I wish I could say and tall, but no, I wasn’t) the reason for that, my mother explained to me, was my twin brother’s sudden departure, sudden death in the 6th month after our birth. She said:

We assumed, and we expected you would die too. You refused to eat for months, but the doctor said you would survive it all. You will survive every one of us.

She chuckled at the end of every sentence. Her enormous boobs moved up and down with each rhythmic sound of her joy. I knew then; she loved me.

That said, my tomboyish, small figure came in handy mostly. I learned how to be invisible under a table in some circumstances, make myself untouchable by evoking pity or mercy, and most importantly, how to somersault over that tree branch, which grew horizontally, perpendicular to the trunk of my cherry tree. It wasn’t a big deal for me to climb up any tree, big or small, parkour style, with ease.

The only tree I was not that successful at climbing was our epic mulberry tree, glamorously grown in all directions and tall in its field of flat land, with a perfectly sculpted trunk. The only tree that I wasn’t good enough to handle. Well, my father was better at it, or maybe I was trying to let him be better than me on this one tree. Let the mulberry tree be his territory to show off his climbing skills to his daughter.

In my memory, my father and I are in my mother’s version of The Garden of Eden, full of fruit trees, colorful bushes, and vegetable gardens. I am spreading the big cotton canvas under the giant mulberry tree; my father climbs to shake it for a mulberry shower. I am twirling under it, bare feet and with an open mouth. It is not only the mulberries that hit me, but my father’s love comes down on me as well, both very sweet and sudden.

There was nothing else to do in that town than be at the mercy of nature. As a religious family member in a village where religion defined all social activities (praying was activism), I frequently conversed with God. I asked him why the hell he chose to put me in a place I didn’t belong to. In this male-dominated culture, most boys and girls did not live their teenage years fully; they jumped to womanhood and manhood right from childhood when they were physically ripe enough to make children. All the buildings had the same height in that town, the same color. The streets were unpaved, dusty in the summer, and muddy in the winter.

When the connection was terrible or broken between God and me, when the mighty power did not answer my questions, I decided to take matters into my own hands and do something about my bickering. I quit the Koran school my mother forced me to go to in the afternoons after my regular school and instead, I sat on my walnut tree, the one not far from the mulberry, on the southeast corner of our garden. I ate walnuts, indulged myself in the exotic scent of their soft green outer shell, and I made plans of meandering.

I watched the walnuts drop down from top branches with their dwellers hiding inside: the skinny worms, speeding, surprised, and woken up by the force of gravity pulling them to the ground. I imagined them calm, knowing that the walnuts’ soft green packaging on the outside would protect them and their spacious home. I imagined they would be nevertheless shivering with anxiety like a ferret transported overseas in containers stuck and forgotten in an antique wardrobe tightly wrapped in blankets.

I mainly was all by myself. I wasn’t allowed to play with other kids in the neighborhood because my mother didn’t like their attitude. She didn’t like their cursing. I couldn’t speak out any of those swear words; I wasn’t able to make it sound like a punch-in-your-face and knock anyone out with my ridiculously soft-spoken words. One day my mother smeared hot chili pepper in my mouth after she heard me saying: Son of a donkey to my brother behind his back, although cowardly, soft to the ears. Well, it wasn’t OK to curse a pure soul like my brother. Whatever my mother did, there was always love in it. When she hit me with her bare hands, in between her prayers to God, when she found out, I kissed my cousin and fell on broken glass at our hiding place and cut my middle finger to the bone; then, there was love in that slap. I didn’t blame her. It was a disciplinary measure, she did what she had to do, and I never saw my cousin again. I am glad.

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I will finally meet my brother’s bride. We are having dinner at their house tonight. When we get there, I see Aysha’s fear in her eyes, slight resistance to what is, yet her desire to be an adult. My brother is 21, and Aysha is 16. She just finished high school. She has clear pale skin, a symmetrical face, big brown eyes, full lips, white, pearl-like teeth all in a row, long brown silky hair, strongly defined cheek, and Jaw-bones. My mother is proud of her own choice. Everyone thinks they are a good match. Finding a good partner and helping young almost-adults build a family is a parental obligation. In this kookie town, girls fear that if they’re not chosen by the end of their 17th birthday, they will have to stay at their parent’s house until the end of their lives. So this is supposed to be a good thing. Are we saving Aysha from possible misery?

Aysha’s house is much smaller than ours. The whole family is humble and very eager to please us. We are all sitting, legs crossed on some floor cushions around a 12-inch high table, having dinner. I am leaning toward my father as always. I use my five fingers to wrap my food with a paper-thin flatbread and grab a handful of it from a shared plate in the middle of the table, looking at the bride’s brother. He is handsome.

