To Crush the Serpent

by Yashar Kemal

  The grandmother seemed to have relented. There was a soft look on her face as she greeted Hassan. She made him sit down and stroked his hair for a while. She even spoke to him. Hassan was overjoyed. That meant people would start talking to him again. This time too, he had been spared. He drank in her words with rapt attention.

  “Halil rises from his grave because of his black passion, my Hassan. Did you know that? It’s jealousy makes him haunt the village. How can I lie here, he says, how can I rest if she gives herself to another man, my own peerless beauty? Ah, my Hassan, that your father’s bed should be so defiled! Your brave handsome father … Come, come nearer to me, my child. Listen!”

  She drew him to her breast and went on in a whisper.

  “How can you know, my darling, you’re still a child, though you’ve grown into a sturdy lad these last years, almost a man … How can a mother with a stalwart son like you do such things? How can she take a man into her bed every night? It’s a fact and not a person in this village who doesn’t know it. Even then, even though your father’s blood lies unavenged, no one can bring himself to kill her. Because she’s so beautiful. And no one ever will. But you, my Hassan, what’s to become of you? How will you ever be able to look people in the face? Won’t you be disgraced for ever? All your life people will speak of you as Hassan, the son of that whore. Never, never till kingdom come will you efface that stigma. I’ve not long to live, Hassan. And what shall I leave behind me? A son killed and unavenged, a grandson with a blot on his name …”

  She held his head away from her and looked at him. His face was deathly pale. She had struck home at last. Children could be jealous even of a mother, a father …

  “It’s no use waiting up nights to try and surprise her,” she went on, elated. “Your mother’s very cunning. A woman who’s bent on deceiving her husband will always find a way. She can get together with her lover, making her husband hold her drawers for her, and he not a whit the wiser. So don’t expect to see anything for yourself. Go out into the village and see if there’s anyone left who doesn’t know about your mother’s goings-on with other men.”

  On and on she talked, always stressing Esmé’s fatal, irresistible beauty.

  Hassan left her side reeling, an unbearable ache in his heart. He could not help himself. He made straight for the village square and found that whoever he met was now willing, even eager to talk to him.

  And so he listened. For a month, for two months he listened to people telling tales about his mother’s whoring. Their words haunted his mind. He was forever seeing a beautiful woman’s legs, her face, her body, naked, enfolded in some man’s embrace. It was driving him mad, yet still he listened. He must hear what they were saying, he had to know.

  As for the villagers, it was as though the grandmother had cast a charm over them all. Whatever she said they repeated over and over again, enlarging upon it a hundredfold. The grandmother held the whole village under a sinister spell, even Hassan. His mother would die. Esmé must die …

  “This is too much, brother. Too much for a man to bear.”

  “If this doesn’t kill Hassan, if he can stomach his mother’s whoring …”

  “Then there’s no blood in him!”

  “Well, if there was, would he have suffered his father’s murderer to live on another minute, even though it be his mother?”

  “He’s got tainted blood, tainted …”

  “They say that when a man comes at night to his mother, strips her naked and begins to do his stuff, Hassan stands by and watches. And gets a kick out of it too!”

  “Gaping … All eyes!”

  “Even his mother felt some shame once. Go away, she said, does a man ever look at his mother like this? And what do you know? Hassan burst into tears. But I want to, he bawled. I want to see it all.”

  “Imagine! He enjoys seeing his mother billing and cooing with any fellow that comes along!”

  “He even threatened to kill her.”

  “If you take a man into your bed when I’m not there to see, he said, if you dare to keep it secret from me …”

  “Now what did his mother say to that?”

  “What could the poor wretch say? I’m a widow, she said. They’ve killed my husband, so I need a man. It’s a shameful thing for a son to look on while his mother’s making love, but if I can’t stop you, what can I do? I can’t live without men.”

  “That she can’t!”

  “She’s like an Arab mare in heat, that one.”

  “She’d handle all the men of the village in a single night.”

  “Yes, and cry out for more in broad daylight!”

  “But what can Hassan do about all this? He’s only a child.”

  “Nonsense, he’s a grown lad, damn him!”

  “How can he just stand by and look on his mother’s private parts and all?”

  “But how can the boy know? If his own mother takes a man into her bed, how can he know it’s wrong?”

  “If you ask me, I think he’s just biding his time,”

  “Heh! What patience!”

  “Well, that’s how it is. Would any child, especially a child like Hassan, bear to see his mother whoring and not do something about it?”

  “A man can bear anything except to have a whore for a mother.”

  “Just you wait! One of these days …”

  “He’s a crack shot Hassan, you know. He’ll finish her off, and the man covering her too.”

  “Don’t make me laugh! Doesn’t Esmé know this? Why doesn’t she take the precaution to hide herself from Hassan? Because she’s sure as death he’ll never touch a hair of her head.”

  “That’t true enough. She’s his mother after all and the most beautiful woman in the world. Such a beautiful woman has to be generous with herself …”

  “How can Halil forget such a beauty? He comes to her in the guise of a red snake. A huge snake, that long, but transparent, a red snake you can see through …”

  “Poor Halil, he coils himself up in front of her, just to gaze at his Esmé. And then he sees her with all those other men. A ghost, a poor ghost … There’s nothing he can do about it.”

  “Only a snake, transparent, made of thin air! How can he take his revenge?”

