by Yashar Kemal
Go Abbas, Esmé said, if you love me, if your love for me is true, go and don’t come back any more. He stood there motionless under the mulberry tree, Esmé facing him, silent both of them. Then as day broke, he turned and walked away towards the Anavarza crags. She gazed after him, standing on tiptoe until he was quite lost to sight.
A month passed and he did not come back. Every night Esmé waited up, powerless to resist a yearning to see him again. Then one morning her heart gave a bound. He was there. It was almost light. She hastened down the stairs. Abbas, she said, go up into the crags. I’ll come and find you a little later. He obeyed. That morning she slipped out of the house, a bundle of food tied to her waist. Nobody saw her leave the village.
And so it came about that for a month, even more, two months, Esmé held her tryst with Abbas in his hideaway in a cave on the Anavarza crags. Once, Halil followed her, but somehow failed to hit upon the cave. Abbas saw him, levelled his gun and was about to shoot, when Esmé restrained him.
Some time later the gendarmes surrounded the crags and tracked Abbas down. He held out against them for a day and a night, but they got him in the end. As they led him down into the plain to take him to the police-station he managed to give them the slip.
That night he came again to Esmé’s house and stood under the mulberry tree, waiting until she came down to him. And there the boy Hassan saw them, clasped in each other’s arms.
The next day shots were exchanged up on the Anavarza crags. Two gendarmes were hit. Halil, who had joined in the search for Abbas, was hurt too. The Kurdish Physician tended his wound. He was a long-faced black-eyed man, always cheerful and smiling. Such things will happen, he said, nothing to worry about, nothing …
And then that last night … Just before the call to evening prayer … Halil, Esmé, Hassan sitting down to dinner … The flame flaring in the window, the blast of a gun rending the air … A scream … The smoke … And Halil, face down over the meal-cloth, bleeding … Bleeding endlessly. And the smell of gunpowder everywhere.
And the dead Abbas being brought down from the Anavarza crags …
Afterwards, they cast his body somewhere outside the village to be torn to pieces by wild dogs.
But Esmé would never let this be. Accompanied by one of the farmhands, she set out in the night and snatched his body from the jaws of a pack of ravenous dogs. Then she put him into a sack and, together with the farmhand, they carried him up to the very summit of the Anavarza crags where they dug a grave, making it as deep as they could. And there, at daybreak, Esmé buried Abbas.
The news spread like wildfire. The village was in an uproar. Mustafa, the second of the uncles, had got hold of Esmé and was kicking her. Bitch, he howled, bloody bitch, you put that wretch up to killing my brother, and now you go and hide his body. Where? Where have you put him? I won’t let you live. I won’t. The body! You’ll give me the body or your life …
But he could not get a word out of Esmé.
The whole village seemed to be shouting at her, men and women, old and young, hurling abuse, calling her all sorts of names.
For many days the villagers with the uncles at their head scoured the Anavarza crags in search of Abbas’s grave. They found nothing, neither the grave, nor the slightest trace of Abbas.
The stream was creamed with a wrinkled layer of leaves and chaff, dusty, stagnant, dead-still, as though it had stopped flowing.
She seemed to materialize out of the earth beside him, a tall slim figure, with pursed mouth and strong determined chin. Her hair was hennaed and gleamed redly under the black kerchief that she had worn ever since her son was murdered. Leaning on a thick reed staff she came and crouched down beside him.
In the distance Mount Düldül smouldered in a copper glow. The air smelled of sun-drenched burdock. Waves of heat purled down the Anavarza crags towards the stream which meandered on, suspended in the air, a tremulous silvery haze, like an abandoned path.
Not once did Hassan look at her as she spoke, yet he saw the single pointed front tooth, yellowed, the dark face, the silk sash she always tied about her waist, so thin now, ready to snap almost. The red, green and blue fringes of the sash hung down to her knees. Always, ever since anyone could remember, the grandmother had worn such sashes, and even now, draped as she was all in black in mourning for her son, she had not discarded the sash. She would be buried in it too. Certainly she must have willed this.
