Mihriban O. Pekguleryuz --Sea Lock Hill

Her name was Emmie, the fisherman’s daughter. Tall and fair with green eyes. When the fisheries season arrived, the whole family went to Saroz. The wind was strong in this wide-open bay. As the fishermen gathered their nets, a coral sunset fell onto the still sky, a few minutes of sunset blues.....then red seabreams and mullets were fried and eaten with green long-beans dressed in sour-grape juice. The sea would shiver first then shake and cede to wait for the night in sweet quivers. A few days of fisheries story.
As the road circles the peninsula and the round castle wall appears, the Sea-Lock Castle stands before you, one heart-shaped beauty of a castle. Piri Reis wrote his Book of the Sea here in the 16th century. From the castle gate, you can see the town cafe and the white houses; the town widens towards the hill and suddenly ends on a plateau with a fountain. .....On the crest of the hill, Cahidi Sultan, an obscure mystique seems to have hidden away after falling into a mystical slumber.....It is not known if the plateau had the fountain when a relative of General E. S., one of the Emperor’s admirals, became the commander of the Straits, but the gentleman must have liked the shady trees of the plateau and its view overlooking the channel that he had a thirty-two room mansion built here. It is buried in the depths of history that in the years when his brother or brother-in-law became the governor to the island of Cos, his grandson Ethan married Sea Lock’s most beautiful girl, thirteen-year-old, golden-haired beauty of beauties, Emmie. Emmie was given a chest of jewelry for her wedding. For a long time, the whole town of Sea Lock talked of nothing but of the bride in the thirty-two-roomed mansion on the hill. Emmie’s tiaras borrowed for weddings adorned every bride in town. “They had a bad eye on my jewelry, on my marriage, my girl,” Emmie said, one day, to her granddaughter, Belle.

Emmie became a mother at age fourteen, she gave birth to a son they named E. Sab after his great grandfather. When her husband, an officer of the army, was away on duty, Emmie, hugged her son and slept in one of the rooms of the big mansion, so Emmie’s son narrated to his granddaughter one day.... When her son was barely two years old, Emmie lost her husband to meningitis and was widowed at age sixteen. She continued to live in Sea-Lock mansion; her in-laws emigrated, died of old age or succumbed to the cholera epidemic. “I am the bride of the mansion,” Emmie said, hovering over her son like a female eagle, single handedly challenging the strong winds on Sea-Lock Hill, “I will not take a stepfather to my son,” she turned away from those who wished to marry her....as Emmie’s granddaughter one day narrated to her daughter.

When the first warm days of spring arrive at this channel, and the sun warms the wave crests announcing the end of a cold winter.... one such warm early-spring day, Emmie and her father took a boat ride in the channel to her aunt’s. Midway, with no others around, Emmie took off her headscarf and her golden hair glittered competing with the sun....one such day.... Sea-Lock castle like a heart on the shore, on the lookout a young officer watching through binoculars....he is mesmerized by the golden-haired beauty sailing in the boat. “Who is this beautiful maiden?” he asks around. “No maiden, she is a widow, her husband died, she has a five-year-old son”. The golden-haired beauty floats away in her boat. “Please ask her hand in marriage for me,” the officer says. The news reach Emmie... The bride of Sea-Lock mansion is firm: “No, I will not take a stepfather to my son.” Messages from the young officer come and go, Emmie’s family pressures her, Emmie finally accepts and marries the young officer. She hovers over young E. Sab, though...”Do not forget, this house is his,” she tells her husband....

So a new life starts on Sea-Lock Hill. The young officer takes part in training exercises every weekend... Emmie pleads one weekend morning, “Don’t go today, stay home, look I am cooking”. Emmie was known to be a great cook. “Prepare the food, I will make it back by the evening,”...on such a day, from the kitchen window, the narrowest point of the channel would appear bluest of the blue, as it appeared years later from over the branch of a fig tree. Most likely, the sound of cannons would rise from the heart-shaped castle....”Ah, the sound of this cannon is so bitter,” Emmie says, “it pierced my heart.” That day, the twenty-year-old Emmie loses her husband of eight months in the rear of a cannon that backfires at the castle, widowed a second time, as she waits with a phyllo-pie pan in her hand at the kitchen window of the mansion on the hill. “My girl, this Sea Lock had a bad eye on me,” she said to her granddaughter one day.

