The swans that connect me to Makedonitissa Restaurant…

`Go to Portobello` she says…

`It’s not so far… Maybe only half an hour away… And you can take the bus, you know… Number 26, Lothian Buses… You will find them there…`

I am searching for the seagulls, where they come from to this town, to Edinburgh… They are the last thing I expect to find here…

Last week, the moment I step in the West End of Edinburgh, I hear their cries…

When I look up, they are all over the place, crouching on the chimneys of the old, stone buildings, flying in the sky, shouting and screaming, calling at each other…

They are big, not the small migrant seagulls that we see seasonally in Larnaca but big ones, all white some of them and some of them with some dark colours – even those with brown feathers, coming down to Rose Street because that’s where the restaurants are and they would chase away the pigeons to feast on the crumbles and bits and pieces…

`If they are here` I think, `the sea must not be far… That must be where they come from… What are they doing in the middle of the city? The sea must be somewhere near…`

So as Malena from Edinburgh suggests, I take the bus number 26, a double-decker, not bright red but white with red and black graffiti on it…

`Please take me to the beach… To Portobello…`

`Sure` the young chauffeur says…

`Please warn me where to get off…`

He smiles at me, nodding his head… A kind way of understanding that I am not from here…

So I sit down to watch this historical city go by, the traffic, the beautiful buildings made of stone – so old, you could even breathe in history here… Twenty minutes later, the chauffeur of the bus calls out:

`The lady who wanted to go to the beach! You must get off here!`

`How about getting back?` I ask him…

`Go down now and you will find the beach… When you want to go back, just come to this street and take the bus across the street – we pass every 10 minutes…`

So I get off the bus to walk down to the beach, my heart beginning to beat faster…

The sea and the seagulls always make my heart beat faster – I become a completely different person, all smiles at the prospect of smelling the salt, walking on the sand, picking up seashells, looking at the horizon, at the sea stretching out forever…

Finally I am here on the beach that looks almost deserted except the seagulls picking at the shells, people with dogs throwing balls for them and the dogs running to catch and bring them back…

A few children playing on the sand…

No one swimming because it would be too cold…

And seagulls everywhere!…

I begin to walk on the sand, collecting shells... There is a playful wind, blowing my hair in my face… And clouds in the sky…

I look at the horizon – everything is a dark blue on the far horizon and here, next to my feet, the waves breaking on the beach, a greyish blue… This is the Northern Sea, not the Mediterranean… You can’t smell the sea like we do on our beaches… And you feel it must be a bit wilder than our sea, our `Mare Nostrum`…

I walk for miles, stopping, looking, taking photos, letting the wind caress my hair and bending down to pick a few seashells…

The gift of nature for today is my encounter with the swans!

I never dreamt I would see swans on this beach – they are swimming in the sea, not far from the shore and I walk at the pace they are swimming… For miles we travel together, on the same line – a swan family of five, three there and two here… On the beach, I recognize a few swan feathers – I know by now how to differentiate between the swan feathers and the feathers of the seagulls. I saw them on the beach where the Little Mermaid sits in Copenhagen and later on, I got very close to them at the Lake Bled in Slovenia where a family of swans live…

Swans mean a lot to me – they bring memories of childhood, of a time before anything bad happened in this country during my lifetime that I would remember… They bring back memories of Makedonitissa where we used to go with my mother and my father and we would eat there… In the Makedonitissa Restaurant there would be swans and I would be mesmerized, just watching them… It was the time before the conflict touched us, before my father was persecuted, before he was punished for his beliefs – because he had refused to be part of TMT - before he was in prison and before he died…

It was a time when we were all happy in our house and in our beautiful garden with hundreds of roses, with no harassment, no stolen dreams, no broken childhood, no memories of reading poems to my father in prison… It was a time when my sister had just got married and I was still playing with my teddy bear, when my brother would be painting lamps in different colours, experimenting with them… We would sleep in the same room and sometimes he would read my picture books for me, the story of a little donkey or Cinderella or the Snow White with the Seven Dwarfs…

It was a time when I would sleep in hot summer days in the arms of my mother in the garden, while she would tell me stories of princesses and kings, of castles and dragons, of dream places I would picture and while she talked I would fall asleep and would miss the end of the story… It was a time when they would buy me Clarks shoes and Cadbury, Smarties and dolls and wooden toys to play with… It was the time when I would watch Captain Pugwash cartoons on TV and would want to be just like Betty Boop!

It was the time of roses in our garden that I would smell, each and every one, to memorize forever the sweet scent and my mother would explain that my name comes from them because `Sev` means `Love` and `Gul` means `Rose`… That she wanted to name me after the roses…That my sister wanted to name me `Funda` that means `Bush` but she said, `No way, I will name her after roses in our garden…`

I remember in those times we even had black roses, imported from Holland especially because my father wanted to please my mother because he knew how much she loved roses… There would be red roses, yellow roses, white roses, pink roses… And as a child of only three, I would go around each and every one smelling like a little animal, memorizing the smell that had given me my name…

My mother would give names to almost all the children of the family – she would be considered the `intellectual one` because she had been a teacher - so from the extended family everyone would ask her what name to give to their newborn. My mother would name the twins of our cousin `Seyhan` and `Ceyhan`, the twin rivers flowing and meeting at some point… She would call my sister `Ilkay`, meaning `The first moon` because she loved the moon and would always point out to me, the stars in the sky… She would give the name `Hediye` which means `The Gift` to a baby girl and it would become `fashion` in the family to give this name to so many girls that would follow… She would try to find rhyming names for brothers and sisters to be named and these would be `new names` not like Ayshe, Fatma, Hasan, Husseyin… She would always look for names with a meaning… The children she would name would grow up and play with me and would come to visit her for years…

The swans connect me to my childhood memories where I would travel in her lap all the way to the sea to swim in Paphos… She would be wearing a dress with pictures of seashells and my father would drive our blue Volkswagen and they would also be singing on the way – a happy family that the conflict did not touch yet…

The swans connect me to my past that is only in my memory, to a life that does not exist anymore…

22.8.2008

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