The Dark Moment

by Ann Bridge

  The proper thing, as Hassan anyhow realised, would have been to spend two nights at Ilghaz to rest the horses, and he took counsel with the driver about this the first thing in the morning. Much to his surprise, Mehmet said that the next stage, to Çankiri, was an easy six-and-a-half hours, and the road, he had ascertained, good; he had attended properly to the horses last night, they were fine animals; if the Effendis wished to go on, it was quite possible to do so.

  There is something rather soothing, but at the same time extremely monotonous about driving in a vehicle which can only do five or six miles an hour, for several days on end; and the monotony of the latter half of the drive from the Black Sea to Ankara is one of the things that seems to have impressed itself most on those who took the Road of the Revolution in the early days—that, and the stiffness and discomfort of sitting upright, hour after hour, in a carriage with poor springs or none, one’s body made aware of every stone, rut or bump in the road as a series of jerks and jolts. Incidents to enliven the journey were few and far between: meeting a peasant on his donkey, overtaking a few cagnés, or, once or twice, encountering a horseman, riding fast, who appeared as a silhouette on the horizon in front, thudded by with a deep sound of hoofs on the unmetalled road, and disappeared over the horizon behind—couriers for Kastamonu or Inebolu, or distributors of the treasured newspaper, the Hakimiyeti Milliyet. The only other break in the monotony was the scenery, which changed, not swiftly as it does nowadays in a fast car, but very slowly and gradually.

  All the same, the scenery was often remarkable. On the first day out from Ilghaz, after crossing the Devrez-Çai, the big valley which runs just south of the range they had crossed the day before, they climbed on the further side onto open downland sparsely covered by a low-growing oak-scrub, with stretches of wiry turf between. But this particular kind of oak—a variety of Quercus Toza—has the peculiarity that its first foliage is of a most extraordinary colour, shading from appleblossom pink to carmine, overlaid with a sort of velvet of silver—Féridé and Nilüfer exclaimed at its beauty as they passed into it. For miles and miles they jogged slowly through this pink-and-silver world, with the great white-and-silver mass of the Ilghaz Dagh rising into the sky behind them, while to complete the enchantment flocks of silky-silver Angora goats, so strangely rectangular with their upright heads and tails, one at each end, were browsing all through the pink bushes, their newly-born kids so intensely white as to look almost luminous in the strong spring sunshine.

  At lunch, which they ate in a very humble han on the further side of those fairy-tale downs, they learned something new. The han—like the village in which it stood—was built neither of stone, wood, nor plaster, but of rammed earth, and the room where they ate was filled with a strangely sour smoky smell which emanated, Féridé was told by Hassan, from the dried dung on which their food was cooked. For now they were up on the high, woodless central plateau of Asia Minor, where—since there are neither trees nor rocks—houses are built of clay, and dung is the only fuel.

  “But what do they put on their fields?” the girl asked in surprise. “At the vine-house at Chamlidja the vines and the fields were always dressed with dung.”

  Ah, what indeed? Féridé had put her finger on one of the eternal problems of Anatolian agriculture—how to grow adequate crops without feeding the soil properly; in a land without wood, dung is the only fuel; but if you burn your dung you starve your soil. Hassan, a townsman, could not answer her question, and applied to the landlord; who, peasant as he was, was acutely aware of the problem.

  “Ah, Effendim, what can we do? The dung of our beasts we must burn, or we should die of cold in winter, and moreover could not cook our food. We do what we can—in summer, when the streams are nearly dry, we dig up the mud from the stream-beds and spread that upon the land. There is feeding of a sort in it: from the leaves of the trees, and all that which is borne by the waters down a stream. But our crops are poor! However, Allah wills it so—we live in a harsh place!”

