But then, when he was just a few paces away, this boy vanished.
Now another boy emerged, this time from behind the cool, shining creepers. Catapult raised, muscles tensed. Throwing back his head, he began to run, fast and faster, as fast as his body would allow, until, like the others, he vanished into thin air.
That was when Ziya noticed he had raised his own catapult and taken aim at the bird. This shocked him, of course. It frightened him, too. He began to tremble like never before. It was as if those boys were now inside him, running just as fast. He could hear their footsteps echoing inside him. The louder they became, the more Ziya longed to lower his catapult, but he couldn’t. In fact, quite the reverse. Without even realising, he pulled back the band. Then – who knows why, or how – he loosened his grip on the leather strap and knocked the bird off its branch. As it fell, it stayed silent and serene. Only when it hit the ground did it begin to struggle for its life.
Ziya froze.
Then something came over him. His ears began to roar. Throwing down the catapult, he ran towards the bird.
He could hardly believe it. ‘May God save the poor thing,’ he thought. ‘Dear God,’ he prayed, ‘don’t let it die.’ But it was all too much for him – the blood, the flapping, the flying feathers – and he didn’t know what to do. Tears streamed down his face as he looked away, only to lean down again to see if there was anything he could do, and each time he did so, he punched himself in the knees. To take on the bird’s suffering, perhaps. Or at least, to mirror its movements and play its shocked and agonised shadow.
It was while he was flailing around like this that the bird went stiff.
Ziya didn’t have the heart to look at it for long. The trees were hanging over him like a many-eyed monster. Pushing his way through the undergrowth, he raced back to town as quickly as his legs could take him, and without so much as a backward glance. His heart rebelled at the pace. He was choking, not breathing. His hair, his forehead, his trousers – they were all drenched in sweat. There was so much water running into his eyes that he couldn’t see. The only time he slowed down was to wipe the sweat from his brow. But this meant he had to raise his face, and whenever he did that, the sun went straight into his eyes. He had to lower them to increase his speed again. And that is how he made it to the edge of town without seeing the red tractor with its trailer full of manure, or the horse cart, or the three women in headscarves, or the boy with the cane and the shoulder bag following close behind. Suddenly Ziya stopped. He straightened out his clothes. Blurred by anxiety, he stared at the rows of houses. For a moment, he saw people pouring out of every window and door. He heard a roar. He saw them pressing down on him, waving their arms, and shouting, ‘What have you done? What have you done?’ And of course, that unnerved him, made his heart beat that much faster. Best, he thought, to hide his fear. Best, he decided, to seem calm and collected. Just then, an old woman appeared before him. An old woman whose chin jutted out so far as to touch her nose. She was looming out at him from the courtyard wall on his right, lodged between the hanging vines and the tin flowerpots, and the shadows of the vine leaves swaying overhead. Beyond them were houses, and other courtyards, and trees of all sizes and telegraph poles; and you could see all these in the old woman’s eyes, which were squinting, but shining with a fire as large and loud as the town itself.
She stared and stared, until finally, with a voice like a wooden rattle, she said, ‘So tell me, my boy. Why were you running like a fawn from a gadfly just now?’
‘No reason,’ said Ziya.
Resting her elbows on the wall and leaning over as far as she could go, she said, ‘Don’t lie to me, boy. What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ said Ziya.
With these words, a flame shot through him and his mouth went dry.
And then there came the voice of Ali the Snowman. Floating over the rooftops: ‘Snow for burnt hearts, snow for burnt hearts!’ Startled, Ziya looked up with a grimace and let out a silent sigh. Then he composed himself and began walking again. But he didn’t get very far. The old woman had used the vines to hoist herself over the wall as fast as a squirrel, and now she stood before him with her breasts hanging like yoghurt-pouches. It was clear from her expression that unless he gave her satisfaction she would bar his way.
She paused for a moment to adjust her scarf. In the same dry rattle, she said, ‘So tell me, what made you run so fast that the soles of your feet were punching that rump of yours?’
‘Nothing,’ Ziya said.
The woman turned for a moment to watch the red rooftops ripple under the hot sun.
Then she fixed her eyes on Ziya’s. ‘Hmm.’ In a warmer tone, she said, ‘So nothing’s wrong?’
