by Yashar Kemal
It was a dark dark night, a night of unrelieved blackness. And then from afar, with long piercing screams the birds came, tiny birds as big as a thumb. Bright birds of light, millions and millions of them, filling the night and the sky, millions of sparks of light that rained over the shrine of Tashbash. All through the night they flashed and glittered, a sparkling river of light. All through that night, till day dawned …
As the sun rose the Bald Minstrel’s saz slipped from his hands on to the warm earth. It lay there, long and slim, among the cotton plants. And the Bald Minstrel remained sitting beside it, erect, motionless, as though frozen. The villagers stared at him and shivered. The sun was quarter-high when he moved. He picked up his saz and took it into his wattle-hut. Then he joined the cotton pickers. A feeling of gladness suffused his heart as he plucked the cotton out of the first boll.
The millions and millions of tiny spangled lights moved on to the west. The night stopped, the light, the brightness, the darkness were still. Only the tiny sparkling screaming spangles.
Beads of sweat sprang out on the Bald Minstrel’s yellow, saffron face.
46
Three times the big eagle wheeled in the sky, leaning slightly on his left wing, as though flying sideways.
It was very hot, a blinding heat that flung the birds in the sky dead beat on to the ground. The sun was still quarter-high and the labourers were picking away slowly, wearily, when Sefer came striding into the field, his rifle slung over his shoulder, a whip in his hand. He was wearing his newest, grandest clothes: breeches and riding boots, a black coat, white shirt and red necktie, and even a felt hat. He paused well in sight of all the villagers and placed the hand that held the whip to his waist in an effort to appear proud and unconcerned. His face was emaciated, sallow, and the long furrows that ran down his neck gave him a bitter look. His eyes were the eyes of fear, restlessly rolling, his lips white, bloodless. But the expression on his face changed every minute, mournful, dull, fierce, brutal, then childlike, afraid, weary and then again suddenly challenging. And all the time the wide fixed smile never left his lips and he kept up his defiant stance, his huge imposing body planted there, his right leg flung forward.
Memidik’s hands stopped picking. Like greased lightning he shot forward, so fast that not a soul realized how and when it happened. His right hand flashed and sparkled in the hard sunlight. Three times it rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell.
Sefer crashed to the ground bellowing: ‘Oh, Mother, I’m lost!’ He drew his legs up to his belly again and again, quivered, and then he was still, stretched out in all his length, rigid.
The villagers were struck dumb. They could not even move. Memidik stood over the body, still holding the bloodstained knife. Then he shook his hand and the knife fell beside the body over the soft earth at the foot of a blue-flowering cotton plant. His face was chalk-white. Suddenly he turned and walked off towards Anavarza. Very slowly he made his way down to the Dry Jeyhan and entered the mass of mauve camelthorns.
The blood still flowed gently out of Sefer’s body into a pool that steamed under the heat. Three steel-green flies flashed three times over the pool of blood.
It was only then, when Memidik had gone and was out of sight, that their tongues were loosened and they began to talk.
‘Now, why did Memidik kill Sefer?’
‘Why …?’
‘Why?’
Memidik killed Muhtar Sefer. His blood gathered into a pool on the warm earth. It frothed under the heat, grew dark and black and hard and crusted. Two days the body lay there under the sun and the green flies flashed about it, steel-green, thousands of them in swarms.
47
The Yalak villagers, having finished picking the cotton in Muttalip Beys fields, went on to pick for Kizir Ali Agha. In all they picked in as many as fourteen different fields. And in each field the second and third crops were as rich as the first. During this time it rained only twice. Memidik was thrown into prison. Sefer’s third wife, Pale Ismail’s daughter, married Durmush three days after her husband’s death. The villagers went twice to town to give evidence for Memidik. Zeliha Lass visited Memidik three times in his prison. She brought him five packets of cigarettes and a kerchief full of fresh green grapes.
It was raining. The straight, relentless autumn rains of the Chukurova had set in for good. Oceans were pouring out of the sky.
All along the muddy Chukurova roads crowds and crowds of labourers from the cotton fields and the rice-paddies moved like long columns of ants. They were making their way back at last to their homes in the hills. In their pockets this year they had more money than even they could believe. It had been a good year for the crops.
