The Cooking Stove / Okan Üstünkök

 

THE  COOKING  STOVE

 

written ’17 -  revised ’21  bristol RI 

Note to the reader:   The original of the story was written in two languages, Turkish and  English. Turkish version,  for those  who may be interested, is also posted in the Blog  as “Kuzineli Oda” .   It may be noted, however,  that the two versions are not  necessarily verbatim translation of one another. Careful readers with  command of both languages will certainly find differences here and there if they were to  compare the two versions which  were written pretty much simultaneously. Turkish version in the Blog lacks the illustration herewith. It is an afterthought, a later illustrative work of the author.
 

 

The Sunday Afternoon Variety Theater          Üstünkök  ‘21

The house we lived in at the time  had a rather pleasant backyard,  closed in at the rear by a hefty stone wall at least twenty feet high. On the other side of the wall there was an outdoor cinema which, on Sunday afternoons in the summer, served as a cheap variety theater frequented chiefly by army conscripts and cadets on weekly furlough.

At the tender age of  barely nine, I could only listen to the band and  the  chorus from the house-side because I dared not climb the formidable wall to take a sneak peek. It was basically the same music every Sunday. The women in the chorus obviously did not get tired of singing the tunes over and over, and neither did the soldiers of hearing them every week.

At pre-puberty age, I would not yet be imagining in the eye of my mind the low-cut dresses, shaven legs and underarms of the belly dancers,  or faces prettied with heavy make-up.  Through the loud and not-so-refined audio system I could only discern the violin, the clarinet, the oud, and the drums, in addition to the voices. I did not know at the time that the show I wished to, but could not watch was in fact the only affordable entertainment available to the lonely enlisted men and cadets, some barely out of their teens, who were all  perhaps hundreds of miles away from their homes and families. Neither did I  realize that the performance  was a truly provincial and  mediocre vaudeville and, as such,  it could best be described as  a somewhat simplistic, amateurish, and almost comical mixture of wiggly dances, singing, slapstick humor, and a magician’s banal act all rolled into one. However, if I were a few years older, I  might have  intuitively sensed from the shouts and wolf whistles that more than  a few of the spectators would  willingly risk to be detained by the military police afterwards if they could only enjoy some intimate moments with one or another of the pretty chorus girls right there and then.

 

In the summer of that year two large and ugly warts appeared on my knee. Nothing worked on the disgusting things. Neither the pharmacist’s  silver nitrate ointment, nor wetting the hardened skin with the sap of oleander bushes, as suggested by a neighbor, was of any use. Finally, one day when I was playing five-a-side soccer with a group of friends in the rough, stony field behind the school yard I took a bad fall and had the whole skin on the kneecap scraped off, warts and all. My friends quickly picked a few cigarette butts from the kerb and sprinkled tobacco crumbs on the open wound, a somewhat mythical, albeit totally useless  remedy we all believed in at that age.

Even as a toddler, every time I took a fall I would regularly be  scolded  for being careless or naughty. For fear of reprimand, therefore, I did not go home that afternoon until bleeding stopped. I don’t remember how but I did manage to hide the knee from my parents until the scab formed.

 

When I started the sixth grade the family moved to an apartment in the newer section of the town. The entrance door opened into a narrowish hallway around which clustered  three of the  rooms. A corridor at the back led to the kitchen, the bathroom and, finally, to a fourth room with a view of, as well as  access to the rather nicely planted garden at the back. With its comfortable sofa, sizeable dinner table, chairs, wall cupboards and, especially,  an extra large cooking stove in the corner, what the family named ‘’the garden room’’ was almost an independent unit which  soon became the most heavily used  venue for many events of our lives.

 

The pupils of the middle school, grades six to nine, were accommodated in a separate  building of the town’s  high school compound. Students did not don uniforms like in private, fee-charging schools but there was still a dress code. Girls had dark grey pinafores with white, starched cotton collars while  boys were required to wear jackets and neckties which made us look like caricatures of grown up men. Yet, we were still little boys who would be running in the yard like mad goats during the recesses to  come back to the classroom each time with sweaty foreheads and rosy cheeks, panting.

 

During a lunch-time volleyball game, one of the students watching the court from the side slung a piece of rusty wire towards the players. The piece flew in the air and hit me, totally unexpecting,  in the open eye.

