Two Summers
By Hannah Katerina
July 15, 2024
July 15, 2024
Koh Kaaf
For a decade I did not speak to my parents. I was angry. Of course, I do not mean this literally, we spoke often, but the thing was that I never managed to say what I meant. The reasons no longer interest me and I take the liberty of assuming you approve of forgiveness. Here, I’ll even say it: Mother and father, forgive me for my absence. I will always be moving quietly toward you.
I will not bore you with details. Instead, I will tell you something new. Listen to me now. I want to tell you something. The first time I got drunk I must have been 13. It can’t have taken more than a sip or two stolen from a parent’s liquor cabinet. In those days we had liquor cabinets. The taste was chemical and warm and it was only a few moments before we erupted in fits of laughter. We rolled homemade cigarettes made from herbal tea bags and bounced on the trampoline in our euphoria.
In France we walked down to the beach, several kilometres across sandy fields and forest tracks. A bottle of vodka was passed around. I think I had the last sip, for I remember launching the empty glass into the shallows of the sea. Perhaps it was a gesture, a statement to the sea and the sand which said that I am young and untouchable and free.
What about the sweet clouds of smoke of nargile and the sea breeze from the Bosphorus? If there is a multiverse, I’d like to imagine that there is a version of me somewhere who is still 16, drunk somewhere in Istanbul. Double vodka coke. Head spinning on smoke-scented cherry and mint.
Thin white curtains flutter inside the room in a breeze, there is the circumstantial evidence of smoke; perhaps a cigarette; which are all that is left from the original sequence. There is nothing here but the air which is lazy and remote and the mulberry tree that lies out of sight in the darkness.
Remember that summer we stained our fingers gorging ourselves on those plump fruits? I stuck my tongue out at you and asked what colour it was. ‘Black’ you laughed, and showed me yours. Nothing can be derived from this; no history, no story, but I will say this:
Do you remember the time we watched the stars? It must have been 2 in the morning. The great metropolis lay beyond us but still they shone so brightly. You pointed out that I resembled the big dipper and before I could comment we were interrupted by a hedgehog rustling in the pile of cut grass at the end of the garden. In the morning we will laugh with timidity about the things that happened. Sweet nutella, spicy sucuk. The water will not be delivered until 11am and our heads pound.
I think of the beaches and the half built apartment blocks we lounged in that summer. The basements we got drunk in, playing our music as loud as it would go. Tonight we improvise. Tonight, we swim under the light of the full moon. Tonight we go into town. And perhaps we will sing songs in the street and see who throws money into our hats, or perhaps we will bump into another group of friends and our two small groups will become one big one.
And we will dance until the last possible moment, until very early in the morning when the roofs of the buildings will appear and change the light from brown to gold.
And we will dance until the last possible moment, until very early in the morning when the roofs of the buildings will appear and change the light from brown to gold.
When I think of that age I think of the poolside, chlorine fuelling our appetite for chicken and chips which we billed to a room that was not our own. The smell of the basement where the laundry dried which was where we slept. Oily hazelnuts from your grandfather's village.
I can still smell it now. Watermelon and cantaloupe and fig and grapes and peaches, all sliced and displayed neatly on oversized plates. Unripe plums dipped in salt. He would always rehearse the cuts on the melon before he sliced it. Running the knife down the meridian and the quarter. This happened every morning during those two summers where everything began and ended at exactly the right time and place.
It was only in this long stretch of space where some things became clear and others did not. You cried in the bathroom for hours after we heard the news. Already there were people missing. And yet, everything was provided for.
How many different colours did I dye my hair over the course of my youth? I do not care to recall. But what happened to that fighting spirit? The one that did not accept that some things are the way that they are. That I would like to know, thank you very much.
And the saddest part is actually that I would like, more than anything else, to return to these scenes. To observe, as though I were some invisible audience, myself in those youthful moments. To hold them, to feel their preciousness in a way that would have been impossible to do at that time. Those summers which felt they would never end. The sense that our youth had just been born.
Do you remember how we clung to one another? The way we would sleep in a jumbled pile, as though we were all one body? Why did those things feel so easy then? For it is not an easy thing to find closeless of this kind. And where along the way did we lose this way of living?
‘What ails you my friend’ we would ask at dinner, thinking we were imitating adulthood. In fact, adulthood has brought no such discussions, only distance which grows and hardens. Perhaps it is my own fault, for in the end I cannot write about things which are essential, only about my own experiences.
This is not a story but a confession.
Not a confession, but a translation.
A transferal; images and snatched memories turned into words on a page that can never be deleted, though they can be changed.
Reinterpreted and refashioned in a manner that suits the times. And maybe, in the future, there will be a reissue. A second or third translation of the passage which would reveal, with the great skill of the translator, something that had not been there before. The last word, still illegible, would give on to something new and of course, the house at the top of the hill would remain, though now with the added detail of blue shutters. There would be a new mention of the wind. The faint sounds of construction that accompanied life there in the city. The forests that were deforested in the night.
There would be those things that would be hinted at, though never fully described. Things that would resemble just the trace of something; an idea, a smell, a music, something quiet and uneventful but nonetheless pertinent. Something that had been left off without our noticing, despite being central to how events unfolded. And in doing so it would be revealed that all we needed was a single word, a way of putting it that would remind us, and having done so, would calm us down.
These are the scenes concealed from the original telling; and so it is that the story begins to suggest other stories, and in the repetition and near repetition, we see that there were never any decisive moments, just the idea of knowledge, shattering, echoing.
Hannah Katerina is a writer based in Palermo, Sicily. Her works have been featured in 212, Blueprint, Avalon Literary Review, Recesses, Juste Lit, Trafika Europe, Where Meadows Reside, Exist Otherwise and BarBar. She is currently working on a collection of short stories about the furthest reaches of our imagination.
Social media: @hannahkaterinaa on Instagram and Twitter (or X)
Author’s Note:
Earlier this year, I started a letter exchange with an old friend of mine that I had fallen out of contact with. Over the course of several months we wrote back and forth, reflecting on our world today and the memories we shared of our childhood in Istanbul. The piece is a nostaglic reflection on those years, a yearning to return to something that can never be recreated, and the age old epithet that sometimes you don't know what you've got until it is gone.