Later that day, there was a knock at the kitchen door. Sylvie stood on the doorstep alone, the pilaff pot she’d borrowed the week before clutched to her chest, her blotched face strained with anxiety.
“Looks like the boil is about to burst,” Ferida muttered as she let her in.
Sylvie walked over to the table, put the pot down and erupted into sobs.
“I’m sorry,” was all she could muster.
“Told you I could smell it,” Ferida said, grabbing the saucepan so viciously, the lid went flying. It clattered noisily to a stop by the stove and Khatoun bent to pick it up.
“Calm down, Ferida. Let Sylvie tell us what happened.” She turned to the young girl. “Take your time. Tell us everything.”
Sylvie shook her head, her fingers tracing the same whorl in the wooden table she had played with a few weeks ago.
“Talk to us,” Khatoun urged.
“Yes, spit it out girl!” Ferida shouted.
Sylvie wiped her nose on her sleeve and looked up. “The engagement is off.”
“Off?” Ferida yelled. “How can it be off? It’s only been on a few days!”
“Ferida! Sht!” Khatoun got up to check the corridor and pulled the door to again. “Stop shouting. Let the girl speak freely.”
Sylvie sat at the table looking ill. She lifted her shoulders and dropped them again. “Sarkis has changed his mind. You know…our parents are dead and he thinks he’ll be abandoning me if he gets married and,” she wiped her nose again and continued, “he thinks he’s too young to marry.”
“Pah! If you’re going to make up stories, you’d better make your mind up first,” Ferida snapped. “Which is it? Is he afraid of abandoning you or is he too young? I thought we’d all agreed that you would be coming to live with us. How is that abandonment? This sounds like rubbish to me.”
Sylvie shrugged and opened her mouth but did not speak. Eventually she reached down and picked up the hem of her skirt and blew her nose. “I only came to bring the news,” she mumbled into her hair.
Khatoun had been watching quietly. She got up and disappeared down the hall to Iskender’s office, returning a minute later, the pouch holding the two bracelets that Sylvie had given them in her hand.
“Don’t worry,” she said to Sylvie. “I’ll tell Alice. It doesn’t matter what the reason is. The engagement is off, that’s all. And once an engagement is off it can’t be fixed. You’d better take this back to Tatou.” She handed over the bracelets and patted Sylvie’s hand as she ushered her outside. She closed the door, leaned against it and exhaled.
“You weren’t very helpful, Ferida,” she said, shaking her head.
“Me?”
“Yes. You. All your shouting. It shuts people down. I would have liked to know more. It doesn’t add up. That boy was besotted. I saw the fever on him. I don’t believe Sarkis changed his mind. I believe it was changed for him.”
“Yes. By that sour-faced, pretentious auntie of theirs, I’ll bet. Anyway, like you say – what does it matter? It’s off and we’ll never know why. You think anyone will tell us the truth? Never.” Ferida slumped over the table and held her face in her hands. “Now what are we going to say to Alice? The idiot girl – it was her first love! How do you ever get over that? You don’t! You take it to the grave with you.” And then she began to cry.
Rage blew the shutters open that night and the moon hid behind the clouds. Lightening lit up the sky in the distance but there was no rain – just a howling wind that settled before dawn. The next morning, the sky was an endless blue, the breeze clean. A sombre household swept the dust out the doors and mopped down the floor. The sewing girls kept their chatter bright and business-like. Buttons, hooks, hems. After lunch the windows onto the courtyard were thrown open and the machines began to hum. Alice’s brothers crept up to her room and tapped on the door but she stayed inside, refusing all offers of food.
It would have been over, dead before winter except for the note under the door. Neither Khatoun nor Ferida could read and when Solomon confirmed that the words passionately scrawled across the front of the envelope were ‘To Alice, my Beloved,’ they were forced to pass the letter over to Iskender whose hands shook as he scanned the script written across the thick cream paper.
“That boy wants to come and see my daughter, let me see – ‘to explain,’ he writes here. Explain what? Abandonment? Embarrassment? Dishonour?” He crumpled the note and threw it into the fireplace. “Over my dead body.”