  “But there’s still Hassan to be reckoned with. You people don’t really know Hassan. He’s not one to bear with a whoring mother.”

  “But he’s only a child! And anyway, how could anyone kill Esmé?”

  “A beauty the like of which Allah will never make again …”

  “And these people want to kill her, just because that doddering old crone tells them to!”

  “Enemies of beauty, they are, enemies of Allah!”

  “Allah who so proudly fashioned her …”

  “Well, it would’ve been better if he hadn’t. She’s just a curse on us all.”

  “But why? Why? There’s no harm in her.”

  “No harm! Who is it, then, strolls through the village day in day out, swinging her hips and turning every man’s head?”

  “It’s such a pity for her …”

  “Then let her go back to her village.”

  “She won’t.”

  “She wouldn’t! They say there are a hundred beauties like her in that village. Here, she’s the only one …”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. As if Allah had the time to make another Esmé, let alone a hundred! She’s unique.”

  “There isn’t another woman to match her.”

  “And to think she’s going to be killed!”

  “By her own son too!”

  “Ah, the godless son! To kill his own mother …”

  “They’d do anything in that family.”

  “Ready to kill they are, every man of them. They’d wipe out not only a mother, but their whole race if they had the chance.”

  “Poor Esmé.”

  “They’ll have her killed.”

  “Hassan will do it.”

  “And he being a child they can’t send him to
prison either.”

  “They’ll all get off scot-free …”

  And then, one day, all the talk and gossip was cut short and an unnatural stillness fell over the village. It seemed to Hassan that no one spoke anymore, not a single villager, not a word, not a murmur. Every day he paid a visit to his grandmother, but she too never opened her mouth either. She might just as well have been dead, and all the others too. Was it because they had stopped talking about his father and mother? The subject was forgotten, buried away as though it had never existed. Hassan wandered about the village, looking hopefully, almost pleadingly, at whoever he came across, but … Nothing … He could have talked to the trees and streams and begged for mercy, he could have done anything to break this awful silence.

  The swallows were no more, their twittering hushed, their nests empty. Eagles still swirled in the depths of the skies, but not a swish of their wings could be heard. All those red snakes and insects, the phantoms in their long white shrouds, the yellow dogs that bayed every night in the graveyard, everything had vanished without a trace. The world was utterly empty.

  As a last hope he went to the precipice below the ramparts of Anavarza Castle and began to walk along the razor-like crags on its edge. The sun beat down mercilessly upon him. One slip and he would hurtle down the craggy depths, dashed to pieces. To pieces! He tried to figure to himself the horror of it, yet he felt nothing, no fear, not the slightest tremor. Down below, the trucks still crept along the roads like toy things, people were only ants and the wide stream a narrow ribbon on the plain. But his head was perfectly steady and it seemed that even if he fell he would never know fear again.

  His eyes fixed on the yawning depths, he attempted to summon some emotion, some feeling akin to fear, but in vain. He broke into a run, dashing along that razor’s edge, wheeling, running again. Nothing happened, nothing, nothing …

  He gave it up and rushed back home. His mother was there, and all at once a racking shudder shook him from top to toe. Quivering with dread, he escaped into the village. But even as he ran that unbearable void enveloped him again. He must go back …

  Near his mother, he was seized with terror, trembling of all his limbs, beside himself. Far from her he was bereft of life, utterly drained.

  Esmé had fired the earth-oven in the yard and flames were leaping up from the hole.

  Hassan stood at a distance, playing with a revolver. It was his father’s revolver. As the flames subsided, his mother bent over the oven. Hassan was shaking again. His flesh crept and his head whirled. Only his mother stood out clearly in front of his eyes. She was surrounded by flames. Suddenly, the revolver he was holding exploded. There was a piercing scream. The revolver burst out again, and again.

  An odour of burning hair and flesh mounted in the air. Everything went blank for Hassan. The revolver dangling from his hand, he stagggered round and round the oven in which his mother’s head was buried, her hair aflame. Then he turned and fled towards the Anavarza crags.

  Three days later his dog tracked him down in that ancient Roman sarcophagus. The lid was drawn almost shut over him. The dog must have followed his smell right up into the crags, his master’s smell.

  A few months ago, I saw Hassan again. He came to visit me where I am living now and told me how well he was faring. He owned plenty of land, three harvesters, five tractors … He had built a mansion for himself, set in seven acres of orange groves, and he couldn’t have enough of describing its splendour to me. He had got married too. A lovely wife he had, and six children by now, three boys and three girls.

  We reminisced on our prison days, on that Agha who had killed four people, but still performed his namaz prayers five times a day, on the cowardly wretch Lütfi … Hassan said that back in the Chukurova people were becoming worse and worse, cruel, hard, inhuman. There was not a man you could call a friend anymore. Ready to gouge each other’s eyes out they were, for a mere five kurush a man would kill his own father … Hassan himself avoided mixing among them as much as he could. His home was so beautiful, the orange flowers smelled so good in the spring …

  1 Baggy trousers worn by both men and women in rural Turkey.

  2 A summer shelter built on stilts.

  3 Haji: a person who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Eshkiya: bandit

  4 All old medieval castles.

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  Harvill Secker is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © Yashar Kemal 1976

  English translation © Thilda Kemal 1991

  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 by Harvill in 1991

  First published under the title Yilani Öldürseler in Istanbul in 1976

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781846559648