The Threshold

When you step through the door of some houses, you do not simply enter a house.

Because.... you know too, sometimes when you step through the door of a house, a story welcomes you before the walls do. Before anyone tells you anything, everything that has ever been lived inside that house quietly settles upon you.

There is the silence of years in their walls, the footsteps of children on their floors, and a restlessness in their kitchen that never stops. Some houses, while growing a person, do not only grow their age, but their soul too.

My childhood also began inside such a house.

In the middle of the 1990s,

In a village around Posof, Ardahan, where the mountains leaned against each other, where winter lasted long, where the earth and the animals came alive again when summer came, in our house...

Life began before sunrise, at least that was how it was in our house.

For my father, Osman, there was no certain hour of the day. Morning began before the sun rose; evening did not end when the work was finished, but when there was no strength left to stand anymore. The fields, the animals, the things that had to be done… He lived as if the whole burden of the world had been placed on his shoulders.

He did not keep his children outside of this burden either.

When we were still very little, our hands learned work.

I used to think that a child's palms should grow through play. But our hands grew through work.

My mother Esin's hands were never empty either.

One hand carried the warmth of dough, the other the smell of the barn. She set the table, looked after the animals, went to the fields, finished the housework; before one was finished, another would begin. I remember her being tired, but I do not remember her resting.

Perhaps mothers' tiredness is one of the things in a house.

Everyone sees it, but no one moves it from its place.

In those years, we were a large family.

There were six of us siblings.

Three girls, three boys…

But among these six children, I had many siblings who came into this world for a short time and then quietly left.

Their names were mentioned only once in a while at home.

Sometimes they were never mentioned at all.

Because there was an understanding that slowly dried a person's soul... after all, there is a woman, there is someone who gives birth...

I can almost see your facial expressions as you read this. What can I say....

Around the same time, my father's older brother Ziya also lived in the same house with us, together with his family. Everyone had not yet separated into their own homes. We lived under the same roof, around the same table, inside the same life.

Ziya was not someone who worked very much,

The burden of the work mostly fell on my father. I wonder, what would have happened if my father had loved us as much as he loved his work? We will never know. Because work was more important to him than everything, perhaps only his own feeding was more important than it. Look, I am underlining this, his own throat... Anyway

..... let me continue

Ziya's wife, Saadet, was never gentle toward my mother.

With my child mind, I did not understand why some things happened. I only saw the change in my mother's face.

Then, one day, something happened in that house that I would never forget.

My mother was making cheese in the lower house.

Saadet poured the hot oil over my mother's head.

Suddenly, a sharp smell of burning spread through the air. The oil flowed from my mother's hair to her neck, from her neck to her dress. My mother's scream hit the walls of the house and came back; as if the house itself was screaming with her. Her dress stuck to her skin, her hands went to her head. I froze where I stood. I could neither go forward nor run back. While my mother writhed in pain, everyone inside the house was silent. That silence was more frightening than her scream; it was deafening, not to the ear, but to the inside of a person.

After that day, perhaps as children we could not name the thing growing inside us toward Saadet.

But we knew.

We did not like her.

We did not like Ziya either.

Because children cannot explain injustice as beautifully as adults can; but they feel it immediately.

I do not know exactly how much time passed. What I know is that there was someone who allowed me to breathe inside the heaviness of that house. That person was my dear older brother Kayir.

The world felt a little lighter beside him.

We would herd the sheep together. The days we went up to the highlands passed differently. While walking among the mountains, following the animals, the weight of the house seemed to remain behind us.

If there was a moment when I felt that I was a child, that is the moment; me, my older brother, and the sheep...

Perhaps the only beautiful moments of the highlands, what remained was a great nothing... Come, let me tell you about an incident from that great nothingness; whenever I remember that day, the inside of me feels bad, truly.

That day, even the silence of the highlands was different.

My mother had gone to the spring to bring water.

My sibling, you know, one of those siblings of mine who died, was in the cradle.

Crying.

My father was there. I feel like saying he was deaf because he did not take care of my sibling. I am ashamed to call him such an uncaring father. When my mother came, my sibling was purple, not breathing. My mother took my sibling into her arms; while the cradle continued to sway gently. That swaying stayed in my eyes for a long time. My mother's fingers were rubbing the baby's cheeks, the sound coming from her mouth resembled a muffled moan that could not turn into words. As if her voice was breaking in her throat, remaining inside her without being able to come out.

That tiny body was no longer crying.

While looking at my sibling in my mother's arms, with my child mind, I did not know what death was; but I felt that something would not return.

After that day, nothing in our house was ever the same.

I saw my mother's pain.

I saw how a mother became silent when she lost her child, how she collapsed into herself. She sat for hours with the baby in her arms; tears were running down her face, but she made no sound. She pressed the baby's head against her chest, then looked at the face, holding the cooling hands between her own palms. Sometimes she loosened her arms as if she were about to let the baby go, then pulled the baby back to herself in fear. As if, if she moved away a little, the baby would really leave, and if she held a little tighter, she could bring the baby back.

But I did not see the same destruction on my father's face.

The only thing he said was, “Am I supposed to take care of the child too?”

I was a child, but when that feeling inside me turns into words, I cannot stop myself from saying, damn you, are you even human, father? Anyway, everyone gets what they deserve on the real scales, because

Some regrets knock on the door when the past has already turned into earth.

.... Anyway

Our threshold

It was not doing a task for someone instead of them, but being given a task.

Rather than being asked, “Are you tired?”, we were told, “Do this too.”

And I learned in time.

Not to talk too much.

Not to want too much.

Not to laugh too much.

Because in our house, laughing too much was also considered shameful.

I did not question this when I was a child.

Children first believe the things they are taught are true.

So I made my laughter smaller.

I became accustomed to the faint, unfinished smile resting at the corners of my lips.

A half-smile…

As if I was knocking on the door of life but did not have the courage to enter.

At that time, I did not know that this would one day become one of the greatest symbols of my life.

I was just a child.

A child growing up among the mountains, trying to find her own voice inside a crowded house.

Sometimes I would wander after my mother, sometimes I would go behind my older brother and the sheep, sometimes I would listen to the adults' conversations inside the house without understanding them.

This was how my childhood passed; with a few safe moments scattered among heavy days, and with long silences whose changing I never noticed.

Life was still ahead of me.

And I did not know how long, how hard, how surprising it would be.

At that time, there was only a threshold in front of me.

And I was standing there without knowing what was waiting for me beyond that threshold.

Now you have read all of this.

You have entered a house.

You have sat at a family's table.

You have seen a mother's silence, a father's quietness, and the fears of children.

Perhaps you will say,

“Then, who are you?”

You are right.

I have told you all of this…

But I never told you about myself.

I…

Serap.

I was that little girl standing on the threshold of life, unaware of what was going to happen to her in those days, with a half-smile on her face.

And this was only the beginning of my story.