“Go and find somewhere else to mope, you dungulugh! Your wife is having a baby. Go on. Oosht!” Iskender struggled to his feet. Despite his best endeavours he never seemed to be in the right place at the right time. There was always a huge chasm between him and everything that was happening around him. He slunk downstairs into the kitchen, and finding the last of the hashish gone, poked about in the drawers for something medicinal to drink, settling, finally, into a chair near the grate with some rubbing alcohol.
“Pomerania. Pomerania. Po. Me. Ra. Nia,” he muttered between sips.
The girls were up and soon the clattering of half a dozen machines rattled through the air. Shortly after breakfast (which nobody touched), just as Lolig had the children sorting buttons in the workroom, another son burst into the world in a shock of red hair. The house erupted into cheers and the sewing was forgotten as Ferida yelled down into the courtyard. The girls gathered around the fountain, shading their eyes from the sun, clamouring for a look at the swaddled baby held in her arms but the look on Ferida’s face was not right. And then Mertha ran down the stairs for more sheets, her skirts dragging a river of blood behind her. And Thooma skipped out the back door without his jacket, returning twenty minutes later with a doctor whose name no one could pronounce. The doctor disappeared into the bedroom and the midwife called over the balcony for more sheets.
When he finally emerged, Doctor Heimlichstrauser crept down the back stairs to the kitchen and lit up a cigarette. Iskender sat gripping a cloth to his face as he listened to the man’s strange accented Armenian. Bile was dancing in his guts, sending a burning stream up to his throat. His face was heavy with pain, swollen to twice its size by the wads of gauze packed around his bloody gums.
The doctor flicked his match into the fireplace. “The placenta was attached to the wall of her uterus,” he said impassively, his grey eyes pale as ash. “It’s very rare, but it does happen occasionally. When the placenta emerges it pulls the top of the uterus with it – in effect, very much like pulling a stocking inside out. This is what happened to your wife. I managed to coax the afterbirth out but I’m afraid her womb has inverted. I can try to replace it by hand and hopefully she won’t need further surgery but it will cause her great pain.”
Iskender retched into the fireplace then wiped his lips with his handkerchief. The doctor crouched next to him and leaned into his face.
“I’ve given her some morphine and I’ll do what I can, but she will need to go to the hospital. Your sister – Umme Ferida? – she doesn’t want her to go but I’m afraid she may not realise how serious this is. The simple truth is, either we get your wife to hospital or…not.” He took a drag of his cigarette and exhaled two long streams through his nostrils. “Do you understand?” He peered into Iskender’s face then gave him a tiny tap on the cheek, just under the eye. “First, let’s get your wife to hospital. Then I’ll get you something nice for the pain.”
Lolig (who’d left the children with their buttons so she could eavesdrop) promptly stepped into view. With a nod from Iskender she turned on her heels and ran, returning shortly with a carriage and their fretful friend, Aram Bohjalian, who paced the kitchen in tight circles until Khatoun was carried past and deposited in the waiting phaeton.
Two days later, Khatoun woke to the crow’s flap of a nurse’s uniform, her breasts heavy, her body on fire. The manoeuvre had been unsuccessful and they’d had to operate, slicing into her – ribs to pubis – later that day.
“When they’d finished…” Ferida spat, “she was no longer a woman.”
A fever kept Khatoun in and out of delirium for a week, during which Ferida went to war with the hospital.
“You don’t feed her enough! The sheets are filthy! Nobody sits with her! You just leave her lying there…”
Eventually the doctors allowed Khatoun home so the hospital staff could get on with their jobs without tripping over Ferida, who’d taken to sleeping stretched out on the floor by the bed, one eye open, ready for the slightest opportunity to harangue the young nurses.
The breeze lifts the curtain and another splash of sunlight warms Khatoun’s face. The baby has gone quiet, his cries replaced by the melodic ‘hampourner, bachigners,’ of Mayreni, the wet nurse who’d been brought in to feed him. Khatoun has never seen her but these last few days at home have been filled with her singing. Voghbed – her last born she has not yet held, fed by a woman she has heard but not yet seen. There goes another one. Every thought, a pattern. Clear and sharp one minute, spiralling across the ceiling the next. And underneath it all, a constant fire in the belly, an unquenchable thirst and an itching-itching nose.
