To Crush the Serpent

by Yashar Kemal

  His head seething, he slumped down there, beside the spring, and burst into tears. Had they killed her? Was she dead already? A feeling of relief was swept away by the searing pain in his heart. He thought of his uncles, obsessed with vengeance, pitiless … Even his Uncle Ali who had disappeared no one knew where … Perhaps Ali had done it. He saw his mother’s dead body. He saw the soundless green flies, the blood congealed in the dust, the limbs asprawl, the bloated face, the yellow fluid oozing from her eyes …

  He ran back all the way to Murtaza Agha’s house. Without a word to anyone, without so much as a goodbye, he flung himself onto his horse and galloped off down into the plain.

  How and when he reached the village, he did not know. But his mother’s stricken face when she saw him, her anguished scream, he never forgot. She told him later that he had been wounded, his clothes bloodied, caked with mud. The horse too was hurt, a broken leg … But he must not worry, she’d get him another colt.

  For days he was laid up, burning with fever. But even when he recovered he would not take a step out of doors, much less venture into the village. He never so much as thrust his head through the doorway. And nobody came to visit him either, nobody asked how he did, not even his grandmother and his uncles. So it was a mystery how that rumour flying about the village came to his ears.

  It was his father who had carried Hassan off from his home in the night, swung him onto the saddle of his horse and taken him up into the mountains. There he’d squeezed his hands round Hassan’s throat until the boy’s eyes popped out of their sockets. Hassan, he’d said, almost strangling him, you miserable wretch, who is it that’s left his father’s blood unavenged, forced him to haunt the world till doomsday, to burn in Hell forever? What kind of a son are you, what kind of a man? How can you live on like that, without honour, like a beast, and feeding on the hand that murdered your father, too? You ought to be dead with shame, Hassan, you ought to die …

  Weeks went by and still the talk did not abate, until at last one day Hassan dashed out of the house and burst in upon his grandmother.

  “I ran away, I, I! No one carried me off. Of my own accord I fled from this cursed place. All because of you … I never saw my father. I never saw anything … It’s all lies. Lies, lies! You’re lying every one of you. Lying!”

  He ran out into the village, screaming at the top of his voice: “Lies, lies, lies!”

  The villagers stared as they would at a creature possessed and when he barred old Sefer’s path, still howling his heart out, the old man started breathing prayers over him to exorcize the evil spirits.

  “Poor boy, poor boy,” he muttered, “his father’s ghost has cast a spell over him …”

  At this, Hassan covered his face with his hands and slunk back home. Throwing himself onto the divan, he remained there motionless, dead to the world. Nothing his mother said or did could draw a word out of him.

  But the next day something forced him out into the village again. And it was the same on the following days. Nothing he heard, nothing the villagers said could make him stop at home any longer.

  And how tongues wagged!

  “A man whose blood lies unavenged will always cast a spell on his son, even if it be an only son.”

  “A man who’s become a ghost will do anything to be relieved from that state.”

  “God forbid that a man should turn into a ghost!”

  “Horrible!”

  “And to be an unavenged man’s ghost is worse than all.”

  “Why think! If Esmé should happen to die a natural death now, Halil would have to walk the earth as a wretched ghost forever, in Hell in this world and in Hell in the other!”

  “With Allah’s will, she won’t die a natural death. It would be too awful for poor Halil.”

  “Better Allah should have given Halil a black stone than a son like that …”

  “But it’s no easy thing to kill a mother. A mother’s love is too precious to give up.”

  “And Hassan’s only a child yet. Why, if he’d been older, grown up now, he wouldn’t have let Esmé live another day!”

  “Even so, it’s not everyone can kill a mother.”

  “A man has to be really brave for that.”

  “Like that very strong man, Zaloglu Rüstem.”

  “Or the outlaw Köroglu.”

  “Like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk … Like the bandit Gizik Duran.”

  “Or like Karayilan, the Black Serpent, who delivered Gaziantep from the French.”

  “Ah, how can you expect a poor chit of a child to kill his mother when even a grown man can hardly do it?”

  “Now for heaven’s sake, what kind of silly talk is that? Trying to provoke the poor boy into killing his mother!”

