Orhan's Inheritance

by Aline Ohanesian

  Kemal struggles to his feet, still carrying his coat of leaves and branches. Everywhere the ground is covered by bodies fossilized in the mud. Vagrant limbs stick out like weeds. A swarm of flies descends upon friend and foe alike, but the sight is nothing compared to the stench.

  Kemal weaves through the mud, taking care not to look down at the human debris, lest his nausea gets the better of him. He presses Lucine’s pale blue handkerchief to his nose, but the smell gets stronger as he nears the river. Suddenly he doubles over, vomiting over his own boots.

  “You look like a vomiting bush,” a humorless voice says. Kemal looks up to find Hüsnü standing over him.

  “Glad to see you too,” Kemal says.

  “Seen Tekin?” asks Hüsnü. His eyes continue scanning the ground.

  “No, I just woke up. Mehmet hasn’t seen him either.”

  “Humph! Of course he hasn’t. That little pussy lice has been prostrating himself before Allah all morning. He doesn’t even pause to help me look for Tekin.”

  “He was washing himself, not praying,” Kemal says.

  “That’s the only other thing that ass giver is good for: ablution.”

  “That’s not true. He’s a brave fighter. We all are,” Kemal says.

  “Go and join him then if you’re so fond of him. I’m looking for Tekin.”

  Kemal does not respond. “The last time I saw him, it was through my scope. He was right over there. In fact, you both were.”

  “Yeah? What the hell were you doing staring at us when you’re supposed to be shooting at them?” Hüsnü steps toward him, his eyes seething with anger. “It must be nice to shoot the enemy from three hundred yards away, hiding in a bush, while the rest of us fight tooth to tooth.”

  The bastard. “You know what’s nice? What’s nice is shooting blindly into the dusty unknown, with your comrades flanked on both sides, so no one need take responsibility for ending a life. That’s what’s nice.” Kemal presses his finger into Hüsnü’s chest.

  “Fuck responsibility,” Hüsnü says, stepping forward so that some of his spittle lands on Kemal’s chin. “We’re the ones who get shot back at while you hide in a bush.”

  “You’re the only brave soldier. Is that it, Hüsnü?” says Kemal. “Brave Hüsnü, who kills the British but fails to save his friends.”

  “Shut up, ” says Hüsnü, shoving Kemal back with both palms.

  “No, you shut up,” Kemal pushes him back. His hands land higher on Hüsnü’s body, near his neck, and with greater impact than he intended. Hüsnü falls backward before springing back up. Once on his feet, he swings at Kemal’s jaw. Kemal feels nothing except rage. He strikes at Hüsnü’s ear and knees him in the groin. Hüsnü stays on his knees panting, then lunges at Kemal’s calves and wrestles him to the ground. The two soldiers are soon covered in mud, their arms and legs struggling against being pinned by the other. Kemal ducks his head from under Hüsnü’s arm and manages to pull away. They continue panting for breath a few feet from one another. Kemal eventually lies down on his back. Gulping for air, he turns to Hüsnü who is holding a hand to his bloody ear.

  “The rest of us are shit, right?” Kemal says. “Mehmet for his prayers and me for my tears. Ass givers and donkey fuckers.”

  There is a long pause as Hüsnü stares at him with a blank look on his face. “And pussy lice,” he says finally, his upper lip curving mischievously the way it does just before he smiles.

  The two lock eyes, then burst out into laughter.

  “Let’s go find Tekin,” says Hüsnü, extending his hand.

  Kemal nods and makes to get to his feet when he sees Mehmet the Babe approaching.

  “There is no need to find Tekin,” says Mehmet.

  “Why? Have you found him?”

  Mehmet nods his head. “I’ve just come back from the infirmary,” he says. He does not look at either one of them.

  “Is he badly hurt?” asks Hüsnü.

  Mehmet the Babe looks past Hüsnü, directly at Kemal. “No,” he says. “He is not hurt. He’s gone to be with his maker.”

  Kemal feels as if he’s swallowed a piece of shrapnel. His tears, so often shed for paltry birds and strangers, are no longer at the ready. It is Hüsnü who breaks down, hiding his face in his sleeve.

