Zeberjet ran both hands over his chest, belly, and legs. Wasn’t it a kind of suicide, overtaxing the body? In that cold cell, with a straw mat to sit and sleep on and a hair blanket for warmth, unwashed, eating nothing but some bread and olives…. Twenty-two days had been his limit, then. He rubbed his neck. November twenty-eighth would make forty days. Last of the Kechejis. You couldn’t count the one in Istanbul who had forgotten the house he was born in. Five years back he had been down on business—selling off two shops that had been in the family for generations—and had not even bothered to have a look upstairs. This manor house and the dead, that was the Kechejis now. They had settled here hundreds of years ago. Kecheji-Zadé Mehmet Agha—Agha by virtue of captaining the Janissaries—who served under Mehmet the Hunter Sultan in the mid-1600s, had a son who distinguished himself in the suppression of an Istanbul uprising and as a reward was deeded the lands pertaining to two villages. Included were several hundred acres of scrub interspersed with monk’s pepper, and it was this tract of land, divided by a river and until then used only as a sheep pasture, which Hadji Zeynel Agha at the beginning of the previous century, using coercion and the promise of share-cropping rights, had induced the peasants to plow for him, reclaiming thereby a rich soil whose income—combined with that from the other farms—was later to provide for the buying and building of several shops in town. Zeynel Agha’s son Malik Agha had built this manor house. It was said of the Kechejis at that time that they could get by for years just by selling the doors of their home and their many shops. Malik Agha held a firm whip hand over the croppers and foremen. Until the day a stroke rendered him bedridden he would be out in the fields on his horse at planting and harvest time, and usually back home an hour or two after sunset. He died, aged sixty-five, when his son was thirty and his daughter-in-law pregnant with Nureddin.
Hashim Bey had let the farmland take care of itself. The foremen grew wealthy on what they filched from the cotton, grain, grape and olive crops. Along with this negligence went a certain magnanimity; Hashim Bey gave no thought to expense. At the foot of the mountain on the stream-bank not far from where the old manor house had burned down in the Fire stood tall warehouses, and there in the eaves lived Hashim Bey’s pigeons. Hundreds of every species. A man had even been hired to tend and feed them. There were some pairs he had paid nine or ten gold pieces for, the price of a matched pair of carriage horses. On occasion as he watched them cross in somersault flight through the air, a high-circling hawk would swoop down and pluck one off. This moved him to offer a standing reward of two gold pieces for every dead hawk or falcon brought in. Then the outlay for weddings, holidays, Ramadan evenings and the festivities attendant on circumcision; dowries when a daughter or servant girl married; the saddle and carriage horses, the grooms. “Brother Rüstem got married two and a half months after the Hürriyet was proclaimed. The feasting and drinking! For three days cauldrons of food stood bubbling in rows under the shed. And what a procession when we rode to Izmir for the bride. Five drum and five zurna players, twanging strings, dancing girls and dancing men dressed as girls. And a bridal coach inlaid with mother-of-pearl, drawn by four grays.” After the wedding they had sold ten shops. Rüstem Bey, it seemed, took after his father. The shops that had burned in the Fire were never rebuilt, the land was sold off piecemeal. In the 1930s, when wheat fell to one qurush and the seedless raisins (which had fallen to three) lay waiting in flattened sacks, piled high while the rats gnawed through them and made nests and the price never budged; when moths got the barley, and Rüstem Bey—coming out from Izmir every month for the hotel proceeds—claimed this was about all their household ran on; during those years he disposed of land for a song, and what few vineyards and fields did remain were later sold off, at his death in 1955, by the three married daughters in Izmir, leaving two shops and this hotel as Faruk Bey’s share: who, down from Istanbul five years ago for the sale of his two shops, had promised not to give up the hotel, laughing, “It keeps me in cigarettes.” That night he had slept on this bed in this room, where both of them had been born. His mother was living with him at the time in Istanbul. Perhaps she was alive even now. She’d be seventy-five. “I can’t go on in this old ruin,” she had said after the Fire. “We have another house in the city. There’s my son’s education to think of, and the girls’ upbringing.” They had moved to Izmir where her father the Adjutant had bequeathed a house in Kokaryalı. It was in the house next door—where Hashim Bey’s youngest daughter Ferhundé had gone as a bride one year before the founding of the Republic—that Rüstem Bey long ago saw the girl his sister had praised so highly and who was to be his wife. A dark, striking girl, quite tall, bosomy, with black hair and eyes, long lashes, a somewhat sharp nose, and thin lips. She was twenty years of age when they married, her