Nobody knew how Alice found out about the letter and Solomon kept his part of the bargain and said nothing about eavesdropping, or sneaking the semi-charred piece of paper up to his room where he pored over it with Afrem’s dictionary before panic made him burn it completely. He even kept his gaze steady as he kicked Alice under the table when she wondered out loud one morning if such a letter might have existed and, if it had, what it might possibly have said and how cruel it would have been to keep such an important missive from the person for whom it was intended. Ferida almost boxed Alice’s ears for starting up with her nonsense but Khatoun pushed her plate to the side, slid her glasses up her nose and studied her daughter.
“There was a letter and it was burnt,” she pronounced. “Sarkis said he wanted to see you. To explain.”
“And?”
Ferida dropped her greens into the sink. “And what? Your father wouldn’t let that boy back in this house now. What are we? Fools everyone in the neighbourhood can walk all over?”
“Mamma?”
“Ferida’s right. Your father won’t have him in the house.”
“And you?” Alice began weeping again.
“What about me?”
“Will you let him come and see me? So he can explain?”
Khatoun looked at Alice then Ferida. Then she remembered Solomon who was watching the whole exchange with his mouth open, a scrap of bread inches from his lips.
“Son, go upstairs and see what your brothers are doing,” she said. She slipped her hand into her pocket, took out an onion and bit into it as Solomon slunk out of the room affecting nonchalance. When she heard the bottom stair creak she turned to Alice.
“It will have to be at night, when everyone is sleeping. Your father must never know. Sarkis works late – he can come here to the kitchen, by the back door, after work. He can bring one person with him – his sister, whoever he wants, but that’s all. We three will be here and Iskender and the rest of the house will be in bed. Ferida will arrange it.”
“Pah!” Ferida said and spat into the sink.
The clouds hung low, not a star in sight when Sarkis arrived with a friend, late, as arranged. The women were waiting. Alice sat in the corner over her mother’s machine, pretending to sew. They had expected the exchange back of rings but Sarkis had refused. He said he wanted Alice to keep the emerald he’d given her and he would carry her photo next to his heart for ever. Alice kept her lips tight, her hands busy. Sarkis stood as close to her as Ferida would allow and was eventually dragged outside, crying like a baby, by his friend.
“It still doesn’t add up,” Khatoun said to Ferida when Alice was tucked up in bed later that night. “Except for the fact that he obviously still loves her, he didn’t explain anything.”
“Yes, he did. He said plenty.” Ferida wiggled her finger. “He told us ‘the worm came out of the tree.’ That’s someone in his own family. And we don’t have to think hard to know who.”
“Perhaps,” Khatoun mused, “it’s time I visited Auntie Tatou.”
Tatou’s rooms were small and stuffy, filled with stuff she’d hoarded over the years. It was a mystery how she still had all her porcelain, her carpets and knick-knacks. Khatoun walked around the room fingering things carefully while Tatou spoke.
“My late brother’s, God rest his soul,” Tatou watched Khatoun trace the delicate curls around the feet of a wooden clock. “And this is my mother’s – and that belonged to my husband, Asdvadz bahe. Everything reminds me of someone. It’s such a co
mfort. Especially since I am alone now.”
“Alone? What about Sylvie and Sarkis?”
“Yes. Of course,” Tatou smiled. “Sylvie and Sarkis. My little orphans, pillows between myself and loneliness. Such lovely children. Still a little provincial in manners, but on the whole, charming children.”
“Children?” Khatoun put down the china egg she had been fingering. It sat in a little gilt throne on the table.
“Obviously! Why else would they have acted without my knowledge and created such unhappiness for everybody? An engagement? Vay, vay, vay! They brought shame upon themselves and your poor daughter with their rash behaviour. Who knows what people think of poor Alice now? And what must she think of us?”
Khatoun perched on the divan next to Tatou. “Alice is fine,” she said. “Sad, naturally, but I don’t think she blames Sarkis.”
