It was then that I started to retain every word I heard and to tell others the stories I listened to. But the children who listened to me breathlessly didn’t know what patience was.
Man: “I will never put the feelings in my heart into words madam.”
Woman: “Why not?”
Man: “Talking of what cannot be will hurt us both.”
Woman: “Surely we can find a way.”
Man: “You wouldn’t speak that way if you knew what I was going to say.”
The voices of the crowd, the rumble of an engine.
Woman: “The train is about to leave.”
(“What’s a train?”/“How should I know, I heard it on the radio.”/“You don’t understand Turkish properly son, she must have said something else.”/“I understood everything Madam said perfectly.”/“What’s ‘Madam’?”/ “The woman’s name.”)
Man: “I remember a scene like this in a novel.”
Woman: “What happens?”
Man: “A young man is in love with a woman. Their love is hopeless. Yet the man tells the woman what his mind fears but his heart desires.”
Woman: “What does the woman do?”
Man: “That doesn’t matter, what matters is the end.”
Woman: “What happens at the end?”
Man: “The woman commits suicide.”
Woman: “That means she loves him.”
The sound of a train.
(“A train must be like a big bus.”/“Let him get on with the story.”)
Man: “If everyone who loves dies I want to spare you that fate.”
Woman: “And the only way of doing that is by remaining silent?”
Man: “What my mind fears but my heart desires is …”
Woman: “Be quiet and kiss me.”
Silence.
Woman: “I’ve waited so long for this moment. Kiss me again.”
Silence.
(“Is he kissing her now?”/“Yeah.”/“Make the silence last a bit longer.”/“Okay.”)
The silence continues.
The sound of a gunshot.
The crowd starts screaming.
Another gunshot.
Woman: “Ah, our love was even more short lived than the love in that novel.”
Man: “Hold my hand madam, so we can die together.”
A whistle blows, gradually the sound of the train becomes fainter.
(“Shall we go and play the silence game with the girls?”/“Come on then.”)
While I was telling stories all the children and I would enter a mirror, then we had no choice but to come back. It was a time when all the children tried to emulate a radio hero called Deniz, we all lived in hope of meeting him inside the mirror. Our hearts raced, we could barely breathe. We would hear Deniz clapping his hands in the red breeze, and set off in pursuit of undiscovered shadows. When talking about Deniz, the adults would sometimes miss prayers, women’s voices would break with grief, men would smoke one cigarette after another. Inside the mirror we would silently follow his tracks.
I was a puny child, my wildest dream was to be Deniz for just one day. We thought he was a sailor and used to honour the fastest swimmer in the stream with the name Deniz. I swam for all I was worth but always ran out of breath. While sleeping with my mother, father and four brothers and sisters in the one-room house inherited from Kewê, I would dream of swimming better the next day, occasionally screaming as I threw off the quilt that weighed down on my sleep. My mother would wake up, stroke my sweat-covered neck and kiss my hair. “Go to sleep Brani Tawo, go to sleep,” she would say softly. I used to think she was saying “Deniz”. Much as it pained me to lose the competition to be Deniz, I didn’t know what unhappiness was. Everyone in the village was happy in their own way; unhappiness penetrated only the souls of those tied to cities. Pain and sorrow were something else, we were familiar with those. Although Deniz was a rebel we still insisted on thinking he was a sailor. While the whole world searched for him we didn’t tell a soul that actually he lived inside the mirror.
One day some soldiers and men in suits came to the village. Uncle Hatip, my mother and I were listening to the radio. As had been the custom in those parts since the ancient tribal era, a wooden rafter placed in the centre of each room supported the roof of the houses. Homes with no centre rafter were considered poor, even if they were whitewashed with lime. In the same place as Kewê had sat thirty years previously, my mother was now leaning against the rafter, observing the world outside the open door. An armed man walked past the door. “Who’s that?” I said.
My uncle replied, “A gendarme.”
Then a man in a felt hat walked past. “Who’s that?” I asked.
My uncle replied, “The tax inspector.”
On the radio several people were talking at once. “Who are they?” I asked.
“The people in Ankara,” said my uncle. The voices on the radio died down, my mother and uncle grew silent.
“And who are we?” I asked. They both looked at me.
That day, as the radio announced that Deniz and his friends had been executed, my ears rang and for the first time ever during my childhood I thought I hadn’t heard the radio right. “The state killed him,” they said.
“Who’s ‘the state’?” I asked. Whenever I asked that question the earth shook and the heavens thundered. Like every child destined to fail “state” in school, I realized that I had to hide Deniz in mirrors that no one knew about for the rest of my life. As the poet said:
The night that Deniz returned from afar,
A girl was combing her tresses before a dark mirror.
Outside were the horses’ breath, radio stations and
The scent of freshly cut straw.
The locks had grown old, the doors aged.
