The Silence of Scheherazade

by Defne Suman

  ‘These important peoples,’ murmured Nanny Dilber as she rolled boreks in the kitchen. ‘Members of parliament among them, you know. Look at they heads, all wearing hats. Whatever our gentleman up to, may God protect him.’

  It had become obligatory for members of parliament to wear hats.

  It was about this time that the nerve doctor from Vienna arrived at the Mansion with the Tower. Sumbul had wandered into the library busy with working, whispering men with hats on their heads. She was wearing a purple silk evening dress and was laughing, with a glass of sherry in her hand. Speaking perfect French, she approached the frowning men to have her hand kissed.

  After this incident – this scandal – Hilmi Rahmi had the tower that gave the mansion its name remodelled after the rooms at the spa hotels he had seen in Germany, with a Western toilet and all. He had pipes installed to carry water from the well to the attic. The water didn’t rise that far, of course, the pressure not being sufficient, so he brought a battalion of soldiers from the barracks and had two huge tanks carried up there. We filled the tanks and covered them with wooden planks. He had iron bars put on the windows. He gathered up all the knives, matches, scissors, poison, kerosene, whatever Sumbul could use as a weapon against herself or anyone else. The nerve doctor said that as the paranoid delusions advanced, she might become dangerous. She might set fire to the house, or kill herself or one of us. As he said this, he peered over the rimless eyeglasses that sat almost at the very end of his nose, and looked straight at me. Later, whenever he went up to the tower to examine Sumbul, he would not let me leave his side.

  When all these preparations had been completed, Hilmi Rahmi picked up his wife as if she were a cut-crystal bell jar and carried her with care to the tower. At the bottom of the steep, winding staircase there was a door hidden beneath the wallpaper and he had a lock set into it. He put the extra key on a chain and gave it to me. It still hangs around my neck. From then on I was to take care of his wife. I was to bring her food, sit with her to keep her cheerful, clean the room, and take her to the bath downstairs to be washed once a week. If Sumbul were to be seen in the house or in the garden, I would be held responsible, and I probably knew what that meant. It was the first time he had spoken to me so harshly. My eyes filled with tears.

  I needed him to love me so much!

  That night for the first time I visited the bed vacated by his wife.

  Shutting Sumbul up in the tower was of great benefit to the ghost. She started talking non-stop. Whenever I went up with pails of water and emptied them into the tanks, whenever I was up there picking up off the floor the records that had been taken out of their leather bag and scattered about, she would be telling her story, at top speed. I pretended not to listen. If I showed the slightest interest, she would take that as validation and assume complete control of Sumbul. No matter where I happened to focus my attention, no matter what I was concerned with, she would branch out, send out shoots. But my presence alone was enough to make her joyful, it seemed, for as soon as the European ghost heard my footsteps on the stairs, the shrill voice would get louder. It was then that I learned the rest of her terrifying story. It made my flesh crawl.

  ‘I slapped her in the face. She was beating on the door, shouting and cursing in the worst way. As if her whoring wasn’t enough, her mouth was as dirty as a street-woman’s. Blood attracts blood – she was just like her father. Let the summer heat come, and let her suffer, shut up in that glass jar of a tower.’

  When she said that, a curtain fell and she began asking questions, pleading for answers.

  ‘Was there anything else I could have done? Huh? Any other thing? She forced me into it. She started it. I had no choice.’

  At that point she got angry again. Sumbul’s soft hands clenched like claws, her nails piercing the flesh of her palms.

  ‘For three months I took care of her like a princess. She swelled and swelled like a balloon. I made lemonade for her to drink, I fanned her with a large peacock feather like a sultan in his harem. What more could I have done? Should she have stayed out there on the street with her bastard and become a whore? I saved her life. Do you hear me? I saved her life. Hers and this one’s!’

  She waved her hand towards me.

  At this point the ghost stopped talking. Holding her breath and staring ahead with glassy eyes, Sumbul would return to herself within a few minutes. Worn out by the invasion of her body, she would lay her head on my knees and cry. Her face was becoming more translucent by the day. In truth, the Sumbul who came back after the ghost departed was not the Sumbul of old. Like the pregnant girl in that cursed story, her eyes were encircled with purple shadows; her dull, silvery face had taken on the desperate expression of a lion cub caught in a trap.

