I

It is quiet.

Much quieter than Gül imagined it would be.

They have everything there, they’d said—her mother-in-law, her stepmother, the neighbours—and everything’s much better than here. That was why Gül had only brought the cardboard suitcase.

She had boarded the train in Istanbul, in the noisy city where everyone seemed to have something to do, where the voices of the street hawkers mixed with the screeching brakes of the trains, the braying of a donkey with the rattle of a coach overtaken by a car.

Germany must be something like this, Gül had thought, only not so many animals and even more people.

At the stations where she had to change, she was scared she wouldn’t find the right train and would get lost in a strange place. This last station is so small that Fuat, standing on the platform, looks taller than she remembers him, even though he’s lost weight. There’s nothing left of the belly he grew on his military service; in fact his cheeks look sunken, and even his hair seems to have got sparser still.

Gül falls into his arms, relieved that someone is there to hold her. Someone who knows the way. As she feels his body the image returns to her mind, of Ceren crying when she said goodbye, at the bottom of the stairs in her parents-in-law’s house.

Fuat’s mother Berrin was holding her, a child of almost three screaming and writhing as the tears ran down her cheeks and she scratched her face with her fingers and tugged at her hair, pulling out bushels although Berrin tried to hold her little arms tight.

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Ceyda, nearly six now, stood next to her grandmother and seemed to understand less than her sister what this goodbye meant. Ceyda is a good girl, obedient and hard-working, Gül thought there at the bottom of the stairs, she’s a clever girl, she’ll make the best of the separation. But Ceren is still so little, and even though Gül makes no distinctions in her love for her children, part of her heart stayed behind there, forever caught up with Ceren’s screaming, scratching and writhing that’s not right for her age. This is how she’ll remember Ceren for the next eighteen months.

But at this moment on the platform the image disappears as she frees herself from Fuat’s arms. He takes the suitcase from her and they walk side by side along streets that look abandoned. Gül can’t imagine people live in these houses, even though there are lights behind the curtains.

Outside, there’s a low hum from a flickering streetlamp.

‘How was the journey?’ Fuat asks, but Gül doesn’t want to talk about her fear at the stations, not to a man who could hardly wait to come to Germany, who left his wife and daughters without looking back for longer than the year they’d planned. She doesn’t want to talk about how she couldn’t do her business in the cold, reeking train toilets these past three days, about how glad and relieved she was to see Fuat on the platform.

‘The journey was long,’ says Gül, ‘as long as the journeys in fairytales.’

‘Yes, it’s a long way on the train. We’ll fly on the way back, God willing. That’s quicker than taking the bus from the village to Ankara, you’ll see.’

He was right, thinks Gül when she sees the apartment. In the only room are a bulky bed, a bedside table, a single-door wardrobe and a chest of drawers; there’s no space for anything else. There’s a small kitchen with a table and two chairs and a tiny hallway.

‘The toilet’s in the corridor,’ says Fuat once Gül has put her suitcase on the bed. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

In her parents-in-law’s house the toilet was in the yard and it didn’t have flushing water like this one, but she’s never seen such a tiny apartment. She thought Fuat was exaggerating as he so often did page 220 when he said there was no room here for the children, even if they slept standing up in the wardrobe.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he says, ‘to work. I’ll be back in the morning.’ Once Gül has closed the door behind her husband she sits down on the bed and opens her case. One pair of shoes, a pressure-cooker, two dresses, underwear, two skirts, a cardigan and not much more.

Why bother lugging cheap rubbish from here all that way, they said, when you can buy yourself really good stuff there?

Gül starts putting her clothes in the chest of drawers, but when she sees the mess she simply tips out the drawers on the bed and starts tidying. When she’s finished with the drawers and the wardrobe, she goes into the kitchen and lights a cigarette, a Samsun. She smoked almost two packs on the journey, and she’ll only have one last cigarette left after this one. She pulls her feet up onto the stool, leaning her back against the wall. There’s a little mirror on the wall above the sink. Gül gets up and looks at herself. She still looks exactly the same as she did in Turkey, but she doesn’t feel that way. Her feeling goes beyond the image in the mirror. Perhaps that’s why she feels like a stranger.

