The Tale of Aypi

by Ak Welsapar

  “What is there not to understand?” she sneered, her eyes filling with menace. “I understand quite a lot now, and you’re teaching me the rest. I can see life around us; I’m not blind.” The ghost got out of the car, but to avoid alarming the boy too soon, she left behind an excuse. “Relax, let me take a look around. If someone suddenly saw us, now for instance, it would be bad for us both, whatever the time or the era. Once, these people were so principled!”

  She walked over the dune and out of sight.

  18

  Aypi vanished behind the dune, then flew up into the sky. She hovered for a moment, listening and looking down on the desert and the world, with its thousand dreams and commotions, before returning to the youth’s side. Just as though nothing had happened, she resumed the discussion.

  “You know, I used to be a sacrifice to naivety. Now though, there’s nothing hidden from me in the whole world, I can see it all. May I say what it is you men need?”

  “Uh… fine,” he muttered.

  “Here’s how it is: You men thirst for absolute control. So you need, as you’ll see, some peculiar, fussy, beautiful little wife to defile – mouthless and voiceless, like a trained dog standing on its hind legs before you! If it’s not true, tell me! When you didn’t find its ilk here, you became anxious -no, not anxious, but truly panicked and exasperated! So you went hunting for a wife in the city, the desert, the jungle! Some of your friends have brought wives from across the sea, haven’t they? You men aren’t looking for wives, but concubines. When you don’t find them here, you won’t stint to bring them from anywhere else on earth.”

  The young man, somewhat stupefied by the cognac, resisted jocularly.

  “No, my friends aren’t looking for concubines anywhere. They find love! What difference does it make if they’re foreign, aren’t they women too? Don’t they have a right to marry and be happy? My friends go off and when they see a woman they want, they love her and return with her.”

  Aypi decided to show him that there were few secrets still unrevealed:

  “Put that fairy-tale out to pasture! What do love and emotions have to do with going from country to country looking for some particular woman? That’s just commodity trading! If you find the necessary commodity, you buy it. If you bring some trafficked wife from beyond the ocean, then what? Where can you find some woman who does just as she’s told, and not stay true to herself? Will you quest in the Amazon jungle for some brute who’ll trade her honour for luxury? It’s all because you’re gutless and lack self-confidence! That’s why you’re looking for a deaf-dumb woman!”

  “Lies!” shouted Kerem. My friends are individuals, and they can marry foreign women if they want!”

  “There’s no shortage of women here either, for a determined man!” laughed Aypi, after clapping her hands. “I’ve only lived a short time in this world, but I’ve realized one truth: The thing men most fear is independent females. You want dependent wives. This priceless ruby necklace once frightened men into murder, so they, wrapping it up in pretty words, took revenge on me.”

  Kerem hiccupped. “She imagines that awful knick-knack on her neck is worth something,” he thought to himself. “She has no idea the amount of money that’s circulating in today’s world.” Outwardly though, he took a different approach:

  “Your necklace is an international treasure, it’s not even a matter of price – it enhances even your beauty. Any man who lays eyes on it would become a pilgrim in your wake!”

  “And if I took advantage of that,” she asked ironically, “and cast off this country, what then? Girls can be individuals too; can’t they find husbands from other nations for themselves?”

  “Them? They’re sluts!” he shouted breathlessly, without a trace of his former tact. “If they’re so motivated, there’s no shortage of men right here!”

  “Ah-ha! Is that how it is? If you bring foreign wives here, that’s self-determination, but if a woman marries a foreigner, she’s a slut! What hypocritical creatures you are! Our women and girls are sick of it! You can’t even make them feel like real women, you mama’s boys. Do you think they won’t go looking for real men?”

  “They’re chopping down our nation and taking an axe to the root of our race!”

  “No,” responded Aypi calmly, “you’re the ones taking an axe to the root. Our women are victims of your spineless behaviour!”

