“If I should die think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.”
Feruzeh looked at me.
“Do you think the foreign soil a soldier is buried on is conquered land?” I asked.
“Are you talking about imperial peace of mind?”
“We were discussing it in a seminar I went to the other day,” I said.
We thought about Rupert Brooke’s grave on an island in the Aegean Sea.
“You could interpret it another way,” said Feruzeh. “Every soldier carries his home with him. No matter where he dies the smell of the soil where he was born and grew up goes with him.”
There was a big group of people sitting at the next table. Several children were running around playing. One child fell over and started crying. A young woman stood up and helped her up.
“If you were buried here what would this land be to you?” asked Feruzeh.
I paused.
The birdsong grew louder.
“The plot of land where I lie would be transformed into Haymana Plain forever,” I said. “A red breeze would blow above me.”
I heard the rustling of the branches.
Feruzeh spread a scone with cream and passed it to me.
“Do you know, it was a good job that Brooke got ill and died on the way to the front instead of on the front,” she said.
“Why?”
“It spared him the pain of having to kill.”
A small leaf floated down onto my lap. I picked it up and put it in front of Feruzeh.
“Who would you say is the greatest war poet?” I asked.
She looked into my eyes.
“Is there a postscript to your question?”
“Rupert Brooke or Emily Dickinson?”
She laughed. “You’ve read The Catcher in the Rye.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the answer in the book?”
I nodded.
“I’ll vote for Brooke,” she said.
“Because he’s our countryman?”
“Maybe. His words mean more to us knowing that he once hung out in this garden with Keynes and that he swam in the river down there with Virginia Woolf on a moonlit night.”
The children running around started climbing the tree beside us.
Now it was my turn to ask, “If you were buried here what would this land be to you?”
“I’ve only ever considered the possibility that I might die somewhere else once. Three years ago, when I decided to go back to Iran. I was really going. I even got a tattoo on my shoulder as a memento of my life here.”
“What made you change your mind about going?” I asked.
She hesitated before answering.
“I’ll tell you, but not today,” she said. “Because what I have to say is about weeping women.”
I looked to see her expression.
Feruzeh drained the last sip from her teacup then poured more for both of us.
“What’s your tattoo of?” I asked.
“A rose,” she said.
“The rose on the cover of your book of secrets …”
“Sometimes you can find infinite meaning in a single design,” she said.
“If you ever go back,” I said, “your rose will feel different to you in Iran.”
“Will you get a tattoo when you’re going back to your country? As a memento from here …”
“I doubt it.”
We turned and looked after hearing curiosity in the voices from the next table.
Some young people were standing under the apple tree a little further ahead. One of them was dressed up as Rupert Brooke. Some young girls in costumes from a century earlier had formed a circle around him. They were reciting poetry in loud voices.
“I think they’re repeating this morning’s tribute. Shall we join them?” I said.
“In a minute.”
“I envy poets more than novelists,” I said.
“Why?”
“What they do is no different from magic. They speak the language of an invisible world, like magicians.”
Every table was looking at them. The young people reciting had created a vortex with the power to suck everything in the orchard inside it.
“If you ever got a tattoo what would it be?” asked Feruzeh.
“I can’t think of one thing that represents my life here …” I said.
“Is the person who returns the same person as the one who arrived?”
“When I arrived there was a real possibility I would die,” I said. “Now I’m like a branch that’s beginning to come back to life.”
“What you’re looking for is simple.”
“Is it?”
“The phoenix that rises from the dead.”
I pointed at the boy who was playing Rupert Brooke in the centre of the young girls.
“He’s the immortal bird of legends. A poet whose poems are still read a century later.”
“It’s getting crowded,” said Feruzeh.
Like ships caught up in a giant maelstrom in the middle of the ocean, everyone was gravitating towards the young people.
“When I was little there was an old man in our village; his tattoo was the first one I ever saw.”
“What was it?”
“A grizzly bear.”
“A grizzly bear?”
“Didn’t I tell you about it?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you in the meadow, on the way back,” I said.
My wanting to tell stories was a sign of my love. Finding stories was easy, my worry was finding the right words to tell them.
“Shall we play a game now?” said Feruzeh.
“I can see that this obsession with games runs in your family,” I said.
She laughed.
“Yes, let’s play ‘One Wish’,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Ask me for something. Your wish has to seem tough and difficult but it must be possible. Make sure you remember that rule.”
“You start so I’ll know how to play,” I said.
She thought for a while.
“You will write a novel with cello suites in it …” she said.
“Okay …” I waited for her to continue.
“In it you will include a sentence that we have said to each other, and no one except us will know what it is.”
“It’s possible but hard,” I said. “I can write a novel but I don’t know whether I’ll be able to bring myself to mention the cello suites.”
“Your turn,” she said.
Without hesitating I said, “You will be a shareholder of this garden.”
“What?”
“A few years ago they were going to put buildings here but they were stopped at the last minute. The landowner is now considering selling the land to the public in small plots, to make sure that that doesn’t happen in the future. That way no one will be able to touch the orchard.”
