I laughed.
“I came from the other world to help you,” I said.
“A week today it’s the anniversary of Wittgenstein’s death. Will you come back then?”
“Whenever Wittgenstein calls, I come.”
“Is that so?”
“You won’t need me anymore. Your pain will soon be healed,” I said.
“I’m beginning to believe you,” she said.
“Me too.”
“To believe me ...?”
“I meant I’m beginning to believe myself.”
She held my hand, smiling.
“You’re a nice dead man,” she said.
“You,” I replied, “are a nice living lady too.”
“Do you have any news for me from the other side?” she asked.
I looked at her. She was serious.
“I’ve just been with Wittgenstein,” I said. “He asked me to tell you this: life is divided into two parts; one is the part already lived, the other the part we haven’t yet lived. The important part is the one we haven’t yet lived.”
“Yes …”
“Yes.”
“May I kiss your cheek ...?” she said.
“It’s bad luck to kiss the dead,” I said.
As she reached up to kiss my cheek she said, “I’m cursed with bad luck anyway.”
The north clouds flowed away as quickly as water. The sky cleared, the world became bright.
Before we stood up we each placed a hand on the gravestone. Our skin became smeared with the mud covering Wittgenstein.
The woman in the white coat took my arm.
We walked slowly. As we passed the church we looked at the sparrows perched on the gravestones.
The woman held my arm more tightly.
Nobody leaves a graveyard in the same state of mind as they enter.
We returned in company from the road we had taken alone.
As we were returning from All Souls Lane the alarm clock in the house on the left rang out six times.
The man at the window was still watching the world outside. His long hair floated down to his shoulders, like dead leaves.
7 Little Mehmet
The Mirror with the Rose Motif
While the neighbours at Kewê’s house were drinking strong black tea and telling stories the Claw-faced woman suddenly burst in, shouting, “Where are my daughters! Find them!” The pallid night slowed down like an ox cart, the dim light of the lamp flickered. Everyone felt their breath falter amid the tobacco smoke, expressions froze. Then they heard Emir Halit’s voice wailing outside. Emir Halit was slumped down on his knees outside the front door repeating, “Lightning struck him, lightning struck him.”
The darkness of the night pulled you into itself. Emir Halit and my fourteen-year-old father used to watch over sheep at night and descend the star-studded mountain peaks of the south to explore every nook and every hollow of the 72,000 universes. Emir Halit would close his eyes and play the reed flute, while my father lay on the ground gazing up at the infinite heavens. A red breeze blew gently above them. My father drew circles in the air and tried to catch the shooting stars, making the same wish every time. If his wish ever came true he was ready to attribute it to the stars’ compassion. The night gave them a loving home. The dogs would stretch out on the ground, the sound of the sheep’s bells would gradually die down. The moonlight would drip down like clear water to the accompaniment of Emir Halit’s reed flute.
That night, as the stars were gently swaying, a flash of lightning suddenly ripped the sky in half. Like a dagger, a thunderbolt plunged down on my father in the darkness, leaving a cloud of dust and smoke in its wake. My father let out a blinding scream, then lay motionless on the ground. The herd scattered, the dogs didn’t know which way to run. The world slid into a dark well. The whole of my father’s left side was burned and the smell of charred flesh pervaded the air. A few metres away Emir Halit, whose reed flute had fallen from his hand, inched closer, looking around him. Upon sighting my father’s body that smelled of flesh and ashes he fell to his knees, too terrified even to cry. Realizing there was nothing he could do, he left the dogs to guard over my father and ran all the way to the village, streaking like the wind, past slopes, stream beds and nighthawks.
When the villagers got the news and arrived at the hill peak in their horses and carts they found Ancient İsmail with my father. It was not in the nature of shepherds to leave their herds unattended. Ancient İsmail, who had wrapped my father’s body in a rug, said, “The grizzly bear tore one of my sheep apart, I followed it here.” The villagers lent Ancient İsmail a horse to take him back to his herd by Mangal Mountain. They took my father back to the village in the cart.
When my father opened his eyes two days later, he had no recollection of how he had got from the star-studded hill- top to the room in the village. “What happened?” he asked the old man Os, who was weeping at his bedside. The old man Os said, “You put your herd to graze in the field in the next village, and the mukhtar there shot you.” No amount of courage was a match for the wrath of the earth and the heavens, but hearts were always ready to challenge the cruelty of humans. The old man Os, who had lied to my father so he wouldn’t be afraid, prayed for the first time in many years, and repeated incantations that broke spells. My father went back to sleep. He discovered the truth the following day, when his four-year-old nephew Little Mehmet woke him by touching his burnt arm. They told him exactly what had happened. My father stayed in bed for months, tortured by nightmares of the earth and heavens heaving and burning.
