A Child of the Orient

by Demetra Vaka

“Now, young hanoum, that you have come once, you will like to come again, and prove to us that we have made your stay happy.”

“I’m ready to come this minute,” I sobbed. At this she laughed, and we began to laugh, too; and thus I bade them good-bye.

The first words I said on reaching my own home were that the Turks were the nicest people in the world. My father was amused, but my mother was horrified, and had she had her way I believe my first would have been my only visit. As it was, eight days later I was again with Djimlah; and thus it came about that from that early age I became a constant visitor not only to Djimlah’s home, but also to that of other little girls whom I met through her, and otherwise.

As I grew older, the vast contrast between my race and theirs became more and more clear to me; and I had the distinct feeling of partaking of two worlds, mine and theirs.

In my home there were duties for me from my babyhood, duties which had rigidly to be performed; and things to be learned, remembered, and to be guided by. The words duty and obligation played a great rôle in my Greek home, and these two words, so stern, so irreconcilable with pleasure, were absent from the Turkish homes.

For me there was a tremendous Greek history to be learned and understood; and the more one studied it, the more one had to suffer because of the present; for in my home we lived with the past, we talked of the past, and of the obligations which the past imposed upon our present and future.

In the Turkish homes there was no history to be learned. All they seemed to know was that they were a great conquering race, that they had come from Asia and had conquered all Europe, because they were brave and the Europeans were cowards. There was no past or future in their lives. Everything was ephemeral, resting on the pleasure of the day, or better yet, on the pleasure of the moment; unconscious of the morrow, and indifferent to the moment after the present.

In entering a Turkish home, especially as I grew older, I felt as if I were leaving my own life outside. They were different from us, these women, these children of the Turks. They were so different, indeed, that I rarely spoke to them of the things I felt or thought about at home. I came to them ready to enjoy them, and to enjoy life with them; and yet, as the years went by, deep down in my heart I felt glad to be a Greek child, even though I belonged to the conquered race; and I began to return to my home with greater satisfaction than I had at first, and to put into my studies a fervour and a willingness which might have been less, had I not been a visitor to these Turkish households.

Yet curiously, too, as I grew older, I liked the Turks more and more, though in my liking there was a certain amount of protective feeling, such as one might feel for wayward children, rather than for equals.

I learned to see what was noble, charming, and poetical in their lives; but I also became conscious that in spite of the faults of my race, in spite of the limitations of our religion, our civilization was better than theirs, because it contained such words as discipline, duty, and obligation. And dimly I felt that we were a race that had come to the world to stay and to help, while theirs was perhaps some day to vanish utterly.