When she hears the key in the lock she wakes instantly and knows immediately who it is. She leaps up, welcomes her husband in her nightshirt and puts the kettle on in the kitchen. Fuat’s eyes are small and red. He doesn’t talk much over breakfast, just nodding at the stories Gül tells about back home. Once he’s eaten he takes a bottle of whisky out of the fridge and pours three fingers into a water glass. Gül looks at him, amazed.

‘Yes, that’s the way it is,’ he says. ‘Whisky, real whisky, like in the movies. You don’t just earn money here, you can really buy something with it too.’

‘But so early in the morning . . .’

‘So what? I’ve been up all night, I’m allowed to have a glass or two when I knock off work.’

And as if out of spite, he pours himself another.

He sips at his glass in silence while Gül washes the dishes. She’s still in her nightshirt and hasn’t even been to the toilet.

‘Aah,’ Fuat heaves a sigh of pleasure after his last determined mouthful. ‘Come,’ he says and walks ahead into the bedroom.

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Once he’s fallen asleep Gül rinses his glass, dries the dishes, puts the kettle on again, lights her last cigarette and puts her lessons on the table. She’s cut them out of the newspaper over the past few weeks.

From these snippets of paper, she’s memorised the word for door in German, day, week, time, road, apple, house, key, breakfast, lunch, bed, chair, table, trousers, skirt. Words she found difficult to remember, which were of no use to her at the German customs either.

They’d told her back home she’d have to go through the German customs, but the word had sounded strange to Gül even in Turkish. In her mind it had got entangled with an image of a brightly lit corridor where men stood in uniforms, heavy guns dangling at their hips.

She hadn’t imagined a man with a black moustache, who fetched a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket, then laid her suitcase on a table, opened it and searched for something. He seemed to be asking questions as well, but Gül had just looked at him with a shrug. She might have recognised the words Tür, Haus, Tag, Woche, Apfel, but she only guessed at the word Zigarette, which sounded similar to the Turkish word.

None of the words Gül knew helped her to say: I haven’t got any more cigarettes. That’s my last pack, that one in my coat pocket.

Still, she would say later, it would probably have been enough just to say, Nein, Zigarette.

But her eyes and reality helped where language wasn’t enough.

Gül repeats all the lessons from the newspaper, then she writes a letter to her father and one to her mother-in-law, drinks another tea, smokes another cigarette, which she takes out of Fuat’s box and which tastes very different to the ones she’s used to. She looks out of the window, cleans the hob, empties out the cupboards and wipes the insides down before she puts everything back. She smokes another cigarette and looks out of the window for a while. The streets still seem empty, but as clean as if they were swept once an hour.

Fuat wakes up that day at around two and wants breakfast. At about four o’clock, Gül goes outside with him, to Germany.

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II

Gül rests her elbows on the fence and looks down the road in the direction from which the postman has to come. Perhaps he has a letter from Ceyda, from her mother-in-law or from her friend Suzan, her old neighbour back in Turkey who left for Germany long before her. She lived in Duisburg, wherever that may be. Gül had thought it was nearby, but Fuat says you can’t just go there. Suzan had her children with her at least, but they liked the country as little as she did. The Germans are so cold, Suzan had written from Duisburg when Gül was still in Turkey, and they talk so little it’s hardly worth learning the language. She’d learnt Italian from the Italians in the neighbourhood, and now her letters come from Naples, where the family now lives.

Gül’s new neighbours are Spaniards, Greeks, Turks and a few Germans as well. Heimstraße, where they live now, doesn’t have an asphalt surface, there are no pavements or paving stones. When it rains the water pools in brown puddles, and even the Germans take off their muddy shoes outside the front door.

Every house on the estate has a small front garden and a larger garden to the rear, where you can plant fruit and vegetables and have a hutch or a coop, for which Fuat wants to buy hens. There’s a large kitchen and a living room downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. The toilet is in the house, albeit at the end of the corridor leading from the kitchen to the back garden.

It’s a little bit like home, thinks Gül. We have space here, we can breathe here, feel the earth under our feet and hands, and most of all there’s space for the children. Soon she won’t have to lean on the front fence and wait longingly for the postman, like so often in the past months when she worked the late shift in the nearby wool factory.

