by Yashar Kemal
Exhausted, his voice quite hoarse now, Süleyman sank down upon the steps. Hayri came to sit beside him. Mahmut could not bring himself to look at them. So much trouble and pain, all for nothing … In the name of all humanity, of this milling crowd in Taksim Square, he was overcome with shame in front of the two boys, with pity for the doomed birds. Without a word, he turned away and slipped into the crowd.
The children were left there, alone on the steps. They looked very small now, both of them. Süleyman was leaning on one of the cages. His neck hung limply to one side. Hayri’s head had sunk between his shoulders, so low it seemed stuck to his breast. The birds were silent now in their cages, too tired to flutter or even chirp any more.
Taksim Square was full to overflowing with evening crowds. From the posh hotel across the square the light of the huge neon sign fell over the cages, the boys, the steps, tainting them all a garish green.
fn1 tesbih: prayer beads.
fn2 simit: a ring-shaped special kind of bread.
14
“I’m going fishing,” Mahmut said to me. “Right away, this evening. I may be going as far as Çanakkale.”
He wore the dejected expression of a child whose toy has been broken.
“Good luck, good fishing,” I wished him.
“Luck!” Mahmut gave a bitter laugh. “Luck indeed! Damn my luck!”
It was days since I had passed near the tent under the poplar tree. Once or twice I came across Tuğrul, and each time he shot me a pregnant look as though gloating over some bad news that he was not telling, laughing maliciously up his sleeve, like the low shameless son-of-a-bitch he was … No one had ever irritated me as much as this boy. I had always found him disagreeable. But now … I longed to give him a good spanking, the bastard, with his smug well-fed look. Because of him, because of those perfidious snake-in-the-grass eyes, I avoided going to the boys’ tent. Because I knew there was something wrong there. Because only if some serious misfortune had befallen the boys could that odious Tuğrul have strutted about with such a self-satisfied air. Why else would a wretch like him, who had surely never had a taste of pure joy, why else would he suddenly be so pleased?
I tried to go to the tent. I wanted so much to see the children, to find out what was up, but my feet always dragged me back.
One morning, I saw that red-winged bird of prey high up in the sky. The boys must be there still, I thought. They must have spotted the bird too. It’ll buck them up. Now, I thought, now’s the time to go down to Florya Plain. I only had to take the path that wound round the seaward side of the Air Force officers’ houses and I would be able to see the tent and the poplar tree …
Instead, I went right down to Menekşe then up the slope again. The tall poplar tree seemed higher, larger than ever, its branches spreading far and wide, but there was no sign of the tent. I hurried up to where it had been and came upon Tuğrul crouching in his old place, his chin on his knees. He gazed at me with mocking triumphant eyes.
The place was covered with the coloured feathers of birds. They were everywhere, stuck to the copper branches of the thistles, fluttering in the breeze, mauve, red, green, white, blue, on the grass, the earth, the shrubs, the trees …
The hearth which the boys had built in front of the tent was black, with a few half-burnt sticks of wood smothered in a soilure of dead ashes between the three bricks. Nearby lay a large charred log.
I turned to Tuğrul and looked hard at him in anger and revulsion. But it meant nothing to him, at all. With that odious insolent smile on his face he fixed his eyes on the clump of dried thistles a little way off from the hearth. I took a few steps and stopped short, aghast, as I realised what he was looking at. My heart twinged with pity. On the dried grass, near a tall blue thistle whose stem was plastered with tiny white snails, there lay a heap of bird’s heads, hundreds of heads, rising as tall as the thistles. Yellow ants swarmed over these heads with the open lacklustre eyes.
From far-off Istanbul came the rumble of the city. Up in the sky, the rufous bird of prey was riding the wind, its large wings spread wide. And before me there rose a memorial to the callousness and the decadence of Istanbul town, to the oblivion of its past, of all that was human, to the loss of many many things, a memorial made with the heads of hundreds of tiny birds.
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Copyright © Yashar Kemal 1978
Copyright in the English translation © Thilda Kemal 1987
Yashar Kemal has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain by Collins Harvill in 1987
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 9781846559624