Sins & Innocents

by Sonmez, Burhan;

  “My uncle.”

  She picked her glasses up from the table and put them on.

  “This camera looks like one of the first Olympus models,” she said.

  The woman in the blue dress brought two cups of coffee and placed them on the table. Surprised, I thanked her. I added milk and sugar to my coffee.

  “I hope you manage to find the camera,” I said.

  Stella pointed to the glass cabinet beside the back door. It was full of old cameras.

  “Those aren’t as old as yours,” she said. “Tonight I’ll have a look at the catalogues I have at home; I might find something. May I keep the photograph?”

  “Yes. I have another copy,” I replied.

  “Have you tried the photographer’s in King’s Parade?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  Stella explained that after the Second World War she had worked on the local newspaper News. She had been interested in photography ever since.

  I finished my coffee.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  I walked towards the door without stopping to admire the antique paintings, the chandeliers and wooden carvings. I saw the woman in the blue dress beside a lion statue. I thanked her again for the coffee.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied. She had a nice accent. I don’t know what she must have made of mine, but she said, “Are you Iranian?”

  “No,” I said.

  She hesitated.

  “Don’t tell me where you’re from, I’ll try and guess.”

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. And added with a smile, “You have until then.”

  I went outside. The world seemed bigger on sunny days. The streets of Cambridge had grown too. I walked past language students and homeless people roaming the streets with their dogs. I gave way to cyclists. I browsed in the bookshops in the city centre.

  In the evening I went to Soham for a wedding. It wasn’t quite 6.30 when I arrived but from the size of the queue at the door of St Andrew’s church I realized that the wedding ceremony of the African slave who had been dead for 210 years, which was going to be re-enacted this evening, was more significant than I had thought. I took my invitation out of my pocket and quickened my pace. I queued behind well-heeled men and women draped in tasteful black and red evening wear. Everyone exuded elegance I would never have witnessed had we met in the marketplace. The smell of perfume wafted all the way to the gravestones by the churchyard.

  Some minutes later I noticed the woman in blue from the antique shop standing in the growing queue behind me. She was wearing a black dress now. I looked; she was alone. I joined her.

  “Hello, are you Iranian?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  We smiled.

  “In the shop you seemed disappointed when I told you I wasn’t.”

  “No, not at all,” she said, almost apologetically. “I just didn’t expect to be wrong.”

  “I’m from Turkey,” I said.

  “Now that surprises me. Your accent isn’t at all Turkish.”

  Her name was Feruzeh and she worked part-time while doing her PhD in English literature.

  At the door I showed my invitation for both of us; Feruzeh didn’t take hers out. The church was crowded. We found seats near the back and sat down.

  The speeches began. The original ceremony had taken place in 1792. A freed slave called Olaudah and a local woman called Susannah had been married in this church. It had all started when Olaudah was abducted from his village in Africa at the age of eleven. Feruzeh and I exchanged looks when we heard that.

  A choir of children took the stage. They sang for Olaudah in the hold of the ship that crossed the ocean. The hold was small, damp and cramped. The slaves died either of disease or because they shook free of their chains and jumped overboard. Olaudah didn’t manage to die. He became a skilled sailor and learned how to read and write. Ten years later his master set him free. He wrote a book about all the hardships he had endured and started to campaign to abolish slavery. Olaudah’s book became as renowned as Robinson Crusoe. In fact both told the same story, black slaves became free by emulating their white masters. When the children finished their song Olaudah had made it safely out of the hold onto the deck and had taken a deep breath.

  Once Olaudah and Susannah had been married again and blessed, Feruzeh wanted to go outside for a cigarette. We slipped away from the crowd and stood beside the gravestones. The air was cool. Feruzeh wrapped her thin shawl around her shoulders. A young boy smoking beside us gave his jacket to the woman he was with. I tried to take my jacket off too but Feruzeh wouldn’t let me.

  It was too late for a bus, so we took a taxi. After dropping Feruzeh off, and giving a week’s food money to the taxi driver, I came home and read poetry late into the night.

  When I went back to the antique shop the following day Stella was alone.

  “Hello young man,” she said. “I haven’t got any news for you about the camera yet. A friend of mine in the Camera Club has a huge catalogue. I’ll look through that. It’s bound to give us a lead.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  She was sitting at her table repairing the cover of an old book.

  “It’s sunny again today,” I said.

  “Thank God.”

  “You feel less lonely on sunny days,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “Are you here alone?”

  “I have friends.”

  “That doesn’t stop you feeling lonely.”

  I thought for a moment. I looked at the sunny garden at the back of the shop.

  “Loneliness comes in all shapes and sizes, no two types of loneliness are the same,” I said.

  “You’re right,” she said. “My loneliness hits me at night.”

  I waited a while. Then I browsed amongst the antiques.

  “Do you like reading?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She held up the book in her hand and showed me the battered cover: All Quiet on the Western Front.

  “It’s the first edition,” she said. “Nineteen-twenty-nine.”

  She returned to repairing her book.