  “You’re wrong!” objected Kerem, in near bewilderment. “We’re not spineless, we do whatever we want: Last month my friend brought a 47-kilogram wife from abroad!”

  Aypi spluttered, and if she had had living breath, it would have caught in her throat, even without that sip of cognac. Then, taking hold of herself, she barked, “What sort of nonsense is this? Now you’re trading them by the kilo, you degenerate?”

  Kerem answered smugly, without batting an eyelid. “This world is one big market. My buddy needed a 47-kilo wife. So what did he do? He contacted a company he knew of, and they sent him a wife from Thailand of exactly that size. Don’t think he bought her unseen! First he picked out her picture and became so obsessed that he couldn’t live without her. He transferred the necessary sum to this company, and secured his happiness! The product arrived at the specified time.”

  “And what if she gains weight?” rasped Aypi, unable to restrain herself. “Is she not allowed to eat or drink?”

  “She won’t gain weight. The company guaranteed it; but if she does, he can exchange her at the seller’s expense. This is really love, my friend is great at that: as soon as he seems ‘em, he’s in love! Her too.”

  Aypi could see that the degradation of women relied on the most refined methods in this age.

  “Barbarians! Savages!” she whispered. “Where is the place you call Thailand?”

  ”The other end of Asia. In the olden times they used to call it Siam. How could I explain it to you... Have you ever heard of Mongolia? It’s beyond that!”

  ”Why don’t you just say Chin-Machin?!”

  Kerem tried to do his best to explain, saying ”No no, it’s not Chin-Machin.”

  ”What kind of country could be there besides Chin-Machin?! Afterwards it’s just water! The end of the world in the east is Chin-Machin and in the west is Pereng, and everybody knows it!”

  ”All right, all right. But the world doesn’t end in Iran.”

  ”Of course not” said Aypi frowning. ”The Earth ends in the south at Mount Kaf, at the other side of Hebeshistan. And in the north the world ends in Saklab!”

  “I love your sense of humour, go on” said Kerem. He took a sip of cognac and continued recklessly. “So anyway, my pal doesn’t degrade anyone. He just gets the product he requires. The reason for the whole thing is that he has an antique Louis XIV style Marquetry bed, made by Boulle himself! You can’t imagine, cost as much as a villa. What sort of idiot would put any more weight than necessary on the thing? See, he weighs 103 kilos, and the most the bed can hold is 150 kilos. So he’s got to find a wife that will fit the bed, right? And so he did, exactly 47 kilos!”

  “Can you imagine anything more disgusting?” exploded Aypi. “If you’d just once put yourself in the shoes of these women! Where are their rights? Where’s the humanity? It’s so uncivilized!”

  “Relax, baby-doll,” said Kerem, “Your perspective is too soft-hearted for the modern world. It’s… like your necklace. Is there anyone else who thinks like you? Everyone lives by their own rules. If you’ve got time, let me explain something.”

  “My time is your time,” she lamented. “Have these mortals time enough for me?”

  “Then listen. Another of my buddies also got himself a foreign woman. He had a business idea, and in order to implement it, he needed one more little cog – and he found it in the heart of Asia. Now his business is running fine, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.

  We live in a market economy, everything is exactly
as Karl Marx said: money-commodity-money! But Karl Marx has made a mistake, if he had said money-commodity-money love, it would have been most appropriate! Then his theory would have worked forever; it would’ve become a total perpetuum mobile! To cut the story short, the woman whom my friend had brought over works hard day and night and is making a heap of money. He’s got a Mercedes and she’s got a Vespa. They’re both satisfied – they both have achieved their childhood dream and what else does a person need?” he laughed merrily. “May it be ever so!”

  “Your friend couldn’t set this idea in motion himself?”

  “No, he just had the idea,” said this representative of the village’s new generation, speaking as an economist. “Not the motivation for daily work. If you’re going to open a restaurant that offers foreign cuisines and earn money that way, you have to act accordingly. If you aren’t married, where are you gonna get cheap labour? True love creates the true motivation to work! Love is the greatest stimulant to labour!”

