Sins & Innocents

by Sonmez, Burhan;

  “Have you read it?” asked Feruzeh.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What did you think of it?”

  “The man in the novel listened to Bach’s cello suites in his house. I had a fantasy about writing a novel with Bach’s suites in it. When I saw that he had got there before me I stopped reading. I couldn’t touch it for two days.”

  The argument around the table continued.

  People are God’s utopia. That’s why God breathed His own breath into them. No, it wasn’t God who created utopia, it was people. People had no choice in being created, but they could decide how to live their lives. That’s why the first woman, the mother of all humanity, ate the forbidden fruit. That’s why the realm of existence where she ended up is people’s utopia.

  “It’s against God’s rules,” said the man with the black-framed glasses, “but people reach utopia by crossing the forbidden line. The writer objects too, but it’s only by violating prohibitions that pirates can get their hands on the real book.” He was probably a university lecturer.

  They gave the floor to Azita to round up the debate.

  “Everyone who upsets my Marquez is evil,” she said.

  The table fell silent.

  Feruzeh leaned towards me and said, “You can write your novel without Bach’s suites.”

  “No matter what I put in their place, I’ll still feel there’s something missing in the story,” I said.

  Feruzeh took the plate from my hand.

  “Will you have some more cake?”

  “No thank you,” I said. “My head is aching so much I can’t open my eyes.”

  “I’ll make you a coffee.”

  “I should go home and lie down.”

  “But the night is still young …”

  “Any minute now they’ll start playing the ‘Three Word’ game.”

  “I’ll protect you,” she said.

  As I was standing up I asked, “Who’s the man in the black-framed glasses?”

  “The Irish man? His name’s O’Hara,” she said. “He’s a born revolutionary, like you.”

  “What does he do?”

  “These days his main occupation is writing love poems to my aunt.”

  “Good for him,” I said.

  “But my aunt is playing hard to get.”

  We went into the kitchen. Feruzeh packed me some cake and home-made cookies.

  “You can eat these tomorrow,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like some more?”

  “This is plenty,” I said.

  Azita came in.

  “Are you leaving?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep last night; I’m tired,” I said.

  “I can see from your eyes.”

  “Thank you for everything. I’m very pleased to have met you.”

  “What did your fortune say?”

  “What fortune?”

  “Didn’t Feruzeh tell you your book fortune?”

  “No,” Feruzeh and I said together.

  “This is your first visit to this house,” said Azita. “I don’t want you to leave without hearing your book fortune.”

  Feruzeh went to fetch the book.

  “When we were young girls Tina and I used to tell our fortunes all the time. We each had a book. We would open a page at random. Whichever poem it happened to be was our fortune,” said Azita.

  “You still tell them …”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Feruzeh came back holding the book with the rose design that I had seen at the pub the other day.

  “This is your ‘book of secrets’ …” I said.

  “Yes,” said Feruzeh.

  She handed me the book and told me to choose a page.

  I placed my finger inside. Mother and daughter looked at the page I had opened together.

  Azita asked, “Have you ever been to a graveyard here?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The dead are good for all eternity. If you visit them you will see the eternity inside yourself,” she said.

  Then she hugged me and hobbled slowly out of the kitchen.

  “Do you know Forough? That was one of her poems,” said Feruzeh.

  “I don’t know her,” I said.

  “She’s one of our women poets. She died young.”

  “Is that why your mother mentioned a graveyard?”

  “It may have been in a line in the poem.”

  “Do you like the poem?” I asked.

  “I know it by heart.”

  Feruzeh touched the words with her slender fingers. Slowly she translated it.

  Another song was starting in the living room.

  5 Ancient İsmail

  Those Seeking their Way in the Darkness

  The night that Tatar the photographer arrived, the villagers chatting at Kewê’s house were more concerned about Ancient İsmail than about the Claw-faced woman’s two daughters who were nowhere to be seen. The girls would eventually return from their giddy rambles, but Ancient İsmail, who shepherded sheep alone, did not stay out on the moorlands late at night like the young shepherds and he was usually home by now. Tatar the photographer said that on his way from Mangal Mountain a young boy had asked him about Ancient İsmail. Everyone was anxious.