“A garden that belongs to everyone and to no one … Good idea.”
“We can buy this little bit where we’re sitting; what do you think?” I said.
She smiled.
“A little voice inside me tells me I should trust you,” she said.
“You can jump off the edge of a cliff with your eyes closed if you like; I’ll catch you.”
Feruzeh hesitated.
“Yes, but have you got any money? I haven’t,” she said.
“Me neither,” I said.
“So what are we going to do?”
“We’ll get a loan from the bank.”
“Hey revolutionary,” she said. “If we start owing money to the bank we’ll be engaging with this system.”
“Let’s engage,” I said, “but not with this system …”
We both laughed.
“You like changing the meanings of words,” she said.
“I’m as innocent as people who don’t only see roses as roses,” I said. “Like
you.”
She smiled.
“I’ve got a pressed rose inside my book, let’s give it to the people reading poetry,” she said.
The children playing beside us stretched their arms out wide and spun round and round in the vortex. They blended into the throng around the poetry readers.
“What a coincidence,” I said. “These children were here when I came here in the autumn with my sister too.”
“It’s the kind of place that children like.”
“Feruzeh …” I said.
“Yes …”
“You also have a sister, don’t you? I remember your mentioning her.”
“I have a twin,” she said.
She turned her head away.
“A twin?” I said. “I didn’t see her on your mother’s birthday.”
“She doesn’t live in England.”
I took a sip from my tea.
“Does she look like Juliette Binoche too?” I asked.
Feruzeh looked at me.
She leaned forward, until she was close to my face.
“I purge my sins with you,” she said.
Her lips curved into a sorrowful smile, just like Juliette Binoche’s.
“Shall we talk about our sins today?” I said.
“No, it’s much too nice a day to discuss sins,” she said.
Slowly she drew away. She sank back into her large chair.
Several blossoms fell from the apple tree above us.
I took the mirror with the rose motif out of my pocket. Before it used to show me the past, now it was showing me the future.
“This is yours now,” I said.
Feruzeh accepted it reluctantly.
“It’s your father’s mirror isn’t it? It means a lot to you.”
“That’s why I’m giving it to you,” I said.
She brought the mirror up to her face. She gazed into it as though tumbling into a well that no one knew about, as though discovering the secret of a clandestine life.
Then she covered it with her hand.
9 The Claw-faced Woman
The Innocents’ Burden
Before Tatar the photographer came to these parts, wolves, foxes and a grizzly bear roamed Haymana Plain. Houses with cooling walls, dogs awaiting the moment they would bark, and the crystalline spring, abandoned by young brides, would sleep embracing the full moon. Bread was scarce, death too common and occasionally, like wounded water, love gushed with blood.
When the Claw-faced woman’s twin daughters found two bear cubs behind the mountain peaks on one of those days when every inch of the plain was sprouting green, new life rippled through the village. They raised the bear cubs on dog swill and shielded them from the malice of inquisitive children. When the dogs’ barking intensified at night they knew the cubs’ mother was roaming close by the village. The Claw-faced woman told them to set the cubs free. The twin girls cried. One morning they climbed to the hilltop together, released the cubs and watched them amble innocently away. A single night passed. The daughters saw the village children dragging one of the cubs through the streets with a rope around its neck. Before anyone knew it, dogs tore the other cub to pieces on the stream bed.
The twin girls cried even harder and from that day they stopped playing with the other children. The Claw-faced woman chased the savage village children all the way to the other side of the hill. As the children tried to shake her off by jumping into the stream beds or by hiding amongst the reeds, they were unaware that a grizzly bear was searching for her lost cubs. The grizzly bear had been wandering for days among the scent of thyme and sprawling speedwell, climbing up slopes and peering behind rocks, panting. For a mother searching for her babies a single night was longer than the torment of an entire lifetime. The enraged grizzly bear attacked everything in her path, leaving the cadavers of the foxes and wolves she had ripped to pieces in her wake.
When the children, who were hiding without making a sound, suddenly saw the grizzly bear, they ran up to the top of the hill and came face to face with the Claw-faced woman. Grabbing a long branch, the Claw-faced woman shielded the children. First she threw a rock at the grizzly bear and then she waved the branch at it. Scenting its cubs’ smell close by, the grizzly bear roared, her pain echoed in the furthest hilltops before returning. She could hear the sound of approaching dogs from below. As the Claw-faced woman turned to look in the direction of the sounds, a blow from the grizzly bear sent her reeling onto the rocks. Gunshots were heard, the dogs came even closer. The grizzly bear took to her heels and disappeared from sight. When they saw the blood stains in the river the villagers thought they had shot the grizzly bear, but when they saw the abandoned carcasses of the two wolves on the path they were perplexed. They feared the grizzly bear’s pain that was so great it made her abandon the wolves she had killed on the path, uneaten.
Until that day the Claw-faced woman’s name had been Saadet. In the past she would plait her hair in front of the mirror, contemplating her face that was as beautiful as water. Then fate played its hand and life continued its course. Saadet, who was left scarred after the grizzly bear’s attack, never again sat in front of a mirror. Living like this for the rest of her life was her ransom for the two bear cubs. At times innocents bore the burden of sinners.
