The Stone Woman

by Tariq Ali

  “You could become a world-famous singer. You could sing in the operas of Donizetti Pasha. You could...”

  “No! I have no desire to sell my voice. Let it give pleasure to everyone. I will continue to sing at our own festivals and in the streets when the mood takes me, but what I would really like to be is a photographer, like the Signor Bragadini.”

  “But why?”

  “I’ve surprised you, haven’t I? I’ve surprised Nilofer with the green eyes and the beautiful nipples. Why? Answer me truthfully. Is it that you could not imagine a future for me other than that dictated by my past and my origins? Do you think only Italians can be photographers? This new art is beyond the reach of a poor boy from Anatolia?”

  “Are you angry?”

  He laughed and kissed me on the lips for the first time. I admired his confidence. How could he be so self-assured, so oblivious to the impediments that lay ahead of him, especially in our world, which was still closed to people like him? Perhaps he had inherited his optimism from his mother. Perhaps she had inculcated him with the belief that everything was possible. All that was needed was determination and inner strength. As if to prove that this was the case he spoke again.

  “I know that one day we will be together. I feel this in my blood. Your Uncle Memed has already recommended me as an assistant to Signor Bragadini, which is what he says I will have to call him. One day I will be famous and then you will come with me. Is this impossible?”

  “No,” I lied. “Why should it be impossible?”

  “Because I come from a poor family and you are the daughter of a Pasha.”

  If only he knew the truth. Perhaps I would tell him one day. I decided to change the subject.

  “I’m three years older than you.”

  “Still not old enough to be Mother,” he laughed.

  “I am sure you will find many beautiful young maidens ready to fall in your arms the minute they have heard your voice.”

  “That would not be a new experience for me.”

  He said this in such a serious voice that we both burst out laughing. Even near the sea, the first time we made love, I had not felt that he was a novice. What puzzled me was the degree of sophistication that he had acquired.

  “Did you learn to read at home or in a medresseh?”

  “Why do you ask, princess? Are you surprised that I am not a yokel?”

  “No. Intelligence has nothing to do with a formal education. But I get the feeling you are both inside and at the same time removed from our culture.”

  “Now you’re saying that I’m not simply a singer of Sufi verses, but someone with an imagination of my own. Perhaps someone who might even one day become a photographer and a more talented one than Signor Bragadini.”

  “Why are you so sensitive?”

  “Because I still sleep in the servants’ quarters and that fact colours your picture of me.”

  “Tonight you’ve slept in this house. In my bed.”

  “Wrong again, princess. It is now too late to sleep.”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “I learnt to read our language in a medresseh, but I learnt to read French from my grandfather and to speak it from a French diplomat whose hair I cut regularly and who shares my admiration for the work of Monsieur Balzac.”

  “My favourite is Lost Illusions.”

  He began to recover his clothes and dressed quickly.

  “Sometimes French novels can become a terrible distraction. I would recommend the work of a philosopher. Auguste Comte. He has much to offer this country. He could stop our future from becoming a bottomless pit.” Selim slipped out of the door without the sentimentality of a last embrace.

  I covered myself and rushed to the window. The very faint first light of dawn had begun to change the colour of the sky. Selim was walking across the garden. He must have felt my gaze because he suddenly turned around and looked up in my direction. I blew him a kiss. He smiled and walked away.

  I had always thought Selim’s emotions might get out of control, that he might start to sing underneath my window, deliberately embarrassing me in front of the family. His serenity surprised me. I realised I was the one in an agitated state. An image of his naked body flashed through my mind and I began to feel weak with pleasure.

  TEN

  A Greek tragedy in Konya; Emineh arrives at the house; Nilofer is enchanted by Iskander Pasha

  I AWAKENED TO THE noise of wailing women. At first I had thought it was part of my dream, but the sound became louder and louder and my dream had been free of any disaster. What catastrophe had occurred? Had someone died? I jumped out of bed, slipping yesterday’s discarded clothes over my half-asleep body. My first thought was that something terrible had happened to Iskander Pasha.

  I rushed down the stairs and into the vast, virtually unfurnished and rarely used reception room to find it filled with sad faces. My mother was weeping as she hugged Emineh and Orhan. Something had happened to Dmitri.

  Emineh ran towards me. I lifted her off the ground. She did not say a word, just put her arms round my neck and sobbed. I walked towards Orhan. His face, too, was wet with tears, but he stepped back when I tried to include him in my embrace. He gave me an angry look.

  “Perhaps,” he said in a broken voice, “if we had stayed in Konya, they would not have dared to kill my father.”

  “What happened?” I asked nobody in particular as the tears began to flood my face. My mother placed a finger on her lips. This was not the time.

  Emineh clung to me even tighter. I took her upstairs to my room. She had been travelling all night and was exhausted. I stroked and kissed her cheeks and I laid her on the bed.

  “Would you like some water?”

  She nodded, but in the short time it had taken me to lift the jug, pour out the water, fill a glass and return to the bed, she was already fast asleep. Gently, I took off her dusty shoes and removed the socks from her feet. I covered her with a light quilt and sat down beside her to feast my eyes. I had not seen her for a whole month. Her face grew calm, and I was about to go downstairs when my mother appeared in the doorway. Seeing Emineh asleep she signalled I should join her.

