The Anthropologists
“Manu and I had no spare sets of plates or matching glasses, but we had plenty of discussion in our lives.”
JULY 9, 2024
Tereza lived two floors up from us. She was old in body but not in mind, even though she had begun to stumble over the language she’d spoken for forty years, after she left her own country.
Before we became friends, she would find excuses to ring our doorbell. One time, it was to inform us that we should move our bikes, before work began in the courtyard. Another time she asked if we would like to have the remaining fruit in her fridge, which would go bad while she visited her grandchildren over the weekend. We accepted the fruit. From then on, Tereza would ring the doorbell weekly, with or without an excuse, and we’d invite her in for tea.
She was very small, which was a surprise each time we saw her, as if she had sprung out of a fairytale. She had bright blue eyes and wore theatrical clothes in unexpected combinations — canvas and silk, velvet and plastic beads. At first I had taken her outfits as a sign of eccentricity, or an artistic sensibility, but she was simply childish. She delighted in life.
Tereza’s daughter lived outside the city with her husband and children. The family visited infrequently and Tereza went to see them whenever she was invited — holidays, birthdays, New Year’s.
I made a habit of buying a good box of cookies for Tereza’s visits, as well as loose-leaf tea — something Manu and I would usually never bother with. I guessed that from Tereza’s perspective, our flat must look a little haphazard. Tereza’s apartment was grand, with the old-fashioned luxuries of real homes. Plenty of armchairs and blankets, sets of china for different occasions, wicker baskets. Things that could not be bought wholesale, in a hurry. I wanted to understand how such a place came into being, whether the acquisition of any of these objects had been an event in Tereza’s life, despite their current look of nonchalance and permanence.
We realized that Tereza didn’t keep track of manners; what mattered to her was conversation.
When my grandmother moved in with my mother, an entire home had been disposed of. Among the few reminders of my grandmother’s previous life were the silver frames with family photos, the wool blanket with which she draped her knees when watching soap operas, a mother-of-pearl box, the walnut dresser. All these items stood out among their new companions, the sense of time they exuded even denser in their modern surroundings.
From time to time, my grandmother wistfully inventoried the furniture of her former home. If my mother was around, there followed the usual argument: Why did you give it away, then, if you were just going to beat me on the head about it? I didn’t think you wanted any of it. Did I ever tell you that? Well, what’s done is done.
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Tereza didn’t care very much about entertaining, even though she brought out silver tongs for pastries and used the small porcelain plates from the buffet rather than the ones in the kitchen. Manu and I had been a little stiff on our first visits, careful about what we did with our limbs, how we held our cups. But we soon relaxed. We pulled up our feet on the sofa, served ourselves from the kitchen. We realized that Tereza didn’t keep track of manners; what mattered to her was conversation. Manu and I had no spare sets of plates or matching glasses, but we had plenty of discussion in our lives. For Tereza, ours was a true wealth. She asked us about our friends, our opinions on music and poetry, about the political situations in our countries whose details she never quite retained, beyond the fact that things didn’t look very bright. This was Tereza’s general disposition: that the world had become a dark place after a brief period of hope in her youth.
Almost at every visit, she recounted the story of how she and her classmates at university had stood all in a line to block the entry of soldiers into the faculty of letters. Her plate remained untouched as she talked, sometimes frantically, trying to tell us as much as possible in the span of a meal. At some point, we had switched from tea to dinner, and we were all happy about this change, our new intimacy.
Tereza wasn’t a good cook, though something of her generation elevated her dinners to ritual: bread and butter on the table, relishes, cloth napkins and candles.
The ingredients were of the finest quality, ordered for her weekly by her daughter, from an expensive supermarket with beautiful, unnecessary packaging.
The daughter called every evening, which coincided with our dinners. The landline rang a few times before Tereza decided to answer it. When she returned to the table, we asked if all was well, to which Tereza responded: She’s relieved I haven’t died yet.
The first few times she said it, we acted shocked. Then we began to say it with her in chorus. We agreed that Tereza was a little odd and that she was one of us.
Parallel Lives
On the phone with his brother, Manu was talking about the different neighborhoods we’d been to on our search.