Four weeks after she had to stop work in the bread factory she got a work permit, at a different labour exchange.

‘Why is it all right of a sudden? I don’t understand,’ she said to Fuat.

‘Bremen is a different province, they have different laws,’ Fuat answered, and Gül just frowned. It was a peculiar country; every two steps was a city, a town or a village. The people didn’t seem to need page 223 much space, but the fact that they lived closer together didn’t mean they felt closer to each other.

With her work permit, she was able to start at the factory where Fuat worked. When Gül worked the late shift they saw each other even less, as Fuat continued to work nights. And even though he gambled and drank just like before and was unnecessarily generous to his friends, the money mounted up.

Fuat has a moped now and drives home on it at weekends without difficulties or major swerves, but as soon as he gets off he has the feeling he’s standing on curved feet on swaying ground.

‘When the children are here,’ he says, ‘I won’t work so many nights.’ And he tells Gül over and over how much bonus he gets just because the sun’s not shining outside.

‘What do I want with the sun?’ he brays. ‘It doesn’t shine on the factory floor anyway. Whether the wool gets washed at night or during the day doesn’t make any difference to the wool or to me, but it does to my pay packet.’

Gül stands by the fence with both feet on the earth, but her heart takes flight with joy every time the postman brings a letter from Ceyda.

My little girl, she thinks. Hardly started school and she can write already, faster than the others, because her mother’s left her behind and it’s the only way to stay in touch herself.

She must take after her Auntie Sibel, Gül’s younger sister, who started school a year early at the age of five because she wept after the other children every day at the end of the holidays. They’d been her playmates all summer long and now they suddenly left her behind every morning to go to school. And although she hadn’t started school until six weeks after the beginning of term, by the end of the year she was one of the best in the class.

May my children get a good education like their aunties and not have to finish school by correspondence course once they’re married like I did, Gül prays. She had failed her exams in the fifth and last year of school and had to repeat the year. But instead of trying over the next year, she had simply not gone back to school after the holidays, and her father had soon sent her to Esra the dressmaker to learn a trade.

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Today the postman shrugs his shoulders.

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘no letter for you today.’

Gül doesn’t wait for the answers to her letters; she writes one every few days so she hopes almost every day that an answer might come. Every day of the week, the postman sees her standing at the fence. Only in heavy rain does Gül wait at the living-room window looking out on the street.

Words, she tells herself, I only ever have words to ease my longing. If you don’t have anyone to hug and kiss, you have to seek solace in words.

The calendar on the wall seems to soothe her longing too, the calendar from which she can tear another sheet of this separation with every day that passes.

Five months to go, only five months, then they’ll be flying to Turkey, she’ll see and hear her children again, taste them and feel them, she’ll have the scent of her daughters in her nostrils again at long last.

She’s been in Germany for over a year now, and when she looks around her that time seems long and hard, especially in the little flat. Now that they’ve moved to Heimstraße everything seems to have got slightly easier.

Those jobs before she started at the wool factory, the hours in the kitchen she’ll never forget, the visit to the doctor, Fuat’s face when he said, ‘He said baby, didn’t he? You’ve heard that word before, haven’t you? What is it you can’t understand?’

Her relief when she saw the blood, her dream that remained with her for days.

It seems to her as if she’d lived a great deal and aged, and she wishes her daughters are still just the way they were when she left them, even though Ceyda can write now, even though the image of Ceren scratching her face still lies as heavily on her heart as if it were an anvil in her father’s blacksmith’s shop.

‘Come on, stay in bed another five minutes, my husband’s always saying,’ complains Ela, one of Gül’s workmates. ‘He wakes up after his night shift and even if I’ve been up and about for ages and have to leave for work he begs me and touches me here and there, all to make me stay.’

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‘Mine’s just the same,’ says Huri. ‘Whenever I have to leave for work he starts pleading for minutes.’

‘Oh, men are all the same,’ says Isik. ‘Don’t think mine is any different. If it was up to him I’d be late every day.’

Gül bites into her bread in silence. She still hasn’t got used to the taste.

