Dear Shameless Death

by Latife Tekin

  In Dear Shameless Death, Kepse appears as a particularly powerful djinn whose possible association with Huvat is rumoured to be the cause of Huvat’s exceptionally enterprising travels outside the village. As for Dirmit, her fated affinity with djinns is marked, or ‘notched’, by the exorcising Djinnman Memet, even before her birth.

  If djinns belong to the realm of the fantastic in Dear Shameless Death’s, village setting, so does the notion of the ‘communist’. Generally pronounced ‘commonist’ – komonist – by countryfolk, it can alternately be used to identify Dirmit’s favourite school teacher who suddenly disappears, an aeroplane that flies over the village and frightens everybody, and somebody’s son-in-law who flies an aeroplane. These mysterious metamorphoses turn out to be a major source of both confusion and fascination for little Dirmit’s rational way of thinking. Like djinns, ‘commonist’ is implicitly understood to be elusive, sinister and subversive. In the urban setting, however, djinns and communists connect instantly and explicitly when Huvat, on hearing that she is not a believer like he and the rest of the family, denounces Dirmit, the ‘djinned girl’, as ‘commonist’.

  As a teenager, Dirmit grows up in the Istanbul of the 1970s, a decade of political repression and unrest. The city saw protests, rioting and violence between extreme leftists, nationalists and religious fanatics like the black-bearded hodja who leads Dirmit’s father, Huvat, into the thick of a violent demonstration against students. Huvat’s intermittent devotion to the holy ‘green books’, the temporary conversion of Dirmit’s elder brother, Halit, first into a hodja dressed in a black shalvar, then into a reader of books on Turkism, the Turkish nationalist movement whose origins date back to the nineteenth century, and Dirmit’s participation in the left-wing teachers’ protest march are further signs of an ideological diversity that is reflected in the family. Simultaneously an insider and an outsider, Latife Tekin forges a certain link between identifying the ‘other’ as ‘djinned’ and as ‘commonist’. This has implications for an understanding of the entire narrative. As Fredric Jameson explained in his essay ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, identifying difference as evil ‘is at one with the category of otherness itself: evil characterizes whatever is radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a very real and urgent threat to my existence’.14 In Dear Shameless Death, it is not only Dirmit who is stigmatized as ‘other’, but Atiye, too, at various points in the narrative, for example when she is pregnant with her first child and later starts speaking a different language, presumably Kurdish. And, most conspicuously, Zekiye comes to represent ‘otherness’ when the witch Sarıkız inflicts upon her – and all the other young brides in the village – the oppression of silence, characteristic of daughters-in-law serving the family. Using the fantastic mode, Latife Tekin has not simply textured an unusual, ‘authentic’ folkloric interpretation of a community’s culture which is both homogeneous and capable of being easily captured in realistic terms for a realistic narrative. By the very use of the fantastic, she has subverted the homogeneity of such an interpretation, making ‘otherness’ visible both within that culture and in the much broader modern cultural framework in which it is located.

  It was perhaps just such a feature of the narrative that led John Berger to comment on the French version of Dear Shameless Death: ‘Latife Tekin…too knows that life stories are composed of gestures and murmurs, rather than of words and deeds. This book (about her native village) is a carpet of immutable gestures woven by country women. Each gesture is a white knot, a black knot, or a brightly coloured one, tied fast by four nimble fingers, at the end of our dark century. I know of no other storyteller with hands like Latife Tekin’s.’15

  REFERENCES

  1 ‘Dinlediklerim gözyaşı olup akarsa, neyi yazarým?’ Gösteri, January, 1984, p. 81.

  2 Ibid.

  3 ‘Istanbul is hurt about us’, translated by Saliha Paker in Mediterraneans 10, Istanbul, Many Worlds/Méditerranéens 10, Istanbul, un monde pluriel, (eds) Kenneth Brown and Robert Waterhouse, Winter 1997–1998. L’Association Méditerranéens, Paris, France and Yapi Kredi Culture & Arts Publications Inc., Istanbul, pp. 128–129.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Interview with Gamze Varim, Cumhuriyet, March 18, 1995.

  6 ‘Dinlediklerim…’ op.cit.

  7 Milliyet, February 23, 1995.

  8 Gösteri, March, 1984, p. 89.

  9 Hürriyet, September 5, 1988.

  10 Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. 1988. The Fragrance of Guava, Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez. London/Boston: Faber & Faber. p. 74.

