Tag #125359 - Interview #97653 (Rebeka Evgin)

After 15 years of marriage, my husband first had kidney stone surgery, he had surgery in a private hospital.  After about a month, he had chest pains one night.  We called the doctor, medicine was not as advanced then.  He was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.  Bypass procedure was not developed much in the 70’s.  When we were married, my older sister, my brother-in-law, my mother, myself and my husband lived in the same house.  When the children were born, we couldn’t fit in one house any more.  My husband and I first moved to Taksim [a neighborhood in central Istanbul].  Mostly people who came to work from the United States lived in Taksim, Kazanci Hill.  I was very young.  My husband’s friends said “Mordo, are you crazy?  How can you live here, they will hit on your wife.  You will have no peace”.  So we moved to Kurtulus, a short while later.  I would wait my husband’s arrival on the hill every evening, and take the bags from his hands.

One evening, after dinner, Sara went out with her fiance.  My husband wanted to lie down.  I thought he did not look well, so I called Sara back home.  When I came back from the telephone, it was over already.  I lived through a huge shock.  I really did not know what to do.  The cure for depression is in working, apparently.  I started going to work after so many years.  My brother-in-law warned me “to wear a coat over pants to go to work”.  I know that a porter accompanied me to work every morning from the boat in Karakoy, and every evening from work to the boat again.  8 years passed like this.  When my first grandchild Elsa was born, I left work.