She likes working here at the factory. It’s not too big, the work’s not hard, and it’s not even a ten-minute walk away. It’s easy for Gül to find the way and there are lots of young Turkish women working here in the combing department, and women from Greece, Spain and Yugoslavia. But this conversation churns up something in Gül that she doesn’t like at all. She pretends she’s savouring every bite of her sandwich.

She married Fuat because she wanted it that way. Other men had asked her father for her hand, and she’d said no. She married Fuat because she wanted it that way. She wanted to get out from under her father’s roof so her sisters would have it easier, so there’d be one less mouth to feed. Fuat is her stepmother’s younger brother, she knew him and she thought she’d find it easier to be with someone who wasn’t such a stranger.

Fuat is good-looking, he was one of the most attractive men in their town; other women said so too. He had a full head of hair back then, shiny with brilliantine, and he made a point of wearing a good suit. He had learned a trade and seemed to be capable of feeding a family.

Gül didn’t know then how much Fuat drank and gambled, but lots of men have those vices, especially young men, vices that people generally call bad habits, and Gül never thought she was in any different position to other women.

But her husband never asks her to stay in bed a few more minutes. Not at all. He always says, ‘Get up, get up, you’ll be late for work. This is Germany, you can’t just turn up late. There are rules and regulations here and timetables. Work is work, and schnapps is schnapps, as they say. Off you go!’

Gül hardly talks to her friends for the rest of the day. She does her work, giving the impression that it demands more concentration of her than it really does.

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The next day, she’s almost forgotten the whole thing when Fuat nags her again: ‘Get up, get up!’

And she never is late for work. As a child, she often dawdled and forgot the time, but that’s long ago now. Even if Fuat never said anything she’d always be on time. She’s offended that Fuat doesn’t seem to know that. She makes two sandwiches more than usual.

‘The same again today,’ says Huri at tea break later. ‘My husband grabs me by my skirt and tries to drag me back into bed.’

For fourteen days, Gül listens to all these stories. She isn’t even pleased about the two chickens Fuat brings home. Her moments of light are the times at the fence when the postman smiles at her from a distance and gives a hint of a nod. Then nothing else matters, then she’s like Fuat when he’s drunk, but in these two weeks she looks at her husband more often than usual and tries to understand if he might be different from other women’s husbands. He never hesitates to wake her up when he has a hankering, but he’s never asked her to stay in bed.

After fourteen days, Gül says to her friends, ‘Yes, but if they keep asking and asking, why don’t you just stay? Do them a favour. What’s going to happen if you turn up late that once? Look at Rocío, nothing ever happens to her.’

Rocío is as thin as a rake, temperamental and talks a lot. When her German runs out she carries on in Spanish. She seems to think if she only speaks urgently and quickly enough and makes enough gestures, people will understand her well enough.

Rocío lives with her husband and children on Heimstraße too. Gül has never seen Rocío walking; the woman always seems to be in a rush, moving quickly, smoking hastily, but regularly arriving after clocking-in time. Only her mouth is faster than her feet.

‘That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?’ says Gül. ‘Give it a try.’

Gül means it quite innocently; she’s just curious, she wants to know what it is that makes Fuat different from all the others.

She didn’t imagine in the slightest that Huri and Ela would turn up the next day not only on time, but also in an obvious bad mood. They look the way Gül hopes she didn’t look over the last few days, even though she felt that way.

‘What happened?’ Gül asks, honestly surprised.

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‘Oh,’ says Ela, ‘I went back to bed, and two minutes later he said, Make sure you’re not late.’

‘The same with mine, he slapped me on the backside and said, Get off to work,’ says Huri.

‘Mine didn’t even ask today,’ says Isik, ‘but I can guess what’ll happen.’

Gül feels sorry for putting her friends in such a situation.

‘Forgive me,’ she says, ‘I had no idea . . .’

‘That’s all right,’ says Huri, ‘it’s not your fault.’

The same, thinks Gül. They’re all the same. The only difference is that Fuat doesn’t know how to flatter me. At least he’s not putting on a show.

And although she’s in a good mood now all of a sudden, she feels guilty at the same time and regrets having made her suggestion to the three of them.