  Some twenty years earlier, at the end of the war, the only people who inhabited the villages were women, children and the elderly. It was silent everywhere; all the houses were abandoned. Ancient İsmail was sixty years old and all the conscripts had given him everything they owned for safe keeping, from their sewing needles to their patterned rugs. A group of bandits got wind of the fact and descended late one night like hungry wolves in the snow, when the full moon was at its zenith and the villagers were asleep. It was ‘open sesame’: there are secrets capable of moving every stone, a key capable of unlocking every lock. The bandits went to the barn first and woke the boy who was sleeping with the ewes who were about to lamb. Holding the gun against his head, they dragged him to the front door of the house. The boy called out, “Father, open the door.” “What’s up?” said İsmail.

  “One of the ewes has lambed, it’s cold out here, let’s bring her inside.”

  Ancient İsmail said, “Don’t worry, just tuck it under the straw.”

  The boy insisted. Just at that moment, İsmail’s young wife said, “I didn’t bolt the door, it’s open,” the ground shook and the men surged in like an angry river. Snowflakes, the howling wind and a breathless fear enveloped the house.

  İsmail told them to take anything they wanted as long as they didn’t touch the women. One of the men started to light the gas lamp, but Ancient İsmail stopped him, saying, “Don’t light the lamp, I don’t want to see your faces.” They tied İsmail’s hands and searched the house for gold and silver in the dark, but found none. They asked İsmail where he had hidden the entrusted treasure, but he gave no answer. The men took İsmail’s four-month-old baby girl from his second wife outside. They laid her down on the snow like a lamb and held a knife against her throat. The full moon shone onto the baby’s face and, after screaming once, she lost her tongue as though she had fallen into a mirror. Sensing his baby’s destiny, Ancient İsmail told them that all the treasure entrusted to him was in the old well. The bandits went to the back of the house and lifted the stones covering the well, before removing the branches inside it. As they lifted out each rope-bound bundle the bandits panted like wolves dripping blood from their fangs.

  At the end of two days during which she did not cry, the baby who lost her tongue in the light of the full moon surrendered her life. Ancient İsmail buried his baby, saddled his emaciated horse and went to the town of Haymana. At the recruiting office, which had re-opened once the war had ended, he wept as he reported the bandits that had invaded his house and told them of his baby that had abandoned her innocent soul. Just as the captain was about to tell him to wait for a few days, news arrived of the capture of a band of robbers.

  Two hundred year
s earlier the French botanist Tournefort had written in his travel diary that, unlike Turkmen bandits, Kurdish bandits did not attack at night. But, with the wars, taxes and destitution that marked the times, the darkness of the night had made itself indispensable to every bandit. Two nights after Ancient İsmail was attacked the bandits had gone down into a storehouse in a nearby village filled with bales of wool and angora, entering by knocking down the adobe wall. The bandits, who dragged a bundle of twigs behind them to ensure they didn’t leave any tracks in the snow, didn’t realize that an oleaster bundle had a hole in it. When they awoke the next morning the elderly male villagers strapped on their guns and, foraging in the snow, followed the trail of the oleaster berries. At midday, they reached a stream at the bottom of Mangal Mountain and found seven men asleep, wrapped up in their rugs. Having taken away the gun from beside each of the men, they woke them up by firing a bullet into the air. The old men went to the town of Haymana the following day, with seven bound bandits in tow and a crowd of children in their wake, and entered the recruiting office.