  11 Berna Moran, ‘10 yıl sonra Sevgili Arsız Ölüm, Gösteri, February, 1993, p. 12–13.

  12 Murat Belge, from the English summary of ‘The Turkish Novel and Sevgili Arsız Ölüm (Dear Impertinent Death)’, Toplum ve Bilim, no. 25/26, 1984, p. 69.

  13 Berna Moran, op.cit., pp. 14, 16.

  14 Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical narratives: romance as genre’, New Literary History, 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1975), p. 140.

  15 John Berger, ‘Livres – Hommages des Auteurs’‚ Libération, January 1, 1998.

  Huvat Aktas travelled for a whole day and a night, ending his journey at noon by the sheepfold in the village of Alacüvek. This time he brought a bright blue bus with him. The bus had collected quite a bit of dust along the way but it still stood gleaming like a mirror in the fiery rays of the sun.

  At first the villagers were horrified by this outlandish contraption the likes of which they had never seen. But in that moment of pure amazement, while some blew prayers to the right and left or panicked and almost wet their pants, a few risked touching the bus gingerly. Huvat Aktas was so childishly delighted with the effect the bus had on the villagers that he didn’t even mind that they ignored his smoke-coloured suit and felt hat. With the help of the driver he embarked on a long explanation about the bus and its virtues. He opened the baggage compartment to show off its interior and lifted the hood so they could take turns inspecting the engine. Most of the villagers, however, except for a few adventurous souls, mostly children, refused to set foot in the bus.

  Before then, the inhabitants of Alacüvek hadn’t done much travelling, even on donkey-back. They only went short distances from the village. And to get to town, which they didn’t visit all that often anyway, they had come up with an ingenious way to shorten the long trip. As soon as they left the village they used to break into a run as if a wild bull were breathing hard down their necks. Once exhausted, they would heave a huge rock onto their backs and trudge on for a while, puffing and panting. Then they would throw down the rock and, feeling as light as a bird, dash on again. So when they first saw the bus they weren’t immediately able to shake their fear of it. However, once they had tasted its pleasures, they began to see how tiring and pointless it was to walk. Then they started taking the bus to the fields, the vineyards and even the sheepfold.

  Of all the novelties Huvat had brought to the village up until then, the bus was undoubtedly the best. The first time he had shown up with a stove. He thought it was an important invention that would save people from having to crowd round the tandır oven all winter. But the villagers were so uninterested in the stove that Huvat lost his temper.

  Before he had even wiped the dust off his shoes, he let loose a bellyful of words, trying to explain the stove’s benefits to those who had gathered around him. After burning up half a hayloft of vetch-grass in it, he grew so angry that he left the village, firmly vowing never to set foot there again. But one day he did show up again, this time with an enormous box under his arm. It was a talking box, and all of Alacüvek was thrown into an uproar over it. Everyone stopped eating, drinking and sleeping. Two women were so scared that they miscarried, and over half the villagers felt faint whenever they stood near the radio. But it wasn’t long before Huvat arrived with something that made them forget all about the talking box. This time it was a woman, with flame-red cheeks and milky skin. And her head and legs wer
e bare.

  For days on end the poor woman was surrounded by a crowd of women and children, who never stopped pawing her. They rubbed her face with the edge of their yashmaks moistened with spit to see if the redness was real and they tugged at her hair and skirt. She was soon worn down to skin and bones. Finally she collapsed and fainted. Then they knew why three sheep had bloated up and died one after the other, why the hen who laid double-yolked eggs had stopped laying and why Huvat’s mother had fallen off the wooden veranda. All were caused by the ill-omened woman who was possessed by a djinn. Their first thought was to strangle her and dump her body somewhere, but they were afraid of her djinn, so they threw out her mattress and bedding and, after a lot of talk, shut her up in the stable.

  On her first night in the stable the woman dreamt she was bending over an iron cradle to kiss a sleeping baby. Then she left through an iron door. From that time on, whenever she closed her eyes she had the same dream until she was having it while she was awake. This went on until a long-haired, snow-white talking goat charged at her. She shouted at the top of her voice, but the goat muttered some incomprehensible words instead of backing off, and hurled itself straight at her. Just then a ball of light dropped from above and the goat’s hair turned pitch black. Slowly the goat backed away and disappeared. From then on the saintly Hızır Aleyhisselam never left the woman alone in the stable. Sometimes he appeared as an old man with a radiant face and snow-white beard and at others as a ball of light. Sometimes he was only a voice. One evening, when the woman had been in the stable almost nine months, she was seized by stabbing pains from her waist down to her tailbone. She writhed about on the ground and bellowed like a calf as tears streamed from her eyes. The pangs were so powerful that after a while her bones cracked open and her waters broke, gushing hot from her womb. And there on the straw at her feet lay a girl-child as big as the chimney of a paraffin lamp.

