Spotlight: Summer Heat by Defne Suman

"'In our family, secrets were buried deep like treasure, never to be spoken of...'

1974. Melike should be happy: school is shut and her parents have stopped hosting parties for their rowdy political friends. But she's scared. She can tell from her parents' urgent whispers about prison, invasion and military coups that Istanbul is changing. So when the family relocate to a quaint village in the south, Melike is hopeful life might get better. And for a while, it does. But then her beloved father disappears...

2003. Nearly three decades have passed, and Melike has done her best to move on. But despite her successful career as an art historian and a husband who adores her, she has always felt a lingering discontent. When she meets mysterious – and extremely handsome – stranger Petro, Melike feels her fortunes changing. But Petro isn't who he says he is. And when Melike uncovers his true identity, she also lays bare a lifetime of hidden pasts...

With a backdrop of the Turkish army's occupation of Cyprus in 1974, Summer Heat explores family secrets, tangled identities and one woman's place in her country's devastating history." 

Excerpt

Petro and I met for the first time at the Bloody Church. 

It was his idea. I thought it was a coincidence. I agreed immediately, excited by the location and the old memories it would evoke: many years earlier, my grandmother Safinaz had lived in a three-storey stone house directly across from the church. My father and I used to visit her every Saturday, and when I pulled back her curtains and peeped out, I could see its red dome. The entrance was almost impossible to locate, concealed within a high wall beneath a tangle of honeysuckle vines. The door was kept locked most of the time; you had to find Pavli, the caretaker, to open it.

But nothing about our meeting was coincidental. 

It was a hot summer’s evening, so hot that even the leaves were parched, their edges curled. Out on Buyukada Island, where I was staying for the summer, the pine forests were on fire, the flames racing across the dark green hills and turning them to desert in the space of an hour. It was stifling in the centre of Istanbul. I sweated my way up the slope to the Bloody Church, stopping to catch my breath under the fig trees of my childhood. In the years since I’d last been in that neighbourhood the trees had grown quite a bit, their thick, dry branches contorted into strange shapes as they reached for the sun along the walls, the steps and the tin roofs. I was annoyed with myself for having taken this job in the middle of summer, as if I were a penniless university student excited to be paid for showing a tourist around the city. What was I thinking, exchanging my cool, breezy house on Buyukada, where my husband would happily make me a glass of ice-cold mint lemonade, for this sweaty trip to the city in the heat? 

Petro Paraskos, the man I was due to meet in front of the Bloody Church, was a documentary film producer. He wanted to explore some Byzantine churches for a new project he had in mind and had come across my name when searching online for an art historian to accompany him. Would I be his guide? It was a strange proposal; I should have been suspicious from the start. Even though I’d written my master’s thesis on churches of the late Byzantium era, I wasn’t a well-known art historian – I had no articles published in international journals – so it was odd that my name had even come up. Perhaps I should also have queried his tone throughout our correspondence – was it too insistent, too assertive, even pushy? For example, he’d guessed that it would be tiring for me to come into the city from Buyukada Island every day, so suggested booking a space for me in the hotel where he was staying. Time was short and his budget was generous enough to cover an extra room. This sort of arrangement had worked well on previous assignments, he said. If it was convenient for me, we could meet on July 19th at 7 p.m. in front of the Bloody Church. 

Ah, Melike, you disregarded all the signs! You ignored the voice inside your head, which whispered that your meeting with this stranger would alter the course of your fate, and jumped on a ferry to the city for the possibility of some momentary pleasure. 

A woman must nourish her soul, keep her spirit fresh with little adventures, right? One man is never enough. (Who had said that? Was it grandma Safinaz?). But that was not what I was thinking as I traipsed up to my grandma’s old neighbourhood to meet Petro that evening. I wasn’t going to cheat on Sinan ever again. I had made that decision. I was tired, worn out. It wasn’t just the keeping of secrets, being clandestine about everything and planning my moves several steps ahead in these delicate games of chess. Even more exhausting was having to deal with the offended hurt of men who would, initially, declare that they had ‘no expectations’, only to persist in pursuing me once we’d slept together. Where such affairs were meant to be a liberation, an escape from daily life, they had instead become just another burden. I had neither the desire nor the energy for new loves. Also, love, I had realized, as with many other pleasures, lost its flavour with repetition; in the end, it was always the same. If I was looking for novelty, I needed to shift my attention inwards, closer to home. I would be turning forty in a month. In this new phase of my life, I would discover not how many conquests I could have, but how to enjoy fidelity. 

So, just that morning, instead of slipping out of the house before Sinan woke up and hurrying to Uncle Niko’s bakery, where I usually had my morning tea and pastry and play sudoku, I waited under the white mosquito netting for my husband to stir. Uncle Niko, who was familiar with my grumpy morning state, always set down my breakfast on my table beside the window without greeting me, then returned to his portable radio behind the till. Sinan, on the other hand, was very talkative in the morning. He woke up with a hundred worldly and otherworldly ideas, rattling them off like machinegun fire before he even lifted his head from the pillow. From now on, though, I was going to listen to my husband’s brilliant early-morning schemes with patience and smiles. 

Leaving him was the last thing on my mind. 

As was finding my father. 

At no stage in my life had I wanted to find my father. Not during the tearful nights of my childhood when I used to secretly mourn his absence, nor in my adolescence when I might momentarily catch his aftershave on the skin of a lover I was kissing on a rickety jetty over the dark waters of the Bosphorus. When I smelled that scent, a wave would swell inside me like a tide rising in the moonlight, but even that didn’t make me want to track him down to learn why – and for what new life – he had abandoned us. Why would I feel that need now? Twenty-nine years had passed since then. That morning on Buyukada, listening to Sinan’s breathing, my father was not among the thoughts passing through my mind. I had closed the Orhan Kutsi chapter of my life a long time ago.

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About the Author

Defne Suman was born in Istanbul and grew up on Buyukada. She gained a Masters in sociology from the Bosphorus University, then worked as a teacher in Thailand and Laos where she studied Far Eastern philosophy and mystic disciplines. She later continued her studies in Oregon, USA and now lives in Athens with her husband. Her English language debut The Silence of Scheherazade was published by Head of Zeus in 2021.