The Undying Grass

by Yashar Kemal

  ‘What?’

  ‘That someone should come to me … Our holy Prophet or the Peri King or Tashbash … If someone like that came to me and said, hark, Long Ali, Allah’s beloved servant, wish a wish and it shall be granted to you … D’you know what I’d wish for? I’d wish that when we return from the cotton Mother should greet us all up there, outside the village, and say, “Welcome home, good villagers, welcome, what have you brought me from the rich Chukurova land?”’

  Elif sighed. ‘So do I. It’s what I want more than anything else in the world.’

  ‘Then, ah, then I’ll spit in these people’s faces, every single one of them in turn …’ He was so wrapped in his thoughts that he never even felt the mosquitoes sticking to his face, needling into his back, sucking up his blood.

  The villagers had lit their big fire on the river-bank and were settling down to sleep near its sheltering fumes, away from the mosquitoes. The fire was lit almost every night now and someone had to sit up and keep it burning till morning. Tonight it was Memidik’s turn. He hadn’t wanted to. He had protested desperately but no one had listened to him. He sat there full of fear and apprehension watching the sky over the well. Even at this distance he could hear the flapping of wings. Tomorrow at this rate the whole Chukurova sky would be black with eagles. They kept flowing in, coming from God knows where, wheeling endlessly in the sky, like a giant shawl streaming in the wind. Their wings gave out sudden sparks under the moon.

  ‘They’ve tied me down here on purpose. They know … Everyone knows. They’re watching me secretly, playing with me … Of course they know!’

  Ali took Elif’s hand. ‘You saw what they tried to do to me, those lowdown people?’ he said. ‘It makes me want to vomit. The vicious brutes! Informing the Government against me! Why, I barely escaped swinging. Thank goodness the sergeant was a sensible chap; he believed me. And the first-lieutenant liked me too.’

  ‘How could such a thing happen?’ Elif said. ‘How could the Government people …’

  ‘That sergeant was an Antep man,’ Ali interrupted her. ‘They’re good and clever, the people of Antep. I wish I were an Antep man too and far away from here … I wish I never had to go back to that village … And what if we find Mother dead, stretched out stiff on the ground? … Her arm in the jaws of a dog …’

  The night whirred, alive with the drone of mosquitoes. The wind had dropped, to be replaced by a stifling clammy heat. The heat rose from the ground in fiery waves.

  ‘Perhaps Tashbash has really become a saint … Inshallah he has, and will take his Mother Meryemdje under his wing. Maybe he knows about me too. If brother Tashbash is really a saint now …’

  Elif rarely lost her temper, but suddenly she was in a quivering rage. Ali had never seen her like this. ‘You watch your mouth, Ali,’ she shouted. ‘Brother Tashbash, brother Tashbash … He’s not your brother, he’s our Lord now. He’s a saint and you’re only a mortal being. If you didn’t talk like this, if instead you prayed to him, then maybe he would watch over Mother, even take her up to his cave among the Forty Holies … Brother Tashbash indeed!’

  The villagers lying around the fire heard her.

  ‘Neighbours!’ Zaladja’s voice rose in a screech. ‘I saw it in my dream. I saw it, I tell you … Long Ali, butchering Elif and his own children, just as he did his mother. I couldn’t bear it. I screamed and it woke me up. Quick, neighbours, quick, go and rescue Elif, save her from that monster!’

  No one stirred.

  Some distance from the fire Muhtar Sefer’s mosquito-net flapped palely in the night. He lay there, awake, thinking.

  Son of a bitch Ali! This is nothing to what’s coming to you. You couldn’t have killed Meryemdje, I know, but she’ll be dead by the time we return to the village, you mark my words, dead the old witch … And so will you, wretched worm that you are! You’ll be dead like that saintly Tashbash of yours. Where is he now? Food for the birds and beasts very likely. And so will you be, Longish Ali … You think I’ll take all this lying down, eh? Me, the son of the headman Hidir! It may cost me everything, even my life, but I’ll do away with that Meryemdje. You can go and cry your woes to the rocks of the Süleymanli slope then, that’s all. Who’ll ever believe you didn’t kill her? Everyone from seven to seventy will bear witness against you. We’ll see then if they don’t speak to me again! I’ll make them, or they’ll be the worse for it. This is a struggle to the death. I’ve already dealt with your friend Tashbash. Now it’s your turn, Longish Ali … What have I done that you people should treat me so? Has there ever been another muhtar like me in the whole of the Taurus land? Hasn’t it always been the village first for me? Its welfare above everything? And this is how you reward me! You go and find a saint for yourselves. And a saint who orders you not to speak to me … How can a man live without ever hearing a single good word coming from the heart, warm and friendly? Or even swearing at you, hostile, cruel, venomous? This is worse than death, what Tashbash has done to me. But I’ll make you talk, every one of you, see if I don’t! I’ll show you what it means to play with me, you double-crossing brutes. I’ll show you … To do this to me … Why, even my three wives … And God knows they think the world of me. Why, not one of them dares open her mouth to me, not even in bed! God! Not even in bed! And my own children too! Not a word! Why, death is nothing to this. This is like dying a thousand times. And you believe I’ll take it all lying down? At last I’ve got a chance to settle Ali’s account, and I won’t spare him …