Downstairs, the girls are hard at work filling orders. Tac-atac-atac-atac, the machines go. Tac-atac-atac. There are children playing in the narrow cobbled street under her window, their voices carrying in on the breeze. Khatoun can make out the high, reedy pitch of Baby Alice’s laughter amongst the others. Alice. Time to stop calling her Baby. Alice, with her long, gangly legs and the gap in her teeth, who still loves her dollies and is uncomfortable around any boy that is not one of her brothers. And like a metronome, above the harmonious sound of children, Mayreni’s song still singing,
The girl went and slept in the garden,
And the wind opened up her chest.[1]
Footsteps run down the narrow street, stop, turn and run back again. The swallows pierce the heavens with their cries. Water splashes as the youngsters sprinkle each other with raindrops that have collected in a large barrel by the door. Ferida’s voice is shrill as she leans out of a window and yells at them.
“You’ll taste my slipper if you don’t shut up! Oosht, off with you! Your mother is sick!”
And a shard of pain rips through Khatoun, opening her chest into a starless night that drags her up into its core. The city sparkles below. Her people and the fragile years of peace that have passed. Her children. Her family. The girls. She gathers them all into a blanket and casts them out into the firmament like a fisherman with his net, watching friends and husbands and children scatter. Where will they land? They are jewels she never managed to stitch down and the Pasha’s wives will be disappointed that they are lost to the wind, dissipated for years, destined never to be sewn into that fabulous neckline. Never mind – they will shine where they land – less is more,
Her lover went to see her
And with a pretty ’kerchief, covered her heart.
Her lover. Where did he go? She can smell him in the cigarette smoke that enters the room before he does. He loves her. He adores her. He believes that love alone – the simple beat of his heart – is enough to sustain her, to keep her his. So he leaves her be, imagining that children and sewing and food and kitchens and rooms full of furniture and clocks are enough. How can you be lonely, surrounded by people? His love pins her to the wall – a mirror image, a photograph of her former self. He nurtured everything once. It was he who tended the thick courtyard of flowers outside their café but now he’s buried his spine in his books and his answer for everything is another drink. “Just going for a walk,” he’ll say and Ferida will roll her eyes as he slips out the door tapping his watch with one finger or two to indicate how long he will be. And as the hours pass and Khatoun watches the walls, her love slips away with the shadows until only his smell remains,
The girl’s lover has gone to Aleppo,
Asked for the price of the clothes,
Opened his purse of gold pieces,
Returned home with armfuls of gifts.
The sewing machines downstairs fall silent and the girls file into the courtyard chattering quietly as they unwrap their lunch. Khatoun opens her eyes and Ferida swims towards her, a bowl of soup in her hand.
“Are you awake?” She moves closer, strangely tender, and another shape materializes where she’d just been standing. Mertha.
“Amma,” Khatoun’s voice is thin, dry.
“Shush. Keep your energy, child. Everything is fine. The baby is beautiful. You just get well so yo
u can hold him.” Mertha sits next to her daughter and takes the bowl and spoon from Ferida. Warm, salty rice steeped with lemon slides into Khatoun’s mouth. Her mother, smelling of vetyver, feeding her. Past her mother, her eyes search the room, recognise nothing.
“Where are my dolls?”
“Your dolls?”
“Be quiet. Set your mind straight,” Ferida’s voice booms from the corner.
“Life doesn’t go straight.”
“Of course not,” Mertha smiles. “Here, hokis, have more soup.” She slips another spoonful into her daughter’s mouth.
“It’s a circle,” Khatoun says.
“Yes. It’s a circle. Here.”
“And at the end…we join the beginning again?”
“I don’t know. Eat up. We need you to gain weight, get your strength up.”
“And all the weight that people lose – where does it go?”