  They saw for themselves that afternoon how harsh the place was; the landscape which they passed through was in the sharpest possible contrast to the fairy-tale, French-tapestry quality of that pink-and-white world of the morning—was indeed almost Dantesque in its strangeness and grimness. Bare gorges of pale soil, so deeply eroded by rainstorms that they and the hills above them resembled the hatching used to indicate mountains on a map, with, here and there, smears of a violent blue-green where the hidden chrome emerged on the surface. But not a tree, not a bush. And then, at sundown, they dropped into a big valley, that of the Akçi-Su, and followed it into the town of Çankiri, where they met the spring, suddenly, in full force—earth-walled gardens full of budding boughs and shoots of green things, and the poplars along the river hung with new leaves, bright as freshly-minted copper pennies. They turned up into the town, through the market, and drew up at the door of their inn.

  This time it really was an inn. Around a long narrow courtyard open to the sky ran two tiers of wooden galleries; carriages and cagnés were standing about the courtyard, off which stables opened; men and women came and went, carrying water from the fountain in the centre, or bundles of fodder to their beasts. The party was led upstairs and along the lower gallery, off which bedrooms opened; the innkeeper threw open door after door, disclosing in each room much the same thing—two or three brass bedsteads, divans upholstered in bright harsh woollen stuffs under the windows, elaborate fringed and embroidered valances above them, rugs hanging on the walls. It was all very neat, and fairly clean.

  “What luxury!” Féridé said. “But could we not be on the floor above? We should get more air, and it would be quieter.”

  Yes, they could do that, and on the upper floor the two girls installed themselves. Féridé wandered about the gallery, leaning over the light wooden handrail to watch the activities in the courtyard below. She felt an extraordinary happiness and contentment filling her—so many difficulties overcome, the new life with Orhan so close ahead, this moment of peace now. Returning to their room, she leant from the window, where over the pink roofs of the town she could see the valley of the Akçi-Su stretching away to the west, all in a glory of sunset light, spangled with the metallic glitter of those young poplar-leaves, as far as the eye could see. “Come and look,” she called to Nilüfer, without turning her head; “it is so beautiful.”

  Nilüfer came and joined her, and they leaned together, resting their elbows on the sill. “I wonder in which direction Ankara lies,” Nilüfer mused.

  “There—up the valley, where we are looking. It is to the west of us, I know,” Féridé said, happily.

  “And now how much longer is it till we get there?”

  “Another day or two, I think—we will ask Hassan.”

  “It is a very long way,” said Nilüfer, slowly. “This is our fifth day on the road, and we were two nights at Inebolu, and four on that dreadful boat! If it is really another two days, we shall have been travelling for nearly two weeks! Who could have imagined, when we set out, that it would take so long? And that we must do it alone?”

  “Dearest, we are not altogether alone—we have had Hassan with us. Though how our two husbands expected us to manage such a journey with no escort, I do not know, I must say! But dji-djim, are you very tired?” she asked, suddenly struck by Nilüfer’s pallor.

  “Not very—yes, I am tired, a little. Yesterday was so wet and cold, and—oh, altogether dangerous and horrible! You do not mind these things—you are to be envied!”

  “Well, now all is easy—and tonight you shall go to bed the moment after we have eaten,” Féridé comforted her. “And soon we shall be at Ankara, in our own homes, and Ahmet will be with you, and all will be well.”

  The following day was not a very long stage either, and the drive was delightful to Féridé, whose glad mood of the previous evening was still on her. In any case that particular stretch of the road over the plateau has a strange and dramatic beauty, for all its barrenness—on either side o
f the valley rise cream-coloured hills, their flanks eroded into sharp gullies filled with blue shadows and capped, astonishingly, with a layer of red earth two or three hundred feet deep. It had rained in the night, and the rain had brought the carmine soil down into the river, so that the stream ran blood-red in its bed of white stones; thousands of the white goats were coming down to drink of the ensanguined waters, while overhead the great black-and-white Egyptian vultures, newly returned from the South, soared in vast circles in the blue. Just before sundown they came to Tönai, with its fields, gardens, and groves of poplars down by the river, and its little rocky hill, sparsely grown with black and stunted pine-trees, rising behind. Not even the news, given them by Hassan, that they had got to spend yet another night on the road, nor the discomforts of the poor han with its rammed-earth walls, wretched food, insects and general dirtiness, had power to dim Féridé’s spirits. “What is one day?” she exclaimed when Nilüfer sighed about it—“Think of the days and days and days ahead of us, when we do get to Ankara.”

