Life was becoming oppressive. Her mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law evicted Kewê from the farm and snatched her children from her. With the twenty sheep they gave her, her dog and her donkey, Kewê returned to the silence of her father’s home. As was customary for widows, she wore her husband’s jacket. She was not yet thirty when she resumed her conversations with the birds under the apple tree day and night.
One night when winter was drawing to an end her eldest son Begohan arrived, rain drenched, mud splashed and windswept, saying, “Grandma sent me, Şemil is ill.” They arrived at the farm in the steppe in the middle of the night, and were at Şemil’s bedside when he expired at daybreak, overcome by measles. Three days later Begohan, the boy whose name was a keepsake from a labourer with a scythe, contracted his brother’s measles and followed suit. When spring passed and her mother-in-law also died, Kewê took her two daughters to live with her.
She sat her daughters under the apple tree, sang folk- songs to them and told them stories with happy endings. Her eldest daughter Sıtê was as tall and well-formed as a slender glass lampshade, it hurt to behold her. One of the childless women in the village promised Sıtê the gold around her neck if she would become her husband’s second wife. Kewê opposed the match, but her daughter left to join that household. One day Sıtê, who had gone to the steppe to collect briar with the village women, suddenly fell to the ground and started vomiting blood. When they brought her back to the village she was barely moving. Kewê wept by her daughter’s bedside throughout the night. At dawn, Sıtê opened her eyes and said, “Ma, you woke me from a sweet sleep.” They buried her the following day and Kewê was left alone with her youngest daughter Mâna.
One morning, they were woken by the sound of drums. The Greek soldiers had traversed the whole of Anatolia, and were approaching Haymana Plain. The men were forced either to fight or to lead the life of bandits. Mothers like Kewê fled to distant villages to protect their young daughters’ honour. Their only sustenance was the barley and wheat in their sack and they would stir half a handful into boiling water and drink it. They came back from behind the mountains a year later and Mâna’s hand was requested in marriage to one of the young boys in the village. But on the wedding night, instead of the young bridegroom, they put his half-witted elder brother in the bridal chamber, pairing Mâna with a fool. My grandmother Kewê was convinced that she was now completely alone in the world and that she had no strength left to bear her destiny. Removing her man’s jacket, she retracted the vow she had made years before when her husband had died, and married a second time.
“I came to this village and married your father because I was in despair,” she said to my mother, who was still a child. “Your father Abdo was a poor shepherd. We had nothing; not a single one of my children was alive. We decided to go to foreign lands and so, loading a saucepan and a quilt onto the donkey, we set off. We roamed Polatlı, Sivrihisar, Çifteler, Eskişehir, Bozüyük and Bursa, labouring in fields, working on farms. Seven years later we returned to the village with an ox cart and a pair of oxen. With our savings we bought sixty sheep and built this one-room house.”
Kewê brought seeds from the apple tree in her own village and planted them at the front of the house where she now lived, in this way reappropriating the tree she had leaned on since childhood. Sitting under the tree as she had done in the old days, she waited for the birds so she could talk to herself.
One snowy winter morning she received news of the death of her daughter Mâna. Leaving her husband sick and burning with fever, Kewê took to the road. Mâna’s slow-witted husband had brought the news. By the time they reached the precipice of her native village, her feet were frozen.
Kewê thought about the Mogul girl whom the villagers talked of, who had cast herself off this precipice centuries earlier. Despair is life’s most deadly executioner. A very long time ago, after the soldiers of Timur, the Mogul emperor, had defeated the Ottomans, they had stopped for a rest on this precipice and pitched their tents, which were as numerous as the stars, in the summer heat. That night Timur’s adolescent daughter Mâna, unbeknownst to anyone, stole away from the camp and threw herself off the precipice. Timur, who had doted on his daughter, limped to the precipice with his lame leg. He had been injured in a battle, though he had wreaked more than adequate vengeance in all ensuing battles. Timur looked out into the darkness and the commanding stars in the sky. Shaking his fists at the sky, he shouted, “Hey Mâna!” The warriors, witnessing his sobbing for the first time, named the area Hey-mâna Plain. The name became part of the local lore and, transcending generation after generation of deaths, travelled all the way to Kewê. As the poet said:
Let not the new light and new hue of the dawn sun deceive thee,
The fruit on the tree is green already while its name dates back to days gone by.
It was dark when Kewê, whose last child was named for the Mogul emperor’s daughter, arrived at the village with her son-in-law. A storm raged in her heart. Taking Mâna’s two daughters into her arms she cried all night; towards morning, clutching them tightly, she lay down to sleep. Alone with her in the bed the two small girls said, “We’re going to tell you a secret; they buried our mother alive.” Kewê also heard what was being whispered in the village. When Mâna had fallen unconscious after lying in bed for three days with a high fever they assumed she was dead and washed the body and buried her. Every day the village shepherd Hilo would herd his sheep, but that day his younger brother went in his place. When the flock was passing by the graveyard, their bells clanging, Mâna shouted from under the freshly dug soil, “Hilo, Hilo, get me out of here!” Hearing his brother’s name, the young shepherd took fright and ran to the dead girl’s house.