“Into the air. Just one more spoon…”
“The crazy people on the street with no homes,” Ferida barks from over by the dresser. “You think they’re talking to no one? No, they’re talking to the lost weight in the world. It doesn’t just vanish. It sits on park benches, waiting.”
Mertha laughs, “There’ll be a lot of me to talk to then – if I ever manage to stop eating so much!” She pats her sturdy body and stands.
Ferida stops rearranging stacks of medicines on the dressing table, crosses the room in a stride and cleans Khatoun’s face with cologne. She takes the tray and swims out of sight again.
The sounds from outside move with the light, slanting across the floor the other way now. On the other side of town Khatoun can hear prayers begin. Her mother lies down next to her, stroking her arm.
Khatoun is four years old again, playing in the yard with a pile of lentils. A red one, a red one, a red one, a stone. A red one, a red one, a stone, a stone. Her brother, Gabriel, is playing nearby, drawing circles in the dust with a stick. He walks over to her and watches her game for a while.
“Give me some,” he says.
She shakes her head. “No.” They’re hers and she isn’t in the mood to share.
“Please,” he whines.
“No!” she looks up at him defiantly. He stares back for a moment and then grabs a handful of the pulses and runs. She chases him out of the compound and into the fields. Running. Running. Her mouth dry. Her heart pounding. Gabriel is nowhere to be seen. The cotton is scratching her legs. It’s in her mouth, in her hair, in her eyes. She can’t see anything anymore. She is in a cloud, suffocating.
The soup is up and she can feel hands patting her back as she heaves into a bowl stained with rust. There is salt water dripping into her eyes. Sweat and seawater and rain. Her mind is on fire. And there, in the middle of the flames, Gabriel, her brother. Only now he is broken. His train has crashed and he will no longer be going to university and her mother is crying as they bring him home wrapped in a sheet. And when they wash him clean they discover a smile on his face; imprinted there because the train crashed just as he was dreaming of his girlfriend who was about to remove her bodice and let him fondle her breasts for the first time. He died with his lips parted and will always be happy as his beginning meets his end. And now there are strangers in the room and the rust from the bowl has stained her front red and her stitches are coming apart. They’ll have to stretch her out on a rack and wind her entrails out and hang them up to dry. The baby in the next room cries for someone. But not her. Will he know she’s his mother when she returns? Or will he forever inhabit that space between them, searching for love? Khatoun reaches out for her little one with the blood red hair but he is just out of reach, and there are hands pulling her up, removing her clothes with the stench of vomit and sweat encrusted in the front and her love is pulled out of her and handed to a man with a strange voice.
The German doctor is back with his dead fireplace eyes. She can hear his thin voice singing, the refrain sung by Ferida and her mother.
“It’s another infection.”
“Another infection?”
“And what?”
“Fever…too high.”
“And where?”
“The hospital.”
“The hospital?”
“Again? Kaknem, eshou botch, vay, vay, vay!”
“If not?”
“…a distinct possibility.”
“Lord have mercy!”
“Asdvadz bahe! Take her.”
And then strong arms lifting her and still, those snatches of song,
The girl’s lover has gone to Aleppo,
Asked for the price of the clothes,
Opened his purse of gold pieces,
Returned home with armfuls of gifts.
The pretty girl, her heart has now opened!
And her heart is now open but nothing can fill it. It is an empty hole and she herself falls into it with no wings to save her. And down she goes and the air rushing by her is cool and soothing to the bright pain behind her eyes and soon, she knows, she will find her dead brother, her dollies, her flame-haired child and her love for her husband. When she reaches her end she will find, once again, where, oh where, oh where to begin.
[1] Anonymous. Traditional song sung by girls in Habousi Village.
