To Crush the Serpent

by Yashar Kemal

  Ali fled to Mersin by the sea. It was no use. Halil was there beside him, looking him humbly in the eye …

  Kill her, kill her, Ali. My grave is infested with snakes and vermin, scorpions, worms, all slowly slowly eating me up, so slowly they’ll only have finished on the Day of Doom. Save me Ali, kill her. My son’s so small yet, only a baby. And his mother’s so lovely … Ah Ali, I’m still in love with her, yes, even though she had me killed …

  Ali took to flight again. He went to Istanbul. Halil followed him there too. Everywhere he went, Halil appeared to him, forever adjuring him to kill, kill, kill.

  “Three times I came back swearing a solemn oath to kill Esmé, to save my brother. But my hand would not obey me. I’ll never be able to do it, never. So I’m giving you this revolver, Hassan, your father’s revolver. You’re a grown lad now, a man. Your father’s blood is on your own head from now on.”

  He rose abruptly.

  “But so beautiful a creature …” he murmured. “No one, no one will ever have the heart to kill her.”

  He turned from Hassan and without a word of farewell, disappeared down the crags.

  He heard old Dursun speaking to him. “Don’t heed the devil, son. Don’t do anything to your beautiful mother …”

  And the wide plain turned into a sea before his eyes. He’d seen the sea once, down below Payas Castle. His mother had been with him. He remembered all those ships too …

  He was getting into a ship with his mother. The ship sailed through a dense forest and then, before them, barring the way, were the crags of Mount Hemité, but her pointed prow cleaved through and white foam spurted from the mauve crags.

  “Stop!” his Uncle Ali shouted. “I’m going to kill you both, now I’ve caught you together …”

  The ship crashed on through the crags, in a surging foam of mauve. Something like blue rain fell over them and mauve crags spilled down on the ship. Ali had levelled Halil’s nacre-inlaid revolver at them. He was going to shoot. Hassan cowered on the deck, sick with fear.

  “Stones will rain over the Chukurova plain! Still alive, all of poor Halil’s brothers, all, his son too, and none to avenge him …?”

  He is running through the mauve reed-bed, Halil, his two hands clutching his wound. The reeds are strange, hewed to a sharp point, piercing Halil’s legs, his arms, his chest. Save me, save me, he screams, his eyes starting from their sockets, and stumbles into the swamp. Blood gushes from the swamp and Halil’s head bobs in and out, in and out of the bloodstained water.

  “Snakes will rain on the Chukurova, locusts, vermin, reptiles, huge monstrous lizards … Adana, Jeyhan, Misis, Tarsus, all the towns will be destroyed by floods, nothing but swamp will the whole plain be. Mosquitoes and ants will finish off the people …”

  He saw his father, as plain as can be, holding his sides and laughing at him, contempt on his face. He heard him clearly. “This, a man? This, my son? No better than a beast …”

  The grandmother had taken to her bed. She looked utterly wasted. There were green circles under her eyes and her hands, too, were tinged with green.

  “I’m dying, Hassan,” she said. “But I won’t let myself die! If I die there’ll be no one left to seek revenge for my son. Not one of you has been man enough to do it. And as for Ali, that shameless uncle of yours, he wants to marry that woman, your mother, his own brother’s murderer! He’s left home and village and is roving up hill and down dale, mad with love for her. Oh, I know she’s beautiful, I know her beauty casts a spell on whoever attempts to kill her … I’ve spent a fortune, my Hassan, a fortune trying to have her done away with …”

  Not even young boys had the heart to kill Esmé …

  Up in the mountain hamlet of Jankizak lived the notorious Haji Eshkiya,3 a retired bandit, who had seven sons, all of them under age, ranging from eight to eighteen years. These children found themselves holding a gun before they were out of leading-strings and grew up in the company of bushy-mustached former bandits, so that in a very few years they could hit a flying crane in the eye, a running rabbit in its hind leg. That was what Haji Eshkiya was waiting for. Minors could not be brought to book …

  A very rich man he was, this Haji Eshkiya. Anybody with an enemy he wanted to get rid of posted straight to Haji Eshkiya and put the matter to him. Give me one of your sons, Haji, he’d beg, and let him put paid to that enemy of mine. How much do you want? … A hundred thousand liras, Haji Eshkiya would say, not a jot less. Think of the risks. Why, they’ve started throwing children too into prison these days! It’s not as though a man’s life can be reckoned in money. Not by all the gold in the world it can’t. But what can we do, we’ve had to take up this cursed trade and must make the best of it …

  The grandmother agreed to pay the price, but the next thing she knew, Haji Eshkiya’s son, only a boy yet, had brought back the gun she had given him, without firing a shot. I can’t do it, grandmother, he said, my eyes were dazzled when I saw Esmé, I was tied hand and foot. Anyone else, Hassan if you like, I’ll kill for you, but not Esmé.

  So many many children are reared in the mountains up there just to kill for money, so many a man would do it too just for a price, but not one was to be found to kill Esmé.