  “No fear! He’s got a head on his shoulders, that boy, he won’t let himself be gulled.”

  “Good for the boy! He won’t kill her. He won’t leave her either.”

  “What a boy! He’s protecting her. Firm as steel he’s turned out to be.”

  “Halil a ghost! What a tall tale!”

  “And even if it’s true …”

  “Look here, if it’s true, then there’s many a man in this village will never rest in his grave, with the life they’ve led, the people they’ve killed. We’ll have a whole crowd of ghosts about the village at this rate.”

  “All that talk about Halil’s not being avenged …”

  “When he has been, well and good. Didn’t they kill Abbas just for that?”

  “Ah, they’re bent on having Esmé killed …”

  “And by her own son too!”

  “How long can he stick it out, how long?”

  “After all, he’s only a child.”

  “They’ll make him do it, mark my words. By hook or by crook they’ll find a way.”

  “Hassan will kill his mother …”

  Hassan was living in a trance. A morbid impulse drove him into the village every day to listen to what was being said about himself, about his mother, his father. And on days when nobody broached the subject he felt cheated, empty, troubled to distraction. He had got so used to hearing people speak about himself that he could not do without it any longer. A sure instinct led him to wherever the talk was going on and he listened silently, tirelessly to the thousand and one stories in which his father figured as a pitiful tormented ghost, his mother as a perfidious whore. And when he heard nothing, he would weave a tale himself, and end up believing it too. He could no longer make out what was real, what was not. His beautiful mother, the ghost of his father seemed to have been transferred into a dream world. And the villagers too, inventing fresh stories, had worked themselves into such a state that they finally believed what a moment ago they knew they had made up.

  As for Esmé, it was all over with her. She had no heart to fight any more. Sometimes, even she believed the strange rumours that went around. If she had had the chance to take her son and go now, if they had allowed her to, she would not have done so. A magic circle had been woven all around them, Hassan, Esmé, the grandmother, the whole village.

  One morning the villagers awoke to the spectacle of masses of swallows thronging wing to wing in the windows and doorways.

  Here in the Chukurova, swallows were familiar household features. They built their nests in barns and stables and were in and out of people’s houses all the time. Each year, returning from their winter migration, they repaired their old nests or made new ones, grey knobby mud packs, and set about the business of breeding and raising their young. To destroy a swallow’s nest was considered a great sin. The saying went that even if the swallow should nest in a man’s eye he must not disturb it. There were a couple of persons in the village who had lost an arm and others who had been struck by the palsy and still went about trembling in all their limbs, all because they had harmed the swallows.

  And now, here were all these nests dashed to the ground and dozens of chicks squirming, crushed, dead … Tiny delicate feathers fluttering everywhere … Yellow beaks op
ened wide in terror …

  A furious frenzied hand was reaching at the nests, prizing them off beams and roofs and hurling them down. In stable after stable, barn after barn the same crazy hand …

  The villagers were aghast. Everyone knew whose hand it was, yet they dared not say a word. The village was aswarm with screeching swallows. They swooped down over the chicks, dead or floundering in the dust, and rose again, helpless, uttering heart-rending cries, obstinately circling a couple of yards above them, refusing to be chased away.

  People hastened to replace the nests as best they could, but it was obvious that half the chicks had perished, and only a few days later the nests were again found lying all over the place, while frantic swallows dashed through the air and clustered above their dying young.

  Again the nests were restored and the swallows diligently set about repairing them. In vain. One night the frenzied hand was at work again …

  Since all the chicks were dead, the villagers saw no point in putting the nests back. As for the swallows, for days they hung about the houses, flitting in and out of doors and windows, then abandoning all hope they disappeared without a trace. Not a single swallow was seen any more after that.

  This was a sign of ill omen and an atmosphere of gloom settled over the village.

  The ruins of Anavarza Castle were also a favourite abode for swallows. For centuries they must have built their nests there, under the covered arches and crumbling walls. People could hardly believe it when a shepherd boy, all flushed with excitement, brought the news that the crags around the castle were littered with swallow’s nests and that the chicks were being devoured by snakes.

