The Railway

Seyit Ali Dastan

 

That May afternoon in 1984 was not a fabulous one in itself, but I remember the day as an entirely fabled chapter of my life when the truth can’t be distinguished from the tale. Were the borders between these two blurry on that day? Or was it just a kid’s mind confusing solid and rather painful facts of life? One-third of a century has passed since those years, but I don’t have a clear answer to this question and am still sailing between the fairies of open seas and a concrete pier connecting us with the alleged realities. At the age of six, though, I was living in Wonderland braided with railways on the poor outskirts of Kayseri, a city in the center of Turkey.

On that late May afternoon, when my mom and I exited the main gate of the State Hospital, I was holding her hand and watching the central railroad station across the highway, a ring road encircling Kayseri. Both the hospital and the railroad station were built at the edge of town, facing each other and giving access to people living in the smaller surrounding towns. However, it was a period when new districts were opening beyond the hospital, railway and the ring road, since Kayseri, the mid-level industrial city, was seeing immigration from its rural periphery. And our home was also in a newly built neighborhood, one called Yeni Mahalle or New Neighborhood.

We needed to go back home by minibus, since our home was not real close to the hospital. While my mom was checking her pockets for the minibus fee, I just rode down the iron guardrail again and again. I finally crashed to the ground, but it did not hurt much. My mom rushed over and grabbed my hand, saying:

“Son, you will break your bones. We’ve had enough of the hospital for today!”

“It was you, mom, who visited the doctor, not me,” I replied.

“You little monster, your tongue is taller than you are. Come here!” and she stressed at a lower volume: “Never let go of my hand again!”

She dragged me down the stairs to the pavement but kept checking her pockets. She was wearing a thin purple coat extending to her feet. This coat was like an extension of her persona, as she had been wearing it for nearly an entire year. It was a lighter tone of purple, and she wore it by tying the belt around it. I very much loved this coat. Of course, I identified it with my mom. But more than that: My mom hid me inside her coat when we waited for public transport in the cold, windy or rainy weather. And I very much liked sticking my head out of her coat and looking around, feeling her affection and warmth – both physically and emotionally.

She checked her coat to buy a return ticket home but finally realized there was a tiny hole. As she traced the bottom of the coat’s inner lining, she found a coin at the lowest part of it. We could touch it from outside, but had no idea how many liras it was? Then we moved to a secluded corner next to the stairs and slowly pulled this mysterious coin to the hole in which it had fallen. It was 50 kuruş, meaning half a lira, embossed with an image of a traditional Turkish farmer girl. My mom closed her palm and said resolutely, “We will walk.” This was how we started trekking back home on that late May afternoon.

We walked across the highway while my mom was firmly holding me. She said we would take a shortcut through the fields away from the roads so that she would not need to hold my hand. We then entered a path through the fields. It was a little wider than a trail and lined by tall grass from the spring rain. Even though I was able to partly see these fields from above when we went by bus or minibus, this was the first time I passed through them. I was walking in front of my mom. The grass was so high that I felt like walking inside a tunnel towards an unknown world.

The notable difference between the center of town and these fields was that I could feel the wind much better. The wall of the tunnel – grass and brush – were moving with the wind and I felt like I was ensconced by rhythmically swinging plants around me. The ground was dry. Even if it was spring. May in that year must have been warmer than normal since otherwise the ground would be wet and we would have to avoid mud. I was walking quickly in this strange world and sometimes getting out of my mom’s sight. In such cases, she would yell from behind me “Ufuk! Wait, son!” I would stop for a moment, letting her see me, and then speed up again and even run.

This chasing and game of hide-and-seek ended when I reached a tiny creek. These creeks were either natural branches of a river, a terminating and fading edge of a larger river, or an irrigation channel. In every case, they were used to irrigate the vegetable planting in these areas. As I reached the creek, I climbed a smallish bank to look around. Ahead of the creek, there was lettuce and cabbage lined up waiting to be harvested. The rows of beans were yet to grow but the sticks that beans would cling to and rise on were already fastened in the soil. The patch was filled with some tinier and shorter greenery such as parsley and spinach. There were some silverberry trees randomly scattered around with dizzying scents permeating the area.

