The Cryptic Knowledge of Silkworms: A View on Bursa in 1922
The view was impressive. A thousand feet below lay the old Ottoman capital of Bursa, like a backgammon board spread out across the valley’s green felt. Red diamonds of roof tile fit into diamonds of whitewash. Here and there the sultans’ tombs were stacked up like bright chips. Back in 1922, automobile traffic didn’t clog the streets. Ski lifts didn’t cut swaths into the mountain’s pine forests. Metallurgic and textile plants didn’t ring the city, filling the air with smog. Bursa looked – at least from a thousand feet up – pretty much as it had at least for the past six centuries, a holy city, necropolis of the Ottomans and center of the silk trade, its quiet, declining streets abloom with minarets and cypress trees. The tiles of the Green Mosque had turned blue with age, but that was about it. Desdemona Stephanides, however, kibitzing from afar, gazed down on the board and saw what the players had missed.
To psychoanalyze my grandmother’s heart palpitations: They were the manifestations of grief. Her parents were dead – killed in the recent war with the Turks. The Greek Army, encouraged by the Allied Nations, had invaded western Turkey in 1919, reclaiming the Ancient Greek territory in Asia Minor. After years of living apart on the mountain, the people of Bithynios, my grandmother’s village, had emerged into the safety of the Megali Idea—the Big Idea, the dream of Greater Greece. It was now Greek troops who occupied Bursa. A Greek flag flew over the former Ottoman palace. The Turks and their leader, Mustafa Kemal, had retreated to Ankara in the east. For the first time in their lives the Greeks of Asia Minor were out from under the Turkish rule. No longer were the giaours (“infidel dogs”) forbidden to wear bright clothing or ride horses or use saddles. Never again, as in the last centuries, would Ottoman officials arrive in the village every year, carting off the strongest boys to serve in the Janissaries. Now, when the village men took silk to market in Bursa, they were free Greeks, in a free Greek city.
Desdemona, however, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down on the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her inability to feel happy like everybody else. Years later, in her widowhood, when she had spent a decade in bed trying with great vitality to die, she would finally agree that those two years between wars a half century ago had been the only decent time in her life; but by then everyone she h’d known would be dead, and she could only tell it to the television.
For the greater part of an hour Desdemona had been trying to ignore her foreboding by working in the cocoonery. She had come out the back door of the house through the sweet-smelling grape-arbor and across the terraced yard into the low, thatch-roofed hut. The acrid, larval smell inside did not bother her. The silkworm cocoonery was my grandmother’s own personal, reeking oasis. All around her, in a firmament, soft white silkworms clung to bundled mulberry twigs. Desdemona watched them spinning cocoons, moving their heads as though to music. As she watched, she forgot about the world outside, its changes and convulsions, its terrible new music (which is about to be sung in a moment). Instead, she heard her mother, Euphrosyne Stephanides, speaking in this cocoonery, years ago, elucidating the mysteries of silkworms—“To have good silk, you have to be pure,” she used to tell her daughter. “The silkworms know everything. You can always tell what somebody is up to by the way their silks looks”. (…) She looked out for other things, too, because her mother also maintained that silkworms reacted to historical atrocities. After every massacre, even in a village fifty miles away, the silkworms’ filaments turned the color of blood—“I have seen them bleed like the feet of Christos Himself”—Euphrosyne again, and her daughter, years later, remembering, squinting in the weak light to see if any cocoons had turned red. (…)
Source: Eugenides, Jeffrey: Middlesex: A Novel. London: Bloomsbury, 2002, p. 21 f.