E. Sab? His uncle comes one day to visit back from the frontier after having fought in many a war; bringing bags of gold to E. Sab’s mother; “Let me take him to the Capital to see his relatives”, he says. E. Sab meets his uncles and aunts on a ranch in the outskirts of the Capital. “Look,” they say, “come live here at the ranch with us, there are many animals, sheep, chicken, horses.“ “Are there also gulus?” E. Sab asks about turkeys in his western colloquial. His uncle laughs, “Yes, my child, there are also gulus!” This is how E. Sab told this story to his granddaughter M one day when M realized that her grandfather loved his uncle, the retired officer had been a father figure to him. Emmie? “I will not give my son to anyone”, she says. She embraces her son, hears not of marriage anymore and continues to live a decade in the ageing mansion atop the hill…. until she moves temporarily to the city across the channel so that E. Sab can attend high school.

Pined-Plateau

The coast here stalks the highway, the sea hides showing herself only briefly at each turn and then disappears again. If you set off from Sea Lock, until you find yourself in Queen City, you play hide and seek with the sea. Queen City’s harbour, wide and grey, carries an arid hill to the sea; then the road continues among pine trees, this time hand-in-hand with the sea. To the side, the village of Pined-Plateau lies on a meandering hill. On this hill, the temple of Artemis has gone to sleep for a couple-of-thousand years under a soil covered with pinecones. The villagers used to hunt for treasures on this hill, her brother and cousin also but with no success, as Emmie’s granddaughter Belle told her daughter one day. The battle of the Dardanelles was commanded from this village. When Emmie looked for a wife for her son, she learned of Sabie, the daughter of Pined-Plateau’s chieftain and sent messages. One eighteen-years-old and the other twenty, Sabie and E. Sab got married in 1917.

I spent summers in the village of Pined-Plateau, the village of my grandmother. I sat on a fig tree with my second cousin H and exchanged my city beats with her village vibes. I sat on a donkey and rode to where the village’s shallow stream met the shore at where Leander who crossed the channel every night to be with his lover gave up his body on sand, silt and reed. I swam in shallow muddled waters among reeds and lay down on wet sand to dry under the channel’s skies. I watched the night skies at the threshing fields at harvest time in the foreground of a chorus of crickets, drew water from wells and watched aunt F make white cheese & semolina dessert on a tin pan on wood fire. I attended a village wedding wearing a pink satin outfit and a headscarf edges embroidered with pink needle-lace, loose on my long hair. The bride came dressed in a white silk outfit drawn at the waist with a gold belt and strings of pearl around her neck. The village girls danced the welcoming dance ushering a blissful life for the bride and the groom.

Sea-Lock Mansion

Once married, Sabie and E. Sab settle in the mansion on the Sea-Lock Hill with Emmie. They have one son, M; they live through one war, the wells are covered with stones, the mansion is occupied by invading families who love Sabie’s son, then the wells are reopened in 1922. Sabie’s daughter, Belle is born five years into the modern era of the country. Belle had good memories of growing up in this house, her father sitting down with her to make her eat her food as he told her stories, being sad when told not to eat all of the oranges on the table and her brother giving his orange to her, sitting at the steps outside the front door eating a bowl of pomegranate seeds her mother prepared for her.

The story should own that for a decade, Emmie and Sabie lived like mother and daughter in the mansion and then they became enemies, when her daughter-in-law removed her headscarf and wore a hat instead, Emmie never forgave her....This is how Sabie told the story to her granddaughter one day: E. Sab first buys the smaller mansion neighbouring the Sea-Lock and moves his family there, then they move across the channel to the city and Emmie is left alone in her mansion with her jewels, her convictions, a beautiful woman, stubborn and lonely, two husbands buried in Sea Lock. The mansion starts to get old slowly becoming uninhabitable, many rooms are locked. The gardens are neglected.

I spent summers close to the town of Sea Lock in my early years accompanying my grandparents on their yearly “pilgrimage” to the Dardanelles. They used to rent out the fields in Pined-Plateau for sharecropping to grow wheat and sesame, and they used to hire help to pick and gather the olives from the lands of the Sea-Lock mansion. All that was left of the mansion was a corner-wall with a half-window and a fig tree at its corner, perhaps the very window where Emmie heard the cannon that took away her second husband. The garden was an olive grove with pomegranate trees bordering, obviously the very trees from which Sabie prepared a bowl of pomegranates seeds for her daughter Belle. The channel looked blue and radiant, peaceful but with an expectation of stories to unfold. I took trips to Anzac Cove and ran in wild excitement on miles-long fine sand to hug the swinging waves caressing it only to have my feet picked by sea-urchins lying hidden deep in the sand. These shores preferred not to be trampled.