The news of the adolescent who had been struck by lightning and saved by angels’ wings spread all the way to the sacred land of Arabia. A wealthy man came to visit my father on his way back from the pilgrimage to Mecca. The rich man, who passed by our village with his four heavily laden horses and two man servants before returning to the town of Haymana, gave my father dates, “Zamzam” water and a hand mirror decorated with a rose motif. The Zamzam water helped my father to gradually regain his strength, the mirror with the rose motif showed him what he would look like once he was back in full health, and as for the dates, they pleased Little Mehmet more than anyone else. Because the pilgrimage to Mecca was not officially permitted in Turkey people set out in secret, passing by the dark ravines on the border. The villagers gazed at the rich pilgrim from the city as though admiring an ornamented horse, they shared his tobacco and were regaled with tales of his travels. Ours was a village without any rich people, the only hope was that the old man Os would find the treasure he had been hunting for so many years.
When Little Mehmet, who grew up on the plains, was studying in Haymana some years later, the teacher came into the class one day brandishing a foreign newspaper and told the children about a country called America. The newspaper she was holding contained news of two shepherds and 400 sheep in Haymana Plain who had frozen to death during the harsh winter. The children clapped with joy, and the satisfied teacher smiled her approval.
Little Mehmet asked his teacher, who had shown them the Chicago Daily Tribune dated 26 November 1953, “Have they heard about this in Arabia too, Miss?”
The teacher replied, “Don’t think about the Arabs in the desert. They can’t read the letters in this newspaper. And because we too have rejected the Arabic alphabet our worlds are now separated.” Little Mehmet was as speechless as the day he discovered that the teacher didn’t know about my father, who had been struck by lightning. Until the day he died prematurely of cancer of the blood, he couldn’t decide whether he should go first to the place they called America, or to Arabia.
The teacher, whose smell was not from here, but of foreign, alluring places, would arrive each day with a new piece of information for the children, saying, “Ignorance isn’t not knowing, it’s knowing false information, and we’re going to overcome that.” Little Mehmet, just like the 400 other pupils who were ready to follow their schoolteachers in adulation, did not understand certain words, but he believed tha
t the teacher knew where he needed to go. One day when his mother came to the school, Little Mehmet told her too. That day, ashamed of his mother’s baggy trousers, head scarf and her not knowing Turkish, he ran out of the playground as fast as his legs would carry him and, when she came after him, he threw his arms around her in a secluded nook with a longing more intense than anyone had ever seen. Every child carried his mother’s smell with him until he died and remembered it on his deathbed, when breathing his last. But right then Little Mehmet, oppressed under the burden of being neither Turkish nor from the city, did not speak to his mother in Kurdish for fear that someone would hear and tell the teacher. His mother had no choice but to believe that it was for her son’s good. They were poor, and ready to cling to a happiness they did not know the name of. Little Mehmet was the first person from the village to have gone to the city to study since Ferman’s two brothers, who were now dead. But fate knew something others didn’t in Haymana Plain: it was not in his destiny to study and also have a long life.
This was the time when doctors hid the word “cancer” from patients to stop death from tormenting their hearts. The day that Ike Eisenhower, the president of the country which had fascinated him for so long, came to Ankara Little Mehmet started vomiting blood. It was his first year at university. The 700,000 people gathered in Ankara with its population of 500,000 waved the Turkish flag with its single star and the American flag with its forty-nine stars in jubilation. Foreign journalists sent news to agencies of an industrialized, modern and prosperous country on mountainous, barren, brown soil. The excitement of the crowd cheering Eisenhower, who waved to them from the open-topped Lincoln car left over from Atatürk, was beyond description.
The citizens of Ankara, who had spent an entire week scrubbing the city clean, had been anxious when it rained the previous day but, when it stopped the following morning, they had crowded into Atatürk Boulevard in the hope of getting a live glimpse of Eisenhower’s laugh. During Eisenhower’s tour of three continents and eleven capital cities, including Rome, Tehran and Karachi, a woman in Pakistan named her newborn baby Ike Khan in his honour. But impetuous death didn’t even wait for the newborn baby to take its first steps before claiming Little Mehmet’s life. Little Mehmet’s mother lamented her son’s premature demise in Kurdish, called him “My lion” in Turkish and cried most of all because he had departed this life before ever having known the love of a girl. As the poet said:
Oh, hell's blindest door, confounded Satan.
Preserve us from the torment of sin.
Though suffering and death be a certainty,
Let love be our life’s sustenance.
No one dared mention the word cancer, referring instead to “it” as though it were a bloodthirsty wolf that would pounce when named.
My father too believed that Little Mehmet’s life was the price for the life that the lightning had spared and, like everyone else, he joined in cursing “it”.
Every death reduced those who were left behind. My father felt it even more keenly when he found his hand mirror with the rose motif amongst Little Mehmet’s possessions at the hospital. He picked up the mirror and stared into it as though he would see Little Mehmet reflected there, but all he saw were his own red eyes. He remembered how he and Little Mehmet had played like children who had quarelled while he was in bed after lightning struck him. Such children did not break off all contact, they still talked, but with objects as their intermediaries. “Hey rosy mirror, tell Little Mehmet I said let’s go to the stream.”
Little Mehmet would reply, “Rosy mirror, tell my uncle that I’ll go wherever he likes once he gets better.”