The alarm bells,
The alarm bells insisted,
On ringing to announce the blight in every heart.
No one got up, no one ran to the window.
Then the bleary eyed children set out with Deniz,
One morning at daybreak to the land of mirrors.
And like trees abandoned in the cold,
The frost thrashed our hearts,
Thrashed our hearts.
I never saw Uncle Hatip again. He gave his carpet bag to my mother and left the village. I heard his story years later from my mother, when I was lying wounded in bed.
As a young man Uncle Hatip worked as a shepherd in the villages on the other side of Mangal Mountain. When, three months after his wedding he accidentally called his wife “Zahide” she felt as though he had stabbed her heart. “Who is this Zahide?” she screamed, her shrieks reverberating throughout the neighbourhood. It was a miracle she didn’t miscarry the child she was pregnant with. Uncle Hatip’s mind went blank; he had no idea where he had got the name Zahide. There were no Zahides, either in his own family, or in this village where he was a shepherd.
The following day, when he was driving his flock out to pasture, he forgot his food bundle at home. He went hungry all day and for that reason brought the flock back to the village a little earlier than usual. If he had not returned home early that day he would have met a caravan of gypsies. When he discovered that the most beautiful girl in the caravan was called Zahide, he would have fallen in love on the spot, like prisoners sentenced to death who lack the strength to struggle against fate. Uncle Hatip would have abandoned his wife and home to run away with the gypsy caravan, roamed distant villages and been knifed to death seven years later in a brawl that started over Zahide. But because he returned from pasture early that day, none of it happened.
Uncle Hatip discovered the unwritten part of his fate when he went to the next village to buy a new gun. The gypsy caravan was in the next village; an elderly, blind gypsy related it all and described my uncle when she mentioned “a shepherd who will come to buy a gun” whilst telling a fortune. When the gypsy asked, “Is unfulfilled destiny better or worse?” everyone listening to her chorused “Worse.” The blind
gypsy contented herself with taking a drag from her cigarette and scorning the villagers with her ancient cackle.
Uncle Hatip shuddered, first to discover there was a Zahide amongst the gypsies, and again, when he learned his other fate. On his way home in the light of the full moon he resolved to tell his wife everything, but she wasn’t there. The neighbours said, “She left, with her pregnant belly.” Everyone knew what it was to love, but being loved was in the hands of fate. That night, as he fired bullets at the full moon, Uncle Hatip realized that it was only now that he was about to embark on his real destiny.
He searched high and low in the villages on the plain and the distant valleys, agonizing night and day over whether his child was a girl or a boy. As the years passed he thought his daughter must be tall like her mother who had abandoned him or, in case he had had a son, he described a youth who looked like himself to everyone he met. “Look at my face carefully,” he would announce in village squares. “Everyone is a lake, until the full moon shines on his face. I am seeking my full moon.” Sometimes he didn’t know exactly what he was pursuing; he would join gypsy caravans that he met on his travels and spend seasons at a time with them, crossing hills and dales. He described no one to the gypsies, he did not say, “Look at my face,” he only asked after Zahide. But while life aged, like a tree in the autumn winds, my uncle did not manage to find Zahide either. He smoked tobacco constantly, and the tobacco smoke cauterized his heart. At a time when he was as much in need of new hope as a child who can’t sleep he bumped into Tatar the photographer in one of the coffeehouses in Haymana. While looking at the photographs Tatar had taken in the villages, he realized that his life had crashed to the ground and shattered, like a picture engraved on glass. Their fates were as similar as the leaves on a tree; Tatar and my uncle were roaming the villages on the plain for the same reason.
I remember the sorrow on my uncle’s face the last time he came to the village when I was still a child. Life was as sacred as a holy book whose every page had been turned and finished but the contents of which remained unknown. My uncle wandered amongst those pages, lamenting and growing pale. Inside the carpet bag he gave my mother on the last day, when he was leaving, there were some old photographs and a camera. My mother had no idea when Tatar the photographer gave the camera to my uncle, but she remembered the camera clearly. While Tatar was taking photographs of her and Kewê during my mother’s childhood she had examined the camera carefully and realized that a destiny was being created inside it, and that from that day a new garden of life would unravel before her.
12 Stella
The White Shirt
I got out of bed.
I checked my phone to see if I had received any calls.
I showered.
I had breakfast in front of the television.
It was a beautiful day.
Outside the bright light beckoned.
I picked out my white shirt from the clean laundry basket and ironed it. I was wearing it on the day I met Feruzeh.
On my way out I didn’t look at the photograph on the wall.
I went down to the river.
I walked beside the joggers and the people rowing on the river.
I walked through crowded streets and arrived at the graveyard where Wittgenstein lay.
I saw the old man from last week at the window of the house on the street leading to the cemetery. He was watching the outside world. I smiled and waved at him.
I looked at my phone, as though it would ring that very minute.