  At that moment, Hızır Aleyhisselam came to the baby’s rescue, this time sending Akkadın, White Woman, in his place. For years Akkadın had been awaiting her day of fulfilment. ‘Hu Allah!’ she would call in winter by the tandır and from the veranda in summer. She came through the stable door holding a bowl of milk and a lantern. Then she picked up the baby, snipped its umbilical cord and rubbed it with rock salt. ‘May you have blood-red cheeks, a smiling face and a benign fate,’ she prayed as she daubed the infant’s cheek with two fingers dipped in blood. Then she departed, never to be seen in this world again.

  After the woman had her baby in the stable, the villagers saw that her fainting spells had really been caused by the load in her belly and not, as they had thought, by djinns or sprites. So they moved the newborn child and her mother upstairs to the tandır room. And, because she was confined, they wound a red cloth around the woman’s head and hung a pair of scissors at the head of the bed. On the same day, with unheard-of ceremony, they named the child. They boiled up water in an enormous black cauldron, and the women and children of the village brought bunches of dried flowers and plant roots of every kind to toss into the boiling water. The disabled, the newlyweds whose husbands had died and the infertile departed as soon as they had cast their flowers into the water. Those remaining drank up the water, cup after cup. Then they formed a line and spat in the newly born infant’s mouth, one by one. ‘May you take after me!’ each one wished as she bent above the baby’s ear. That evening, the face of little Nuǧber – they had named the baby after Huvat’s mother – turned red as a beetroot and burned feverishly for days.

  Soon after this ceremony, Huvat returned to the village, this time with a water pump. At the villagers’ request, he left it in front of the double-winged gate of his house. At first the villagers gathered curiously around the pump, but after a while they didn’t even dignify it with a glance, as if it were a dead dog sprawled out on the ground. Their scorn so angered Huvat that on the morning he was due to leave he got up before dawn and connected the pump to the well. Its awful creaking roused the whole village.

  The woman Huvat had brought from the city turned out to be surprisingly clever. In no time at all she learnt to bake bread in the tandır oven, to shear sheep, to dry cows’ dung, to get the lambs to suckle and to bring on a miscarriage with a hen’s feather. Her erişte pastry was as perfect as tiny pearls, and she outdid the young girls and women of the village at weaving colours into carpets. She even started composing dirges in houses where there was a death. After a while her speech changed too, and she began to speak just like the other villagers. One thing she never learnt, however, was how to stop and give way to the men she met on the road. Instead, she marched straight ahead with firm steps. After her daughter, she gave birth to a boy and at last settled in. As a reward for a son, Huvat brought her a sewing machine on one of his visits home. So she put aside the carpets, sat down at the machine and took in sewing in exchange for eggs, fat or a bowl of wheat. When she had first seen Huvat she hadn’t much warmed to him because he was so dark. But later on his name was always on her lips, and she made up türküs about him shamelessly. Whenever and wherever she felt like it she warbled out, ‘Oh, Huvat! My Huvat!’

  Atiye – that was her name – was delivered of another son as big as a yearling sheep. And so she continued to bear children but she gave them no peace. The village children roamed about wearing nothing but a greasy bib, but she clothed her own in a very odd manner. Young Nuǧber gambolled about in the village dust and dirt dressed in nylon garments, with a ribbon in her hair and a dummy in her mouth. The boys climbed into the topmost branches of the walnut trees wearing dungarees held up with braces, and they chased the oxen and donkeys with coloured whirligigs in their hands. They were as confused by village games such as ball-pitching at stone heaps, pretend picnics and shooting slingshots as they were by hard balls, water pistols, balloons, plastic dogs and whistles. On top of all that, their mother had invented something called ‘soap’, and once every two days she nearly flayed them alive scrubbing them with it. And then one day, instead of the slender father who had left them, a giant of a man returned and thrust something called ‘orange’ into their hands. That did it. Nuǧber gasped once and lost her voice. Halit, the eldest son, caught a djinn. ‘Straws, red and green straws, women with swollen bellies!’ he cried out as he thrashed about on the ground. Seyit, the youngest, was never the same from then on, either. He started to snap like a dog at anyone who came near him.