You’ll see when you visit, he said, or something like that. I didn’t understand everything he was saying, but I could always tell from his tone who he was talking to. It was too enthusiastic, full of effort. He saw me looking at him, and went to the bedroom as if I had glimpsed something embarrassing.
Manu would often tell me about things he and his brother had done as children, their mutual likes and dislikes, their adventures. At university, he would report to his brother all the new and strange things he had witnessed, his sense of loyalty still rooted back home. Around the time that Manu and I graduated and began forming our own mythology, his brother married and, in the following years, had three children.
It didn’t happen all at once, though it seemed like it: the brothers diverged fully in their paths. Manu’s brother had never been to the cities we’d lived in; he had neither the time nor the means. And although it seemed unlikely now that he ever would, Manu would end his anecdotes by adding, You’ll see when you come.
On our visits there, we spent time with Manu’s brother’s family, entertaining the children for a few hours, giving them presents, always with a sense of guilt that we were hiding something, trying to conceal just how different our own lives were from theirs. The strain I heard in Manu’s tone when he talked on the phone was also this: the effort to make it seem that he was still part of their old schoolboy mythology.
Anthropology
The summer of our second year at university, I traveled to Manu’s hometown to conduct fieldwork. We’d started dating a few months earlier, and it was unthinkable from then on that we should be apart. The other person was our native country, even if we didn’t know a word of each other’s mother tongues.
It was just life, in a somewhat ugly town. There were afternoon snacks of Fanta and stale vanilla cake.
I was studying anthropology and the trip seemed the shortest route to spending the summer together. My fieldwork involved daily bus rides from Manu’s parents’ apartment to an international organization where I played with the neighborhood children, made tea, and arranged documents. Otherwise, I would sit in the courtyard with the men and women from the neighborhood who came daily to observe the commotion at the center. Manu was doing an internship at the same organization, making charts of the center’s expenses, finding ways to show that the community had benefited from donations.
In the evenings, Manu’s brother picked us up and drove us to a bar outside town with a bowling alley.
I was supposed to be taking daily notes for my thesis, though I found my subjects self-explanatory, if not a little disappointing. From my handful of anthropology classes, I’d come looking for a list of specimens: kinship structures, gift exchange, rituals, costumes, notions of the sacred and the profane. I should’ve known better than to expect that these would be performed daily in clean strokes for me to collect. It was just life, in a somewhat ugly town. There were afternoon snacks of Fanta and stale vanilla cake. The children that came to the center wore sneakers and had cell phones. They listened to the same pop songs as the rest of the world.
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My last year at university, one professor of anthropology trained our attention inward at the close of every lecture. The professor looked wizened beyond age and seemed perpetually troubled by the world, which made me inclined to take her teachings seriously. She asked us to notice that just life — writing papers, going to parties, applying to jobs — could always be mapped out following the structures we learned about in class. Friday night blackouts and graduations and hockey games, the cigarettes we bummed off one another outside the library. All these were the unspoken foundations of our society, whose rules we had perfected, so as not to think of them as rules but as the smooth tracks of life. From time to time, the professor would ask us to imagine an anthropologist observing the everyday routines with which we had set up our lives. They might be arbitrary or essential, but they were rules to a game nonetheless, one which gave an illusory sense of harmony and permanence.
The first time she brought up the imaginary anthropologist, I visualized a tiny Martian in a safari outfit, taking notes on a flip chart. But even with the absurd image, the point was clear.
The imaginary anthropologist remained with me after I finished university. I would summon her to narrate the simplest interactions when I tried to untangle the layers of an argument, when I edited footage, when I was dressing up for an event. I called on the anthropologist to examine our lives as we moved from place to place, where we were never natives. What would she write down in her pad if asked to study Manu and me as a tribe of our own? Trained as she was to identify the ways of people rooted in their homes, their language and customs, what would the tiny anthropologist point to in our makeshift apartments, where we lived without a shared native tongue, without religion, without the web of family and its obligations to keep us in place? What would she identify as our rituals and ties of kinship, the symbols that constituted a sense of the sacred and the profane?
Because it often seemed to me that our life was unreal, and I summoned the anthropologist to make it seem otherwise.
From The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş, on sale July 9th from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2024 by Ayşegül Savaş. All rights reserved.
PHOTO: by EyeEm, via FreePik
✺ Published in “Issue 18: Sports” of The Dial