Something in her voice was as soft as her breasts.
‘Nothing,’ Ziya replied.
But the old woman was not fooled. She could see Ziya was shaken, just from the way he kept shifting his weight. As her eyes slithered over his body, she wiggled her chin.
Ziya kept his eyes on the road ahead. Calmly, he walked on. But inside, he was still running, running from a fire. He couldn’t catch his breath. The ache in his side was killing him. He got home that day walking slowly and calmly, though inside his body he was running. Sprinting across the courtyard, passing under the trees and through the huge shadows cast by their leaves. Hurtling through the door, racing into his room to throw himself on to his bed. He cried a few miserable tears there. He would have made a noise, too, but he gave up on that idea when something in the kitchen began to clatter. So instead he bit his lower lip and buried his head in his quilt. Above him he could hear some tapping, flaring and vanishing, and then flaring once again. Then he could hear water dripping in the kitchen. Intermittently at first, and then faster and faster and faster. Ziya kept his eyes on his patterned quilt. Rows and rows of yellow flowers with green leaves, all shivering in the wind. He followed those rows to the place where they almost converged, almost bent into each other as if to hide from an inaudible whine. At the edge of the bed they merged into a thick line that looked as if it might, at any moment, dissolve into the room. Now he could see a stain spreading across his quilt. A deep hole, that’s what it looked like, until, after shifting his head, it became a small mound. For a time it stayed still, this stain, as if trying to outdo the little table in the corner. Which in the end, it did. Then suddenly it stirred. As it stirred, it grew wider. As it grew wider, it grew feathers, more and more feathers, and claws, and wings. Then it began to beat its wings just as wildly as that little bird he’d hit. Ziya watched all this in amazement through moist eyelashes while some strange force dried up the veins on his tongue and squeezed all the air from his throat. He told himself that this creature flapping so wildly before him was an apparition, nothing more, and that the bird he’d shot was far away, lying beneath the trees outside town. Still he could not shake off the thought that this was the bird’s soul pursuing him.
At that moment the bird stain went stiff – stiff and still as the table behind it. But not for long: a few minutes later, the stain began to beat its wings again, and then, just as suddenly, it stopped. This repeated itself over, and over, and over again. Over and over, that sweet, silent bird he had left for dead so far away came back to life only to die once again in front of Ziya’s eyes. With each death his sorrow was harder to bear. He could hear the roar of a tractor outside, and the echoes of horses whinnying in the distance. Whinnying through their discoloured teeth, throwing back their manes, sending their complaints soaring over the tops of the tractors and through the air, into every nook and cranny of the town, leaving only the scent of horsehair and sweat in their wake. Except now, blending in with them, was Ali the Snowman’s shrill voice. ‘Snow for burnt hearts! Snow for burnt hearts!’ It did more than just blend. It was as if that voice knew how much pain Ziya was in. Forcing its way through the sweat and the horsehair, it swept right up to Ziya’s window to look inside, before returning, just as fast, to the table in the village me
ydan. Ziya shivered in his bed. Then a wave of anger swept through him, and he swallowed hard. ‘That stupid voice just won’t leave me alone.’ And then, as the stain grew yet another beak, and yet another pair of beating wings, his eyelids grew heavier, and he fell fast asleep.
Before long, Nurgül Hanım arrived. Gently, she tucked him in.
‘People undress before they sleep, my boy. Does anyone sleep like this?’ But after she had covered him, she lingered at the foot of his bed, smiling kindly.
Then, as if she thought Ziya was listening, she said, ‘There’s food on the stove. I mustn’t let it burn. I’d better go back and check.’
She tiptoed into the kitchen and turned off the flame under the saucepan. Calmer now, she shuffled out into the courtyard in her nylon slippers. Passing through the shadows of the huge leaves, she went first to look over the wall. There was no sign of her husband; just a few boys some way away. The fun seemed to have gone out of whatever they’d been doing, because they were shouting at each other. One looked like he was ready to eat the others raw. Each time one boy finished shouting, and before another started, he would raise up his hands like two ferocious claws, and let out a string of filth. ‘You’re queers, every last one of you! So don’t forget. I could make your mothers’ cunts as moist as a cat in heat.’ At first Nurgül Hanım did nothing – she just stood there, squinting out at them, smiling kindly. Before she was even aware of smiling, she was stroking the basil plant next to her head and breathing in its lovely scent. By now the boys’ bickering had turned into rage: they were jumping on each other, rolling about in the dust.