The only person at home was Mâna’s mother-in-law, and she said, “Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone; if they take the dead body out of its grave we’ll live in fear for the rest of our days.”
One month later Mâna’s daughters also died of measles and were buried side by side in two small graves.
Kewê, who now had no children left, decided to find a wife for her second husband Abdo and bring a new child into the house. “What are we going to do with a child, crazy woman? I’m a sixty-year-old man,” said Abdo. It was 1935. Kewê asked the grandmother of a young girl called Emine who had come from a distant village to visit her relatives for her hand in marriage. She had pushed to the back of her memory the anguish she had felt when her own daughter had become the second wife of a married man.
“That day we worked on the farm,” she told my ten-year-old mother. “Your father cut the crops with his scythe, your mother Emine walked behind him, putting all the stalks into a heap, and I picked up all the bits that were left behind. When Emine went into labour we came home. By morning you were born. Abdo was waiting outside. ‘Crazy woman, what did you have?’ he asked. ‘A girl,’ I said. ‘Never mind,’ he consoled me. Emine was dark skinned, while your complexion was white, you were a white lamb before a black sheep. The harvest ended and in midwinter your father became bedridden. We buried him one bayram day under a relentless downpour.”
Emine was still a young girl and in the spring her elder brother Hatip came to announce that Emine had a suitor in her own village. They were sitting under the apple tree. Breathless, and with a beating heart, Kewê asked them to leave her the baby. Emine, realizing it would be better to go to her new home as a childless bride, knelt down beside Kewê and wept. And, leaving my mother behind like a tree she meant to come back often to water, she set off one day at daybreak with her brother Hatip. Life’s weary ox cart plodded on. When they built a mosque in the village the old man Haco became the imam, married Kewê and moved into her house. More than one another, those two elderly souls, who had bathed in separate rivers and were both alone in the world, went to sleep with their arms around my baby mother, whose real mother lived in a distant village.
As he listened to Kewê in silence, Tatar decided to freeze time and take a photograph of Kewê,
Haco and my mother all together under the apple tree. What was strange was not life but death; knowing it would never be sated it lusted after everything in its path. Haco, who went to the mosque, would return with the villagers a short while later and they would put the world to rights over tea and tobacco. There was still a long time to go before the Claw-faced woman came and shouted, “Where are my daughters?” The night was just starting and outside on the apple tree a lone bird was singing.
4 Azita
The Sacred Apple Tree
I arrived at the main entrance of Trinity College.
I looked at the apple tree to its right. The huge door I often walked past had made me blind. I remembered this apple tree when Feruzeh mentioned it yesterday.
I walked slowly on the lawn. I touched the four perfectly proportioned branches sprouting from the trunk and circled its girth.
Two girls asked me to take their photograph. They hugged the tree. They were careful not to step on the flowers. They had come to Cambridge to study English. They were from South Korea. They asked if I knew whether the college was open for visits. As our chat continued they wanted me in their photographs too. I felt like the owner of the tree.
We learned in primary school that an apple fell on Newton’s head. But not many people knew that the tree at the entrance of this college where he taught came from some seeds from the original tree in his town.
The apple tree was laden with blossom that was radiant in the April sunshine.
A young couple speaking a language I didn’t recognize approached me. I took their photograph too. Just then the porter at the college entrance came and asked us politely not to step on the grass. I apologized.
The Saturday morning and sunny weather crowds were growing bigger.
I leaned against a bicycle and closed my eyes. My eyes were burning because I hadn’t slept the previous night.
I didn’t let it get to me anymore when I couldn’t sleep. My spells of insomnia were gradually becoming shorter and more infrequent. Nowadays they only lasted a day or two. In the beginning I used to go mad with despair when nothing helped, no matter what I took, and I would lie in bed semi-conscious for days, gasping for breath, my mind blank.
Last night I had gone to bed as usual with a book. Before long my eyes started to feel heavy and I switched off the light and drifted into a dream world. My thoughts were like a stylus as it moves along a record. They started off in a wide space and were captured by the darkness of sleep when it became narrower. I was like a star spinning in the vortex of a black hole before disappearing into its centre. Nothing, not even light, could escape from the pull of that darkness. Only the sounds from outside disturbed me; the roar of diesel engines, drunks shouting. Just before midnight the large girl in the flat next door had sex, then her cries died down.
One night some two months earlier, I woke up to the sound of music and the shaking of my bedside table. My neighbour, who didn’t have sex at that time of night, had invited her friends round for a party. I knocked on the door, which was opened by a woman in a miniskirt. I told them that after three days of lying awake I had finally managed to get to sleep and asked them to turn the music down. Holding a cigarette in one hand, she took my arm with the other and dragged me in. The crowd of people in the house didn’t bat an eyelid when they saw me in my pyjamas and if I hadn’t been so badly in need of sleep I would have accepted the invitation of the woman who said, “Why don’t you join us?” My neighbour was nowhere to be seen. The woman blowing cigarette smoke into my face took pity on me and turned the music down a fraction. I went back to bed. That night my bicycle was stolen and I didn’t hear the thief breaking the lock. After that day, whenever I couldn’t get to sleep I would say, “They can steal my bike all they want, as long as I can sleep.”