  The nerve doctor, who visited the tower every day at nine o’clock sharp, did not believe in the ghost’s story. That pleasant old man with a goatee did not believe in the ghost. He would shine a light into Sumbul’s pupils, listen to her heart, measure her pulse, and record all this in his notebook with meticulous handwriting. But he was not at all interested in whether the pregnant girl in the story lived or died, what happened to her baby, and so on. According to him, the birth, blood and midwife were all symbols of trauma in Sumbul’s subconscious.

  Furthermore, he learned that in her childhood Sumbul had escaped from her family home in Plovdiv after it was burned down by Bulgarian armed gangs and that she had come all the way to Konya on foot. After prodding Hilmi Rahmi, he also discovered that Sumbul’s mother had lost her mind and died in the mountains while they were escaping. Near the end of their journey from Plovdiv to Konya, she had abandoned her child, Sumbul, while she was asleep in an inn. She ran away, never to return. A Skopje family travelling with them from Plovdiv took Sumbul to Konya and handed her over to a distant relative. A year later, a gendarme brought the mother’s body to their doorstep. For months she had lived like a wild animal in the mountains, biting anyone who approached her. When a gang of men tied her hands and arms and tried to rape her, she bit the neck of the brute on top of her, severing his carotid artery.

  When Sumbul saw her mother at the place where the dead were washed, she couldn’t recognize her. Her full breasts were empty, her soft belly sunken, her hair stuck to her skull in patches. But the main reason the twelve-year-old girl couldn’t recognize her mother was the mouth. The woman’s white lips were wrinkled, her mouth twisted inwards. Villagers, afraid that she would bite them, had pulled her teeth, one by one.

  The nerve doctor listened with surprise and undisguised happiness on his face to what Hilmi Rahmi was relating about his wife’s past. He took copious notes in his leather-bound notebook. Later, when he was listening to Sumbul – to the ghost – he would look through his notes, shake his head and mumble some things to himself. ‘Aber ja, natürlich, sehr interessant.’ He couldn’t have cared less about the baby or its mother or even the prisoner in the tower, Sumbul herself, who was foaming at the mouth like someone having an epileptic seizure as she spoke.

  When I took up the breakfast tray or washed her in the bath, I couldn’t look into Sumbul’s face any more. Every night, as soon as darkness fell, I would rise from my bed, walk like one afflicted with sleepwalking to the door at the end of the corridor, open the white mosquito netting and slip between the lavender-scented sheets and into the arms of the grieving husband. There, in the light of the moon seeping between the shutters, the silk nightshirt embracing my naked skin would come alive, would burn like fire. Our connection was as old as history. I wrapped my arms around his waist as I had done on that fateful night. We were riding a galloping horse. Only he heard my voice.

  In the light of day, life continued as if the night had never been.

  Sumbul asked me for some clothesline rope.

  Not the ghost. Sumbul herself. She was begging.

  ‘I implore you, Scheherazade, bring me a strong piece of rope from the laundry room.’

  I kept on with what I was doing, as if I hadn’t hear
d her. Sumbul’s voice, as if the station on a radio had been changed, moved to a different wavelength. Holding her head, she repeated, ‘Le jour où la fille est descendue du bateau…’ The day the girl disembarked from the ship, the harbour was so crowded that one could not see the blue…

  The Love-of-Small-Touches

  ‘Vre kids, don’t thrash around so much, you’ll capsize the boat – this thing is like a hazelnut shell anyway,’ yelled Minas, who was sitting on a kilim in the pointed bow. He was surrounded by baskets and bags, and under his arm was Adriana, looking like his big sister.

  ‘Oh, shut up, malaka! Instead of sitting there lecturing us, come and row for a bit and let us have a smoke.’

  Stavros and Pandelis, stuck on the oars, were out of breath. Minas pretended not to hear. He had brought his mandolin and was playing while Adriana sang. ‘With seven of us packed into such a tiny boat, it’s obviously going to sink,’ muttered Niko, squashed among the fishing nets in the bottom of the boat.