  “And you can’t do it either, my Hassan. You’d never have the heart to kill your beautiful mother. But mark my words, she’ll bring another man into my son’s bed, some vermin like that Abbas … Ah, my son, my Halil, so handsome I hardly dared to kiss him, they have stained him all in blood … How can I bear it, how can I live on with my son’s murderer preening herself insolently in front on me, free to go and come as she pleases?”

  A raging northeaster was blowing, uprooting trees, sweeping away stacks of grain, churning up the dust of the roads, shaking the very crags. Eagles hovered in the sky, breasting the blusterous wind.

  Hassan was trapped in a circle of fire, and the circle was growing smaller and smaller. Tall flames, the height of five men atop each other, were closing down on him. He felt himself stifling.

  “You’ve not had a bite of food these last three days, my darling.”

  Beads of sweat stood out on Hassan’s brow.

  “Darling, if you go on without food like this …”

  Hassan turned on his side. He would not look at Esmé.

  “Hassan, if a person doesn’t eat anything for three whole days …”

  His face was burning.

  “D’you want to die?”

  Yes, Hassan wanted to die. Aaah, if only he could die!

  No one looked at him any more. People turned away when they saw him, even his uncles now, even the village dogs seemed to shrink from him.

  They knew, everyone knew, who had started the fire. Anything could be expected of someone who let his father go unavenged, condemned to be a poor wretched ghost. Such a one would set fire to houses and to people too if he got the chance.

  And the swallow nests? Who had destroyed them, killing all those poor chicks? Only a degenerate son like Hassan would harm poor dumb creatures and, God knows, little children too …

  “But look at him! Just look at his nerve!”

  “Gadding about all over the place as though he’s done something to be proud of!”

  “A snake, that’s what he looks like, a poisonous snake.”

  “Holding his nose in the air, damn him, as though …”

  “As though he’d killed his father’s murderer.”

  The burs of the prickly pears he had been picking had stuck into his hands. But no matter. A little fine sand rubbed over them would soon make them come out.

  He hardly felt their prick. He was wandering about the village again, anxiously listening for what people might be saying, but nobody seemed to be talking about his father any more, at least not in front of him. After all these months, after all these years of making it their one topic, could it be that they had forgotten the murder, the ghost, everything? No, no, Hassan was sure it couldn’t be so. It was just that people fell silent when they s
aw him, which made him all the more avid to know.

  And when one day he managed to ferret something out of another boy, he felt strangely elated …

  Halil was still madly in love with Esmé. Every night, he rose from his grave just to catch a glimpse of her. He longed to make love to her, poor ghost, but that was impossible, so he would probably end up by strangling her, and her bloated body, livid, purple, would be discovered one day among the Anavarza crags.

  Swallows, eagles, snakes were pursuing him, all burning in a great fire. Sleep would not come to him at night, and with the first cockcrow he rose and climbed up to the top of the Anavarza crags. There, below the old ramparts of the castle, he stared down into the precipice that dropped into the plain, a sheer descent of rock.

  Then, in the half-light of dawn, he began to step along the jagged rocks, balanced on the very edge of the precipice. The plain below was paved with marble, the remains of some ancient Roman edifice. One false step and he would be smashed to smithereens on that marble. He knew it, oh how well he knew it, but still he went on, his heart in his mouth, yet willing himself to walk on, and when he came to the end of the narrow knife-edged rocks, he looked down into the shadowy depths and breathed again. This time too he’d done it. He hadn’t fallen. Exhilarated, he ran back all the way to the village.

  It was the same every day.

  “People in this village shouldn’t speak to that boy any more,” Crazy Haydar stated, his withered cheeks sunk into the cavities of his toothless mouth. “He’s got a curse on him. Every night he goes up there, every night, and … I’ve seen him with my own eyes.”

  “That’s right,” Stoneheart Remzi said. He was a former bandit who’d taken to the hills after hacking his sister to pieces. “We must take no notice of him at all. He’ll go mad that one, or else he’ll yet … Who knows …”

  “Well, I for one will talk to him,” Old Meryem declared. Her voice was no louder than the whine of a mosquito. “I wouldn’t want the poor boy to die or go mad. It’s bad enough for him with his father a ghost.”

  “Besides, he’s such a sweet boy,” Zala said. They called her Flirty Zala in the village. “Why, if he were just a little older I’d make him run away with me, I would!”

  “I’ve seen him too, walking on the edge of that precipice,” Mustan said, twiddling the hairs of his long sparse beard. “And let me tell you this, it’s his father who takes him up there every night, holds him by the hand and makes him walk right on the edge of the precipice. In the dark too! But he’ll cast Hassan down the crags one of these days, mark my words …”

  For some time now his grandmother had refused to talk to him. When he visited her she turned in her bed, her face to the wall, and only moved again, muttering curses under her breath, as he was leaving the room.

  This morning he dressed carefully and after making a good breakfast he went straight up to her room.

  “Speak to me, Granny. Talk to me about my father. Tell me why he’s become a ghost. Tell me how he’s to be saved. Speak. Is it true that he’s being devoured by worms and vermin? Tell me …”

  That’s what they said. They were eating him up, Halil, the worms, every day, and then every night he rose from his grave, a ghost …

  “How is it that he’s eaten up like that, Granny?”