  The commander asked Ancient İsmail if he knew the bandits. İsmail told them he had not seen their faces in the dark but that he would be able to recognize the man who had tied him up, from his fingers. They lined up the bandits and İsmail touched each of their hands in turn. One of them was just a boy and as beguiling as the light of the moon. İsmail touched him as though touching the fingers of the bandit who had tied his hands that night and said, “These are the hands that tied me.” The young bandit was called Lille. He was just seventeen, his breath was as fresh as a rose and his face shrouded by an orphan’s shadow.

  As the soldiers were taking the seven bandits to jail, the prisoners shouted and created a scene. Seizing the opportunity, Lille escaped to the ruins of the ancient Greek church. There he jumped onto a horse and, dodging the bullets whizzing past him, managed to shake off the cavalrymen pursuing him. For a week he travelled on secluded tracks and, late one night, when he was about to expire from cold and hunger, he reached his village. Wrapped in velvet-lined woollen quilts he lay burning with fever for two days. One day at around noon news came that soldiers had been sighted in the plain. Immediately the women set up their tandoor ovens, placed the gold and silver the bandits had looted over the months inside and covered them with a layer of stones and chaff for burning. They made dough, rolled out pastry and started singing. Lille put on women’s clothes, donned a kaftan and started churning buttermilk. With his heavily kohled eyes and the small beads he attached to his muslin there was none more beautiful than he in the village.

  The soldiers searched high and low but found neither the gold nor Lille. As a young soldier was shyly eyeing the women’s lovely faces and hennaed fingers he suddenly realized that only one woman’s fingers did not have henna. The soldier held the un-hennaed hands. Lille sighed and his heart ached like a young branch struck by a knife. A red breeze caressed his skin before racing on. The air resounded with the women’s cries, entreaties and reverberating screams.

  Lille was sentenced in Haymana. He would pay with his life, by hanging from the end of a rope, for the death of the baby who had died of fright. Lille’s sisters and aunts brought the hidden gold and laid it all at Ancient İsmail’s feet. Clutching his hands they knelt before him, weeping. If Ancient İsmail forgave him the soldiers would retract the death sentence and the women’s only male relative to have survived the war would return to life. But İsmail had not forgotten the scream of his tiny baby suspended from the full moon on the night of the attack. His heart turned to ice and froze; it did not soften like snow that melts in the sunshine.

  Lille was brought to the scaffold. Tradition being immortal, they granted him a last wish. At his request, instead of a holy Qur’an they gave him a reed pipe. Lille played a timeless steppe melody to the crowd gathered in the square, the children watching from a distance and the starlings pecking for food in the snow.

  Hush and listen, the wind will tell you which dream is quickly shattered and

  Which dream people come back to, hush and listen, the wind will tell you,

  Roses bloom, the wind blows softly,

  To the enamoured youth gently,

  After a lifetime spent broken on a bird’s wing

  What do people yearn for in their last breath, hush and listen, the wind will tell you.

  Lille’s sisters married men who returned from the war, vowing to bring not children but swords of vengeance into the world. They named the first male child in the family ‘Lille’ in memory of their brother. When the new Lille turned seventeen they strapped a gun to his waist and sent him to find Ancient İsmail.

  Lille set off, asking pedlars, shepherds and Tatar the photographer, whom he met on the way, for directions. When at noon he found Ancient İsmail he stopped, raised his head and gazed up at the sky. A drop of blood oozed from his lip that had cracked in the midday sun. Lille repeated his name as though making a sacred vow and, drawing his gun in the merciless steppe, he pulled the trigger. But destiny had its own account in Haymana Plain and the life of every Lille flowed into the same river. The gun jammed. “Go away from here,” said Ancient İsmail. “One death is enough to destroy a life.” Lille did not listen to him but, seizing his knife, attacked like a hungry wolf descended from the mountain. Ancient İsmail was strong despite his years and he plunged his own shepherd’s knife into the young boy’s heart. Dogs barked, the larks took flight. If this Lille had killed him Ancient İsmail would have been released from the pain of that other death too. The realization hit him as he lay enfolded in his rug until nightfall, convulsed with tears, burning with fever and shaking as though in the throes of epilepsy.