I ambled in slow motion amongst the rustling leaves.
I couldn’t see the gravediggers. I wondered whether they worked in the rain and had sunny days off.
I stopped beside several gravestones, trying to guess their inhabitants’ stories.
The shadows of the trees shading the graves contained clues of the lives of the dead, like the lines on the palm of a hand.
I went behind the church.
I reached Wittgenstein’s grave. The people who had remembered the anniversary of his death had placed bouquets of flowers by the gravestone.
I sat on the dry earth.
Following Anatolian tradition, I cleared some dried leaves from the grave and sprinkled water from my bottle over it.
Anyone who saw me would realize I intended to spend the whole day there.
The sun was scorching my forehead.
I took a poetry book out of my bag and opened a page at random.
When I was a child I remember a crying man reading poetry on the radio one day. I realized then that one shouldn’t cry when reading poetry.
Children received their share of the village harvest too. Everyone who harvested crops gave the children two handfuls each of wheat, which we exchanged for biscuits and lokum from the pedlar. I refused the wheat of the children who offered it to me in return for reading them poetry. Poetry, which at that time was as sacred as prayer, could not be measured with wheat. But I did sometimes accept the lokum they offered me after I had read the poetry.
When I was a child, touching earth and wheat made me feel alive. Our village became rooted in time, along with the earth and the wheat. Contrary to what they believed in cities, a person’s history did not begin with their oldest family member.
I finished the poem and put the book back in my bag.
I looked around.
I was alone with several hundred gravestones.
I lay down beside Wittgenstein’s grave. The same soil was beneath us and the same sky above us.
I closed my eyes.
I imagined there was a gravestone above me. A large, grey, flat gravestone.
I started singing a folk-song, so loud the last cadaver by the furthest wall could have heard.
Birds flew away. Branches rustled.
The sound of music came from the other side of the wall.
A violin was playing.
I stopped to listen. The violin stopped too.
I opened my eyes.
I waited a while.
I began the song again.
The violin accompanied my voice.
We continued in unison.
It was the same folk-song Kewê had heard the labourers sing in the field and had then sung to my mother forty years later. Whenever I sang that song I imagined myself beneath that night’s red breeze. I remained true to the memory of that starry night when Kewê was in love.
The day I had told Feruzeh Kewê’s story she had asked me to sing the song to her. Blushing like a bashful child I had said, “It’s not the right time.”
Here I was now, sharing the song I had never sung in front of anyone with the dead.
The sun warmed my face and my voice.
It had been years since I’d stretched out on the ground like this. My skin was sprouting roots down into the soil.
My song ended.
The violin fell silent.
The birds returned, the branches’ shadows quivered.
I should get up, take some bread from my bag and scatter the crumbs over the grave. I had read that in a Dostoevsky novel. When the birds came to eat the bread the dead would hear them singing.
My phone rang. I answered without looking to see who it was.
It was a friend inviting me to a picnic by the river.
I should have kept my phone switched off while I was there. Being with the dead was as sacred as entering the temple of sleep. But for the past few days I had kept my phone on even while I was sleeping.
I sat up. I looked at Wittgenstein’s grave. The red roses by the gravestone shone in the sunlight.
A sparrow landed beside the roses and hopped a couple of paces. My phone rang again. The sparrow flapped its wings and flew away.
I didn’t recognize the number. A woman said she was calling from the Western Front antique shop. She was a friend of Stella’s, and had seen my note when she had passed by the shop to pick up a few things.
“Stella’s in hospital,” she said.
I took the slices
of bread out of my bag. I broke them into small pieces and scattered them over Wittgenstein’s grave.
I went to the bus stop.
A thousand and one thoughts flashed through my mind on the way to Addenbrooke’s Hospital. I bought a bunch of flowers at the hospital entrance.
I went up to the third floor and found Stella’s ward.
The nurse pointed out the bed by the window. I opened the curtain a crack.
Stella was asleep.
I sat down on the chair beside her.
I put the flowers down on the bedside table.
The wires on Stella’s chest were connected to a screen.
I examined the screen. Although I didn’t understand them I decided that the numbers and readings were all what they should be.
I contemplated the lines on her face.
Her pale skin was now a little paler, her hair looked thinner.
I bent down and listened to her breathing. Her breath was deep, warm and old.
Feruzeh had told me that Stella had a son who lived abroad. I wondered if he knew.
Slowly, Stella half opened her eyes. She paused.
“Hello young man,” she said.
“Hello dear lady,” I replied.
She tried to sit up.
I raised the headboard to a vertical position and plumped up her pillows.
“What time is it?” she asked.
I told her.
“Would you like some water?” I said.
“Yes please.”
One night her chest had felt tight. She had called the emergency services and the ambulance had reached her in time.
“What do the doctors say?”
“I’m over the age limit, but they say I’m going to get better.”
Sins & Innocents Page 10