husband twenty-three. For the two years that Faruk went to secondary school in Izmir (he was to hang himself the summer of his graduation) he spent the winter in that house with his older sister, coming home only when the school year was out. Nebilé Hanim, on the occasional visits she made with Hashim Bey to see their two youngest, would implore, “Just once a month. You could hop the Thursday afternoon train and be back Friday evening.” But Faruk would excuse himself with his studies. Summers—school ended in early June—the whole family would move to the Azmakaltı vineyards with the two watch towers. They would stay until the September grape harvest. After Faruk and his mother died the family managed to go only three more times. Fear of deserting troops kept them away during the mobilization, and throughout the Greek occupation there were robber bands to worry about. “Semra took it the hardest. She used to say summers had gone stale. Her first visit hadn’t been much either, she was pregnant and couldn’t ride. Maybe it was the day she wheedled Rüstem Bey into letting her mount up; at any rate, come fall her child was stillborn. The next summer they rode out almost every afternoon, coming in toward evening. I remember the sweaty horses, their flanks lathered. The coachman had to walk them before stabling them. Faruk generally went along, but would split off after a while so just the two of them could be alone. In fact there were days when he would rather have stayed behind, but then Semra always teased him; ‘Young Law’s afraid of losing,’ and she’d laugh. Called him Young Law, for brother-in-law. One day he asked what made her that old. ‘Four years,’ she said, ‘four whole years’ difference, so.’ Rüstem Abi would urge him to come along, too, ‘Or I’ll feel hurt.’ Aunt Nebilé would pray after they left. One evening they were riding fast over a stubble field when Rüstem Abi’s horse tripped and fell. Semra screamed. Faruk jumped off his mare before it even pulled up and ran with a cry, ‘It’s my fault,’ to where Rüstem Abi lay on his stomach, deadly still with blood streaked across his forehead. Faruk sank down over him but Rüstem—he was playing possum—gave him a sudden hug and kiss. They came back together that dusk, trading jokes, laughing. The two brothers had always been close but after Rüstem Abi married, Faruk’s love for him turned to adoration. He leapt to his every wish. And then the mare. One evening less than a week before he died Faruk was still out after dark and Aunt Nebilé got very worried. The men saddled up and went searching, Semra alongside her husband. They found him in the foothills beside an olive grove, guarding the mare he had ridden into the ground. ‘I won’t let the jackals get her,’ he said. They roped her carcass to the other horses for the long haul back, and that night dug a ditch to bury her.”
More and more cars were passing outside. The sound of a train reached him. You wondered what Faruk had been thinking as he rode his horse to death. Had that been the evening he came to the final choice? For him to cry out, “It’s my fault” when his brother lay seemingly dead meant he had death in mind, and the guilt of it was on him. After the marriage Faruk’s love had turned to worship. People thought he avoided his sister-in-law out of respect. No one had understood, unless perhaps Nebilé Hanim sensed something. Didn’t Semra know either? She may have been so intent on Rüstem that her “Young Law’s” furtive glances—at meals or out rid
ing—went unnoticed. Since the couple, by his mother’s account, used to slip down to the river on sultry nights, coming back toward morning, he must have sat by the window in the dark and waited. For his brother? On such nights Faruk himself apparently used to go out, but would return long before they did. Perhaps one night, when the heat kept him awake and he left his bed to go half-naked down to the river, he had seen them resting together or asleep on the small, tree-enclosed beach so that after, on torchlit evenings between the two “towers”—the ground having been sprinkled before sunset and spread with straw mats, the flat tin receptacles of kerosene-soaked charcoal aloft on four thick poles, and a banquet of dishes spread before them cooked by Chief Maid Kadriyé with the two servant girls (and which, under the watchful eye of his mother he forced himself to eat)—the meal over and conversation falling off he would withdraw to his room (else his mother would expect him back) and lie there till the flames were extinguished below and everyone had turned in; emerging then to go sit near that clearing by the river bank, aware of a fish or a frog or sliver of earth shearing off and splashing into the river, of the two watchdogs that barked in answer to a jackal’s distant howl, of the evenly spaced hoots of an owl perched in a tree on the other bank—likely calling its mate—and uncertain in all the passing time why he waited; guilty, on edge, as he watched the moon- or starlight-outlined vines through which the two of them might soon again come down. Was that it? The two of them naked on those hot, breathless nights when even the screened open window gave no relief and sweat slicked their bodies where they touched, if one spoke—“They’re