The day that the mirror with the rose motif was the intermediary for my father’s and Little Mehmet’s conversation, when they melted into it and entered another world, was the day Tatar the photographer arrived to take their photograph. Hearing what he wanted to do, the old man Os ran up and blocked Tatar’s path: “I won’t allow you to take these children’s photograph,” he said. If the old man Os had let him take it that day, a photograph of my father and Little Mehmet would exist today. But only their mirror remained. The mirror given to my father by the rich pilgrim who had visited him after he was struck by lightning, which my father had given to Little Mehmet when he was starting university, had now been returned to him by death’s hand.
8 Brooke
The Orchard
Feruzeh and I met in the last street in the south of the city. It looked over the fields that pointed to Grantchester.
“You haven’t had breakfast, have you?” I said.
“Of course not,” said Feruzeh.
We locked our two bicycles together and leaned them against the fence. Feruzeh was wearing jeans and a burgundy T-shirt.
“Let’s see if Grantchester has changed during the winter,” she said.
“Last autumn my sister came to visit me. She’s the last person I went there with,” I said.
“Where does your sister live?”
“In Turkey. She came to see me, as I couldn’t go.”
“Does she come often?”
“It was the first time we had seen each other in seven years.”
“When will you be able to go?”
“It will depend on my legal status … I don’t know …” I said.
We put on our sunglasses and strolled along the path through the grass at a leisurely pace.
There hadn’t been a blemish in the sky since it had cleared the day before. The sun shone warm and bright.
“Were you able to sleep okay?” asked Feruzeh.
“More than okay …”
“I bet you didn’t set foot outside.”
“I listened to your mother, I went to the cemetery yesterday.”
“So soon?” she said.
“I wonder now why I never went before.”
“But it was raining yesterday …”
“I took my umbrella. I met a woman whose husband had just left her. She was crying in the graveyard.”
“Women who weep in graveyards …” said Feruzeh.
We walked on in silence.
We looked at the large meadow carpeted with red poppies and yellow daffodils.
A rabbit shot out of the grass. It stood in front of an elderly couple approaching us from the opposite direction.
The elderly woman bent down slowly and brought her face close to the rabbit.
When we reached them I bent down too. The woman smiled.
The elderly man, who had remained standing, said to Feruzeh, “What a lovely day.”
“It’s beautiful,” replied Feruzeh.
“Are you going to the orchard?” asked the elderly man.
“Yes.”
“My wife and I have done this walk every week for forty years.”
“The beauty of ritual …” said Feruzeh.
“I agree,” said the elderly man. “When we were young like you we used to walk on this path and meet elderly couples. Now we’re old and we’ve met you.”
“Forty years…” said Feruzeh.
“Listen …” said the elderly man.
They listened to the meadow and heard the larks.
“These birds, the yellow flowers and the river were all here,” said the elderly man.
A kingfisher took flight and flew down towards the river.
“Will you join us for a cup of tea?” asked Feruzeh.
“Ah young lady, it would be too far for us to walk all the way back. But we go to the orchard every Monday morning. If you come early one Monday we can have tea then.”
“But today is special,” said Feruzeh.
The elderly man smiled. “Are you celebrating the anniversary of the day you met?”
The rabbit turned around and vanished in the long grass.
Holding her arm, I helped the elderly woman to her feet.
“Today is the anniversary of the death of Rupert Brooke,” said Feruzeh.
“This morning some young people were paying tribute to him in
the orchard,” said the elderly woman.
“We’re going to pay our own tribute,” said Feruzeh.
“Today a certain gentleman read me Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’,” said the elderly woman, indicating her husband.
They looked at me.
“I’ll read it too,” I said.
“You should,” said the elderly man.
“My grandfather died in the First World War, like Brooke,” said the elderly woman.
“Let’s not depress these young people with talk about death,” said the elderly man.
“You’re right,” said the woman.
We parted, saying we hoped we would meet again and each went our separate ways.
A punt was heading south on the river at the bottom of the meadow. One girl was guiding with a pole while the other two girls in the punt were singing at the top of their voices: “And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees …”
Feruzeh hummed the song. A river of green slid away unseen beneath the trees.
Following the footpath that ran through nettles and cornfields, we arrived at the orchard an hour later. We went to the café, stood in the queue and bought scones, honey, clotted cream and a pot of tea. Carrying our trays, we went out into the garden and sat at a table by the trees. “I’ve missed the scones and clotted cream here,” said Feruzeh. Shooing the wasps away from the tray, I said, “So have the wasps,” and poured the tea.
We cut our thick scones in half and spread them with cream and honey. The pleasure of having breakfast in the orchard together … Our eyes met as we drank our tea. The taste of tea changed depending on whom you drank it with. The sun filtered down between the branches of the apple tree above us. I opened the brochure I had picked up in the café.
I found the page about Rupert Brooke and read ‘The Soldier’. Feruzeh listened to me with her eyes shut. The orchard appeared to expand; several blossoms fell from the branches.
“This is in your specialist area,” I said. “How would you interpret the beginning of the poem?” I passed her the brochure, Feruzeh read the opening lines:
Sins & Innocents Page 7