  He knew he had to get rid of the corpse and dump it in the creek in the south before daybreak. As it was growing dark Ancient İsmail hoisted the body onto his shoulders. At the bottom of Mangal Mountain he set off first in the direction of the east, then of the south. To avoid the shepherds who watched by night he took secluded routes, wading through stream beds. As he put the corpse down beside a rock to catch his breath, he heard laughter ringing out in the darkness. He tiptoed in the direction of the laughter and peeped. He saw Ferman sitting by a freshly dug grave, with two girls before him laughing and dancing. They had lit a bonfire. Ancient İsmail, consumed by grief for the boy’s untimely death, recognized Ferman through his misty eyes, but did not realize that the others were the Claw-faced woman’s twin daughters. He took them for two fairies that had taken on the form of girls. He imagined that as they had dug a grave they were waiting for a dead body, maybe they knew that Ancient İsmail had killed a man.

  When Ancient İsmail arrived at the creek after midnight he was soaked in sweat. He hid the corpse among the reed beds and washed his hair and neck with water he poured from his cupped hands. For years he had performed his prayers twice, once for himself and once for the executed Lille, but his prayers were not strong enough to bear a new death. He would in any case pay for the sin in the afterlife. This soil, this sky, could not heal the wound of an old man. Before returning to his herd he lay down on the ground, breathing deeply, and looked up at the bright sky. The stars were swaying gently, the moonlight dripped like weary water. The herds’ bells and a shepherd’s reed pipe could be heard from the mountain top.

  Just then lightning struck, like a dagger that glints suddenly in the darkness and vanishes. A scream rang out from the summit of the hill and İsmail stood up and searched the infinite skies from east to west. He had no idea where this lightning had come from on this summer night. Panting, he climbed to the top of the hill. When he reached the plain he saw that the sheep had dispersed and the dogs were waiting beside a shepherd lying on the ground. The shepherd, who was not moving, had been struck by lightning and his left side was completely black. The smell of charred flesh pervaded the air.

  They had heard the lightning strike in the village too, but the thought that a tragedy might occur hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind. A handful of people were searching for
the Claw-faced woman’s daughters in the village barns. The neighbours at Kewê’s were discussing who the young boy who had asked Tatar the photographer about Ancient İsmail might have been. Tatar said that when he had taken his photograph the young boy’s teeth were clenched and that he had a piercing, razor sharp look in his eyes. He would develop the photo when he returned to the town, but it wasn’t until he brought it the following year that Ancient İsmail recognized the face. When, one year later, he encountered once again the image of the boy he had killed, Ancient İsmail thought Azrael was playing games with him and lay awake the entire night, before surrendering his life at daybreak.

  6 Wittgenstein

  All Souls Lane

  Slowly I half opened my eyes.

  I thought of the words of the poem Feruzeh had read the night before: “Let’s believe in the beginning of the cold season.”

  The pain in my head made it impossible to get out of bed. I drifted back to sleep.

  A good while later I woke up to the sound of banging. It was midday.

  My long, exhausting sleep had once again been dreamless.

  I had a shower.

  I had tea with bread and butter, cheese and jam for breakfast.

  I glanced out of the window. There was no sign of yesterday’s spring weather. Clouds shrouded the sky.

  As I was going out I looked at the photograph on the wall. Juliette Binoche saw me off with her innocent gaze. It was comforting to think there was someone at home waiting for me.

  I didn’t take my bicycle, I felt like walking.

  I walked down to the river path and felt the cool air reviving my skin as I breathed it in. The joggers along the river and the rowers had started their day long before me.

  I walked quickly as far as Bridge Street but I was more sparing with my breath going up the slope. I stopped when I reached the cul-de-sac halfway down Huntingdon Road.

  There was a sign on the wall saying “All Souls Lane”. It was a good name for a street with a graveyard.