So much time had passed, yet she was till scouring Anavarza in search of Abbas’s body which that bitch of a daughter-in-law had spirited away. She would find it, yes, and throw it to the dogs, make of it food for the birds of prey and, for that, she poured money on the children of the village, living out her days in the unflagging hope that now, today, they would find that body. And ah, if only her other sons had proved to be men, if only they could have dealt with Esmé …
“Yes my lion, yes my brave little Hassan, there was no man like your father in the whole of the Chukurova. If it had been any other one of your uncles who’d been killed, if your father were alive, my valiant Halil … Ah, then you’d see … Not just one woman, but that woman’s whole family he’d have wiped out, stock and strain, cutting them up root and branch. If your uncles had been men they’d have seized that woman the very day your father was murdered, dragged her by the hair to my Halil’s grave and there, with a sharp razor, they’d have cut her throat and cast her head over here, her body over there … She would never have been able to flaunt herself before me, that woman, the mother of my own grandson, taking advantage of the fact that she’s your mother. If your father had been alive and seen that bitch strutting about like that … He’d have thrown her carcass to the wild dogs and birds, your father would. Was there anyone like your father? Like the eagles on the Anavarza crags he was. Not like those miserable wretches, not like those uncles of yours … Aaah, if only you were older, if only your hand could wield a gun … Then … That bitch of a mother of yours … You … You, yes, only you! You’re the son of my Halil, my Halil who was like the eagles on the Binboga Mountains, the hawks on Mount Düldül, the falcons on Mount Aladag. Aaah, my poor Halil …”
Hassan listened, his unseeing gaze on the creased, scumlined surface of the water, motionless, not a flicker on his face. A large black and blue butterfly fluttered up and down over the stream. Hassan’s eyes followed it, up down, up down. Soon there were more butterflies over the water and then, all in a swarm, they swirled off to settle on a blue-flowering shrub, dyeing it deep blue, a black-traceried mass of blue.
Weeping, she rose and intoned a lament, crying out her son’s name, “Halil, my Halil, the noble Bey that you were … Your son is a good son, yet only a tiny child. And so they live on, those who killed you, basking in your house, eating your bread, usurping your goods, stepping over your grave … I, a mother, a mother! Your mother … How can I endure all this? I, a mother …”
She bent her steps towards the Anavarza crags and sank onto a rock. The sun was setting, but her passionate vibrant lament never paused. A lump rose to Hassan’s throat.
“Soon, very soon she will get married, the one who killed you. Another man she’ll take into your bed, some vile worthless fellow. And no one, no one to avenge you, only your son, my grandson, and he so young … Others will take your place in the arms of the one you loved so blindly. Your dear body rotting away in the earth, and she still thriving, prospering over your blood … Ah my Halil, my brave noble Halil …”
Her voice rose to a shriek, raising the echoes from the crags, spreading far into the plain below.
“Your orphaned son … A nacre-inlaid rifle in his hand, a silver dagger at his waist … Riding an Arab colt … But alas, the pity of it! Too young yet. Too small to wield the rifle, poor mite, too weak to kill a grown woman …”
It was dark when he returned home. His mother put some food before him. He could not eat it. She tried to make him talk. He could not say a word. His jaws were locked. Assailed by doubts, she took him in her arms, kis
sed him, fondled him, talked to him, but she could not make him even look at her.
That night sleep did not come to Hassan.
One day he overheard his mother and his Uncle Mustafa talking.
“You may not be to blame, Esmé,” Mustafa was saying, “but all the same I advise you not to remain here in this village. Leave your belongings, leave your son. Go, and save your life. My mother won’t speak to me any more because I refused to kill you. Ibrahim’s ready to kill you any day, and if he hasn’t up to now it’s because of me, because I wouldn’t let him. But I warn you, so long as you’re here, alive in this house, my mother will never give up. She wants your blood. Nothing I can do will stop her. The whole village, all of Anavarza plain holds you responsible for Halil’s death. So long as you stay … Even I … Even I may kill you in the end, Esmé. Go while there’s still time. Let no more blood be shed in this house. We can’t hold out much longer. If I don’t kill you, if Ibrahim doesn’t, our sons will do it. My mother will call upon her family, her brothers. She’ll find a way. Your death warrant is hanging round your neck. If no one else will do it, she’ll persuade Hassan, your own son, to kill you …”
“Very well,” Esmé’s voice was calm, composed. “I’ll go. I ask for nothing. No money, nothing from Halil’s property. Let it all be yours. I’ll take my son and go away, back to my father’s house.”