When the mansion whispered in cracks and quivers to Emmie that it can no longer shelter her, only then she moved to the city across the channel; she bought a house in the fashionable district of Hospital Hill in the city of Dardanelles. Vestiges of Sea-Lock mansion, pieces of burgundy brocade drapes, Emmie’s mother-of-pearl inlayed bathroom clogs, a set of bronze-inlaid silver bowl and cup, a gold-embroidered purple prayer-rug and a white chiffon headscarf stayed in our home long years as if Emmie accompanied us in our life’s journey. Belle remembers at age six walking with her cardigan folded on her arm up the Hospital Hill to her grandmother’s new home. The houses of the city of Dardanelles welcome you into a conservatory draped in crochet curtains. A narrow staircase up, the visitors are entertained among flowerpots in a living room of many windows that looks like a ship’s deck dimmed with heavy lace curtains; sweet pastries, and jam are offered with silver spoons, and drinks and sherbets in colored-crystal glass. The girls are attractive and staid and when they speak warm-hearted but immutable. They are all of solid character. Like Emmie they all seem to be taking on life in their own fashion.

It is late 1930s, a time of reforms in the republic, the Latin alphabet and the civil law are adopted, the women are granted the right to vote. E. Sab an accountant working at the Ministry of Finance is suddenly transferred to the coastal Aegean city of E to investigate a corruption case and moves his family to a new life. It is just before the WWII, the republic is young and enthusiastic; the people are driven to education and arts; they are dedicated, civilized, and polite. The times roll while Emmie lives alone missing her son. After a few years, at age fifty-five she marries a gentleman, a native of the Dardanelles and a distant relative of her first husband.

Empress City

The Empress City of Bosphorus, no longer the Capital city but always a pearl of the world…. this city is like a body-invader infusing into your veins such that your heart beats with the sound of footsteps on her cobblestones, with the roll of tramways along her Independence Street, with the sirens of boats crisscrossing her channel, with the rain trickling down her sycamore trees. She captivates you and makes you eternally her own…. A few years after his duty in the Aegean city, E. Sab asks for a transfer so that her children can have access to good education; they arrive and settle at the beautiful Empress City at where a Roman aqueduct forms an organic arch over the boulevard crossing the city east-west. Emmie, yes, she marries at age fifty-five in the city of Dardanelles but after six months her husband has a stroke and dies.....With her bundle of jewelry and the last bag of gold, thrice widowed, having a light stroke herself, she moves in with her son’s in the Empress City. “They had an evil eye on me, my girl,” she says to her granddaughter, Belle.

WWII breaks, there is rationing in the city and anxiety in the air. The country helps both sides with food and supplies to avoid entering the war on either side, and a rationing is activated country-wide; people buy flour, sugar, oil in quotas. E. Sab, a reserve officer of the army, is called on duty in the army division in charge of logistics. As salary they are sometimes paid in supplies. Sabie makes scones from the flour, sugar and oil for all the students in Belle’s classroom at the Empress City Lycée for Girls, a very fine high school with university calibre teachers.

And Emmie? Not leading a happy existence, cross with her daughter-in-law, bitter towards her son, saddened by her grandson who makes fun of her, she gives all her love to her granddaughter Belle...... Belle every day after school rushes to her grandmother’s room to listen to the stories of this tall beautiful woman with long golden hair, long fingers and finger nails that look manicured even when cut very short, a beautiful face with slight traces of a recent stroke....”They had a bad eye on me, my girl: she says “all of Sea Lock, on me, on my jewels”. When she leaves saying “I am returning home,” she gives her bundle of jewels and the last bag of gold to Belle. “These are yours, my girl” she says, “Do not give these to anyone.”

When the news of Emmie’s death arrived from the Dardanelles, it was the end of the war; the gold that Belle gave to her father was already spent. Most of the jewelry was later given to Belle’s brother at his wedding, who later sells the jewels, unlawfully sells the lands in Pined-Plateau village and the lands of the mansion atop the Sea-Lock hill. What was left of Emmie’s jewelry for Belle are stolen by her best friends, best friend’s husband, or lost. Belle for many years describes to her daughter the jewels adorned with ruby flowers, diamond bees, amethyst violets and emerald leaves. She is grief-stricken each time she wears the few pieces left in her possession, a brooch, a pendant, earrings and a ring, and each time she remembers the hilltop mansion where she was born. Belle gives her daughter when she is fifteen the diamond-heart pendant evoking the heart-shaped Sea-Lock castle, given to Emmie by her first husband; “wear this my daughter,” Belle says, “it was my grandmother’s.”