  The three friends carry Tekin’s body to a hilltop facing the arch of Ctesiphon. The imam is nowhere to be found so Mehmet directs the cleansing of the body and wraps it in a shroud made from the shirts of fallen soldiers. It is the best they can do in these circumstances. Kemal tucks the wooden finch meant for his son in Tekin’s lifeless hands. These are hands that killed the enemy and also whittled a toy bird for his child, he thinks.

  “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” Mehmet chants in Arabic. “To Allah we belong and to him we shall return.”

  Kemal listens as Mehmet’s voice washes over Tekin’s body before being carried away by the wind. The words speak of the same god who sanctioned this war, this war that took away Nazareth and then Lucine. This war that has now claimed Tekin and is slowly claiming bits of Kemal’s own soul. And for what? For some pasha or war minister they’ve never even seen and for some god whose identity and nature no one can agree upon. Kemal is now certain there is no truth or beauty in this god, just as there is no truth or beauty in this war.

  CHAPTER 24

  Place of Sin

  “HOW MANY?” FATMA asks. The boy, Ahmet, grunts in response.

  “How many today?” Fatma demands to know.

  “Three,” the boy answers.

  “And is he among them?”

  They begin every morning in this fashion. Fatma asks the first question and quickly follows it with the second. When the troops were first garrisoned in Malatya, Fatma saw it as a sign of God’s mercy. The Almighty had taken her husband, taken her parents, and left her with an invalid mother-in-law whose dependence on her was continually increasing. Desperate for money, she had gone to the lieutenant governor of Malatya to offer the troops lodging and meals. Nabi Bey had a reputation for being a just and moral man. The rumor was that he had initially defied the deportation orders, sparing hundreds of Armenian women and children. Fatma, who had expected a portly, balding man, was taken aback by the lieutenant governor’s bright green eyes and freshly pomaded hair. For his part, Nabi Bey took one look at Fatma’s black curls and full lips and appointed her innkeeper of an abandoned khan just outside the city proper, with only her mother-in-law and a boy named Ahmet as helpers. The troops arrived shortly thereafter, which is also precisely when Nabi Bey began his daily visits. Being married did not slow down the lieutenant governor’s courting of Fatma. A courting that began on his first visit, to which he brought with him a sack of pistachios and asked only for tea, and ended a few visits later, when he gifted Fatma with two herrings and a gilded hand mirror in exchange for her body’s warmth.

  At first, her mother-in-law treated the lieutenant like a proper suitor, hoping against hope that the widow girl, who had brought her nothing but bad luck, was finally going to be useful. And though Fatma could sense her mother-in-law’s disapproval, she also noticed that the old woman’s moral outrage didn’t prevent her from enjoying the herring. All the snorts and grimaces stopped with the arrival of deportees from the eastern provinces, the sight of them reminding the old lady that as Kurds their loyalty could also be questioned. The deportees marched through town like the walking dead, clothed in rags, stinking so badly that the old woman put carbolic acid on the windowsill to keep the stench away. Dogs and birds followed them wherever they went, tracking the scent of death. Bodies were carted away in the darkness, buried, their possessions burned or stolen. The people of Malatya looked on in horror or hate, feeling better about their own lot. A few risked their lives to save a child here, feed a mother there, but soon they returned to the business of their own survival.

  When Fatma finally relented to her suitor’s wishes, Nabi Bey suddenly insisted upon paying her for what she had already given him more or less f
reely. He placed three paras on the indentation of the mattress where his body had lain. Fatma stared at the coins for a few moments, knowing their power over her life, before curling her fingers around them. Soon after, in a moment of despair, after another one of his visits procured barely enough to feed a mouse, Fatma told the bey that any soldier willing to pay was welcome to her services. Her mother-in-law, who until then needed bread more than she needed a chaste daughter-in-law, expressed her disapproval by practically climbing into her burial shroud and dying.

  For her part, Fatma now thinks of her sex as a cabinet of sorts. Men open and shut its doors, putting things in and taking things out. When the cabinet between her legs hums and gyrates in response to a rough caress or a slow kneading, she tells herself that it is separate from her. Inside her but separate, like a piece of furniture she’s inadvertently swallowed. She gets up, determined to see if Nabi Bey is among the three waiting for her. She feels drawn to him despite how he has treated her. He is one of only two men who have ever piqued her interest. The first turned her into a widow; the second, into a whore.