“No, you can’t do that,” Mustafa said. “You can’t take Hassan away. He must stay with us.”
“Then I won’t go,” Esmé replied. “How can I go without Hassan? I can’t be separated from my son.”
“Look here, they’ll never let you take him away. My heart bleeds for you, sister. I’m telling you, your days are numbered … Go.”
“Not without Hassan,” Esmé said stubbornly.
“Do as you like then,” Mustafa said. “If you want to die … Isn’t it a pity for you? You’re still young. You could …” He stopped.
“Never will I leave without Hassan,” Esmé said. “Never will I go anywhere without him. How could I? He’s all I have in this world.”
“Don’t you understand what I’m telling you?” Mustafa cried, incensed. “We can’t show our face in this village as long as you’re alive. You had Halil murdered, you! Everyone knows it. What can be easier than killing you? The meanest dog hereabouts would hold us to scorn if we didn’t.”
“Don’t, my Agha, I beseech you,” Esmé said. “If I have to die, it’ll be with my son near me. I’d rather die than live without him.”
Mustafa rose. He was a tall man, with broad shoulders and a large face. Hassan saw his eyes. They were bloodshot, terrible. The figure of his uncle loomed even larger in the lamplight. Hassan was afraid. Yet he loved him all the same. Mustafa had been trying to help his mother, to save her from those who meant to kill her …
After this, it seemed to Hassan that an eerie silence fell over the village, over the house. For the first time since his father’s death all the talk about his mother had stopped. No one even uttered her name, neither in his grandmother’s house nor anywhere else. And as the days passed his mother grew more and more pensive and troubled. All through the night she would sit up, brushing her long hair, or wander through the house, the very figure of fear.
Then one night the front door was kicked open and three men crashed into the bedroom, firing their guns. Esmé was nowhere to be seen. They combed the room with their electric torches and riddled the beds with bullets. One of the men spotted Hassan cowering in a corner, frozen still. He dealt him a vicious kick in the ribs.
“Get up, you wretched whelp, snuggling all this while in that bitch’s groin, your father’s murderer …” He kicked him again. “Where is she, the bitch you call your mother? Where’s she hiding?”
Hassan was mute.
“We’ll find her, never fear, even if she’s crept into the serpent’s nest, under the bird’s wing. We’ll find that bitch and kill her, tear her limb from limb. I’ll do it with my own hands. I’ll never let that whore live on with the blood of my nephew on her hands, my brave Halil, his bones rattling in his grave …”
There was no sound from Hassan. He guessed who they might be, these men, and where they had come from, his grandmother’s relatives who lived up in the hills, her brother, her nephews, all wild cut-throats …
They ransacked the whole house and, finding no one, left after a parting kick at Hassan. “What kind of a son is that?” they said. “Living cheek by jowl with his own father’s murderer … No better than hogs …”
Esmé had heard their footsteps in the yard. Slipping quietly out of the room, she had made her escape and run straight to the gendarme station which was situated a good distance away from the village.
In the morning she returned accompanied by a squad of gendarmes. They found not a trace of the men. But Esmé would not drop her complaint. She lodged a deposition with the public prosecutor in which she stated: “My brothers-in-law are plotting to kill me. If I am found murdered, I state here for everyone to know that the criminals are the brothers of my late husband.”
Everyone heard about it. “She’ll die,” the grandmother vowed. “And I will live to see it. Even if she shuts herself up in an iron chest, she’ll die …”
Esmé knew it too. Sooner or later they would get her. She lived in constant fear, hardly ever sleeping, sitting up night after night, nervously combing her hair, her ears strained to catch the faintest unusual sound.