Allegedly
Ourfa, Summer 1915
Khatoun
Ourfa, the Eye of Mesopotamia. Situated at the crossroads of ancient highways, it nestles in the warm, fertile valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; the cradle of civilization. According to legend it was the first city to re-emerge in the world after the Great Flood. The birthplace of Abraham. The spot where Nimrod, the Babylonian King, later flung Abraham onto a burning pyre for refusing to worship pagan gods. Where Jehovah intervened, turning those flames into pools of water and the coals into sacred fish – still alive and swimming in the pleasant Dergah gardens to this day. To the north and west lie the barren limestone foothills of the Anatolian massif with its distant, fortress-like villages clinging to its precipitous sides. To the southeast, a sea of cotton and wheat fields stretch all the way to the horizon – past the biblical city of Harran, last stronghold of the Sabians, worshippers of Sun, Moon and planets.
Born as Urhai to Nimrod of Babylon, Ourfa endured centuries of conquest and change. The Hurrians, the Amorites, the Hittites – everyone wanted to dominate the strategically placed city at the heart of all trade routes. The Assyrians elevated the place into a prosperous political and cultural centre. The Seleucids fortified and renamed it Edessa. Under the Parthians it became a Royal City; the capital of Osroene for almost four hundred years. And in the first century BC, Dicran the Great included it within the new boundaries of Armenia, and many Armenians migrated to the city. It was in Ourfa that early Christians worshiped freely and built their churches. The Crusades passed through twice, in between which Zengi of Niniveh turned the churches back into mosques and it wasn’t until sixteen-thirty-seven that Ourfa, having swung for centuries between Islam and Christianity, finally settled down as part of the Ottoman Empire under Murad IV. A flourishing, articulate city filled with Turks, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Maronites and Jews. A city where the fez mixed easily with straw boaters, the veil with abundant, loose hair. A place where any combination of beliefs was acceptable, particularly if it were different and somehow complicated by weird embellishments from all paths of religion.
And if you were to stand amongst the crowds lining the streets today, you would be excused for thinking there was some grand procession approaching. A carnival perhaps, or a religious ceremony. All roads leading into the heart of Ourfa are packed with people jostling for the best view. They’re hanging out of windows and standing on chairs in unshuttered shops. Over there, a family of five have crowded on the back of a mule that looks ready to collapse. The air is thick with expectation, suffocatingly hot and strangely quiet despite the number of people.
Khatoun stands in the sun shading her eyes. She’s hooked Solomon by the collarbone, tucking him in close
. Alice stands next to him with Voghbed on her hip and Afrem leans away from them, his long legs twisted into a scribble like his father’s. Ferida is there too, jostling with the crowd behind them, her elbows sharp jabbing wings, her face set in a scowl. She’s been arguing with Khatoun all morning.
“Asdvadz! In this heat? You’re crazy! It’s not safe. What do you think they’ll learn? Voghbed is still a baby, for God’s sake. Iskender, babam, stop her!”
But Khatoun had been adamant. “This is not the first and it will not be the last. I want the children to see. Let the eye tell the tale.”
Iskender had waved his hands in the air, disappearing into his room under Ferida’s hurled slipper and she’d had no choice but to follow Khatoun, dragging scarves and shalvar out of her room to disguise them all like Kurds before they set off. And now they stand waiting along the side of the road in the baking sun with half the city. Sweating, moving. Surging forward.
And here it comes.
First, the smell. Recoil. Then shuffling and murmuring and clouds of dust followed by people. A ribbon of people. Tufts of hair, hollow thighs, bloodied feet. The majority are women. There are no young men amongst them – just a handful of children and weightless grey beards seemingly carried along by air.
In the distance, a migrating Kelaynak bird calls out, and apart from a startled call in reply, the only sound is the shuff-shuff-shuff of feet passing by. Not a shoe in sight, all of them dressed in rags and many naked, causing some gasps from the crowd, ooh and ah! Tittering. The women walk on, oblivious. Some, the lucky ones, have belongings strapped to their backs. Soft limbs drape soundlessly from their bundles, a thin little arm, a blackened leg. The stench is overpowering and an enterprising youth and his sister are doing brisk business selling strips of orange peel to stuff up the nose. And there, a vendor with iced water and lemon. Another with nuts in cones.
The Seamstress of Ourfa Page 15