Whenever I wore that heart pendant I felt like crying..... I stopped wearing it for a long time...maybe thirty-five years. Whenever my mother mourned the loss of her inheritance...”Give up, Mom,” I said, “these lands, jewels are a little dark, not known how they were obtained, from whom and how. They took away Emmie’s husbands, let them be sold, thrown away, stolen, sunk and vanished”....Then one evening as I cheerfully ushered in a new year wearing my black dress and Emmie’s heart pendant...in the wee hours of the New Year, I looked in the mirror and felt joyous, “Look Emmie the darkness seems to have lifted...look the mansion is gone, even its very stones are no more; in its place are many white houses where families live. Multitudes of new human stories have been written in E. Sab Street...the days of darkness are over”....and I made the dangerous proposition, “I will now wear the pendant not for the bride of Sea-Lock mansion, but for Emmie of Sea Lock.”

Belle married five years after the war’s end, five years after the death of Emmie; she married a man that vibrated love, a genius of a man, a resilient man, a man with a sense of humour, a phenomenal father to their only child, but he died perhaps a little early at age fifty-nine. His story is kept for another tale…Belle, devasted, grieved, “I thought we would age together and take long walks hand-in-hand”. Belle a loving teacher, a loving person, a most loving mother, a jewel of a person widowed at age fifty took care of her mother, Sabie, Emmie’s daughter-in-law, who also had a stroke. Belle was also at her beloved father’s deathbed, in his last breath E. Sab looked intensely passed his daughter and hallucinated “my uncle, my uncle”…..his uncle was indeed a father figure for him. When Belle retired, and Sabie was no more, she joined her daughter and son-in-law in Montreal. Her beautiful life is left to another tale to tell. I took Belle to the town of Sea Lock before she had her dementia. She cried asking why and how her childhood home had been converted to an E. Sab street with many white houses where people did not know of Emmie.

Sabie’s son, M? He lived on the money he made from selling the lands and the jewels of Sea-Lock Hill, and the lands of Pined-plateau; he died right after the death of his only son at age forty. The jewels of Emmie? on a September day, I lost them along with every piece of jewelry my mother and I owned in a black bag as I flew from Montreal to the Empress City to spend my sabbatical year. Two girls posing as neighbours helped my mother up the elevator into her flat and stole my bag with its thousands-of-dollars’ worth of contents including Emmie’s jewels, money, IDs, more importantly my memories and those of Belle and Emmie; can thousands-of-dollars carry so much value? Perhaps the jewels had taken pity on me and left my possession……That year I looked for Emmie’s grave in Sea Lock’s Cahidi-Sultan cemetery, skipping over thorns and stones to no avail. “Where are you, Emmie?” I shouted. “I need your answers”.

The Story does not end here….

Stories seldom do end; they are open ended... they only attempt a transient final thought, a temporary last beat. My husband had a series of heart attacks upon our return from my Empress City sabbatical. I rummaged through my empty jewelry boxes for any piece of Emmie’s jewels that might have been left behind, a chain-hook, a tiny chip? Whatever looked ancestral I put in a plastic bag, drove to the shores of St. Lawrence and flung the bag into its rapids. I already had the most valuable jewel of Emmie, her granddaughter, Belle, and that would probably be Emmie’s answer to me. This may have ended Emmie’s story.....but perhaps the tale will not end before the jewels of Sea Lock find their true home at whatever coast, channel or hill-top they truly belong to.

The Sea-Lock Hill? The story should disclose that Sea-Lock Hill was Cynossema in Trojan times, a hill where Priam’s wife Hecuba went mad at the news of her youngest son Polydorus’s death during the Trojan war by his protector the Thracian king Polymestor who wanted to possess the gold and jewelry of Hecuba….Perhaps this hill always bore ill fate.

I am an engineer by training; I teach materials engineering at a Canadian university. Writing and painting (watercolors and oil) are my true self, while engineering is an acquired identity. My writing is somewhere between prose and poetry, sometimes more poetry than prose and at times more prose than poetry. Whether art or science, my purpose is to create; create objects, materials, scenes, thoughts and feelings to share.