In the days that followed, Mustafa came again several times, secretly, in the night, pleading and threatening in turn.
“Go Esmé,” he adjured her. “Don’t force us to bloody our hands. As long as you’re alive, we’re dead. How can it be otherwise when before our very eyes you had your lover kill our brother? Get out of this village, Esmé, or we’ll have to kill you.”
“Kill me then!” she replied defiantly. “I won’t go anywhere without my son.”
“No one’s going to let you take him away. You must go alone.”
But Esmé stood her ground. “I’ll never do that,” was all she would say.
One night Esmé was sitting on her bed combing her hair, when suddenly her hand was arrested and the comb hung in her hair. She turned to Hassan. He was looking at her. Their eyes met and she leapt out of bed. He saw that she had never undressed at all. He rose and put on his clothes, while Esmé went to their chest. As she lifted the lid, he caught a pleasant scent of wild apples. Quickly she took some things out and wrapped them in a bundle. Hassan picked up his rifle and soon they were out of house and village and hurrying along the road.
When day broke they had already gone past Bozkuyu village and were pressing on for Dikenli. Once there, they would be safe at last, for the land around Dikenli was wooded and they could easily lie in hiding if they were being pursued.
But they were still on the bare open country of Bozkuyu, flat as a board, when the horsemen appeared behind them in a cloud of dust. They flung themselves into a hollow and tried to shrink out of sight. In vain. The horsemen unearthed them as surely as if they had put them there. One of them was Mustafa. They seized hold of Hassan and lifted him up onto the back of Mustafa’s horse. Hassan made no resistance.
“Farewell to you, Esmé,” Mustafa said. “You can go now, wherever you please.”
They whipped up their horses and rode off back to the village.
Hassan was so tired he fell asleep the minute they entered his grandmother’s house. He had already been slumbering on the horse’s back and roused himself just enough to stumble up the stairs where he sank down in a heap at the head of the banisters.
He awoke to his grandmother’s mournful voice raised in another of her long bitter laments and pausing only to call down curses on Esmé’s head. He heard someone say: “She’s back. Came right back to the village when they took the boy away from her.” Unhesitatingly, he rushed out and ran back home. Their house bordered his grandmother’s yard.
Esmé opened her arms to him, but somehow Hassan shra
nk back. He could not bring himself to face her. From the big house, his grandmother’s laments and curses, raised to an ululating pitch, could still be heard.
After this incident, everything was quiet for a while in the big house and the village. But hardly anyone spoke to Esmé any more. It was as though she did not exist, as though no one called Esmé had ever come to live here.
For Hassan it was worse than before. It seemed to him that wherever he went, whatever he did, his grandmother was there beside him, speaking to him with love, lamenting her son, cursing his mother. As the days went by he began to hear the villagers talking again, young and old, everywhere, whenever they found him within earshot, and always they spoke about his father, of his father’s shameless murderer Esmé, of the bereaved, inconsolable grandmother.
The village was asleep. A lone rooster crowed three times and fell silent. Then a dog raised its voice in a long frenzied howl. It was a sound Esmé had always been afraid of, this baying of a hound in the night. Her flesh crept and she muttered a prayer.
Suddenly, Hassan spoke. The room was very dark. He could not even make out his mother’s silhouette. If he had, if he’d discerned the smallest movement he would never have plucked up the courage to speak. He knew it.
“Let’s go tonight,” he said. “Now, this minute. We can take a different road to get wherever it is we want. If they still come searching after us, if they track us down, I’ll hide somewhere and wait until they go away, which is what they’ll do when they see I’m not with you. Shall we go?”
“All right,” Esmé assented.
She had been holding two bundles of clothes and necessaries ready just in case. They set out at once.
The sun had not yet risen when they heard the sound of hooves and saw the five horsemen approaching at a gallop. Hassan flung himself quickly into a dense thicket of brambles and blackthorns.
“You walk on,” he breathed to Esmé. “I’ll catch up with you as soon as they’ve left.”