  Drawing her shoulders back and donning a haughty expression, she walks into the main room where, indeed, Nabi Bey is seated across from two other rather scrawny-looking soldiers leaning against the wall. Upon seeing her, he rises from the divan. But Fatma strides right past him, extending her hand to one of the young soldiers in the back of the room. Nabi Bey stands red-faced while the soldiers mumble something about not minding the wait.

  Fatma claps her hands at the boy, saying, “Come, come. Neither God nor the devil recognizes rank in these walls.”

  When his turn finally comes, Nabi Bey is more interested in giving Fatma a lashing than receiving any pleasure from her.

  “You ungrateful whore! What kind of pleasure do you get from belittling me, huh?”

  “I wasn’t a whore until I met you,” Fatma says.

  “That’s true. You were a lowly Kurdish cunt leaching off your dead husband’s mother. Without me, you’d be starving or dead. Do you know what is happening right now to thousands like you?”

  It is a rhetorical question. She is no Christian and he knows it. Still, Fatma is determined to find out more about what is happening in the world. The troops of the Tenth Army Corps, who started as her guests and became her clients, have provided Fatma with a great deal of information. Bit by bit, as men dropped their pants, prodded her with their fingers, or reached into their pockets for a few paras, she’s learned about Malatya and the empire. But she can no longer stay in the little house blind and dumb to what is happening outside, spreading her legs by day and sniffing her dead husband’s ghost by night. For now, she concentrates on making Nabi Bey forget her offenses and remember her many “virtues.” She leans back on her divan, exaggerating the arch in her back and letting her heavy breasts go their separate ways on her torso.

  Nabi Bey lowers himself on top of her. She lies inert, letting his considerable weight press her back deeper and deeper into the straw mat until she can feel the stalks pressing into her flesh. The straw is bothersome, as is the moistness that turns his body into a slippery whale of a fish. But what is intolerable is the scent that accompanies the ordeal. The man’s gastro-intestinal adventures waft out of his pores and into Fatma’s flared nostrils. Garlic, pistachio, and cured meat. Aman Allah. Dear God.

  Her sight is the only one of her senses that dances to the rhythm of a distant harmonious melody, far away from here. She fixes her eyes upon a spot in the ceiling. It looks like an oil stain just above the bed. Now how did an oil stain make its way up there? If a splotch of oil could find its way up seven feet and lodge itself permanently to a ceiling, then surely Fatma could find herself far away from this room—in an equally unpredictable spot in the universe.

  Hours later, with her customers all gone, Fatma sits on the floor, away from the dreaded divan where she spends her days. She places the basin between her spread legs and begins her nightly cleansing ritual. She spends every evening like this, cleaning her place of sin. As a child, she hadn’t noticed the mystery in between her thighs. She skipped and climbed trees with all the other girls and boys, but then the two dark cherries on her chest grew into apricots, then melons. She was covered in a head scarf and hidden, forbidden to play and told she was shameful. She hated that place between her legs until Ibrahim, her husband, came to worship there nightly.

  Now she hunches over herself, carefully cleaning the folds of delicate skin that make men weep and quiver, and keep her alive and well. She pays it its proper respects but knows that like everything else it mustn’t be overused. When the ritual is over, Fatma remains seated on the floor, contemplating her trip to the Armenian Quarter, or what is left of it. Those who left with nothing more than an oxcart are said to have buried their gold in courtyards and orchards. There, in the abandoned homes of her former neighbors, she might find some hidden treasure that will help her escape this life.

  Given the climate in the village, Fatma has left the inn only twice in the past year, once to the mosque and once to the hamam. Both times she took care to cover herself and was accompanied by her mother-in-law. At the hamam, the village women had taken pleasure in taunting her. A few refused to share the bathhouse with that orospu, dirty whore.

