Every stone on every grave had been plastered over. They had chiseled new names on some stones and left others empty. Kemal’s grandfather had been given a new name. Her grandmother had been left nameless. Her father kneeled beside another, smaller headstone and ran his fingers across the fresh plaster. More and more people gathered, and up the row Kemal saw a man with a mattock beat the stone of his father. The man broke the stone to pieces and started digging.
Her father stabbed the stone before him with the chisel until the plaster crumbled. And once he licked his fingers and polished each letter, it was Kemal’s old name she saw in the tombstone. Her father polished the years. But this grave was not her grave, and she figured the boy who lay in it had never lived to be half her age, even.
Up the row the man with the mattock, now shirtless, his hands sticky with mud to the elbows, pulled out bones from the ground and lay them one by one in the shirt beside him.
12.
They worked on the bagpipes. Day and night without rest. When Kemal’s fingers bled, her father no longer kissed them. “My fingers, too, are bleeding,” he’d tell her. He started drinking, despite the Qu’ran and his own judgment. Sometimes, tired, Kemal pierced a hole too broad in the chanter, butchered a reed, snapped a mouthpiece.
“It’s that new name they gave you that makes you clumsy,” her father would say, flaming. “To make bagpipes you need a man’s name.” At first it was a quick blow behind the neck he dealt her, but soon his hand loosened further. No day rolled by without a beating.
The money they’d dug up was not enough for a hundred skins, so one night her father took her up to the goat pens to steal kid goats.
There was no moon when they walked out of the village. Hot wind blew in their faces, a gust from the White Sea, and Kemal’s lips cracked the more she licked them. So she kept licking, the salt and seaweed, so clean after the stench of her mother. They climbed a hill and crossed a meadow. The wind turned musky. In the distance they could see a scatter of sparks from a fire, tall and bursting with pinewood. Around that fire, Kemal knew, the shepherds lay too drunk to notice them coming. The dogs started, but when the wind threw the familiar smells at their muzzles, the dogs fell once again silent. This was the pen Kemal’s father came to when he bought meh skins. These were the dogs Kemal played with, the dogs she rode like mules, the dogs that had once licked her body clean when, as a baby, her father had bathed her in a trough of goat milk by this same fire.
At the pen hedge Kemal clamped the knife in her teeth, and hoisted herself over. She stood silent amidst the herd, sleeping goats dreamily munching, flickering ears. She could see the fire over the hedge and hear the shepherds snoring, the dogs whimpering, lazy, the wind gusting muffled between the twined hedgerows. In the dark her father was looking for kid goats. Only kid goats could turn mehs for a bagpipe. An older goat, ready for mating, reeked so bad, not even rose oil could cure it.
Kemal waded through the darkness on all fours, still biting the knife, her spit drooling. She came to a kid goat and like her father had taught her, rolled it flat on its back, sat on its hind legs, clenched the front in her fist. The goat did not scream even when she cut a hole in its belly. She breathed the stench in. The goat flapped its ears. Kemal buried her hand deep inside it and the wet heat stunned her fingers the way snail horns are stunned when you touch them. She felt her way around the stomach, a meh bloated with half-grazed grass instead of air. Then she caught the goat’s heart, midway in its beating. The goat kicked lightly, its neck stretching when she clamped its muzzle.
In the dark, she could hear her father dragging his belly across the short grass, stopping goat hearts. His nose whistling, stuffed from hay and flower, his breaths deep and even, regular knocking. She could not see him nor did she need to. She could not imagine that this same hand could hit her. In the dark, he was the way Kemal would always remember.
From that night on, she began to sleep in the workshop on the piles of stolen goatskins and in her dreams she saw hubs, reeds, chanters, mehs, like hearts beating in her clenched fists. And in her dream, it was her mother’s heart she was clenching, and so she clenched tighter.
13.
They were up to seventy bagpipes when the militia car came back to the workshop. Three men and the sergeant Kemal had treated with well water. “Now listen up, comrade,” the sergeant told her father. “The shepherds called from the goat pens to say some goats were stolen. So we followed the wool thread, if you permit the expression, and guess where that thread led us? Show us, kindly, the receipts for these skins you’ve purchased.”
