"You see what I mean?" asks Dame Dervish.
"I guess so," I answer.
"I want you to see the fellowship in Massachusetts not as something imposed on you but as an opportunity. Turkey or the United States, it isn't important, really. What matters is the journey within. You won't be traveling to America, you will be traveling within yourself. Think of it that way."
There is a confident serenity about her, which I like. She might well be right. I have to learn to live peacefully, fully, every day with the voices inside me. I'm tired of constantly being at war with them.
With a sudden urge and zest, I flag down a passing taxi. "Come on, then, let's go," I say as I open the door to the cab.
"Where to?"
"To the train station," I announce, beaming.
"Did you decide to go to America by train?" Dame Dervish asks as she chuckles to herself.
I shake my head. "I just want to go and smell the trains. . "
I just want to spend some time at the station — inhale its strange, pungent aroma, the odor of people rushing in all directions, the heavy tang of the destitute with their dreams of affluence, the refreshing hint of new destinations. Whenever I feel the need to contemplate a mystery or observe the world, whenever the nomad in me wakes up, I go there.
Airports are too sterile, clean and controlled when compared with train stations, where the heart of the underprivileged still pulsates.
Haydarpasha Station is an old, majestic building with too many memories. And like many old, majestic buildings, it, too, has its own djinn and fairies. They perch on the high windows and watch the passengers below. They watch couples split, lovers meet, families unite, friends break up. . They gaze at the thousand and one predicaments of the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, and still find us puzzling.
If you ever go there and walk right into the middle of the station, if you then stand still amid the hullabaloo with eyes firmly closed, listen, you can hear them whispering, the djinn and fairies of the
station. . uttering strange words like poetry, in a language long forgotten. .
Perhaps, like the Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis, they, too, are saying,
New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas. The city will follow you. . You will roam the same streets.
Women Who Change Their Names
I was eighteen years old when I decided to change my name. By and large, I was happy with my first name, Elif, which is a fairly common girl's name in Turkey, meaning tall and lithe, like the first letter of the Ottoman alphabet, aleph. The word is encountered in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Turkish, although to my knowledge, it is only in the latter that it is used as a female name. That same year, I had read Borges's "The Aleph" and I was familiar with his description of the word as a virtually untraceable point in space that contained all points. Not bad, I thought. Striding along with all the vanity of my youth, I did enjoy being likened to a letter, though I would have much preferred the entire alphabet.
It was a different story, however, with my surname. It upset me that as women, we were expected to take first the family names of our fathers, then our husbands. Having grown up without seeing my father, I couldn't understand, for the life of me, why I should carry his name. Since I was also determined to never get married and take my husband's name, I concluded that the rule of surnames simply didn't apply to me.
I had been pondering this paradox for a while when a prestigious literary magazine in Turkey selected for publication a short story I had written. The editor, an intellectual in his midforties, gave me a call to congratulate and welcome me into the literary fold, which he said was "no different from a jungle with wild egos." As he was about to hang up, he told me to let them know if there were any last-minute changes I would like to make before the magazine went to press.
"Yes," I said urgently. "My last name. I am changing it."
"Are you getting married? Congratulations!"
"No. Not like that," I interjected. "I have decided to rename myself."
He chuckled, the way people tend to do when they don't know what to say. Then he said, very slowly and loudly, as if talking to a child with a hearing impairment, "O-kay, and how do you want us to write your name?"
"I don't know yet," I confessed. "It's a lifetime decision. I'll have to think about it."
There was an awkward silence at the end of the line, but then the editor gave another laugh. "Well, of course, go ahead and do it. What's the harm? You are a woman, there's no reason for you to take this too seriously. Even if you choose the most poetic surname for yourself, you'll end up with your husband's anyhow."
"Give me a day," I said. "I will find the surname I will have forever, whether I get married someday or not."
Every name is a magic formula. The letters dance together, each with their own spin and charm, each an unknown as much as the other, and together they concoct the mystery that a name holds. Like sorcerers in the dark, adding letter upon letter, ingredient after ingredient, the language unit by which we are known puts a spell on us. There are names that help us soar high in the sky; there are names that weigh on our shoulders and slyly pull us down.
Men live without ever feeling the need to change their family names. Their credentials are given to them at birth. Settled and stable. They inherit their surnames from their fathers and grandfathers, and pass it on to their children and grandchildren.
As for women, whether they know it or not, they are name nomads. Their surnames are here today, gone tomorrow. Throughout their lives, women fill out official forms in different ways, apply for new passports and design several signatures. They have one last name when they are young girls, and another upon marriage. They go back to their maiden names if they get divorced — though sometimes they retain their ex-husbands' family names for practical purposes, which doesn't necessarily make things easier — and adopt an altogether different one if they get remarried.
Men have one constant signature. Once they find the one that suits them, they can keep it till death without changing a single curve. As for women, they have at least one "old signature" and one "new signature," and sometimes they confuse them. Signature of the bachelor- ette, signature of the married woman, signature of the divorcee.
Women writers have also undergone a series of name-change operations. The late-nineteenth-century Ottoman novelist Fatma Aliye wrote her novels and novellas mostly in secret, as she did not want to upset her husband and family with her "independent ways." One day she stopped using her name and published her next work under the pseudonym "A Woman."
For that's what she was. A woman. Any woman. All women. Getting rid of her name was like casting off the heavy mooring that tied her to the mainland. Once she ceased to be Lady Fatma Aliye and became only "a woman," she was free to sail anywhere.
In the 1950s a romance novel called Young Girls appeared in Turkey, by a certain Vincent Ewing. The book quickly became a national best seller, finding good coverage in the media. Strangely, no one knew the writer. No journalist had managed to get any interviews from him. Only three things were known about the author: He was American, he was Christian, he was male. Turkish people read the book with that information in mind.
Years went by. One day it was announced that the author of Young Girls was, in fact, a young Muslim Turkish woman. Nihal Yeginobali was her name.
When asked why she had chosen to hide her identity, her answer was intriguing:
"I was a young girl myself when I wrote Young Girls. There was a considerable degree of eroticism in the novel that was considered inappropriate for a young woman such as myself. So I picked a male pseudonym. In those days there was more interest in translated novels. This is why we decided that the writer of my novel should be American. My publisher pretended it was translated from English."