The tradition is that these lovebirds, my brother, and Aysha, by force, need to get to know each other before their marriage. Her parents set up a room for them. They will meet every week for a few hours as part of a getting-to-know routine. There is a narrow sofa to sit on and talk about each other’s likes and dislikes. I wonder if they even know what they want in life.

My brother, Ibrahim, has a not yet fully grown beard, a thin mustache half an inch over his upper lip, big brown eyes, light brown skin, somewhat average height, and a chubby look that most well-fed men have in this town. He is a silent type, doesn’t like to speak much, a sensitive boy. He makes face masks out of olive oil and egg whites, likes to draw, and writes poems about love. My brother does not laugh much. And lately, he walks around with the frown that his gender, every other male of this town, carries on their faces all day long; the symbolic formation of downwards wrinkles on a man’s face when he feels overwhelmed, realizing that his free will is taken away, he has to obey the social norms for survival. He feels revengeful to women in return, encased in a shiny, silent ego. He forgets that he enforces what he despises by following the rules while he desires to break them, but maybe it is just convenient. There is not much room to grow in this society for males because men are already perfect, ready to enjoy the fruits of life as they are. Collectively, the Muslim community excuses a boy before he is born for any imperfections that he might occasionally reveal. And if not, the women closest to him are to blame for all those human faults. Despite the predetermined, comfortable fate of men, things might go wrong at any time in a man’s world. I remember the day my brother, Ibrahim, grew 12 inches at once and deepened his legitimate manly frown. On a sunny Sunday, sometime in September, in the middle of our harvesting season, just a few hours before our dinner, his confidence, pride, confusion, and pain grew 12 inches.

Everyone in the room was mad. Something must have happened. My sister, Nuriye, has done something unforgivable or so wrong that the men of the house punish her physically in front of her mother’s sobbing eyes. I hoped they wouldn’t notice me standing behind the door, looking inside from the tiny crack they left open. Nuriye was talking to a man yesterday, and she was maybe flirting with him. It is not advisable for a widow with two kids to actively seek a partner. The belief is that the people around her will take care of her needs, find a suitable husband for her if she behaves. Supposing she isn’t a disgrace to her family! What shame is for women is a different matter for men. I bet the man she was flirting with didn’t get slapped on his face but his back as congrats!

But Nuriye is a free spirit, always has been. She wasn’t expecting love when she had an arranged marriage to the son of one of the town’s most respected families. She was happy to get out, escape from being my father’s and my brother’s anger stone. She was way past the limit of eligibility. With 22, how could she be choosy? It was her only chance! But to her and everybody else’s surprise, she found passion and love in her arranged marriage, and they had two beautiful children. Two girls. All was good until her husband hung himself in the middle of their living room. His depression won the battle.

Now my sister disobeys all the social rules. I imagine her mind going in circles saying: fuck everybody else, and missing secretly the intimacy she had with her husband.

My father has his arms folded on his chest, stepping back, leaving the stage for my brother to better beat my sister, commanding him to become a man and take charge of the situation. Everyone is screaming. My father holds my sister’s arms tight to make her a perfect target, a punching bag. I am silent. I don’t know what to do. My mother is trying to stop them but is unable to help my sister. I am smaller than I already am, without a voice behind the door, frozen.

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My father bought two goats as a wedding present for my sister-in-law Aysha on their wedding day and 15 gold bracelets that she chose to her liking. My brother doesn’t look happy. His face is discolored, not from the sun but from the worries in his heart. I want to know if he likes her. If he even wants to have a family? But I am not old enough and never will be to ask those questions and converse with all-knowing men about things that matter.

I am not sure if my brother sees Aysha’s beauty, but my father does. And my mother notices their attraction to each other. I can feel the energy between Aysha and my father when we are sitting all together and having dinner. My father becomes joyful when Aysha is around, and my sister-in-law is full of laughter, charming, and kind when he is next to her. It is cute in normal circumstances, but I think this is not normal! I understand that love has no boundaries, but we do.

My father kindly does and buys anything for my sister-in-law before her husband can react to her wishes in a way that everyone else feels excluded. I will not put up with exclusion. I passed the admission test and am going to an all-girls boarding school, as I have planned on my walnut tree. The summer is over. I think about my mother’s pain and feel her resentment and anger for cherry-picking Aysha for our family.

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Despite all that drama in everyone’s heart, we all act like nothing is going on; no longings, no heartbreaks, no secrets, and nothing we need to worry about at all. We go on with our daily life, and sometimes like a hesitant jaywalker, we stop talking in the middle of our sentences to avoid spilling out our deep, unconscious disappointments and reformulate our thoughts into kinder words. My father still surprises my mom with gifts now and then, but her smile is not that of a spoiled lover anymore when she receives his presents. On the contrary, Aysha is happier than ever with