Portrait of a Turkish Family Read Online Free

my grandmother critically poked and sniffed at her cooling dolmas , and nine times out of ten she was ordered to prepare and cook fresh ones as those already made were only fit for the Christians to eat. Feride was called in to superintend the making of kadin-ğöbeği , heavy, syrupy doughnuts which when properly made are light as air and heaven to eat. I was very fond of kadin-ğöbeği and purposely delayed in the kitchen looking for a chance to steal one of them as they were cooling in the rich syrup. The advent of the supercilious Feride caused sulkiness to mount in the breast of Hacer and she muttered many unmentionable things beneath her breath.
    Her beloved Feride safely installed in the kitchen and nothing likely to go wrong, or so she fondly hoped, my grandmother next went upstairs to her bedroom taking İnci with her, to my mother’s annoyance, since this left Mehmet and me with no supervision. İnci was instructed to sort out the clean linen and bath-robes and innumerable towels that would be required at the hamam. Bars of soap and a large bottle of eau-de-Cologne were brought from their hiding-places and all the other appurtenances needed for the correct toilette of a lady about to take her bath. İnci was told to pack all these things in little embroidered cloths, which were kept especially for this purpose, and I was several times called upstairs and warned of all the things I must not do at the hamam. By the time my grandmother had herself uselessly run up and down the stairs several more times, she suddenly came panting into the salon and threw herself without the least semblance of elegance into a large chair. She fanned herself vigorously then complained to my mother that she was very tired and that she could not understand why it was that whenever she wished to take a bath it was she who had to do all the work about the place. Hacer, she said, was more than ever useless and she did not know why she continued to keep her, excepting perhaps that it was because she felt pity for her, knowing that no other household in the world would keep her for more than a day. My mother, who had a soft spot for the maligned Hacer, here interrupted to tell my grandmother that – on the contrary – when she went to the hamam she completely disorganised the entire house. Warming to her subject in the face of my grandmother’s disbelieving attitude, she said that here was she – starving, with no one to prepare a meal for her, her children were hungry too and that as Hacer had already been twice told to throw away all the dolmas she had spent the entire morning cooking, she felt that the rest of the day would go by in similar fashion until we would all die with the hunger.
    This considerably enraged my grandmother, who thought the whole accusation very unjust indeed, and she then added chaos to chaos by impetuously ringing for Murat and ordering him to run immediately to the butcher to buy meat as everyone was hungry. Murat, who was hungry himself, went with great haste lest my grandmother changed her mind again. She, with great indignation at being so unjustly accused, went off in a temper to the kitchen to instruct Hacer to leave everything and prepare luncheon since my mother, worn out with all the embroidering she had done that morning, was starving.
    She suddenly recollected that henna had to be applied to her hair and called Feride away from the kadin-ğöbeği , demanding to know why the henna had not been prepared before this time. Her obstreperousness affected us all, and me in particular so that I was continuously fractious, eventually reducing İnci to weak tears of rage.
    ‘If I go to the hamam,’ she ground out at me through tightly clenched teeth, ‘you will come home looking like a lobster. I shall hold your head under the boiling water until you die and pull your nose until it is as long as an elephant’s nose!’
    Sufficiently intimidated I fled to Hacer who gave me sugar to eat and sat me on a high