  “I’ve seen them,” the shepherd boy swore. “May my eyes drop out if I’m lying. All the snakes of Anavarza, each with a swallow chick in its jaws …”

  Next it was the eagles that the death-dealing hand turned to. Broken eggs and dead eaglets were scattered all over the Anavarza crags, while furious eagles thronged above, whirling in ever greater numbers with a loud swish of wings. A constant burst of gunfire kept them at bay.

  It was a fire he was seeing, burning in a circle wide as ten threshing-floors. And into this circle of fire dead eagles kept falling, dead swallows … Dead yet screeching … And the rocks were on fire too. Birds, beasts, snakes, the very ruins fled from the blaze, screaming with terror. The bushes, the trees, the houses burst into flames.

  And the fire drew nearer and nearer and became a rag. The hand reached out, soaked it with petrol and threw it burning through the door of the grandmother’s house. Another burning rag was cast through the window. First the divan caught fire, next the door, then the wooden pillars. A strong northeaster whipped up the flames and the whole house was ablaze in an instant. The fire leapt to the barns and the stables and it was not long before it had passed on to Esmé’s house.

  Esmé had dressed quickly, and when she saw that the fire was threatening their house, she went to rouse Hassan. But try as she might she could not make him wake up. So she lifted him up, bedding and all, and carried him outside, setting him down under a tree in the yard.

  Hassan was watching the flaring flames from under his half-closed lids. He saw his mother dragging their huge chest all by herself down the stairs and out into the yard, but made no move to go to her help.

  “Wake up, Hassan, do!” she cried. “You must keep guard over this chest. Everything we own is in it.”

  The night had turned bright as day. Men in white drawers and shirts, some half-naked, scurried about the yard with pails of water, trying to put out the fire. But the blusterous northeaster fanned the flames even higher, casting fiery fragments far out into the village. A few huts had already been reduced to cinders. Parts of the big house had come crashing down, while from the burning barns and stables rose the bellowing of cattle and neighing of horses.

  Hassan continued to feign sleep, while his mother rushed in and out of their burning home to save as many of their things as she could. Every now and again she bent over him and stroked his head.

  “Sleep, my Hassan, sleep,” she murmured. “Nobody suspects a thing. You did well. It serves them right, those heathens. Good for you.”

  In the end Hassan sat up and slapped a hand over her mouth.

  “Shh!” he hissed. “D’you want to give me away? You’ll have me killed. Shh!”

  Quickly, he lay back as though overcome by sleep again.

  As day was breaking he rose and washed his face at the pump. Weary men and women were coming and going among the devastated homesteads. His grandmother was crouching hunched up against the wall of her yard and his mother was still carrying half-burnt objects from the ruins of their house. Then he looked up and saw his nacre-inlaid rifle hanging from a bough. A wave of joy swept over him. He had forgotten it inside the burning house, but not his mother, not his lion of a mother!

  The burnt-out buildings were smoking gently in the morning haze, exuding an odour of burnt wool and flesh that stuck in Hassan’s throat.

  With the help of some farmhands Esmé began to move what had been saved from the fire into a small house with a zinc-sheeted roof under the huge weeping willow beyond the wall of the yard. As for the grandmother, she settled into a two-storied frame-walled house right next to it. So they were neighbours again …

  There was much argument in the village as to who or what had started the fire. Everyone had a theory and suspected someone else.

  For some reason or other, the three sons of Kizir, a poor peasant, were denounced and arrested, and the lamentations and curses of their mother and wives rent the skies for several days.

  Next, suspicion fell upon Black Osman. He was found lying, senseless, in a ditch. Somebody had dealt him four knife wounds.

  The rubble from the fire was soon cleared, with all the villagers lending a hand, and master-builders were brought down from the mountain hamlets to start rebuilding the houses.

  Hassan never went into the village at all. From morning to night he was out hunting in the reed-bed below Anavarza or sitting and dreaming among the thyme-scented crags.