all asleep now, let’s go to the river”—and with sheets wrapped round them, moving cautiously in the dark so the household would sleep on, they stepped out into the cool air hand in hand, and barefoot, ignoring the bite of dirt clods, running over the freshly plowed rows between vines to reach the clearing and lie down, or perhaps they swam first, entwined wetly on the sheets then and joining; would he creep close enough to see, crawl up where he could hear their moans, their choked voices, her cry of “ahh, hold me always”? Or would he flee back to the tower? Hadn’t he called the servant girl up one of those nights? A young girl whose hand trembled pouring the young bey his cup of water, who blushed when he looked at her—he must have asked her up one night toward the end, to find that only for one woman, for one woman impossible…. Zeberjet shook his head sharply. All this was conjecture, his own interpretation of hearsay. There was nothing to ensure that his mother hadn’t exaggerated, even lied, in telling what she had seen and heard. And actually she hadn’t referred to such an attachment. “We could never understand why he took his life at nineteen. He told no one, left behind not one small note. We went through his wardrobe, chest, books and diaries with a fine-toothed comb; but there was nothing.” If Rüstem Bey had suspected Faruk of pining for his wife would he have named all his sons after him? When ten years following the suicide Rüstem Bey named his third boy, like the first two, Faruk, someone told him the name was a death sentence and he answered, “If he dies, it’s with this name. He lives, still this name.” Interpretation and hunting for motives didn’t count, they yielded no certain answers. What counted was the act, and there was but one certainty after all for man.
Beyond the curtain it was no longer dark. The light that seeped through made objects distinguishable. The foot of the bed, the table, chair and kerosene stove, his clothes on the rack, the white lampshade that hung from the ceiling. Would it bear his weight eighteen days from now? Why was he waiting? The bed trembled. Would absurdity, contradiction, interruption become meaningful if they happened on November twenty-eighth?
He got up.
He dressed.
He made the bed.
He washed his face. A three-day stubble.
He brewed tea and drank two glasses.
The clock on the safe showed 8:15 when he sat down behind the desk. He opened the register. Since November 4th he had put down no names for imaginary clientele. Basically the running of a hotel was no different from running an institution, managing a large business, or governing a country. Just when you began to know yourself and understand what the means at hand might be, that’s when you slipped and broke down. Luckily the managers of government didn’t realize this, or they could do much more harm than the manager of a small hotel. He closed the register. What point was there any more in putting down these names, or leaving a note behind? Later a police report—minus the “questions put”—would establish that it all took place on November 4th. Suppose some thorough investigator examined the books and found that the people who stayed overnight between October 30th and November 4th last year had stayed again this year. On the very same days, in the very same rooms. What would he make of it? Zeberjet smiled. He rose and laid last year’s register back in its chest under the stairs. From the drawer he took the key to Room 2. He saw the cloud-topped mountain on his way up, from the window on the landing. He returned from Room 2—the Retired Officer had spent a week there—with the clothesline left by those emissaries of the Veterinarian Bey. Back in his room again, he set the shaving kit at the base of the wall and drew the table over to the bed, lifting it up with some difficulty onto the mattress. He took off his shoes and socks. Jacket, slacks and sweater, at first draped over the chair, he re-hung on the rack. Getting onto the bed in his underwear he pushed down on the table, testing, then climbed carefully up and stood erect. He grasped the short length of lead pipe above the white lampshade and pulled down on it with both hands. With a cracking sound a chip of wood split off where the pipe joined the ceiling. Paint and plaster fell in his hair and face. He stepped down onto the bed and then the floor. The lampshade hung lopsided at the end of its pipe. Retrieving the clothesline from the foot of the bed he went to the pantry for the bread-knife and pestle, which he carried up to Room 2. There he pushed the bed—the foot first, then the head—over to the window. Pounding on the knife handle with the pestle in the middle of the floor he cut out a sizeable patch of linoleum. His face was drained of color now and grim, his breathing shallow. He leaned back against the bed and sat for a time regarding the worn, darkened boards he had exposed. They had found their way here decades ago and had been nailed in. It would have been woodcutter women who hewed them, in some forest on a mountain. Felled with axes and bucksaws by the men, lopped, de-barked and left in the shade to dry, the great pine logs had lain in a clearing (on who knew what mountain—perhaps the Sabuncubeli