Territet, Jan. 1907.
Your letter of yesterday annoys me. You are “changing your pension,” you say, “because you are not free to come in to meals when you like.”
What an awful grievance! If only you English women knew how you are to be envied! Come, follow me to Turkey, and I will make you thank Allah for your liberty.
Ever since I can remember, I have had a passion for writing, but this is rather the exception than the rule for a Turkish woman. At one time of my life, I exchanged picture postcards with unknown correspondents, who sent me, to a poste restante address, views of places and people I hoped some day to visit.
This correspondence was for us the DREAM SIDE of our existence. In times of unhappiness (extra unhappiness, for we were always unhappy), discouragement, and, above all, revolt, it was in this existence that we tried to find refuge. The idea that friends were thinking of us, however unknown they were, made us look upon life with a little more resignation—and you, my friend, who complain that “you are not free to have your meals when you like,” should know that this correspondence had to be hidden with as much care, as if it had been a plot to kill the Imperial Majesty himself.
*****
When our correspondence was sent to us direct, it had to pass through the hands of three different persons before we had the pleasure of receiving it ourselves. All the letters we sent out and received were read not only by my father and his secretary, but by the officials of the Ottoman Post.
One day, I remember, the daughter of an ex-American minister sent me a long account of her sister’s marriage, and she stopped short at the fourth page. I was just going to write to her for an explanation, when the remaining sheets were sent on to me by the police, whose duty it was to read the letters, and who had simply forgotten to put the sheets in with the others.
You could never imagine the plotting and intriguing necessary to receive the most ordinary letters; not even the simplest action could be done in a straightforward manner; we had to perjure our souls by constantly pretending, in order to enjoy the most innocent pleasures—it mattered little to us, I do assure you, “whether we had our meals at the time we liked” or not.
*****