  I examined the antique paintings. I touched each lampshade and wooden carving in turn. The frame of the mirror beside the lion statue was carved with rose bush motifs. I stood in front of it and straightened my glasses.

  “Goodbye,” I said, and left.

  The sound of the bell on the door was drowned out by the cars outside. It was hot. The street had grown crowded and there was no trace of yesterday’s spaciousness.

  The following day I bumped into Feruzeh in the city centre for the third time. She was looking for a present for her mother’s birthday on Saturday.

  “This is our third meeting in three days,” I said.

  “Yes, people are always bumping into each other in small cities,” she replied.

  “It looks like you’re not working today. Shall we have a coffee when you’ve finished your shopping?” I said.

  “Yes, why not,” she replied.

  “I have an appointment in a few minutes. It’ll take about half an hour,” I said.

  “Okay, I’ll have finished by then. Where shall we meet?”

  “You know the pub Fort St George. It’s by the river.”

  “I’ll see you there in an hour,” she said.

  The pub was exactly halfway between our two houses. I was late. Feruzeh was sitting in the back room at a table overlooking the river.

  There was a book in front of her.

  “I’m sorry, my appointment was longer than I expected. I couldn’t let you know because I didn’t have your number,” I said.

  “Don’t worry, I read my book,” she said.

  I put the folder I was carrying on the table.

  “I was interpreting for a patient at the clinic. The doctor kept us waiting,” I said.

  “Do you interpret every day?” she asked.

  “Two or three tim
es a week.”

  “Like me, I help Stella out three days a week.”

  “Stella’s nice,” I said.

  “I’ve worked with her for a long time; she’s like a mother to me,” she said.

  “Have you had a drink?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “What will you have?”

  “Tea.”

  I ordered at the bar.

  “Do you know, I’ve lived in Cambridge for years, but this is the first time I’ve been to this pub. I’d heard it was nice, but I never imagined it would be so peaceful,” she said.

  “It’s always like this on weekdays. I’ve picked out a handful of places in the city where I like to read. This is one of them. It’s never crowded. You’ve chosen my table; I always sit here. I watch the boats sailing past on the river. I read for hours.”

  I looked at the book in front of Feruzeh. It had a rose design on the cover. I guessed it was in Farsi. She turned it towards me.

  “Can you read this?”

  “It looks more like embroidery than writing,” I said.

  Our tea arrived. We both added milk. She took sugar, I didn’t.

  “But you take sugar in your coffee,” she said.

  “You’re very observant.”

  She looked at her book.

  “In the olden days everyone had a book that matched their soul. They would call it their ‘book of secrets’ and carry it around with them wherever they went, forever. This is mine,” she said.

  Her slender fingers rested on the book. They sat amongst the letters stretching across the page like a flock of birds.

  “Does everyone in Iran walk around with a ‘book of secrets’?”

  “If only they did,” she said.

  She wore her hair in a ponytail. She had a pendant with a rose in the centre.

  “Do you go back to Iran very much?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Is your PhD about the secrets in Iranian literature?”

  “My thesis,” she said, smiling modestly, “is about the influence of the First World War on English poetry.”

  “Why didn’t you choose something to do with the connection between English and Iranian poetry? That’s more in keeping with your own situation.”

  “And what is my situation?”

  “What I mean is, as you know two languages and two cultures, you could have put them together.”

  “You think like my mother. I’m a woman, so I could have worked on women’s issues. I’m a Muslim, so I could have studied religion. I’m Iranian, so I could have tackled the Eastern question. Why should I limit myself to those boundaries?”

  “You write poetry, don’t you?”

  “Do you think that’s a requisite for studying English poetry?”

  I sipped my tea slowly.

  Feruzeh went on. “Isn’t it enough to write a thesis about something you love?”

  “What you say makes sense. You see, I don’t think like your mother.”

  “So you approve of my thesis then …”

  “Yes.”

  She drained her cup.

  Then, as though remembering the question I had just asked her, she said, “My mother left Iran with me and my sister when I was seven. I haven’t been back since.”

  “Did you leave during the Revolution?”

  “Yes, when the new regime came into power.”

  “Do you have family there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father?”

  “My father was imprisoned a few days before the shah went into exile. After the mullahs came into power they said he had died. We never found out what happened to him.”

  “Was he involved in politics?” I asked.

  “He was a university lecturer. My mother blamed both regimes for his death.”

  “Do you ever get nostalgic?”

  “About my father?”

  “I meant about Iran …”

  “I don’t remember much but I do miss it, though I’m not sure exactly what it is I miss. Iran is like my father. They don’t exist in the real world, they’re only alive in a world that lives in my memory.”

  “Where would you like to die?” I asked.

  “Here maybe.”

  “But I bet your mother would prefer Iran.”

  “Definitely. When I was a child and she was teaching my sister and me to write Farsi she used to insist that we would go back one day.”

  “A friend of mine asked people from all different countries that question as part of his research for his thesis. Most of them said they would like to die either in the place where they were born or in the place where they grew up. My friend’s conclusion is that your motherland is the place where you want to die.”

  “Maybe. How about you?”

