A Bar of Soap by Yavuz Altun

My mother is, erm, was obsessed with hygiene. She never ate street food or sat on a pavement beside a busy road. Packed subways and concert halls and amusement parks full of children terrified her, yet she could spend an entire afternoon in a dentist’s office, breathing the oily tang of clove and the sharp, clinical scent of acrylic.

She was the reason home, for me, was a scent more than a space. We lived under a rigid regime of cleanliness. The house always hung in a fog of detergent. In my childhood memories, the sound of the vacuum cleaner was buzzing in the background. Hand towels fragrant with dish soap waited in almost every corner. After playing outside with other kids, the only way back into the house was through the ritual of a bath.

Some evenings, watching TV, I would see her face beam when an advertisement promised “extra clean”. She wasn’t a blind believer though, she tried the product first, then scrubbed her own decision. Advising neighborhood women about cleaners was her form of community work, and the neighbors fancied her more than her own parents and sisters, who had never learned how.

In their defence – and to some extent in mine – she was extremely hard to love. My father had tried, maybe never quite enough, and eventually left. I never saw her cry; his departure was no exception. After that she buried herself in work: a small tailor shop, resembling her slight figure, she had run since youth. The business was an uncanny success. She showed her customers no fuss, no affection, but her craft secured their loyalty. Her obsession, I thought, had sharpened an already impeccable eye for detail.

She wasn’t difficult, only disciplined. The eldest child of two educators. Not cold, but cautious. Not affectless, but measured, functional. When we fell ill, my sister or I, there was always medicine and chicken soup beside our beds, but no hugs.

The pandemic surprisingly changed her. Almost sixty, she sat at home most days, sneaking into the shop sometimes to mend a respected customer’s skirt. She began making surprise calls. I remember my sister was in disbelief after Mom asked so many questions about her PhD and marriage. On the phone with me, she sounded like a friend rather than a parent. She mostly raged about people who refused to wear masks at the supermarket and even let slip a few funny stories about Dad. Later I heard she even had broken the ice with her sisters. They spoke a few times a week, gossiping and trading tips for old age.

With an arsenal of masks, gloves and sanitizers, hoarded in her cupboards, way before the pandemic, women from the neighborhood came to her for supplies when stores ran out. She had a safety system: a call first, the request made, and the order waiting at the front door when they arrived.

The ways the disease had spread proved her right. People were in need of her wisdom.

A few years after that, I got a call from the doctor’s office. Decades of exposure to bleach and solvents had ravaged her lungs and liver. A terminal condition, long unchecked because she never complained. They asked me to assist in her last weeks. Unhappy with my job, I quit and moved back in.

The pandemic glow faded fast. The woman who raised me returned. We spent long hours in silence, except for the persistent coughs and involuntary moaning. Her body was brittle as a bird. Beady blue eyes, ringed by yellow. In those days, I longed for more than what we had: to finally name what was missing, and how it had shaped me. Maybe I was yearning for a late intimacy as a consolation prize. But I wouldn’t, well, couldn’t do that. If I asked for closure, opening Pandora's Box, what would I have gained here, at her deathbed? In the end, this was a story in which she must be the main character.

As my sister keeps telling me: Parents are like hurricanes; you cannot reason with them. You learn to heal on your own. If someone helps, that is a kind of heaven. Luckily she has that person.

One afternoon near the end: “I’m afraid,” Mom said. “Of what?” I replied without thinking. “Bugs,” she murmured, ashamed like a child. “They’ll crawl over my body when I die.”

I almost laughed, then saw she meant it. “I want a coffin,” she added after a pause. “Like in the movies.”

The next week I went around the city, asking dozens of imams if her wish could be honored. Most waved me off before I finished explaining. One imam, tall and slender in a baggy robe, listened with grace and agreed, on one condition: No public attendance to the prayer and the burial. It would be a secret.

Despite my objections and efforts to assure her death was nothing like she imagined, Mom agreed with the imam’s plan.

I only told my sister and Dad; to everyone else who asked about why they were not invited for the final duty, I shrugged and said, “You know Mom…”

At the very last moment, I managed to slip a bar of soap inside the coffin. She loved that smell.