“Of course not. Who could blame the boy for coming to his senses? He realised his whole life is ahead of him. What would he do married to a girl like Alice at this age? Last time I saw her she was still playing with dolls. Can you imagine her a mother?” Tatou giggled and patted Khatoun’s knee. “Come now, drink your tea. They’re children, thank goodness. They’ll get over it.”
“From your lips…” Khatoun picked up her tea and studied the cup nestling in its paper-thin saucer.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? I still have the whole set, from Paris,” Tatou smiled. “One day I’ll go back. They say the French army is coming to Ourfa. The Allies. Perhaps I’ll go back with them.”
“Do you remember it?”
“Paris? Only that I was happy there as a child. We always meant to return, but life changes. I got married, my husband got a good position with the government, we stayed here. Now I’m a widow with not even a brother or sister alive. And despite all those years of service we got nothing. My husband left me naught but trinkets and books, except, of course, the light of my eye, my darling Isabelle.”
“And a grandchild on the way, Insha’Allah!” Khatoun held her tea up in a toast.
“Oh yes! Masha’Allah, Le Petit Prince. I just know it’s going to be a boy. I felt him kick as I stitched up her dress. He’s growing so big her belly split the seam right here! I took the needle and thread to it right away.”
“While she was wearing it?”
“Of course.”
“Oh…no…that’s…”
“What?”
“Never mind. A superstition.”
“I simply can’t wait. My grandchild will be the most important thing to me, not that I expect you to understand.” Tatou smiled, leaning in as close as her stays would allow, “I mean, what is loneliness to you surrounded by all that family? How many children do you have – four? And still one brother miraculously alive and two sisters somewhere in the world and even your parents and that gaggle of girls living under your roof. Sewing, stitching, busy, busy, growing vegetables in your pots and pans and so many of us dead in the marches. Burnt, raped, starved in the desert. You seem to sail through life so easily, Khatoun. One day you’ll have to tell me your secret.”
Khatoun took a sip of her tea. “We are fortunate, it’s true. But we also lost people we love.”
“Yes, yes, some uncles, some friends in the resistance. Perhaps if it wasn’t for those friends, that futile opposition, the people of Ourfa may have had a different fate. Still…” Tatou sat back again. Observed the clock tick. “Some people crave solitude, a little time to themselves. Others fear it – they want family around them at all times. Let me ask you something. What does life mean if you are alone? If you’re not feeding somebody, do you still get hungry? I don’t know if I do. I eat simply because the maid puts the plate in front of me. If there was no one to prepare food for, would you even bother to eat? Some people get very confused – whose life do they live once family has left them?”
“You live your own life.”
“But what is your own life? Every mother knows you give up your life for your children. Think, Khatoun. What would you be if I took that family of yours away from you? Why do you suppose Ferida stays with you? You think she likes being little more than a servant for her brother and his family? Of course not. She stays because without you she is nothing.”
Khatoun put her cup down on the lace covered table, her smile never faltering. “I’m not sure I agree, Tatou. To me, it’s a simple case of desire. Desire is what gives your life meaning. If you know what you want, your life is validated. You have a purpose – a goal – no matter how small it is. If you’re hungry, you know what you want to eat. It’s when people are depressed that they complain that they don’t know what they want. Happy people have desires and they know what they need to fulfil them. They say things like, ‘oh, I fancy some choereg and hot tea,’ or, ‘I would kill for some stuffed vegetables right now.’ Wanting something is what makes you live life. Although I do believe that sometimes you have to find that desire. To create your purpose – to stitch it into your life.”
For a moment Tatou was silent; then she threw her head back and laughed.
“Happy people want choereg?” she chuckled. “I don’t understand a word of what you just said…stuffed vegetables? Please! My sides. You obviously don’t have enough to do if you can spend your day thinking up ridiculous theories like this. I never knew it before, but you’re so like your husband. I always thought he was the dreamer and you were the practical one, but non! By the way, talking about him, how is he? Iskender? Still…how do you say…melancholic?”