  A shudder ran through Memidik’s body as he stoked the fire. Frogs croaked in a distant marsh and were silent again. The dark sky studded with huge stars was alive with eagles. Pale moving specks …

  ‘If the man sitting there on the well-stone sees the body in the well … The dead man in the mirror …’

  Memidik was soaked with sweat. The heavy clammy air … The flaming fire … The burning earth …

  Long Ali drew a long deep sigh. ‘Have you noticed Sefer’s face these days, Elif?’ he asked. ‘The mocking way he looks at me? And yesterday he threw me one of his barbs … People are saying, he said, that you roasted Meryemdje over the embers and ate her, and I wouldn’t put it past you … Of course, I couldn’t answer back. Ah, God forgive me, but our Lord Tashbash couldn’t have known what he was about. The man’s free to abuse people to his heart’s content and no one is able to say a word to him! I’m sure he’s cooking something up for me. What d’you think?’

  ‘I don’t like the look of him, either,’ Elif replied. ‘Besides, he’s got the villagers’ ear again. What I think is that you must get back to Mother quickly.’

  ‘Well, you see how I’m working. I’m surprised at how quick my hands are. My sack’s full before I know it …’

  ‘That’s what makes them all mad, that you should pick three times, five times more cotton than they do. That’s why they make up stories about you killing Mother …’

  ‘I don’t care. Just let me make enough to pay those debts … Just let me get back to Mother before …’

  Everyone was asleep now. The fire burnt less brightly. A slight breeze arose and the night grew lighter. A truck was passing along the distant road, its rumble echoing up the Anavarza crags. Ali watched it for a while. Its headlights shone upon the dark clump of eucalyptus trees in the woodswamp.

  ‘Elif,’ he said. But she was asleep. ‘Poor thing,’ he murmured. ‘She’s worn out. And now this trouble with the villagers … And worrying about Mother … A stone would crack up …’

  His mother is lying stretched out on the dust of the road, one hand closed tightly over a thorny wild artichoke, her other arm missing, torn off at the shoulder. Down the bare gravelly hillside a lolling-tongued, scraggy old wolf comes loping up drawn by the smell. Soon he will be tearing her piecemeal.

  Ali tried to shake this picture out of his mind, but no sooner had he done so than he saw again the doddering old wolf descending that bare gravelly slope, loping up to his mother’s dead body, down, down the sun-bak
ed, stony, thistly hill, nearer and nearer to the corpse, his huge mouth opening now, his long sharp white teeth visible. A snarl, but he cannot get at the body. Tenacious he comes back again and again, but each time he finds himself up at the top of the gravelly slope … And back again, with his tongue lolling, down through the desiccated thorny cardoons …

  ‘I must get back to Mother,’ Ali thought as he laid his head on his pillow. ‘Quickly, before … Before she dies. Ah, if only I could go tomorrow …’ He drew the sheet over his head. A cloud of mosquitoes fell upon him with a loud drone, but he was too tired to chase them away. He fell asleep.

  15

  More and more stories spring up about Meryemdje and how she met her death. This is how these stories are told on a stifling, breathless afternoon of cotton picking.

  It was very hot. Not the slightest breeze stirred the air, no clouds had yet risen over the Mediterranean Sea and the sky was a shimmering, blinding brightness, perfectly bare, with not even a bird in sight. The Anavarza crags steamed like a mauve flame in the heat. The burning earth, the stubble, the Jeyhan River flowing like melting silver, the white cotton flashing sharply knife-like, all the world lay smouldering under the sun.

  The earth burnt like a live coal.

  Elif set down her basket and went to the barrel on the outer edge of the cotton field. She filled up the bowl. The water was blood-warm, turbid and yellow. She drank it up in long slow draughts.