I collapsed, the wire half stuck under the eyelid. My teammates rushed to my side and took me to the principal’s office. My father was quickly summoned to take  me to the hospital. I did not feel any pain but  it was found that the impact deeply scarred the cornea in the right eye, broke open the lense within, and tore the pupil out of shape,  rendering the eye well-nigh useless. For the first time in my life I did not get punished for carelessness when I was brought home with an oversize bandage on one side of my  face.

With one eye thus effectively blinded, I lost binocular vision and started to see things differently from that day on. Even my dreams changed. In one, I dreamed I was among the enlisted men queing in front of the theater for the show.  Inside, I  sat next to a young cadet who was constantly waving at and signaling to one of the girls, the pretty one in pink strapless blouse and a short, short, very short, revealing  skirt. She was not totally indifferent, it seemed, for she picked a bright red geranium from the flower pot behind and flung it to the cadet. I could swear I felt in my dream the sharp, acrid smell of the freshly picked flower as the young soldier next to me caught it in the air and then jumped onto the stage, embraced the girl warmly, hotly, steamingly in his arms before the military police forced him back to his seat. Although I could not know at the time  that this was the precursor of yet-to-come wet dreams of adolescence,  I still refrained from telling my parents about it.

Once, in the wee hours of the morning,  just before the crack of dawn, I woke up suddenly. I saw my parents standing at the foot of my bed, watching me intently. I tried to get up but was stopped by my father. There was a strange light in my father’s eyes. I turned to my mother. She, too, had the same greenish glare in her eyes. My hair stood on end with fear. I felt the blood drain in my veins.  I dropped back on the pillow. My parents leaned over and, gently holding me only with their fingers, lifted me off the bed as if there was no gravity, no weight. The door was closed and my grandmother was softly snoring in the adjacent bed, her dentures in a glass of water on the nightstand. My parents glided across the room carying me only by the slightest touch of  their finger tips. To my utter amazement the three of us went through the closed door and flew towards the coal-burning stove in the hallway. It was still dark yet I could clearly see every thing in the greenish light coming from my parents eyes. The big stove’s top flipped open on its own. My parents turned me on my head to shove me in but there was no fire left, not even an amber. They gave up and carried me the same way back to my bed.

Then I really woke up. Since I had lost the eye I had had many weird dreams but this one was really scary. With the stove gone cold, I was shivering. I pulled my covers up to my head and soon stopped thinking about the strange glare in my parents’ eyes, grandmother’s snoring, dentures looking strange in the glass,  and  went back to sleep.

When I woke up again the room was filled with warm sunlight. I  looked around. It seemed my grandmother had already got up to start the day’s chores but it was unusually quiet in the house. Then I remembered that it was Sunday. On Sundays the family had a late start and lazily gathered for brunch with garlic sausages  and eggs, thick home-made soup, and  fat pastry rolls that were baked in the oven of the cooking stove. I got out of the bed and hurried to the ‘garden room’ without putting slippers on, knowing full well that my grandmother would give me an affectionate spank for walking barefoot on cold terrazzo tiles. I expected and even wanted that. It was part of the Sunday’s ritual.

In the garden room my parents were already seated at the table and grandmother was near the cooking stove. The room was filled with that reassuring, homely, warm air and the delightful aroma of something baking. As I chirpily said ‘’good morning everyone’’  my parents slowly turned their heads to look at me. Just like in the dream, there was the same weird greenish glare in their eyes. I had goose pimples all over.  My grandmother was smiling but now the same strange, unearthly light emanated from her dentures also. I heard my father say  in a hissing voice  ‘’lassst night the ssstove in the hallway wasss ussselesss, now we’ll try the cooking ssstove.’’  My  parents slowly got up from the table and glided towards me again. I felt paralyzed.  All of this was exactly  like in my dream. My parents reached me and touched my body ever so lightly. I nearly fainted. My head dropped like that of a straw doll. As I was carried by my parents like a weightless goose down pillow, I opened my good eye with my last grain of energy only to see my grandmother open up the cooking stove. Hot, hot, hot flames were twisting, twirling, and dancing as if alive and were coming nearer, nearer, nearer.  As I felt the smell of my hair and eyebrows being scorched in the heat,  I could only whisper  ''oh,  sh.t!’’.

Those were my last words.                                                                                                                                 

 

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