  “Your father, Hassan, your father! I’ve seen your father! A yellow mongrel dog had been at my heels for some time. It was a moonlit night, bright as day. The dog, his tongue hanging, stopped every now and then and raised its head to bay at the moon. As I turned into Alikesik pass, my flesh began to creep. The mongrel dog howled again and before my very eyes it changed into a tall figure in a white shroud! Then, it was a yellow dog again baying at the moon, and again the ghost. And the next thing I knew, both had vanished, but instead I saw in front of me a huge red serpent, so red the darkness glowed all around it. The rocks, the roads, the growing grain in the fields, the reed-beds, all was bathed in its reflection and a fiery torrent of blood cataracted down the Anavarza crags, sweeping everything before it. The earth shook and Halil appeared again swathed in his white shroud, his face a ghastly yellow. He grasped my hands and spoke. “Listen to me, Mollah Hüseyin, oh brother, hear me well! A terrible fate is mine. Hell would be a blessing in comparison. Three days ago I was an ass toiling for a poor indigent peasant. Before that a wild boar in those mountains … A month ago I was a dog at the door of my enemy Abbas’s mother. A swarm of locusts I was once, and they set fire to me. I hopped off as a single grasshopper and got away …”

  Hassan hid his face.

  One day he saw his Uncle Ali standing under the weeping willow tree, signalling to him. He ran up and greeted him with surprise.

  “Where have you been all this time, Uncle Ali?” he asked. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I was running away,” Ali said. “Trying to escape … There’s nothing else I can do, nephew. To the end of my life I’ll be a fugitive.”

  “From whom?” Hassan asked.

  “Fate,” Ali said. “My fate, and perhaps yours too.”

  Hassan bowed his head.

  “Come, Hassan,” his uncle said. “Let’s go up into the crags.”

  “Just let me get my rifle,” Has
san said.

  They set off for Anavarza Castle. Climbing up the old Roman steps, they reached the foot of the castle walls and sat down on a rock. Trucks, cars, buses, carts and harvesters rumbled faintly on the road below. A long dust-devil was speeding across the plain.

  Ali was a tall man, in the prime of youth, but his face was already deeply lined and the skin of his neck creased like an old man’s. His hawk nose lent him a hard, severe look. Yet now he seemed stricken by some unbearable sorrow.

  “It’s too much for me,” he burst out suddenly. “I have to tell someone. Hassan, you can help me, only you … Look, take this. It’s an old Bulgarian revolver, an officer’s revolver. See how beautifully the stock is worked with nacre and ivory? It was your father’s revolver. Your father … Hassan, he’s been pursuing me ever since the night he was murdered. Yes, that very night he materialized before me, a tall shadowy figure, tall as a poplar, pale and white, the nose, the mouth, all its features the very likeness of my brother, yet only an immaterial shadow … He bent over me. Ali, my dear brother Ali, he said, listen to what I have to say. You’re the youngest, the bravest of my three brothers. I depend upon you. My son’s still a tiny child, it’s you who must avenge me, you who must kill her, she who had me murdered. Don’t leave me to wander about the world, a poor ghost … But I could not kill her. She’s too beautiful, Esmé. How could I ever destroy what Allah has so lovingly created? The night your father was buried I took this very revolver you see here and penetrated into your house to kill her. She looked straight into my eyes, a thing of beauty, and spoke. Kill me, she said, kill me but don’t let my son ever know an uncle of his did it. You’d make an enemy of him for life, make him hate his father’s family. I know you won’t rest till you’ve killed me, so do it now and let me be delivered. She lowered her lovely head. Come on, shoot, she said … My hand trembled. I could not press the trigger. How could I kill this heavenly woman, the like of which Allah could only make once in a thousand years? Sister, I said, I cannot kill you. I cannot raise my hand against so beautiful a creature of Allah. I’m going away. I shan’t stay here. Let someone else kill you if it has to be done. I can’t … And so I fled. But there was no escape from Halil. He was after me in his white shroud, imploring, weeping like a child. I can’t do it, Halil, I can’t, I kept repeating. If it had been anyone but Esmé, my own mother even, I’d have done it, to save you from being a ghost. But not Esmé, never, never, never! Even you couldn’t have killed her, Halil. No man can … Halil flung himself down of all his length, moaning so dreadfully that the earth shook and trembled at the sound. Kill her, kill her, he wailed, no man can do it, but you must. You must, to save me. You love her, I know it, no man can help falling in love with Esmé. Didn’t I do so? And an incurable passion it was … Yet see me now! See what a horrible fate is mine … Oh, how he pleaded with me!”