  All the same, the following day was disagreeable and trying. They had slept badly, woke early, and were longing to be off and away from the dirty infested place as soon as possible, but Mehmet insisted stubbornly on starting late—it was a short stage, only five hours, to Ravli, and his beasts could do with an extra spell of rest after all their exertions, he said. The monotony of the road was much more pronounced than on the previous two days—the red-and-white hills had been left behind, and the great bronze-coloured bulk of the Idris Dagh, looming up against a sullen sky ahead and to their left, was the only major feature except for the brownish villages, their houses walled and roofed with earth of the same colour as their unfenced fields, tucked away high in the hills on either side, far from the road. This peculiar arrangement aroused Féridé’s interest, and as usual she asked Hassan about it—why were these villages not built nearer the highway? Hassan, also as usual, applied to Mehmet for the required information.

  “But for the water,” the driver replied. “The springs are in the hills, and the people must live close to the springs, naturally; for with such sun and such wind as they have here in summer, Effendim, the water dries away into the earth in what one could drive in a quarter of an hour—less! Look,” he said, pointing with his whip to their right, where a stony track led up to a group of houses which seemed to cower in a cleft in the hillside—“See how there is a water-course, and no water.” And indeed beside the track an obvious stream-bed, now stony and almost dry, descended towards the road. “Water—that is the problem here,” said Mehmet oracularly; “water and fuel. No trees!” he said, and cracked his whip to clatter past a file of cagnés.

  There were a lot of cagnés on the road that day. There had been a few convoys the day before, but not many—Mehmet, who habitually informed himself on all such matters, as leisurely users of the road have been wont to do for a couple of thousand years, stated that they carried the cargo of a boat that had put in to Inebolu three weeks earlier. Soon, too, the lack of water ceased to be apparent, for a violent rainstorm came on, blotting out the lowering outline of the Idris Dagh, and presently bringing foaming freshets coursing down those short dry stream-beds that ran out from the hills. “Mon Dieu, why do they not dam the streams?” Féridé said on seeing this, as she sat crouched with Nilüfer under the Inebolu blanket. “If they did that, they could preserve water, and have it at will. Mehmet!—why do they not dam up the streams?” But Mehmet, hunched up in his sheepskin coat, had turned deaf again and did not reply.

  Presently both Féridé and Hassan noticed an extraordinary thing. They themselves, to get protection from the cold beating rain, were huddled—the girls under the blanket, Mehmet in his sheepskin, and Hassan in his military greatcoat; but the women of the plateau, who were driving the cagné-teams of slow-moving oxen, walked along unconcernedly beside the carts without their brown goats-hair cloaks, which they had spread over their loads; the cherry-colour of their flowered trousers and jackets becoming an even darker red as the rain soaked into them. “Goodness, why do they not wear their cloaks?” Nilüfer exclaimed at last. “This is idiotic, what they do! Rain cannot harm the ammunition, can it, Hassan Bey?”

  “No, certainly it cannot, packed as it is,” the young man replied from his horse.

  “Then do ask them why they do this,” Féridé urged, impatiently. “Ask that one”—as they overhauled a woman dragging at the oxen which hauled a cart full of shells, whose swollen shapes were plainly visible through the sodden cloth which covered them. “Stop, Mehmet! —I wish to listen.”

  She never forgot what she heard when Hassan did as he was bid, and asked the woman why she did not wear her cloak, instead of spreading it over the insensate metal of the shells. A big fine creature, she stood still, drew herself up, and made this answer: “My body”—striking her breast—“is only my own; these”—and she gestured at the shells—“belong to the Nation!” And she turned away, to continue tugging her team along the miry road—to Féridé a figure of unforgettable splendour.