  “So there wasn’t a deserving woman to be found in this country?”

  “This country’s women talk too much!”

  “Women are women everywhere. Won’t the ones from other countries be just the same as the local variety after a few years here? What if they get just as demanding as our local women?”

  “They’ll need a lot time for that and by then either the prince will die or the pauper! One of my friends says that whenever his import wife begins to cry, he just hands her 1,000 manat and sends her into the city to spend it. So she wanders around, buys stuff and comes back happy. Unfortunately, we don’t have any women like that left; ours need other things to make them happy. Endless demands tire men out.”

  “This isn’t business, and it isn’t love either,” Aypi sighed. “It’s just oppression of women, and pig headedness of men!”

  “Hey, don’t exaggerate! And you don’t give enough credit to love! You know, my friends have smooth parquet floors in their houses and polished tableware. If you don’t have a bubbling jacuzzi to warm yourself up as well, what’s the use of an imported wife?”

  “What does that stuff have to do with love?” asked Aypi incredulously.

  “It’s obvious you’ve been buried in the sand, when it comes to modern love! You get your import-wife on all-fours and on top of four dishes, and chase her around the floor! Have a great time! Then, you get the jacuzzi bubbling and dive into the bubbles where she’ll nibble on your toes one by one, count them, love them – from one foot to the other! Ah, you’re still too young to understand this sort of thing!”

  “Oh, that’s how it is?” asked Aypi through bloodless lips, her eyes flashing. “I can see what you need. Basically, someone who’ll rear up on hind legs when you show them a fish, or sit happily before you like a pet dog; a cringing creature called a wife!”

  Kerem ignored her displeasure. “Basically,” he said, gravely repeating his word, “This world’s all about gain! Otherwise, you’ll be left behind and left hungry. It’s not morality, religion, or culture that makes the world turn.”

  “Then what does?”

  “Hey, you said you knew everything! But not this?”

  “I don’t! If you do, tell me!”

  “Okay, in this world, profit is what really matters! Religion, culture, and even the morality that every age cloaks itself in are all just means to a gain! I don’t know who first made up this rule, but we have inherited it from our fathers, who kneeled before the worst dictators ever in order to stay alive! They’ve instilled this mind-set in us, so it’s not fair for them to be offended by anything we do now – I mean the ones that keep saying they’re moral and we’re immoral. That’s total hypocrisy! What kind of morality is it, that’s built on daily fear and lies? All this talk of morality is just a pretty skin to cover up coercion! As soon as it’s removed from ideology, it dissolves into thin air.”

  “Sooner or later, you’ll all be victims of your own injustice!” said Aypi, whose every word betrayed her increasing anger.

  “Perhaps,” said Kerem unconcernedly, “but don’t let that put you out. I’m not the one who created injustice, it’s how the world is made and no one else has any plan to fix it. When they try to chip away at injustice, they just end up making it worse. It’s no different with us. For example, we were once a third world country, so the developed countries exploited us. Now we’re a little wealthier and we ourselves can exploit the third world at our leisure. As you can see, the world is set up tier by tier. The strongest exploit us, and we exploit anyone weaker. What’s so strange about this? It’s like you’ve just arrived here from the Moon. You know a lot, but you understand nothing. You’ve got blinders on because of your strict morality. If you want, I’ll try to explain it to you in simple terms: If men look for wives from across the seven seas, it’s just their response to reality. In our times, the harmony between the sexes that nature designed has been messed up. Women’ve lost their natural personality, and men’ve become too submissive and they can’t take it anymore. As a result, they’re forced to look for the endangered tribe of natural women in dense jungles!” he said, laughing.

  “Is that so? So what does it mean if a woman flees the country to look for a husband? Maybe they just want to live as simple women and with men who can take care of themselves? Is it the woman’s fault that harmony between the sexes has been upset?”

  “No, but the women were the first to disrupt it, and they’ll be the ultimate victims. They’ll never get husbands.”