  The labourers were working sluggishly, in slow motion. They plucked the seed from the bolls languidly, with the tips of their fingers. Not a leaf fluttered. It was as though they were plunged in a heavy mass of smelted tin. Even Ali found his hands slackening.

  Elif counted the bolls on the plant before her. Twenty-eight! God be praised. Without moving from her place she picked all the twenty-eight bolls. A little way off was a large tomato-plant heavy with ripe red fruit. Elif was the first to see it. She was delighted. Just the thing for our pilaff, she thought. But before she could take a step two other women made a lunge for the plant and plucked it bare, leaving only a dark stem where a moment ago all had been a red riot.

  Then Elif saw another tomato-plant. This time ten women pounced on it. As they went up the line the tomato-plants multiplied and almost all the labourers managed to get some. If it hadn’t been for Hassan, Elif, slow to put herself forward, would have gone without tomatoes for her bulgur pilaff that evening. But the boy suddenly spied some tomatoes hidden among the tall green cotton and lost no time in sweeping up the lot.

  The sight of the tomatoes had brought some life into the field. The labourers worked more quickly now. Everyone had their eyes on Ali’s hands again. ‘It’s killing one’s mother makes a man’s hands run like a machine,’ they muttered.

  Zaladja’s withered neck craned forward, her white handkerchief slipped to her shoulders exposing her scanty hennaed hair, one thin pigtail trailed over her breast like a cat’s tail. She was shining with perspiration.

  ‘Satilmish told me this. He was running away from army service again and he thought he would hide in the empty village for a while. “Oh, I wish I’d never thought of it,” that’s what he told me when he came here secretly last night – he’s gone now – “never, and I wouldn’t have seen that monstrous thing. It happened as I was running down the mountain to avoid the gendarmes. Thirsty as hell I was, and making for the Güloluk spring where the water’s like ice and will cut your fingers if you hold them in for a second. Throw a water-melon into it and it’ll burst in two from the cold. Well, I went down to the spring, would that I hadn’t! I heard a moan and stopped short, frozen … There was Long Ali, holding his mother’s head under the water and never letting go. Mother Meryemdje’s legs kicked in the air, her body squirmed and struggled. But Ali is a strong man, very strong. He kept Meryemdje’s head down until after a while she stopped struggling. Her body trembled and strained, then it went limp. Ah, I wish I’d been struck blind and not seen what I’ve seen …” Yes, that’s just what Satilmish said. Then he said, “Ali pulled his mother out of the water and laid her down. He untied a rope from round his waist, trussed up her feet and began to drag her down the hill. Poor Meryemdje’s head draggling on the ground! Her long hair smirched with dust and earth! I followed them, I couldn’t help myself. I followed them as if I were bewitched. Suddenly Ali looked back. His eyes were upon me, glowering, bulging, bloodshot. I ran for my life. He chased after me. A full day and a full night he chased me until I reached the mill at Narlibahche and hid in the old turning-wheel. I knew that Ali would not come near the mill. He’s afraid of snakes and the mill’s full of them. So he couldn’t get at me, but he lay in wait there for two whole days. I was dying of hunger and thirst, but I couldn’t get out. He would have killed me. A huge black snake crept up and coiled itself before the hole of the turning-wheel. Then another came and settled at the other end. I had fallen out of Ali’s grasp into the hands of the snakes … I had to get out, but how? One of the snakes raised its head, cocked an eye at me like a bird and after a while it slowly slithered off. God bless the creature, I was saved!” After this Satilmish rushed down to the Chukurova. But in the morning what should he see? Long Ali himself! Satilmish began to tremble. He shook like jelly. His jaws were locked, his legs quivered. He couldn’t stop trembling. He trembled all day long, then suddenly in the evening he took to his heels, howling. “Long Ali’s after me,” he screamed. “God save me, Long Aliiii …”’

  Zaladja’s skin was wrinkled and tanned like morocco leather. ‘Curse this heat,’ she grumbled. ‘And this muddy, blood-hot water. Curse this Chukurova. And curse our Lord Tashbash for not doing something to save us from this hell.’

  Far to the north, the mountains of the Taurus hovered barely visible, drowned in the heat-haze like a light film of ashes, like a flimsy ephemeral cloud that would vanish in an instant.

  The sweating labourers, with their tongues hanging out, kept looking south towards the Mediterranean Sea, but there was no sign of the white sail-clouds, those harbingers of the cooling south wind.

  ‘Another couple of hours like this and we’ll just catch fire and burn away,’ Shirtless declared. ‘What’s happened to our south wind?’