forests) until the woodcutter women with their heavy shalvars (even on late, hot summer afternoons, while the men yawned in the woods or goat-hair tents and went to sleep and the goats themselves had left off foraging to seek the deep shade), with their multiple skirts, their embroidered yellow red and black woolen vests and block-print, beaded, sequin-fringed cotton scarves (stopping now and again to wipe their brows as they called out “Zeeyy-nep, haul that water!” and a little girl would hurry from the tent, leaning to one side with the weight of a pine or juniper-wood jug—chiseled or carved out of a log, the water in it sweet with the wood’s fragrance—whose handle-less, broad-mouthed form the women would raise, drops spilling down their chins onto the swollen bust of their wool vests) came along to wield the sharp, hot bucksaws, sunlight flashing off them, sawing in the tenacious rhythm needed to cut out the boards, which would then be packed by mules (or hauled on a man’s back) down to a foothill road and the waiting oxcarts (those beasts slow and monumental, the carts squealing as the great yoke-bowed necks surged on the downhill—uphill they would strain with the pointy stick goading their flanks) and on to the lumber warehouses in town, where Malik Agha, his new manor house going up, must have bargained and bullied them away at the meanest rate, or had his construction foremen procure them, to be brought and set in place here some one hundred and twenty-five years ago. Zeberjet bent down, and using the knife began to gouge at the wood. The boards were all but rotten, soft with being worn down—before the linoleum had been laid—by feet, slippers, clogs and brooms; and with soaking up the water scrub-brushed an
d rag-swabbed into them once a week (by a servant girl, the pail beside her, rear end wagging as she retreated across the floor on her knees, who had first taken up the rugs, felt mats, carpets, and cushions—and who would one day be married off with a paltry dowry, some poor relative [or other stand-in, but poor] the aftermath of thorough use at the hands of the household men: pinching at every opportunity, the feeling up and then ducking—some went gladly, others had to be pulled—into a room, a bed); and soft too with the nightly audible gnawing of woodworms. He found he could do without the pestle, simply using the knife to chop with while the wood—especially where the rust-eaten nails were—crumbled away. Before long he had a hole and was looking down through it. It was near the place where the ceiling had broken when he yanked on the lead pipe. Chopping with the knife he enlarged the hole in that direction, then let one end of the rope down through both openings. Passing the other end over the bed he tied it underneath in the center, with repeated tight knots. On his feet again he pushed the bed back to the middle of the room, the head first, then the foot. The rope had laid a groove in the quilt. He pulled hard on it. Strong enough. Who could have made this bed, he wondered, when it had first been brought here? And who could have guessed the use it would someday be put to? He went downstairs with the knife and pestle. Setting the pestle down he opened the cupboard in the pantry to scoop a little shortening onto a small plate. This he took to his room, closing the door when he was inside. The rope, its one end going up through the ceiling, had slid off the table onto the bed, where it lay loosely coiled. He put the knife and plate on the table. Slowly, carefully keeping his balance, he climbed up. He gripped the rope and hauled on it with his entire weight. The knots held in the room above. Using the knife to saw at the rope he cut off a decent length, which he tossed over by the door together with the knife. He made a noose and running knot in the rope that hung, greased it, and tossed the plate down at the foot of the bed. It fell intact. Another faint vibration went through the table. Zeberjet put his head through the noose and adjusted it. At that moment several horns honked outside. These were joined by others, and then it was horns, train whistles and factory sirens in a long, unbroken blaring. What was this? Were his ears playing tricks on him? Or was it an appeal from the world outside? He was still here, everything was still in his control. He could slip the rope off, wait some more, run for it, give himself up, burn down the manor house. The freedom of choice was unbearable. He knocked the table over with a push of his feet; and falling through emptiness stopped short. Eyes and mouth open, legs stiffening and threshing, he reached up in an effort to grab the rope. (What came over him? Had he thought of something left undone? Or was it the parting realization that the gift of life is unparalleled and the one task on earth is to guard it, to hold out no matter what, to stay? Or was it the flesh in mute, mindless rejection fending off death? His head was sinking. His arms dangled. A thickish ivory fluid oozed from under his shorts and down the left leg. Catching in the hairs above his knee, it ran onto the quilt and spread. Above him the swinging rope made a creaking noise where it rubbed against the wood.
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