  A little while earlier, the full moon had risen like a cannonball from behind Mount Nif at the stern of the boat. Elpiniki, snuggled in beside Panagiota like a princess, got confused and shouted, ‘Look at the sun – what a beautiful sunset!’, whereupon the boys teased the poor girl until she turned as red as the rising moon in her embarrassment. They were still laughing.

  ‘Tell us, Elpiniki mou, if the sun rises behind that mountain, will it set in the same place? What do they teach you at Homerion, yavri mou, eh, babe? About the fairies of Mount Nif?’

  ‘Elpiniki, look! There’s another sun over here. It’s setting on this side. Ha, ha, ha.’

  ‘You guys are all so mean. I’m never coming out to watch the moon with you again.’

  ‘Is there a moon? I only see two suns.’

  Panagiota gave her friend’s arm a gentle squeeze. Elpiniki was blonde and as beautiful as the legendary fairies of Mount Nif, which was why they were having a go at her for having said something stupid. Because the two of them were the only ones in the neighbourhood to go to Homerion School for Girls, they were the butt of lots of jokes. Homerion was a school for rich girls, girls from families living in mansions in Punta and Kordelio. The other kids in the neighbourhood were all at the church school and took every opportunity to make fun of Elpiniki and Panagiota.

  A British cruiser passed them at full speed. In the darkness it slid across the sea like oil, as if it wasn’t even touching the water. The girls, chewing on their lower lips, turned to look at the captain, who touched the brim of his cap in greeting. He was a handsome man, about the age of their fathers. Elpiniki read out the name of the boat, written in Latin letters on the side: ‘Silver Light’.

  ‘Is he an American, do you think, Giota? Did you see how he looked at us? He’s a sexy one. Shhh, listen to me. There are men who go around picking up girls in our neighbourhoods for the officers from Greece. Have you heard about them? They have the most expensive silk dresses sewn for the girls and they rent rooms for them at Kraemer’s.’

  ‘Shhh, vre Elpiniki. Don’t say crazy things, yia to Theo, for God’s sake. And that place has changed its name now. It’s called Splendid. You have no idea.’

  The long, slender muscles in Stavros’s back kept appearing and disappearing as he pulled on the oars and the wet sand splashed over him. The boys had taken off their shirts and were rowing like fishermen, with bare backs. Stavros’s shoulders, broad from swimming, were set off by the puny white body of Pandelis sitting beside him. He looked exactly like the Ancient Greek statues Panagiota had seen in the museum at the Evangelical School.

  This time it was Elpiniki’s turn to nudge her friend. ‘Girl, you’re going to fall into that boy. Don’t sell yourself so cheap or he won’t pay you any attention.’

  As if he paid her any attention anyway! Without saying anything, Panagiota turned her face towards the dark water. When they had gathered in the square before going down to the wharf, Stavros had greeted her with a vague nod. That was all. Even though they hadn’t seen each other for weeks. Recalling his indifferent, even bored, attitude, her heart tightened. She tried not to look at Minas and Adriana fooling around in the front of the boat. In the silver moonlight, the sea was filled with sharp-nosed gondolas, called kurit in Smyrna. From all of them came laughter, songs and mandolin melodies.

  Elpiniki, still staring at the British cruiser, said in a voice loud enough for Niko, sitting on the fishing nets, to hear, ‘I’m going to get a European man like that, you wait and see.’

  Niko took his harmonica from his pocket and joined in the song that Minas was playing and Adriana was singing. Its penetrating notes rang out sharply in the darkness.

  ‘Heya mola, heya lesa,

  Heya mola, heya lesa…’

  Elpiniki was frowning. Panagiota took her friend’s hand to comfort her. Recently, word had gone around that Niko had fallen in love with a Turkish girl living in Karantina. It was said that the girl’s family had connections to the Sultan’s palace and that her father was so rich, he was buying up the hotels on the quay from the Europeans, one by one. Was such a thing possible – could a Muslim ever run a hotel on the quay? And what would a girl raised in a mansion in Karantina be doing with Fisherman Yorgi’s son Niko? Anyway, if Niko married a Turkish girl, his father would disown him. This was all just empty gossip. Elpiniki was worried for nothing.