  Soaked through, they ate some food in the han at Haleçik, and then drove on over a pass across an outlying spur of the Idris range, down into more fertile and cultivated land, where brown and twisted vines were showing knotty buds, and so came to Ravli, where they were to spend their last night on the road. Ravli boasted three hans, none of them good; Hassan chose what he thought was the best, and they did at least secure a brazier to dry their wet clothes. Nilüfer had caught cold, and was pale and silent; high time they did reach Ankara, Féridé thought, as she brewed tea, gave her sister-in-law aspirin, and tucked her up in most of the bedding—this journey had lasted long enough.

  “She will be able to go on tomorrow, no?” Hassan enquired rather anxiously, when she went down to fetch some soup, all Nilüfer felt able to take. “It is only three-and-a-half hours on to Ankara.”

  “Oh yes, I think so, if we don’t start too early. It has been hard for her, all this.”

  “Hard for you also, I think,” the young man said, in a tone of undisguised admiration.

  “Oh, I am hardy!” Féridé laughed, and tripped away with her bowl of broth.

  A little later he came tapping at the door—“Féridé Hanim!”

  “Yes,” she said, slipping out—“What is it?”

  “There is a messenger here on his way back to Ankara, one of those who carry the newspapers; he is riding straight on tonight. Would it not be well to send a note to your husband, to say that you are here, and arriving tomorrow?”

  “Yes—indeed. I will write it at once. Will Orhan get it tonight?”

  “Tonight, or very early tomorrow.”

  As she hurriedly scribbled a few lines, the girl thought how wonderful it was at last to be so near that what she wrote now, Orhan would receive in a few hours’ time!—after their three months of separation and almost complete lack of letters, it seemed too good to be true. “Tomorrow! I shall see him tomorrow!” her heart sang ceaselessly until she fell asleep.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Where will they meet us, do you suppose?” Féridé asked of Hassan as they left next day. The rain had stopped, and in the morning sunlight Ravli was a pretty place enough, embowered in big poplars, with earth-walled gardens beside a small quiet river, where peach- and pear-trees showed signs of blossom.

  “At the city’s entrance, I imagine,” replied Hassan, who really had no idea.

  Mehmet, without turning round, put his oar in.

  “Unless I am much mistaken, they will be waiting at the bridge; that is where travellers are met.”

  “What bridge, Mehmet?”

  “But, the bridge over this river—the Çankiri Bridge, men call it, since it is on the Çankiri road.”

  Mehmet was right. After driving for a couple of hours along the valley, whose poplars and gardens were in sharp contrast to the desolation of the last three days, they came unexpectedly into a small range of low savage-looking hills; Nilüfer, whose cold was still heavy, gave
a little moan—“Oh, not more precipices!” But the road wound through them easily, and rounding a last sharp bend came out at a bridge backed by a low bluff. That scene always remained imprinted on Féridé’s memory— the grey double-arched bridge, the white-stemmed copper-leaved poplars rising in a group of Claude-like grace above the quiet slow-moving water, with two splendid horses tied to their branches; behind, above the road beyond the bridge, the steep bush-grown face of the bluff, so like the bluff that rose behind the yali, and two tall figures in uniform that at the sound of their horses’ hoofs rose from beside a little fire, and hastened towards them with long swift strides—Ahmet and Orhan.

  After eager and excited greetings the little cavalcade went on, up and over the rising ground—and there, across a wide stretch of cultivated land rose two low hump-backed hills, both covered with houses, one crowned with an irregular outline of fortified walls—Ankara! Calling from carriage to horses, from horses to carriage, they trotted towards the city, exchanging news; Ahmet was troubled by Nilüfer’s pallor and obvious indisposition, but—“If you knew what we have been through!” Hassan exclaimed. “Snowstorms, drifts, this appalling road over the Il-ghaz Dagh!—and rain yesterday; we were soaked through!”

  “Do not forget the women,” Féridé said—“The women who carry the ammunition and lead the cagnés; they are incredible!”

  “And what about my horses, who pulled you all through the snow and over the mountains? Are they not also worthy of praise?” Mehmet asked. They all laughed, and praised his gallant team till the cross-grained old man was mollified.