  “I want my grave to be in the village where I was born,” I said.

  I poured more tea into our empty cups.

  “I saw the photo you gave Stella. Is it of your family in your village?” she asked.

  I opened my folder and took out my copy.

  “This is the only photograph I’ve got of my uncle. It was taken in a coffeehouse. The man next to him is Tatar the photographer. As Tatar is holding his camera someone else must have taken it.”

  Feruzeh took the photo.

  I told her about Tatar the photographer, my uncle and my grandmother.

  Outside it was raining gently.

  3 Kewê

  The Moorland Song

  When Tatar the photographer had arrived in the village the previous summer my grandmother Kewê had looked wordlessly at the camera of this man rumored to stop time while resting her back, bent under the weight of a life as heavy as gravestones, against the apple tree. Now, as she touched the photograph in her hand, she recalled her childhood, spent in a remote village. Raising her head she gazed at the tree that stood like a mute child, bathed in the shadow cast by the open door. Her ancient eyes grew dark.

  In the olden days, when her father was all alone in the world with his only daughter, who prayed assiduously late into the night, Kewê had bowed her head before the sword called destiny. During her childhood, as her mother and seven elder brothers died one after the other in ambushes or from illness, she got into the habit of sitting under the apple tree in the garden day and night talking to the birds.

  Death accompanied her everywhere because, many years earlier, her father had been a guest at the house of a certain agha and that agha, instead of serving him soup, meat stew and bulgur with lentils, had offered him nothing more than unbuttered börek. Kewê’s father’s pride had got the better of him and he had sworn a bitter oath on the life of his chestnut mare. He had no idea that the agha had been preoccupied with two Englishmen and an officer who had called on him the previous day, staying only as long as it took to drink a glass of sherbet. This agha, whose finesse had vanished along with his manners since the days when he evaded paying taxes to the Ottomans, had not slept a wink on account of these unexpected guests. Before long, the pretty girl the agha intended to marry disappeared with a man whom no one knew, and everyone on the plain – suspecting Kewê’s father’s involvement – knew that vengeance hung heavy between the houses like summer heat, and would soon come knocking on their door.

  Kewê, who had grown up in the shadow of a curse and spent most of her time under the apple tree, was oblivious of her slender body, her snow-white complexion and her velvety voice. Which is why when Allodin, the heartthrob of every girl by the fountain, declared he loved her and no one else, she couldn’t believe it. When their fathers couldn’t agree over the bride price Allodin had no choice but to abduct her. Kewê was the only one who didn’t know that one day, when the village girls were out collecting briar, Allodin would gallop into the field on his white horse, sweep her up onto his saddle and, adding his own cries of joy to the girls’ shrieks of happiness, ride off with her towards the villages in the west. As Kewê told this story to my mother as though it were a fairy tale, she would say
, “Stop Allodin, don’t charge your horse towards death!” and each time my mother would think that, like all fairy tales, this story too would have a happy ending.

  While pregnant with her first son, Kewê arrived on a donkey at the field where the labourers were harvesting the crops, carrying a bundle filled with lamb, bulgur and onions. When the sun had set and the crops became invisible in the darkness they all sat down together beside the piles of straw. The most spectacular stars of the plain shone down on them that night, while fireflies glowed as far as the eye could see.

  The majority of the labourers were lowly souls, convinced that God had abandoned them. They had travelled from distant cities in the east bearing their scythes on their shoulders like rifles, with no other refuge than their arms, their breath and their masters’ compassion.

  Begohan, the labourers’ foreman, had paid the price for his gambling, and who knows what disgraceful acts that he was too ashamed to repeat, by banishing himself from his home and was now purging his sins with the sweat of his brow in foreign lands, living for the day when his wife and children would accept his vows of contrition. When Begohan had finished his tale he shut his eyes and sang a folk-song. A red breeze blew gently. Forty years later Kewê sang that song, which she had memorized after a single hearing, to my mother. And forty years after that, her eyes closed, my mother sang it to me. Now, in a foreign city, surrounded by stone buildings, I hum the same song to myself at night. To enable me to withstand life, as ancient buildings do, sometimes I too close my eyes.

  That night the foreman Begohan said, “Allodin Agha, if your child is a boy, name him after me.” Kewê gave birth in the autumn, by which time Allodin had forgotten all about that incident and was about to find a different name when Kewê reminded him of the promise he had made beneath the stars. As a tribute to the labourers’ friendship and the boundless sky, she remained true to her memory of the night when her heart beat with love and to the folk-song of the steppe.

  Kewê had tied a piece of cloth around the apple tree for her dead mother and each of her seven brothers. She repeated the act after the demise of her father, closely followed by her father-in-law. But the night when her husband too collapsed on the threshold she vowed she would never again take anyone to her bosom except her four weeping children. Instead of tying a cloth around the tree, she did like everyone else in Haymana Plain who spilled blood to free themselves of the horrors of blood, and sacrificed a lamb. Dipping her finger into its blood she smeared it onto the foreheads of her children, Begohan, Şemil, Sıtê and Mâna.