  ‘I will kiss your freckle, my love,

  Just please don’t cry

  Aman, aman.’

  That rascal Minas could play any instrument he took in his hands like a professional. The strings of the mandolin were really coming to life under his small, swift fingers, and Adriana’s voice was like velvet. Panagiota could tell from the contractions of Stavros’s naked stomach that he was laughing silently. She burned inside. She hung her arm down from the boat and trailed her hand in the sea. Water passed through her fingers like silk.

  When they landed at Agia Triada, they made their way to the crowded courtyard of a house. It was a windless night and cigarette smoke hovered like a cloud over the tables. The musicians were playing a village greeting song and a few people were dancing in the space in the middle. Those sitting at the tables were raising their glasses to the musicians, calling out their names and sticking money on their foreheads. Everyone there, men and women alike, clearly knew how to behave at a dance. Adriana wanted to leave immediately and so did the others; but then Minas saw that wine was being served and insisted that they stay for a while. They sat at a table. Niko perched on the edge of his chair and swung his amber prayer beads in the air. Elpiniki was supposedly talking to Pandelis, but her eyes were on Niko.

  Everyone was casting sidelong glances at them, as if making fun of their inexperience, their youth. Panagiota was upset. What in the world were they doing there among the adults? She and Stavros had still not said a word to each other. She was tired of waiting, tired of figuring out how to reel him in. She drank down the wine that had been placed in front of her in one gulp.

  When the folksong ended, the musicians were joined by two girls with tambourines, a dulcimer player and a baglama player, and together they began a merry piece that made fun of the Greek king and praised Venizelos to the skies. The girls went round encouraging everyone at the tables to sing along, shaking their tambourines and making the gold discs on their headdresses quiver. It was a comical piece. Minas began to clap in time to the music and the others joined him. Even Stavros was smiling. Panagiota was suddenly filled with happiness. All by itself, her leg reached out and rested on Stavros’s knee; the heat passing between their two legs was like warm, sweet sherbet flowing from the heart. Out of the corner of her eye she examined his profile, strong and flawless, as if carved by a fine knife. Their shy, trembling elbows touched on the table.

  After the Venizelos piece, when the musicians struck up a polka, Stavros jumped from his seat as if he’d sat on a pin. Knees and elbows separated. Minas drank down his wine, stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray, took hold of Adriana’s arm, and
pulled her onto the dance platform in the centre of the courtyard. Neither of them knew how to dance the polka, but it wasn’t long before they’d picked up one or two steps by looking at other couples. While the others were applauding them, Stavros grabbed Panagiota’s hand and led her away – unfortunately not to the dance floor but in the opposite direction, towards the door.

  Unlike Adriana, Panagiota did know how to dance the polka. During break times at the Homerion School, their snobbish friends had shown Elpiniki and Panagiota the steps they’d learned in dance lessons, and when they returned home in the evening, the two girls practised together on their shared terrace. So she was cross when she and Stavros ended up out on the street. The wine was burning her stomach. But when she realized that her hand was clasped in Stavros’s huge palm, her disappointment turned to joy. They mingled with the crowds thronging the narrow streets around the church.

  While they’d been sitting in the courtyard, the streets had filled with hordes of people who’d come from Kordelio or Bournabat by sea or overland to enjoy the first fair of the summer. Officers in uniform, stylishly dressed ladies and rich merchant families were alighting from their carriages. Itinerant peddlers had hung lanterns above their carts to show off their goods, and because this little village did not have gas lamps to light the streets, the lanterns swaying on the boats out at sea shone more brightly than usual.

  Small, shaven-headed village boys were shouting, ‘Over here!’, as they jumped off the axles of the carriages. They were covered in dust from head to toe from wrestling each other in the heat. Some of them were barefoot. Suddenly they all raced off in the direction of a barker’s voice, to the square in front of the church. Little girls with blue ribbons who had all got down from the same carriage were pulling their father by the hand.