Last night’s book was about a child who ran away from home to go to the stars. He smuggled himself onto a ship but it sank and he ended up on a desert island. I liked reading illustrated books at night; they sent me to sleep. But last night it hadn’t worked. The stylus in my head got stuck and the disc had turned vain, interminable circles. The star outside the black hole did not get pulled into the vortex.
I opened my eyes, straightened up from the bicycle I was leaning on and crossed the road. I was tired and crouched down beside the post office.
A child pushed his brother, dropping his ice cream on the floor. His father scolded him. They went back to the ice cream van on the street corner.
A man showed me a map and pointed to the marketplace. I gestured that he had to walk towards the left.
I stood up when I saw Feruzeh.
“Have you been here long?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
She looked at the impressive door of the college.
“This door reminds me of giant wall rugs,” she said.
“Excuse me, are you Iranian? Is there any chance that you might be Iranian?”
“Yes,” she said, laughing.
“When I look at it from a distance I see the same thing,” I said. “But when I get closer the patterns of the rug disappear and the oppressive shadow of aristocracy looms.”
We walked towards the apple tree. Feruzeh noticed my happy expression.
“You look as though you’ve just met up with a long lost relative.”
“Is it that obvious?”
“Yes.”
We didn’t go up to the tree. The college porter was standing in front of the door.
“I took some photos for some tourists while I was waiting for you. If you’ve brought your camera I’ll take your picture too,” I said to Feruzeh.
“I didn’t bring it. But it’s you I should take a picture of.”
“Next time,” I said.
“Is this tree anything like the one your step-grandmother grew?” she asked.
“Ours was bigger.”
“Yours …” she stressed.
I nodded.
“I read that this tree comes from the original one that grew the apple that fell on Newton’s head, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it had the same fate as my grandmother’s tree, taken from its original land,” I said.
“They planted this tree here long after Newton’s death.”
“Don’t tell me it’s only a legend!” I said.
“To banish all doubts about the tree’s origins there was an investigation and it was proven that the two trees were related.”
I smiled. “That’s typical of the English.”
No one asked us to take their photograph. They always approach people who are by themselves.
I pointed at the door of the college and said, “Shall we go in and look around?”
“I haven’t had breakfast,” said Feruzeh.
“Where would you like to eat?”
She thought for a moment. “I’ll choose the pub today.”
“Okay.”
Leaving the apple tree and the huge door behind we started walking down the street.
On the street a girl was playing Vivaldi’s Spring on her violin.
We strolled past buildings that tourists were admiring with rapt attention. We walked past Great St Mary’s Church, which gives a spectacular view of the whole city from the top and where the theologian Erasmus preached five centuries earlier, past the house where Fitzgerald, the first person to translate Omar Khayyam’s poems from Persian into English, lived two centuries ago, past King’s Chapel, the stained glass windows of which were removed during the Second World War so they wouldn’t be damaged, and veered left.
The garden of The Eagle pub was full, so we sat inside, at a table by the window.
“I’m going to have a toasted sandwich. What will you have?” asked Feruzeh.
“I’ll come with you.”
“There’s no need,” she said.
“I’ll just have tea,” I said.
“Are you sure? Don’t you want anything to eat?”
“Maybe later.”
Before heading to the bar Feruzeh took a
folder full of photocopies out of her bag and put it in front of me.
I looked at the first page: Impressions of Turkey During Twelve Years’ Wanderings. Under the title it said Professor William Ramsey.
I leafed through the pages.
A big group of people sat down at the next table and started talking at the top of their voices about the old graffiti on the ceiling. They pointed at the pictures of the aeroplanes on the wall, making sure the whole pub heard how fascinating they were.
My attention wandered. Slowly I closed my tired eyes. My mind trembled like a leaf in water.
Feruzeh came back and put the tea tray down on the table.
“Are you tired? Your eyes are red,” she said.
“Don’t worry, I’m fine. Where did you get this?”
She took the file from my hand.
“I was in the library yesterday. I thought I’d look up travellers to Anatolia for you. That’s the first thing I found. I photocopied it.”
“There must be some interesting things in here.”
“There are. I had a quick look. Ramsey was an archaeologist and he went to your part of the world in the nineteenth century.”
She found a page that she had marked earlier. “I think he was the traveller who visited the house of the agha in your grandmother’s story. Look ‘… he entertained us with what he called sherbet, which was only dirty-looking water sweetened with sugar. Sterrett manfully drank his glass, and kept up our credit for decent manners; but I could not get the stuff down’, he says.”
I read the paragraph Feruzeh was pointing to.
“This is amazing,” I said.
The comments of the people at the next table about the Second World War pilots who had gone there and written their names on the ceiling were getting louder and louder.
Sins & Innocents Page 3