Nurgül Hanım called out to them, ‘Stop fighting, boys. Stop fighting!’ Again and again she called out to them, but they paid her no heed.
Then, without willing it, she pulled off a large sprig of basil and threw it in the boys’ direction. This struck her as funny, somehow, so then she took off one of her slippers and threw that as well. But even this was not enough. The slipper landed a few paces away from the boys, and they didn’t even see it: by now they were tearing at each other’s collars, scratching and punching and kicking without even looking where their blows were landing.
Nurgül Hanım had no idea what to do.
Then one of the boys poked his head out from under flailing arms and legs, and spotted something.
‘A twister’s coming!’ he cried. ‘Run! A twister! Run!’
With that, the boys jumped to their feet. Seeing the whirlwind that was heading down the street, they scattered.
By now the whirlwind reached as high as the rooftops. It was a muddy tube, churning noisily through the air. The things it had picked up were turning with it, of course: huge stones that looked like lead, dust, leather broken to splinters, sheets of paper, shards of glass, and leaves, rusted tin, scraps of wood, nails and rubbish, some old tasselled hats and paper bags. Mixed in with all these was a large handkerchief whose stripes and borders sparkled as it swirled. The wind whirled down the street, taking Nurgül Hanım’s slipper with it before leaping up into the sky, whereupon, with an unearthly groan, it vanished.
Nurgül Hanım was still crouched below the wall, hands over her head. Her heart still pounding, she kept her eyes on the earth at her feet.
The town looked like a different town altogether now. It was still as still, dark as dark. Everyone had gone inside, slamming their doors hastily behind them, leaving only the whirlwind to roam the streets. A fearful minaret of wind – that’s what it looked like, whirling down the streets of this town. Then suddenly, this whirlwind stopped, losing all sound and all shape. The things it had carried were now dropping and falling and flying back to earth. The whirlwind had swept through town, a fog of havoc, sucking up everything in its path – sucking down to the soul, even. Now it had dropped it all back on to Nurgül Hanım’s street, as if to say, ‘Here they are. In these symbols are your future, your present and your past.’ But Nurgül Hanım didn’t look too closely at this shower of falling debris. Instead she fought her way through the splinters, the shards and the scraps to retrieve her slipper, and once she had it on her foot again, she darted back into the house lest the whirlwind return. She had reached her doorstep when the town midwife caught up with her, clutching three sets of prayer beads. She no longer looked like a midwife. Her headscarf was unravelling, releasing a shock of white hair. Her clothes were caked with dust, and she was tiny enough to be mistaken for a child born of the wind.
‘I’ve never seen a twister like that,’ she said, trying to straighten herself up. ‘Never! My days, what was that?’
Swallowing hard, Nurgül Hanım agreed. It had been horrifying. Just horrifying.
The midwife held on to the wall to catch her breath, and then, very calmly, she surveyed the things that the whirlwind had deposited on the street.