“I’ve lost them,” Kemal’s father answered.
“And your passport?”
“I might have burned it.”
“Losho, drugaryu,” the sergeant told him. “That’s too bad, comrade.” He walked between the boxes and kicked them over gently, and Kemal watched the reeds and chanters spill out on the wood floor. He leaned down a little to face her better, then licked his thumb and wiped the dried blood from her split lip. “Why is your lip split?” he asked her, then took her hands and examined her fingers. “And why are your fingers bleeding? Is Father trying to make a quick buck?” The sergeant kept pacing and counting the bagpipes. Then he suggested Father come back to the station to have some coffee—some Turkish delight, even—and talk things over. He handed a pair of handcuffs to Kemal’s father and asked, kindly, for him to snap them on his own wrists.
14.
From then on, it was Kemal who took care of her mother. When the dark fell, she jumped over the fence to their neighbors and squeezed what little milk they’d left in their goats—half a jar, a whole jar sometimes. She felt no remorse for stealing. No neighbor had come to ask how Kemal managed, now that her father was taken. How her mother was feeling. So she cooked lumpy hominy or popara, and though her mother refused to eat, Kemal forced her—twenty spoonfuls at dinner and ten at lunchtime.
They kept waiting for the militia car to bring back Kemal’s father.
“Is that,” her mother often said, “an engine I hear?”
In the shower, Kemal brought the three-legged chair for her mother to sit on. She could not stand to see her mother naked—how thin her arms were, her legs, how swollen her kneecaps, how her bald skull glistened, and the hole in her belly where the pouch connected.
“It’s not that bad, really,” her mother told her. “I’m doing much better.”
Kemal could no longer stand to see her own skull in the mirror. So she let her hair grow longer—thick and prickly at first, like pig bristle, then much softer. She did not like the way her hair tickled her neck, cheeks, eyelids, but she liked to run her fingers through the locks and twirl them. Her mother had given her an old comb, and for an hour each morning Kemal combed at the threshold.
“Let me touch your hair,” her mother asked sometimes, but never dared raise her hand to touch it. She’d only smooth a crease on the blanket. “Beautiful hair, Kemal. Down to my waist. Do you remember?”
Sometimes Kemal took her bagpipe above the village to play with the echo. Once, she saw cars on the road below her, bumper to bumper, with mattresses, chairs, wooden cribs roped to their tops—blue, green, yellow, red cars, blood flowing away from the mountain. She’d heard men talking of fleeing to Turkey, so she tried to imagine herself in a red car, and the car speeding, and only the road before them, clean, smooth, endless. Her father was driving, her mother beside him, and in the back Kemal played the one song she loved most.
Down the slope she watched people from the upper hamlets haul their households on their backs like camels. Men and women and children loaded. She watched a woman trip and all the things tied to her back snap loose and roll down the slope with her body. Pans and pots and spoons and ladles and metal plates jumping wildly and catching the sun like gold coins. So Kemal struck her song with the bagpipe: A little pebble rolled down the mountain, gathered its brothers. Down in the valley Stoyan was herding a hundred white sheep. “Don’t roll, little pebble,” St
oyan begged it. “Don’t gather your brothers. I’ll give you my two sons, little pebble, just spare my white sheep.”
15.