In the town, over the pavements and down the streets set with large white pebbles from the river, they strode with large calloused bare feet, water streaming down all over them, going from shop to shop, purchasing all the necessities for the winter months. Both the women and the men had their shalvar-trousers rolled up to the knees.
Long ant-like trains of people tramping under the rain, sick, feverish, bent under their loads, steam rising from their backs, would fill now for days and days the roads and passes leading into the Taurus Mountains, in the long trek back to their villages. But they were happy. They had money and so this year there would be no fear of the money-lender. And up in their mountain homes the weddings would begin to be held. They would don the cheap bright-coloured clothes they had bought down in the town and would enjoy the festivities to their hearts’ content, forgetting the heat, the fever and the mosquitoes, the blood-hot muddy water of the Chukurova. Until next year …
Long Ali never stopped a minute in the town. He flew like the wind, his trousers rolled to his knee, his clothes cleaving to his body, oblivious of everything about him.
‘My mother … Oh, my mother,’ he kept mumbling. ‘This time … If you’re all right … Never, never again will I let you out of my sight …’
She came before his eyes sitting on the threshold of their home, dozing in the autumn sun with a kitten in her lap.
‘Mother, oh Mother! Mother, we’ve come!’ And she would throw her arms around his neck. So happy … ‘Oh, Mother, Mother, here we are at last!’ How she would laugh … Would she ever forgive him?
And again his mother came before his eyes. He opens the door … A stench, such a stench … Meryemdje curled up there, bloated, rotting … Green flies buzzing all over her. The yellow ants have gouged her eyes out. They have eaten off her nose, her lips …
Long Ali held his nose, almost fainting.
And again he saw her. This time, instead of the kitten there is in her arms a young partridge, the beak and feet only just beginning to turn red.
With feverish haste Long Ali pressed on.
When she had finished her shopping Zeliha Lass went to visit Memidik in the prison. She had bought a silk kerchief for him, a white one. She held it out, wet from the rain, together with a green ten-lira note, also wet. Memidik would not take the money. He stretched out his arm and clasped Zeliha’s hand. Through the iron bars he held her hand over his heart. How fast it beat, how warm her hand … They did not speak. Tears came to Zeliha’s eyes. She looked at Memidik and smiled happily.
The boy Hassan arrived just as Zeliha was leaving. Her clothes were clinging to her slender willowy body and a slim tall vision of a woman was left in Memidik’s eyes.
Hassan smiled. He held out a nylon bag with three boxes of matches in it. Nothing could have pleased Memidik more than this gift. Like Tashbash, he thought proudly. The boy holds me one with Tashbash …
‘Hope you’ll get out soon, Memidik,’ Hassan said, putting on his most grown-up air.
‘Thanks, brother,’ Memidik said.
‘I’ll bring you some more matches next time. I won’t let you be without matches while you’re in here.’
‘Thanks, brother, thanks …’ Memidik was in seventh heaven. Then, quickly, as though asking about something very secret: ‘Tell me, Hassa
n,’ he whispered, ‘after I left what did our Lord Tashbash do? Have you got news of him?’ It was a question he had not dared put to any of the villagers who had visited him up to now.
‘He’s well,’ Hassan stammered, taken aback. ‘He’s lying there on the hill. He’s well …’
Memidik wanted to ask more about Tashbash, but he thought better of it.
And now it was Old Halil who was limping in to see him. ‘Well, you crazy boy,’ he said, ‘I hope you get out soon. But it was a good thing you did. Bless your hands.’
‘Thanks, Uncle,’ Memidik said.
Old Halil pointed to the sky. ‘Look, Memidik, look.’
Memidik looked and smiled.
Like ants pouring out of their holes the labourers were tramping up the roads and passes under the driving rain, back into their mountain homes, their trousers rolled up to their knees, their backs steaming.
‘Look, Memidik,’ Old Halil said again. ‘Look!’
Memidik looked and smiled again.
Up in the sky, as though stuck to it, slightly huddled over himself, his wings wet and slow, the great eagle was flying off towards the distant mountains. Three times he wheeled round and round at the far end of the Chukurova land. Then he glided off towards Mount Aladag.
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Copyright © Yashar Kemal 1968
English translation © William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1977
Yashar Kemal has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by The Harvill Press in 1996
First published with the title Ölmez Otu, Istanbul, 1968
First published in Great Britain
by Collins and Harvill Press, 1977
Paperback edition published by Collins Harvill, 1989
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781846559655