“Nashan is going to be married, you know.”
Of all my Turkish friends Nashan was the one my mother liked best. Perhaps this was because she felt she had a share in her bringing up, since the day on which she had been summoned by Nashan’s mother to pass judgment on the little girl’s clothes—the little girl whose raiment I had compared to that of a saltimbanque, when she had thought that she was dressed like a great lady.
“Oh, is she?” I cried, a trifle hurt. “She has not even written to me that she is engaged. I am afraid she cannot care for her marriage.”
I hastened to call on her. She received me in her French boudoir, faultlessly dressed in a Parisian gown, her hair done in the fashion prevalent in Europe at the time. We were so glad to see each other that at first we forgot about the marriage. Finally I asked about it.
Boundless became her indignation. “He is an Asiatic!” she cried, with undisguised horror. “They are giving me to a man who cannot understand a word of French, to a man who is an arriéré—who believes in the subjection of women! They are handing me over to an unknown, who has not touched my heart—merely because our fathers decided that we should become husband and wife. And this Anatolian—this man who has lived all his life in an uncivilized country—has come to claim me—me, as his wife.”
Since her indignation could rise no higher, it toppled over in a torrent of tears. She laid her blonde head in my lap, and wept. And I wept with her, because she was eighteen and I was sixteen, and life seemed so full of tragedy. How dreadful the world looked to us in that hour—and how we hated our elders.
She had lost her mother, her only support, as, long ago, I had lost my father. We had an orgy of tears, which cleared the atmosphere, and helped the barometer to rise. The courage of youth returned to us.
“What do you intend to do?” I asked.
“I thought of dying,” she said simply, but “I don’t want to. I hate to die. Life is so interesting, and I am so healthy.” Inconsequently she added: “Come and see my trousseau.”
No French girl could have had a Frenchier one. No Parisian a more Parisian one. If the father was imposing an Anatolian husband upon her, he was generous in his supply of European accessories. She and I forgot our troubles in admiring and gloating over the creations just arrived from Paris.