One night Kemal’s mother called her over. “Listen, Kemal, I’ll be facing the Merciful soon, so do me a favor. Bring me a bagpipe. I want to blow into it.” When Kemal brought her own bagpipe, her mother cradled the bag in her arms like a baby and touched her lips to the blow pipe. A frail breath escaped her and the bag expanded, just slightly. “Have I told you, Kemal, how I met your father? I was a young girl then, sixteen, but my father had already promised me in marriage. I was to marry a neighbor, twice my age, but a rich man—he owned five fields and had traveled to Mecca. Well, one summer evening I go to the fountains—there were fountains, Kemal, outside my village where the water was softer—and I begin to fill the coppers. I hear footsteps behind me, and when I turn around I see your father. His shirt unbuttoned, his hair disheveled and his face sweaty and covered with sawdust. In his arms—two bagpipes. ‘I’m a bagpipe maker,’ he says. ‘Blow up one bagpipe and I’ll blow up the other. I want to hear,’ he says, ‘how they sound together.’ So I blow up one bagpipe and he blows up the other. In two breaths—that’s how quickly he did it. ‘Have you seen,’ he says, ‘a man blow up a bagpipe faster?’ ‘My husband,’ I tell him, ‘needs only a single breath to do it.’ ‘I’ll be your husband,’ he says, and sets the bagpipes to screaming. He holds one under each arm, squeezes and dances. And I can’t stop laughing. But I did stop when I saw, running toward us, my brothers, back from the tobacco. They’d seen your father courting me, and they didn’t need to see more. They gave him a good thrashing. Split the bagpipes, tore his girdle belt. That night, a pebble knocks on our window pane. ‘I’m stealing you,’ your father says when I meet him under the shed, ‘and tomorrow we’re getting married.’ Zeynep, Zeynep, I told myself, you’re a promised bride and your father will kill you. But if you live, your life will be a song with this man, a merry man, a bagpipe maker.”
Then in one swing her mother threw the bag down on the floor. “Take me to his workshop, Kemal,” she said. “In fifteen years he never let me set my foot there.”
And Kemal took her.
“So many skins,” her mother said, “so many chanters. One hundred bagpipes, your father told me before they took him.” Then she looked at Kemal and her eyes misted just enough. “Do you think that maybe—”
In the morning, Kemal moved her mother’s bed to the workshop. And she started making bagpipes. But she butchered the wood parts, ripped holes too large in the goat skins. None of the bags she’d crafted could make music. What they made was screeching, hoarse and ugly.
16.
Days on end Kemal worked, and because the silence scared them, they left the old radio playing. They listened to the news from foreign places, to a voice reading the Danube levels. Povishenie edinatsa, the voice read in Russian. Onze centimeters, in French. Kemal had never seen the Danube, never would see it, but she wondered how big of a river it was and what it meant for its waters to be up by eleven. Was this a good thing or a bad thing? To whom did it matter?
At night, they listened to a program called Night Horizon. People could phone that program and talk on air about the things that hurt them. One engineer from Plovdiv called every night to say he could not sleep. “Dear Party,” he always began his confessions, “I haven’t slept in fifteen years.” He kept a close count—“and three months, and four months, and ten days, nine hours, twenty-one, no, twenty-two minutes.” An old man from Pleven recited children’s poetry to his daughter. After each poem he begged her to phone him in the morning. His daughter never phoned him in the morning and so he kept reciting. But there was a woman from Vidin who Kemal and her mother liked to listen to above all. That woman read letters she’d written to herself, mostly, but sometimes also to other people. I am outraged, comrades, the woman read from one letter, because there were green peppers on sale at the farmer’s market today and no one told me. All my neighbors bought green peppers. Stuffed jars for the winter. I can still smell the peppers roasting and no one told me.
Kemal’s mother laughed at that one. “Peppers in November,” she said, and asked Kemal to throw more wood in the fire, to keep it burning a little longer. By the stove, Kemal kept waiting for the woman to mention the Danube. Could the woman see it outside her window, Kemal wondered, the way they could see the peaks of Rhodopa? And what did Kemal’s father see out his window? She hoped he had one. She hoped they let him listen to the Night Horizon.
“I want to call that program,” Kemal said, “and play Father my bagpipes. I want him to tell me how to make them better. I need a man’s name, Mother, don’t I, to make bagpipes?”
“My dear Kemal,” said her mother, “I had forgotten how pretty your voice was.”
17.
So, like the pepper woman, Kemal began to write letters. She wrote in copying pencil and taped up notes all over the village, mostly outside the village hall, where people could see them. “Dear Party, a Turk cannot become Bulgarian. Give us back our old names so we can eat figs and go to the Jannah.”
But nothing happened. So one day she wrote a new note and nailed it to the well bucket, down on the square of a Christian village. Dear Party, a large amount of poison has been dumped into the well. Do NOT drink water and give us back our old names.