When I turned back, I saw my mom putting one of her hands on her forehead and looking at me. She was hardly breathing and seemed tired, although we hadn’t walked too much.

“Come down son! What are you looking at?”

“I am trying to see our home, mom.”

“You can’t see it yet. We need to walk a bit further.”

I went back to her. She extended her hand but I ran away again. She yelled from behind: “Slowly, please. Walk near the creek. Don’t get too close to it!”

We started to walk alongside the creek. This creek and others around it would be the first to die in the transformation of these areas over the coming years. They were dried out, and the vegetable farming ended. Farmers and landowners started to sell their fields to building contractors to develop the area. During the next ten years, almost the entire space we were then walking through would turn into a new district within the city. The area where we were walking at that time would host streets, shopping centers, mosques, municipal social facilities, schools, and of course residential units. The original city dwellers would remain in more central locations for another decade or so, while these newly opened construction areas were filled by immigrants. But these new districts would get older residents in just two decades and then, in the 2010s, streams of new immigrants flocked to them.

At some point, the creek became wider and thus shallower. It looked like a small pond encircled by local trees. These were poplars and willows commonly found in central Anatolia. They can easily and vigorously grow in watery areas like this. The willows create a poetic impression while the poplars produce harmonious sound in windy weather. That is why this place seemed to be used by locals and farmers as a picnic or resting area. There was burned charcoal, some purposefully placed smooth stones for sitting as well as pieces of wood. I started to throw pebbles at this pond-like body of water while waiting for my mom to catch me. She finally came there and leaned on a stone. As I was throwing the rocks, we were both listening to a pastoral symphony of rustling poplar trees, and plops in the water from the falling pebbles and the gentle splash of the creek. It was an exceptional moment. I was feeling the eternal resonance carved in my soul. A kid does not have the woes of the past because he doesn’t have a past, and he has no concerns for the future because he can’t comprehend the predicaments ahead. That often makes childhood the most beautiful interval of a person’s entire life, a period which many people reminisce on later. This was my case. On the other hand, my mom is like a Tarkovskian character behind me, sitting and resting on a cold stone, looking at me and struggling to drift through the turbulence of her life.

This hypnosis captivating both of us finally ended when I see a swing hanging on the willow tree and emptily moving with the wind. I asked my mom to push me on it, and she agreed. After a few minutes, however, she said that we need to go and arrive home before the sunset.

We kept walking next to the creek until it reached a railway. At that cross-section, the creek was sent through a large concrete pipe under the tracks. This was where we changed our path and started to walk along it.

I was walking right on the railway itself, while my mom was on the ground. The bed of the tracks was a bit higher than the ground, like half a meter, and there were no trees close to it.  I was moving on the steel bars like an acrobat, changing and running between them by leaping and hopping over the tracks like a squirrel.

At one point my mom called me “Ufuk! Son, Wait.” I stopped and looked at her. She continued “Don’t make noise!” At that moment of silence, I was barely standing while my arms were open to keep balance with a single foot on the track. The only thing I could hear was some calls of the birds and the rustling of the wind on the plants. Then, my mom climbed the railway. She put her head on the iron bar for a second and then called to me, “Come here son, put your ear on the bar like me.” She put her left ear on the bar and I put my right ear on it.  We faced each other so close that I could feel her breath. As I gazed in her eyes, I saw thin bloodlines in the whites, as if she had just cried.

She said quietly, very quietly:

“Can you hear that?” – She focused on and repeated, “Can you hear that?”

“No, mom,” I replied. “What am I supposed to hear?”

“Shh!” she said and stressed, “Just listen; you can hear it”.

As I was looking right inside the pupils of her eyes, I could hear a deep noise or a deep roar. Where was this sound coming from? From the depths of the world or from somewhere inside of my mom? Was it the whizz of the big bang or our hearts beating? At that moment, I had no idea what that sound was as it increased every second. Then, my mom lifted her head from the track and looked in both directions. She took the last coin, 50 kurus, from her pocket, put it on the track, pulled me away from the railway by my hand: “Watch it now!”

