There was a time, not many years ago, when the name Harikleia was instinctively associated with Sunday trays of imam bayildi, checkered robes, and cleaning headscarves. It was a name that smelled of green soap paste, that overturned the small cups of Turkish coffee in the afternoons, that placed a handful of coins on the fortune teller’s apron and soaked yellowed wedding dresses in indigo dye. It was a name that, when you heard it, with the instinctive impulse of a sleepwalker, you took out the dirty underwear for washing.
Anyway, when she heard it, Chara would break out in pimples. Not that she didn’t have a few of those on her charming little face anyway, even though her aunt Soultana regularly blasted it with a mixture of May rosewater with two drops of bay leaf oil and lavender, and although she herself had already turned nineteen. Adolescence had paid a neat Armenian visit a few years ago and refused to leave...
Harikleia Sekeroglou from Tsimpali, Constantinople, in the year 1918, already successfully passing her nineteenth year in this vain world, after thoroughly analyzing her turbulent school and youthful life, had come to a fundamental conclusion. She announced it with great fanfare to the other women of the Sekeroglou family one afternoon when she found them sweetened, enjoying their halva in the little kitchen nook, which for the Constantinopolitans was the navel of the house and the center of their small world.