  We went into the adjoining room, which had not been dusted for at least a hundred years, and sat on the bed, after we had removed the covers.

  “Where is Orhan?”

  “Your friend Selim has taken him for a walk by the sea. The boy likes him. I suppose that is a good thing.”

  “Mother!” I almost shouted at her. “This is not the moment. What happened? Will someone please tell me what happened to poor Dmitri?”

  It was a sad story. There had been trouble in Konya. Its purpose was to drive the remaining Greeks out of the city. The instigators had been under the influence of the Young Turks, who saw all Greeks as the agents of Britain, Russia and France. These were the people who wanted to recreate a pure and modern empire. There had been few enough Greeks in Konya in the first place, if one compared the town to Smyrna and Istanbul, but the supporters of the Young Turks wanted to create an impression. Messengers were despatched to each Greek household warning them that if they did not take their belongings and leave town, their houses would be taken over and the rest of their property confiscated. Everyone had left, except Dmitri. He refused to part with his books.

  The messenger arrived with my letter the very next day. He read it carefully and then took Emineh to the house of a Turkish neighbour. He embraced her and kissed her eyes and then her forehead. Then he sat down and wrote a reply. He handed it to the messenger, but told him that he should wait till the next morning and return with Emineh. The neighbours pleaded with him to take the child and bring her to me, but he refused.

  That night they came into the house silently and slit his throat. His books were untouched. Dmitri was the only casualty. My mother handed me his letter. I wept again as I broke the seal. It was difficult to imagine that he had gone for ever. My love for him, if it had ever existed, had not been ver
y deep, but he was a decent man and, as I never tired of telling my family, he had been a loving father. The thought of my children made me cry out aloud. My mother clasped me to her chest and stroked my head till I had recovered. After drinking some water I read the letter from Konya.

  My dear wife,

  I have reached the end of the road. The future threatens and the past has already condemned me. The rogues of the town, who now dress themselves in the garb of Young Turks, claim to be supporters of reform and modern ideas. In reality they are nothing more than criminals who wish to occupy our houses and increase their own status in society. As you know this is a modest house, but my family has lived here for over a hundred years. I feel a strong sense of attachment to this town and this locality. I refuse to be swept out of here like a piece of filthy rubbish. If they actually attempt to carry out their threats, I will look the assassin straight in the eye, so that he can remember the face of at least one of his victims. I fear for the future, Nilofer. The omens are not good. They who are driving us out will destroy much that has been good in the Empire.

  I do not wish you to regard yourself as responsible for my decision in any way. I realised a long time ago that we were not well suited to each other. I was the frog who remained a frog and you were always a princess. I always felt that if you had not been of such a proud disposition, you would have returned home long before Orhan was born. I think you realised at a very early stage that our marriage was a mistake but could not admit this to your parents. Your pride condemned you to a life with me, which must have been unbearable. I always felt this to be the case, but could never bring myself to say it to your face. It hurt too much.

  I know that, like me, you are proud of the children we produced. I’m very sad that I will not be able to follow the story of their lives as they grow older or one day hold their children in my arms, but I know they will be safe with you. If it is not too much to ask, speak to them sometimes about their father. When they are old enough to understand, please explain to them that their father died with his dignity intact. He refused to live in the shadow of fear.

  I once began to tell Orhan the story of Galileo, but stopped because he was too young to appreciate the dilemma. Galileo held the truths he had discovered to be of very great significance, but as soon as they endangered his life he recanted with the greatest ease. He felt that whether the earth or the sun revolved around each other was not worth his life. He may also have felt that it was more important for him to live and work so that his students could spread the truth. He was probably right to make that choice. I am but a humble school teacher. My refusal to submit is a political act. Tell Orhan and Emineh that I’m sorry, but there was truly no other way for me.

  Dmitri

  As I went to wash the tears off my face my mother began to read the letter. It was noble of him to absolve me of all responsibility, but I knew that if I had loved him he would never have given his life away so easily. Orhan’s anger was justified. If I had stayed behind in Konya none of this would have happened. He had taken the decision to die without consulting anyone else. It was an act that could only be carried out within the silence of the heart. The mind could not be allowed to interfere. If his emotional life, in other words the hurt he felt at my decision to withdraw from it completely, had not become too much for him, he would still have been alive. He did not want to admit this to himself or the children, but I knew it was the truth. He found the daily pain of life unbearable and suffering it was useless since hope itself was dead. Nothing he could do would have brought me back to him. Suddenly an awful thought crossed my mind and I screamed, bringing my mother rushing to my side.

  “What if it was my letter to him that pushed him into oblivion?”

  “Don’t think such things, Nilofer. From his letter it is clear that he acted in this fashion because of his beliefs.”

  “You never knew him, Mother. That is not so. He decided to die because life without me was not worth living.”

  “Don’t torment yourself, child. Think of the children. They must believe in that letter. It was his wish and there is a nobility of purpose there which I admire.”