Our eyes fixed on the coin, I started to hear the sound that I had just heard on the surface of the track. As the roar got louder, I finally saw the train coming from where we were heading. The operator blew the horn as it approached us, probably trying to keep us away from it. It was a passenger train with wide windows, so the passengers might see a mom with a purple coat and his little boy holding each other’s hand.

After the train went by in less than a minute, we checked the coin. It was so crushed that it had become a sharp metal cylindrical plate. My mom then put the coin in my small pocket and said

“This is a gift for you.”

“A gift? But it is no longer money.”

“Don’t worry, it does not really have value as money anyway. Just keep it as it is.”

“Until when?” I asked.

“Forever!”

“When does forever end, mom?”

“Until…” She stopped thoughtfully as she probably realized that I was not old enough to understand her words. She looked at the railway in both directions again and, fingering it, added, “Until this railway ceases to be here.”

My mom was just trying to evade my questions. She could not know that the railway would survive the transformation of this area in the coming years. As the streams and the creeks dried up, the farms were left to some wild weeds, the trees were cut, a new district rose up with a new form of life. However, the railway remained in place, even the buildings were set back many meters. And if somebody were to time-travel from the past to today, the railway is the single benchmark that was both present then and now… A new district has been born, grown and changed all around the constant steel tracks of the railway. Those who travel on the trains once saw farms, cows and scattered trees, while now they gazed on fences, apartments, roads and people all around.

We walked for some time until another dirt path crossed the railway. “We will go this way,” – my mom indicated this turn. I jumped on the railway again and passed across it. There were reeds swinging in the wind. It was still daytime, but the evening was getting closer and there were some intermittent gusts.

I saw a strange bird with a reddish crown on it. Probably an endemic species of songbird. I started to chase after it, as it was quite uncommon for a kid like me. The bird was not flying high, so could easily be followed. It disappeared out of sight, but I found it again from its song. This lingered a while. In the end, however, I lost it. I could neither see it nor hear its song.

Then silence prevailed: no bird calling, no wind whipping, no tree rustling, and no footsteps. But wait, where was my mom? The path of the railway made a half turn, and I could not see beyond due to the long reeds. I started to look at the turn and wait for my mom to come after me. But she was not there. I was out of her sight, and she was out of mine. She usually did not let me go so far away from her, and now she was not coming. I felt lost. Where was she?

Then I dared to walk back to the railway. My slow steps turned faster as I reached the curve. After I had rounded it, I saw my mom on the railway. She was just standing on it, not moving at all. She had taken off her headscarf, and the wind was blowing it together with her coat. It seemed to me as if her body was hovering over the railway. This impression was magnified by the light of the setting sun, which let me see her in a silhouette against the dark orange sky background.

I shouted “Mom!” and started to run towards her. I was leaving dust behind so fast did I run. But she stood still on the railway and did not call me or come to me. I finally reached and hugged her. As she did not bend down, I could just put my head to her belly. She finally responded to me. She grasped my head and gently touched my hair. I felt the same warmth from these hands when they were swinging me a while ago below the willow tree. And the scent of my mom’s purple coat alone was giving me the same sense of endless trust. But my ears on my mom’s belly cannot yet hear the beats of my sister who was still nothing but a tiny hearth inside my mom, and I did not know we were taking three people on our path home that late afternoon.

As we left the railway, I held my mom’s hands tightly and said, “Never let go of my hand again.”  Admittedly, during the rest of my life, I did not hold her to this promise. And I lost the gifted coin a few years later. And one evening some 30 years later I took the train to Ankara Airport’s international terminal, leav-ing her hands back in Kayseri. But in any case, on that late 1984 afternoon, a passenger in a train racing by us would see a mom holding the hand of a kid as well as a kid holding his mom’s hand. And the train would be so fast that our image was momentarily one, and we were in the midst of a swirling pattern of green fields and orange sky, like two indistinct figures in a Van Gogh painting. The metamorphosis from childhood to boyhood and then to manhood might have been started on that fabulous day, each stage leaving some stationary steel traces behind.