Saadet was born in that distant city Ankara. By the time her lieutenant father was done fighting in the First World War and the Greco-Turkish War she had grown into a young woman. Her father returned with a young sergeant from Istanbul in tow. Saadet married the sergeant from Istanbul, but it wasn’t just in Haymana Plain that the waters of the river of time flowed murkily, they flowed murkily in the city too.
His inheritance of corpses and wartime nightmares led the sergeant from Istanbul to taverns, where he got into fights and sank to the depths of isolation endured by the homeless. One night he marched his wife through dim streets to a dilapidated mansion. Realizing she was in the midst of a den of drunks Saadet ran to the window and, without a moment’s hesitation, jumped into the bushes and spent the rest of the night hiding in a hollow. The following day she returned to her father’s home.
The sergeant from Istanbul pounded on the door of the lieutenant who had once been his commander, demanding his wife back. Every night he raised the neighbourhood from their beds. He had exceeded every limit and his life hung from the edge of a precipice. The night the sergeant from Istanbul, whose tears were long spent, burst into the house raining down bullets, he did not cry. The lieutenant and his wife died, Saadet was wounded and the sergeant from Istanbul joined the list of missing persons. All women shared the same fate and every woman accepted the portion due to her. Saadet decided to go to a certain village of which her father had spoken, and disappear into the anonymity and solitude of Haymana Plain. As the poet said:
Don’t ask the salt it doesn’t know, don’t ask the soil it doesn’t see,
The women were the first to weep,
In their bare hands a mirror and a knife.
Don’t ask the water it doesn’t know, don’t ask the leaf it doesn’t see.
The women were the first to weep.
One night during the Greco-Turkish war, Saadet’s father had been wounded in Haymana Plain and lost his unit. At that time the old man Os was sixty years old and he smuggled the lieutenant he had spotted near the village into his home. Three days later the lieutenant got back on his feet and, though he was wounded, stole out into the dark, followed the sound of gunfire, found his own soldiers and rejoined the war. When the war ended and he returned to his family he was as proud of the cigarette case that the old man Os had given him as he was of his medal. Years later, sensing imminent tragedy, he gave his daughter the cigarette case and told her that when she had nowhere to turn to she should head to Haymana Plain and seek out the old man Os. When Saadet arrived in the village pregnant and distraught the old man Os embraced her and wept harder than he had wept during the war when the entire plain was a bloodbath.
A month later Saadet gave birth
to twins and Kewê and Asya became her closest friends. Asya, who lived alone, would sing in the cemetery at night, then drop in to see Saadet’s daughters. Sometimes she would take the girls to the cemetery and play with them there, placing crowns of cemetery weeds on their heads.
Asya taught Saadet Kurdish and learned Turkish from her. As she listened to Saadet’s tales of cars, gramophones and telephones she could barely believe that the sun had seven colours. She only accepted it once they had looked at the rainbow together one day. She thought history was a book filled with corpses and asked when the new war would begin. Saadet told her she must keep the things she told her to herself and not breathe a word to anyone. “People who live in cities don’t know each other,” she said.
Asya was afraid: “Why?” she asked.
“The city is very big.”
Asya tried to imagine the city but couldn’t. “So why do they live there?” When she heard that city folk used a black stone called coal for heat she said, “How can you burn stone?” She thought that cities meant going to remote places, whereas in the village remoteness came to you.
Asya taught Saadet that crows descending in flocks in the spring were harbingers of the news of a harsh winter. And also that the best way to keep mosquitos away from children so they could sleep soundly was smoke from dried cow dung. When a rainbow appeared it meant the foxes were celebrating a wedding, children who jumped over a rainbow could change into whichever sex they liked. Love was a matter of fate, separation patience, death a test, while hope was the only remedy. As she listened to all this Saadet gradually came to realize the difference between the worlds of the village and the city. One grew inwards while the other grew outwards.
As Asya spoke she would sometimes stop and listen to the red breeze outside, hoping Ferman would suddenly appear. She would get up and clean the house and lay freshly laundered covers on the beds, as though she had heard a signal bell in the distance. The following morning, having awoken from a delectable dream, she would tell the young brides by the fountain that she would soon attain her desire. There was no one who didn’t love her but many who mourned for her. As folk-songs lamenting her fate went from mouth to mouth she was protective of her unfulfilled happiness. She implored God to grant everyone such intense love, but to make everyone else’s fate different. Sometimes she would have fainting fits and declare in her delirium, “I’m going to have a child.” The young girls would swear by their elder brothers, while Asya would swear by her late father. She didn’t pay heed to people’s talk and when nothing was heard of the grizzly bear for a while she didn’t set much store by the rumours that Ferman had killed her. “A mother whose cubs have died is an orphan, Ferman wouldn’t hurt an orphaned bear,” she would say. One season later the story was reversed; this time the villagers whispered the news from one ear to another that the grizzly bear had killed Ferman.
Sins & Innocents Page 8