  “’A stone with a hole in it,” exclaimed Aypi, “never stays on the ground, there’s always a boy to poke a stick through it!’ Women will never have trouble finding men! It was men who broke the peace!”

  “No, women!”

  “Men!”

  “Women blame everything on men,” said Kerem, “but they’re wrong, you know.”

  “Fine. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. So, you’re also one of these men on a quest, right?”

  Kerem found it difficult to give a straight answer to this. He took a sip of cognac and reflected for a moment. When he finally opened his mouth, the cognac had gone to his head.

  “It must be strange to hear this from a newly married guy, but I won’t lie to you. Yes, I’m looking. My wife is cosmopolitan and emascul– em– er, mensa– emancipated! That kind of woman isn’t a normal woman. She’s more like a supporter or partner: in bed, in childbearing, or professionally. Men though are looking for a real woman, even if she is from the jungle. Hey, come closer babydoll! Let me hold that little body of yours! Even if it’s lighter than air, you’re still the natural woman I want!”

  “Stop fooling around!” she snapped.

  “I’m not fooling around,” slurred Kerem. “I’m telling you secrets I don’t tell anyone else! I’m silent around my mom and dad, but when I’m with you, I babble. Why am I silent around my parents? I’ve got nothing in common with them. That’s why,” here the youth pinched his lips tightly together, “that’s why my mouth will be shut when we get to the village, see? If I open my mouth my parents clutch at their hearts like they’ll fall over, as if I’m the one causing all the world’s problems. I’m just a man of my times, that’s why I’ve a much better rapport with people my own age, not my parents.”

  “Why don’t you defend your land like Araz?” asked Aypi, who had been wondering this for a while. “Why did you give up and move to the city? Isn’t it better to be a native in your own village, than an outsider in the city?”

  “You’re totally wrong!” argued Kerem.

  “What’s wrong about it?”

  “Whoever can’t fend for themselves is an outsider! The one who can becomes a native anywhere. If you’re poor, you’ll be the outsider’s outsider even in the land of your seven forefathers! It’s hard to understand the modern world if you’ve got an outmoded mind-set. Anyway, what’d you say your name was?”

  “If I say
my name you’ll get tongue-tied and lose your train of thought, so go ahead and call me ‘babydoll’ like you’ve been doing, maybe you can figure out the rest by guessing.”

  “Be still my heart!” said the youth, hearing this female double-speak. He grabbed the half emptied cognac bottle and filled up a glass. “You have a sip too, when winter comes it’ll warm you from the damp.”

  “What can damp do to me?” said the woman, and she smiled bitterly. “It’s all water under the bridge for me!”

  “Damn, where was I? Oh, yeah, look at the women my friends have brought over: They were strangers when they arrived, but after they started working, they were no longer outsiders. Even the one I said was brought over to be the cog in a business plan isn’t just any cog; she’s this country’s cog! So how can she be an outsider? Babydoll, you on the other hand, with this old fashioned thinking of yours, I just don’t know…” He stretched out his arm toward the ghost’s knee.

  “Take back your hand!” she spat, rapping it soundly.

  “Okay, I’ve got it… Some people take pictures, some take drugs, and some…take back their hand! But where was I? Right, in my opinion, if there’s an outsider here, it’s you, babydoll. You’re clearly behind the times – it’s obvious from every word you say and everything you do. You’re the foreigner, and that’s all there is to it. These women you call outsiders are closer to me than you are, because they know how to live life, but you, on the other hand, simply don’t. That’s why things are a lot tougher for you than for them. You know, there’s only one real competition in this world, and that’s the battle of the sexes. See, war between religions, nations, and militaries will end someday, but the battle of the sexes is eternal!”

  “Why?”

  “If there’s no battle of the sexes, life will stop; there’ll be no progress, and no future generations! Geez, don’t worry your head about these things, come on, let’s have some fun! Just tell me babydoll, why’re you so unsubstantial?”