  Caps, headcloths, kerchiefs were cast off and collars pulled open. A pungent odour of sweat spread low through the field; weighed down by the heat, it mingled with the acrid smell of cotton.

  Something flashed and sparkled on a cotton stalk nearby. Hassan ran up to it and saw a large beetle, with popping eyes and hard, iridescent wings, green and pale blue with shades of yellow and a bright red line. He picked it up and turned it in his hand. It was so slender and brittle, it looked as if it would break at a touch … Carefully, he laid it back on the plant. The insect flashed in the sun. Hassan’s eyes filled with tears.

  Stooped over the cotton as though playing his saz, the Bald Minstrel was picking away, still as a stone statue, looking neither left nor right. His shirt was open and the long white hairs of his chest stood out.

  Ummahan’s eyes filled with tears.

  Pale Ismail’s daughter, with her flushed cheeks and sunburnt face, looked more alluring than ever. Her wide hips swayed voluptuously under her skirt. Her eyes were on the men and her whole body was aflame.

  ‘In the cave down in the Peri Valley Meryemdje was pleading … Ali, aren’t you my son whom I suckled at these breasts? Ali, how can a man shed his own mother’s blood. Don’t kill me, Ali, you’ll be damned for ever … Don’t kill me, Ali, I’ll stay here in the village if you want … For a whole day and a whole night she pleaded with him. So Ali didn’t kill her. No … With a long stout rope he lashed her to the pine-tree that’s in front of the cave … You’ll stay like this, Mother, till I come back from the Chukurova … Ali, Ali! This is worse than death. Loosen the rope, Aliii … But he was already far away. Meryemdje’s voice raised the echoes in the mountains and the Peri Valley resounded with her cries. Night fell and the stars appeared and wolves began to howl. From every gorge and valley a wolf
’s howl rose, louder and louder …’

  ‘Who saw this? What wretch? Why didn’t he untie her?’

  All hands were arrested. The labourers froze in a long loaded silence.

  Then a voice burst out: ‘I saw it!’

  ‘So did I …’

  A flight of jet-fighters from the Injirlik air-base zoomed overhead, very low and loud, swallowing up the air, and vanished in a moment over the mist-swathed Taurus Mountains. Another flight arose and whipped past. Each time the labourers looked up from their work and watched the planes until they were lost to view.

  It was very hot. The Taurus Mountains melted into a glowing haze, then reappeared, a wan, flat girdle about the plain. Pale blue, tenuous …

  Stretched in a long single row the pickers were like the beads of a multi-coloured tasbih. From a distance they seemed motionless, only a variegated streak brushed in on purpose to put some colour into the unrelieved yellow and dark green, the dazzle and dust of the flat wide plain.

  ‘Blood is oozing from Meryemdje’s nose, drip, drip, dotting the dusty path. Her hands sink into the dust as she crawls on all fours. The blood is streaming more quickly now. Soon, all her blood will gush out of her nose in one big spurt leaving her body drained … Around her neck is a halter. Spellbound Ahmet is holding the rope! The idiot brandishes a rawhide bullwhip too and when he feels like it he lashes out at her. Now they have come to the rocks, but still he drags her on. Meryemdje’s hands are torn and bleeding. Suddenly they tumble down together. Meryemdje is streaming all over with blood. Her mouth is a foamy mass of blood. She rolls down the ravine and lies stretched out on a long white rock, clawing at the rock face. Then she looks up, her eyes starting out of her head. Her back is broken, all crooked … The blood running … The halter about her neck … Spellbound Ahmet has collapsed on a stone, shaking with laughter. And there’s Long Ali standing very straight, watching! Meryemdje cries out to him, but no sound comes from her mouth. She implores him silently, in vain. And now the rocks are turning purple, so hot you can’t keep your hand on them. Meryemdje’s blood turns to steam the instant it touches the burning rock. Her pleading infuriates Spellbound Ahmet. He seizes her by the legs and swings her in the air, slamming her down on to the rocks again and again. Meryemdje’s eyes are bursting from their sockets … She is sitting on the rocks … The blood-soaked halter is in Spellbound Ahmet’s hand … Long Ali is watching, his arms crossed. Meryemdje is proud, she wouldn’t ever plead with anyone. But this is different. Ah, it’s for her life, and life is dear, curse it, very dear. It’s the only thing worth struggling for … It would be better not to beg, not for anything in the world, not even for one’s own life. But ah … Meryemdje is pleading, yes, and Spellbound Ahmet laughs at her like the madman he is.’