  Her husband had been the only son of the town butcher. When his father died, the mothers and aunties of the village paraded their daughters around him expectantly, but it was far too late. By then Ibrahim had fallen under the spell of his youngest and toughest customer. He liked to say it was Fatma’s haggling tongue that did him in, but Fatma suspected it was the way she let her head scarf drop every time she smiled at him. His mother’s illness gave Fatma a rare opportunity to rule the house. Where other young brides bowed their heads in submission to their husbands and mothers-in-law, Fatma made decisions and gave her opinion freely. Outside the house, she shrugged off the insults. Ignoring the jeers and hisses from the villagers, she laughed her loud laugh and spat at those who dared cross her. When confronted about his wife’s behavior, Ibrahim only smiled and encouraged anyone who disapproved to take their oxcart to the only other butcher in the region, located some twenty kilometers to the east.

  It has been two years since Ibrahim left for the Balkan front and two months since Fatma buried her mother-in-law. If Ibrahim appeared to her now, she would beg his forgiveness. She pulls her veil down, making sure the dark wool covers her entire face and body. She extends her hand, pretending to reach for something and notices that this exposes a sliver of skin where her hand meets her wrist. The fabric, concealing everything but her kohl-rimmed eyes, is meant to provide a measure of modesty but covering herself always gives Fatma a surge of power. Under its folds, her past is erased and her sins absolved. Besides, these days there is nothing modest about her. Like the veil, which separates her body from the world, she exists now only in the in-between places. Between modesty and seduction, damnation and deliverance.

  Once on the street, Fatma keeps her eyes lowered and her steps quick. Using her sense of smell to guide her, she strides past the scent of dead skin and soap outside the hamam and through the back alleys of the spice market where the smell of mint and garlic almost makes her stop. When she reaches the merchant’s stalls that mark the beginning of the Armenian Quarter, Fatma thinks that perhaps her trusty nose has finally betrayed her. Where once the blacksmiths, cobblers, and tinsmiths released clouds of copper, sulfur, and leather dye into the dusty air of Malatya, Fatma now smells something entirely different. She is sure the devil himself has vomited onto the earth’s crust, producing an odor so vile and permeable that it burns her eyes and throat.

  Gone too are the sounds of clanging metal, the scraping of soft bristles on leather, and the excitement of human voices straining above the clamor of the once-bustling market. Fruit flies swarm past her, swooping up before her eyes, daring her to look up. The shock is not in what she sees but what she doesn’t see. The merchants are all gone, their overturned stalls and broken windows off
ering silent testimony of hasty departures. The door of the Armenian Church is splintered, as though some demonic animal with large horns has pummeled through it. Someone must have tried to take shelter here. She says a silent prayer even though she is quite convinced by now that there is no god, not in heaven and certainly not here in Anatolia.

  She places an acid-soaked handkerchief to her nose and quickens her steps, veering as far away from the river as possible, thinking only of survival. A sea of twinkling stars, blasphemous in their majesty, illuminates the dark night. How dare they shine on so much suffering? And then it occurs to her that these stars have borne witness.

  “What have you seen?” she whispers, looking up. She is half waiting for an answer when her foot collides with something and her body falls to the ground. It is a body, sickly smelling but not yet ripe with death. Fatma rolls away at once. The body groans. It turns on its side, away from her, clutching what looks like an infant’s swaddling cloth. From the long wild mane, she knows it is a girl.

  CHAPTER 25

  Rebirth

  THE DRY DIRT of the desert covers the open sores on her feet. Huddled in one corner of the abandoned shed, Lucine shuts her eyes and tries to pray, but the words, so carefully etched into her mind by Mairig and their priest, have escaped her. Fragments and short phrases from ancient prayers rise above the fog, empty and impotent: the crazed ramblings of a misguided race. She pushes the words aside and presses Aram’s blue swaddling cloth to her chest instead. The smell of Mairig’s milk is long gone, but inside its soft folds she can still smell the sweetness of him. She burrows her face in the tattered blue wool of his swaddling cloth, sniffing at the lingering scent of his sweat and licking its center where she still tastes the salt of his tears or hers, she isn’t sure. Soon his screams, long melodic wails, followed by a staccato of angry reprieves, fill the empty shed, and she is glad. She will do nothing to stop them this time.