‘So what’s all this now?’ she said. ‘There’s worse in this mortal world, my beauty. Oh yes, far worse. When I was a girl, a twister destroyed a whole village. On the other side of those mountains over there, and then some. Turned it into hell on earth. When the news spread, some people wanted to go and have a look, so they jumped on their horses and off they went. Those of us left behind waited at the town gate. For two days we stood there with bated breath, waiting for their return. And while we waited, our elders and betters got busy imagining the worst, and for two days they whispered their worst fears into each other’s ears. Our hearts were with that village on the other side of the mountains. Even the ones who’d stayed home would scramble on to their earthen rooftops every half hour or so, to see if they were there yet. We didn’t have tiles back then – they just got themselves ladders, went up to the roof, shaded their eyes with their hands and looked towards the mountains. Then they’d hurry inside again, like anxious little shadows. As for those who couldn’t leave what they were doing, or were cripples, or too exhausted to get up on the roof – well, they would send their children to the town gate to ask if there was any news. And these children – well, they could not help noticing that this was something they could do, something that made the grown-ups sit up and listen, so they’d race over to us and ask us for the latest in the most solemn tones, and then spin on their toes to race home faster than they had come. Even on that first day, some of them had worked out ways of making the job easier, of course. Rather than huff and puff all the way out to us every hour, and all the way back to the edge of the mud huts, they began to ask for news with a system of hand signals. And we’d answer in kind. Bowing our hopeless heads. Flapping our hopeless arms. The more we did this, the stranger things became, until we were not just signalling to the children at the edge of the mud-brick houses, but to the shadowy figures in the distance. Who never asked questions. Who just stood there. What I mean to say is, we did a good deal of bowing and flapping. Come to think of it, I doubt we would have been so upset about all this if those men hadn’t jumped on their horses to gallop off to that village struck by disaster. We wouldn’t have felt this degree of pain, our streets wouldn’t have been awash with worry and sorrow, and we wouldn’t have had half the town gasping at the town gate, and the other half going up to their rooftops every other minute to look for news. If you ask me, it was pointless, galloping off to that village, because there was nothing they could do when they got there. It was at least a day’s journey – a day and a half even – as the crow flies, and those jackdaws had taken no food with them. No nothing. If you ask me, they just went there to gape at the ruination. If you know anything about the mysteries of humankind, you know that there is this side to us. There’s another side of us that likes to talk about the ruination we have seen and spin tall tales. But never mind. There we were, waiting at the town gate, where the grass is now, for two long days. Then, on the second day, just as the light was failing, the horses came back; heads lowered, eyes crazed, and defeated, they came down the road that winds through the gardens. It must have been their silence that made their hooves hit the earth so hard. And perhaps it touched our hearts, too. That is why, at first,
we just stood there frozen. Why we all sprang to our feet at exactly the same moment and rushed towards the horses. The men were grey in the twilight. They got off those big horses and heaved great sighs. Looked all around them, as if in search of something. Bowed their heads in shame and silence. And so they remained for some time. They just stood there, saying nothing, struggling with the agonising memories they’d brought back with them, as it were. They loosened their trembling tongues after that, of course, and in voices as dry and yellow as the desert they began to tell us how the whirlwind had changed that village into hell on earth. Let me say this: what they told us was more than we listeners could bear. We were afraid even to imagine what they described. According to what they told us, the whirlwind did not hold dominion over that village for long. It was no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. But within that space of time there was not a place in that village that this blind apparition did not ravage; wailing most horribly, it careened from nook to cranny, turning dust to smoke, sucking up whatever it found in barnyards, and courtyards, and dunghills, and the streets. With shocking speed it span this silo of debris around and around, only to rise as high as the clouds and disappear. Only then did the villagers come to see how violent it had been, and how merciless. Because at that very moment, five children came tumbling down from the sky, and with these children came three lambs mired in filth and excrement, and with the lambs came chickens, pots and beehives, and pruning hooks, and glinting hatchets, and after all this, a few things that looked like sacks and pitchforks and rags, and various items of laundry. The villagers who had taken shelter here and there were dumbfounded by this terrifying scene of ruination. They ran screaming through the wreckage, to their children, their poor children, who had been ravaged beyond recognition. That same day, just after the midday prayers, they wept over these children as they gave them to the earth. But the catastrophe didn’t end there, my beauty, for while they were lowering those little lambs into their little row of little graves, they heard that two other children had gone missing. So while those men were still shovelling earth into those graves, other men joined the women in their hunt for the two missing children. Running to the grain stores, they looked behind the sacks and heaps of winnowed wheat, and in the pitchers, jars and buckets that lined the entryways, the barns and the henhouses, the vegetable patches and the dung heaps, and after examining underneath the horse carts and the oxcarts, they split up into groups that combed the streets of the village, over and over, but there wasn’t one trace of those two little children. To make a long story short, they at last found one of them at the very top of a giant mulberry tree, and the other stuck inside a narrow oven chimney, struggling to breathe in the thick smoke. In the end, they had to dig two more little graves next to the other five. What I mean to say is this: there are worse things in this cruel world, my beauty. Far worse.’
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