“Not melancholic, no. Iskender is one of those people who really does love solitude. He’s angry about Alice, right now, of course. One minute she was his little girl, suddenly she was a woman in love. Now she’s broken hearted.”
Tatou slapped her cheek and sputtered with laughter again. “Please Khatoun! You’re going to kill me with you absurdity! Alice is a child – what can she possibly know about love at her age?” She wiped her eyes with a scrap of lace and lowered her voice into a whisper. “And to go back to your theory about desire – you’ll find that the people who want something in this world are always the ones who are never satisfied.” She rang a little bell at her side and a maid in starched black and white appeared. “And now, Khatoun Hanum, do you need anything else? If not, I am going to get Angelig to clean up the room so I can take a nap. I’m afraid you have exhausted me with your impossible views on life. I’ll have a headache right now if I don’t lie down immediately with a cloth over my eyes.”
Khatoun stood up. “I’m sorry about the headache, Tatou. Thank you, no, I have everything I need.”
“Good.” Tatou grabbed Angelig’s arm and pulled herself out of the chair. She took Khatoun by the elbow and led her down the rickety staircase to the front door where she paused, her face split by a wedge of light that fell in as she pushed the door open onto the street.
“Before you go, Khatoun, a word of advice. Don’t encourage Alice’s nonsense with talk about love. Let her be a child a bit longer.”
“I was younger than Alice when I married.”
“Yes. Just like me. Arranged, of course. But all this talk of love is fantasy. You can’t expect me to believe that you loved your husband when you first married him. He was old enough to be your father, for God’s sake!”
Before Khatoun could reply, Tatou reached out and covered her mouth with her papery hand, “Don’t say it. Even if you thought you were in love with him. Love is like the seasons – you start with spring, youth, passion and soon you end up with winter, cold, snow. And then they die anyway. Believe me, Alice will get over it – if you allow her to. Don’t, for pity’s sake, fill her head with any more of your ridiculous fantasies. I couldn’t bear any more youngsters weeping around the place. Really, Khatoun, you act as if somebody caused this break up. They’re just adolescents who have come to their senses and in a few weeks they’ll all forget about it and we can return to normality.”
“Insha’Allah,” Khatoun said and then, as she paused on the step before leaving Tatou
’s house, the words slipped from her mouth like birds taking flight. “Did you ever love, Digin Tatou? Do you know what it’s like to have had love in your heart and to lose it?”
Tatou opened her mouth but before she could speak Khatoun reached forward and, in the same way Tatou had moments earlier, covered it with her palm. “They say someone must die so that those left living can appreciate life. My wish for you is that you discover…” Before Khatoun could finish her sentence, Tatou had stepped back and shut the door in her face, the unsaid words hanging for a moment with nowhere to land before scattering to the skies with the slam of the door.
It was the beginning of winter and the mountains were covered in snow. The air was crisp, the sky bluer than ever in summer. In the eighth month of pregnancy Isabelle, Tatou’s only daughter, sat up in bed just before dawn, declared she was hungry, belched and felt her heart stop. When the doctor arrived the tip of her nose was cold and the child in her belly was motionless. She was buried a day later in a tall box, child still in belly, a light drift of snow falling over the earth.
Khatoun has reached the Dergah Gardens, the leafless trees dancing in the sky. The ground is crisp, the air sharp. They were just words that had slipped from her mouth. And what are words? Nothing but hot air and vibration. Only the bitter cold can make you see them. But sadly, words never get lost. Words last longer than matter – longer than anything you may have or have lost. Words are what, if anything, remain.
The French
Ourfa, April 1920
Khatoun
The back alley leading to the Pink House is only six feet wide; the flagstones worn smooth with age, a slippery drain running down the middle. In the past, the doors leading into the kitchens would have been thrown open to drink in the cool air. Today they are bolted shut, as they have been for years, the locks on some so corroded that if you were to try and open them you’d be met with a rusty screech of protest.
The Seamstress of Ourfa Page 28