  “You always used to call him a skinny, ugly Greek school teacher, Mother.”

  “He was that too, but ugly people can sometimes be noble.”

  Despite the sadness, I burst out laughing. I was sobered by a knock on the door, fearful that it might be one of the children, but it was Petrossian.

  “Iskander Pasha wishes to see you, hanim effendi.”

  I went to his room, but it was empty. Iskander Pasha was sitting at his desk in the old library. It was a beautiful old room, with wooden panels on the wall and bookshelves that almost touched the high ceiling. Most of the literature was in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, German and French. The classic works of our own culture mingled easily with the encyclopaedias of the French Enlightenment. When he was a tutor here, the Baron had helped to modernise the collection. French novels, German poetry and philosophy had filled the two empty shelves closest to the ceiling.

  Hasan Baba had often told us that three Korans in the library dated back to the ninth century and their value was inestimable. This was where we were summoned for punishments as children, which may have had the effect of discouraging us from reading. The library was engulfed in sunshine today, making it seem warm and friendly.

  Iskander Pasha was writing in a thick leather-bound volume, a diary in which he made an entry every single day and, since our evening story-telling had been discontinued, the number of entries had multiplied. It had become part of the new routine after his stroke. He could now walk without a stick and his body showed no signs of any disability. He turned around as I entered and rose from his desk to greet me. He held his arms out wide and I fell into them as the tears began to fall again. He stroked my face and kissed me on the head. I could not remember when he had last treated me with such open affection. The fear that he was on the edge of sanity seemed to have been completely misplaced. If anything, the entire episode of the photograph had brought his submerged humanity back to the surface.

  His speaking notebook, as Petrossian had named it, was in the pocket of his dressing gown. He took my arm as we walked back to his room. As we sat, side by side, on the divan, he took out the little book. In it he had written: “My little Nilofer, who has been widowed, I want you to know that I have always loved you. Nothing mattered.”

  “Did you always know?”

  He smiled and nodded.

  “But how?”

  He wrote: “You had green eyes and red hair, unlike your mother and unlike everyone else in our family for as long as I can remember. I knew for sure when you laughed as a child. It was a very nice laugh and it made your mother very happy. I was sure it reminded her of her lost lover. I did not mind in the least. You were a beautiful child and I was proud to act as your father. You have made one big mistake in your life so far, but, despite what I once thought of him, I’m very sorry that the schoolmaster Dmitri died in such circumstances. Ottoman civilisation has collapsed. Those who seek to fill the vacuum imagine they can make up in violence what they lack in culture. Talk to Halil about this one day. I think he underestimates the problem.”

  I talked to Iskander Pasha that evening for many hours, and for the first time I felt that he was treating me as an equal. I told him that I had been somewhat disoriented when Mother revealed to me who my real father was, but that after a few days the knowledge had ceased to matter. He wrote in reply that the importance people attached to blood relationships had a great deal to do with the laws of inheritance and not very much with genuine affection. In this regard, he joked, our Sultans have been remarkably unsentimental, ordering that their male children, bar their chosen successor, be strangled to death with a silken cord—the choice of silk being important so that the royal neck was not sullied by cheap cloth before it was broken, but even more importantly so that no royal blood was spilt by common executioners.

  I asked whether everyone in th
e family knew of my origins. He shrugged his shoulders indifferently and wrote that he had not discussed the matter with anyone and when Halil and Zeynep’s mother had raised the suspicion with him on her deathbed, he had not even bothered to reply. He then insisted that we had exhausted the subject of my birth and he never wished to discuss it with me again. I was his daughter and nothing else mattered.

  In a bold attempt to change the subject I posed a totally unrelated question.

  “Have you ever read any book by Auguste Comte?”

  The question seemed to really shake him. He wrote in an agitated way: “Why? Why do you ask?”

  “Someone asked me.”

  “Who?” he wrote.

  “I think it may have been Selim.”

  His eyes softened immediately. “I have read something by him, but Hasan Baba became a complete devotee for a short time, when we were in Paris. He forgot the Sufis and embraced rationalism. He even began to dress in the style of a French plebeian. It all wore off after we returned to Istanbul. This Empire has a strange way of sweeping aside all the refined thoughts in our heads as if they were mere cobwebs. The clergy have made sure that Istanbul thrives on ignorance. We will talk of him tomorrow. The Baron might have a great deal to say on the subject. Organise a conclave after dinner. Let us discuss something serious for a change and tell Petrossian to make sure that Hasan and his grandson are present. I am so proud of the way in which you have taken over the running of this house. Your mother must be relieved.”

  I was filled with a very deep love for him, a love I had not felt before. The remote figure I had known all my life and whose wrath I had so often feared had vanished. In his place there was a warm, generous man with a depth of understanding that must always have been there. We are all capable of wearing the mask, but underneath we remain what we are even if we do not wish others to glimpse that reality. I was sure that Iskander Pasha had returned to his true self. Perhaps he had found inner peace at last. I sat there for a short while, looking at him in silence. Then I kissed his hands and left the room.