In daylight, from up the road she watched a crowd surround the well. A man splashed two buckets on the pavement and all stood over the puddle as if over a deep hole. A woman began wailing. At last two militia Ladas arrived from the city, blue jars spinning. Kemal did not know if these were the people who’d taken her father—she could not tell one from the other—but she watched them scratch their heads under the blue caps and stare into the puddle like they could see the poison.
To see them so puzzled and stupid gave her a sense of lightness. She would write more notes like this one.
18.
A few drops of blood rolled down her mother’s shoulder and Kemal licked them. She watched more drops gather and wondered if her blood knew yet, if it had sensed death had come. She had moved the body back to the old room, but had nicked a spot when cutting the dress to remove it. She filled up a wooden pail with water and gathered clean gauzes from a box in the corner, and washed her mother’s arms, chest, legs. After she’d washed her, she dressed her in her other good dress. She rolled her to her father’s side of the bed and spread newspapers over where she’d just lain, to soak up the water. She brought her bagpipe but didn’t play it. Instead she lay on the newspapers, held the bag and thought of how her mother’s breath had filled it slightly. She spread out her fingers and watched them. The more she watched them, the more they looked like another girl’s. They felt borrowed, cold, swollen, and they crafted lousy bagpipes. She spoke her old name—Kemal—and the more she repeated it, the more it flowed in itself, the deeper it bit its own tail. She repeated her new name, Vyara, and kept repeating—the old name, the new name, until one devoured the other. Until both felt foreign.
Her body was not her body. Her name was not hers.
19.
Next morning, she wrapped her mother in white sheets. She dragged the bundle out in the yard and onto the two-wheeled carriage they used to haul raw skins from the pens. There were still skins in the carriage, so she spread those for a cushion. She fixed a shovel beside the body and pulled on the carriage. It wasn’t heavy.
She could see shapes behind curtains, ghosts without names and honor. By the time she reached the graveyard, the sun was as high as it would be. By the time she dug the hole up, the sun was setting. She lined the bottom with goatskins so her mother wouldn’t be too cold. She stained the sheets when she rolled her over; her hands had blistered from digging.
It was in that boy’s grave that Kemal lay her. But she would not let the boy rest beside her. So later, after she’d piled back the earth in a black heap, Kemal chucked his bones at the sun to feed its burning a little longer.
20.
; That night, Kemal sheared her hair with the kitchen knife. Then, in the workshop, she gathered up all bagpipes—eighty-seven, she counted—and began to inflate them. One after the other the bagpipes let out their pointless screeching. Then, one after the other, Kemal set the woodpiles, boxes, skins, on fire. Out in the yard, she held her own bagpipe and squeezed her elbow, and let the pipe draw flat lines of sound, terrible, stabbing. She watched the flames fatten, and sparks exploding, the hut collapsing and hissing pipes and chanters shooting up in ashen showers.
All over the village dogs were barking. Once more Kemal could see shadows from dim-lit windows, and once more no one stepped out, not even to curse at her for all the clamor.
She stuffed her sweater with gauze and old newspapers, then crawled out of the village toward the cooperative haylofts. The guards were already drunk in their barrack, and even when Kemal nailed her new note on their door, they did not wake up.
Dear Party, give back my parents.
Two tractors stood in the dark, and Kemal remembered what her father had once told her: a day would come when from the east a white ram would rush, sprinting, and from the west a black ram. Both enormous, with horns like nesting snakes, like serpents of bone scattering lightning and fire. The earth would tremble with their hoofs and young and old would gather to see them. Some would hop on the white ram and up it would take them, up to the Jannah, so they could glide with the eagles. But others, vile and wretched, would crawl onto the black ram. Down the black ram would drag them, down to the low earth, to creep with the maggots.
Kemal crouched by the black ram and pressed her face against its bumper. She stuffed its mouth with gauze and paper. Lit a match, let the flame loom from under her fingers. Hid far away by the hayloft and waited for something to happen. For some time nothing happened.
Then, in pyre and lightning, the horns uncoiled and heavy hoofs made the earth tremble. She saw the black ram collide with the white ram and the guards stumble drunk and dreamy out of their barrack. Which ram would take them, she wondered, and which would take her?
East of the West Page 16