  But she obstinately refused to say a word to him.

  It was the same with his uncles, his cousins, the village children … Sometimes it seemed to him that even his mother was dumb.

  The sun was beating down on Hassan’s head and the stream alongside flowed in an incandescent glow.

  He was running away, pressing on down Dumlu way, to where Dumlu Castle trembled in a reddish veil of smoke. The hot dust burnt his bare feet and he was dying of thirst.

  The cool southwester began to blow as evening fell and still Hassan did not take a pause, not even to refresh himself at the stream and quench his thirst. But now his legs were dragging him backwards. He was afraid of what lay before him, afraid of what he had left behind.

  Suddenly, he wheeled about and without knowing it found himself speeding back to the village. It was midnight when he reached the foot of the Anavarza crags. They loomed above him, soaring higher in the darkness. Booming sounds came from up the old ramparts and also the howl of a large animal in pain. The wind shook the trees and bushes and rocks.

  As fast as he could Hassan clambered up and came panting to the foot of the ramparts. His hands and feet were cut and bleeding, but he did not hesitate. He went at once to the edge of the precipice and started balancing himself on the knife-edged rocks, walking as on a tightrope. There was a thundering roar in his ears. The thought of the yawning depths below made him sway, but he kept on, taut, quivering, drunk with terror.

  Suddenly, a shadowy figure rose in front of him. Hassan cast himself down to the side. In the same instant the figure was on him, pressing upon his chest. He screamed, but not a sound came out of him. Then, gradually the stranglehold on his throat relaxed and he began to breathe again.

  After a while he rose. His knees were shaking, but once more he climbed onto the razor edge of the precipice and started balancing himself, walking from one end to the other, ever more recklessly, just as though he were performing a light country dance.

  The dawn found him still tottering along the rock edge. Far down below, all whirling together in one dizzy mass, he saw the stream, only a tiny rivulet now, narrow ribbons that were the roads, ant-like people. A finger-sized red truck swirled in the dust. Round and round it went as Hassan collapsed into a cleft among the rocks.

  For a long time he did not move. The sun was high now, the rocks hot. Hassan was sweating, but he lay there in a daze, not even knowing whether it was day or night. Translucent red snakes glided between the rocks, casting a ruddy glow about them. His father Halil, swathed in his white shroud, was killing them. At every blow sparks shot up into the sky and fell back in a shower of stars. Yet the snakes reared up again and again before they dropped dead. Hard-cased lustrous insects rattled across the rocks and paths. Small button-sized white snails were plastered over the bushes, the trees, the flowers, over every blade of grass, millions and millions …

  He tried to raise his limp body, but the pain was too much for him. Yet he must get up, he must, in spite of his fears, his dizziness, he must walk once more on the sharp narrow edge of the precipice. He felt he would die if he didn’t. Dragging himself to the rocks, he heaved himself up and gazed out at the remote depths. The vast plain stretched on, perfectly flat, right up to the foothills of the Gavur Mountains. Hemité Castle, Yilankalé, Toprakkalé4 were wrapped in a haze, but the plain was aglow, bathed in light. Only the chasm below loured darkly, threatening. Hassan did not look down. Rallying his last remaining strength, he leaped onto the rocks and moved forward, walking with one foot almost treading the emptiness. It was worse, much more terrifying in the daylight. His head whirled, his body went limp. He could not take another step. He stood there, on the edge of the void, swaying backward and forward, knowing he could not but fall. His eyes were blacking out, then in turn being blinded by a strong dazzling light. And the deafening roar in his ears increased as he swayed.

  At last he sank back senseless onto the rocks. If he had fainted in his forward motion, he would now have been lying smashed to pieces on the marble-paved surface below. The eagles, swarming in hundreds, would have picked at his flesh and finished him even as he fell.

  The white-shrouded figure had come again, driving a horde of red snakes before him.

  “Hassan,” he was saying, “aren’t you my son Hassan, my very own progeny? Can’t you save your father? Here you see me, herding hundreds of red snakes, but they’re not really snakes at all. Every one of them is a man whose murder has not been avenged, who is doomed to haunt the world as a red snake, and the demons of hell have made me their shepherd. A shepherd of red serpents, Hassan! How can you bear to see your father in this state, how? Have you no pity? Aaah, to crush the serpent, Hassan, to c
rush the serpent …”

  Dead swallows, flames, stones from the ramparts hailed down upon Hassan. He took to his heels, running for his life, fleeing before that horde of red serpents …

  The village was humming with talk again. Esmé and the ghost of Halil were on everyone’s tongue from seven to seventy. Halil had come back, they said. People had seen him. It was his mother he’d gone to first. And afterwards, longing for his village, he’d come to sit there, under a fragrant orange tree. People swore they’d heard his voice crying out in anguish.

  “A shepherd of snakes, they’ve made me, the demons of hell, of red flaming snakes. And then they’ll turn me into a long transparent red serpent … Ah good people, please don’t let me be a serpent! If only they would crush the serpent … Ah, to crush the serpent …”

  Then, with a great bang, he had burst into fragments and red snakes had started to rain over the village.