  For a long time the Alacüvek folk didn’t know what to make of all the tales Huvat told them or the things he brought with him and left in the village. Eventually they came to believe that he had captured Kepse. ‘Come on, tell us how you collared that djinn!’ they begged as they rubbed his back. The djinn Kepse was invisible at first but later it appeared as a fever, followed by sweating and shivering. Finally it pounced on your chest and sat there, a black ball with neither hands nor feet, and with eyes like lentils. If, just at that moment, you were quick enough to reach out and grab Kepse, it immediately became your faithful servant. But if you missed, and it escaped, you never got another chance.

  ‘I swear, if I were able to catch Kepse I’d bring all the places I’ve ever seen right here to the village!’ Huvat declared whenever the villagers brought up the subject of Kepse. ‘May I be blinded for life if I could catch Kepse or anything else!’ he vowed again and again. But one day he happened to say, ‘If you think I’ve been pulling your leg come along and I’ll show you.’ All the youngsters who loafed about the village throwing stones at the walnut trees followed him. And that’s how over half the inhabitants of Alacüvek came to set foot on city soil. Some became central heating installers, some house painters and some whitewashes. None of them returned, except for Huvat.

  After a while Huvat’s bus, with its fiendish whistle and bright polish that mirrored the dry plain with its wild pears, henna-coloured rocks and shrubs with prayer rags, became a mangy cur limping along the roads with a wounded paw. It could no longer take the slopes without stopping for breath. Even on a flat road the engine
boiled and the bearings started to seize up. One by one, its mirrors, wipers and door handles dropped off. Its driver finally gave up one day and abandoned it. So the bus settled back against the garden wall and sat there peacefully at rest.

  After the bus, which he had brought to the village with so many hopes, had collapsed, Huvat went into a sulk with the villagers. Only a very few people were lucky enough even to have set eyes on a bus, he said. The villagers had actually had a chance to ride in one, and even to take it out to the sheepfold and the pastures, but they had never really appreciated it. For days he paced angrily about his house, shooing away those who called to wish him good health instead of worries. At last, irritable and worn to a shadow with brooding, he started plucking hairs from his nose until suddenly it swelled up like a drum. In his grief, he sat in the garden under the cypress trees, from morning until night, gazing at the mountains and sighing. Then he would break off a big branch, chew off all the leaves and spit them out on the ground. After that came a time when he couldn’t be approached because of the smell of gunpowder. He shouldered his gun at dawn, set out with his dog and returned at dusk with blood dripping from his game bag. He ate only the flesh of hare and, in the evening, when he had eaten enough and rested a little, he aimed his gun at the doors and walls. Atiye grew tired of picking up empty cartridge casings everywhere, of cutting out paper discs that would fit into the casings and of filling the shells with buckshot. She grew tired of villagers constantly showing up at the door to ask for some hare fat to cure their sore ears. Finding that she couldn’t feed her animals properly, bake bread in the tandır or get on with her sewing, one night, after she had soothed and stroked Huvat to sleep, she gathered up all the cartridges and threw them down the well. The next day Huvat searched everywhere, shouting and pleading, but after a long sulk with Atiye he calmed down and built a pigeon loft on the roof. He also took to rearing partridges in a corner of the garden. All day long he shuttled between the garden and the roof, and in his sleep he started to sing like a partridge and coo like a pigeon. Atiye grew anxious, concerned about her husband’s condition. First she plucked three hairs from his beard and asked the hodja to recite a few prayers over them. Next, without Huvat knowing, she had some charms made and concealed them in the pigeon loft and the partridge pen. ‘Such doting isn’t good for you! They say it’s a sin!’ she warned, trying to pry her way into his thoughts. The charms saved Huvat from his passion for pigeons and partridges, but soon he started to play the ‘egg game’. He competed with the young men each night and bashed eggs together until morning. ‘My egg’s a good one, yours is rotten,’ he wagered, losing sight of everything but the game. Huvat was so enthralled with the egg game and singing its accompanying türkü that when his eldest son turned up at his side one night and pleaded, ‘Dad, Mother’s calling you. She’s given birth!’ he snapped, ‘Get out of here, you lying pup!’ and shooed him away.