The Silence of Scheherazade

by Defne Suman

  She laughed out loud.

  The creature, half horse, half fire, and the goddess with skirts ablaze burst onto the bright orange quay at Bella Vista at the same moment. Their faces were crimson, and white halos encircled their heads. People screamed at the sight of them and huddled even closer together. There was nowhere to escape to.

  The incandescent pair reached the middle of the quay and stopped, glancing first at the dark water and then at each other.

  The girl smiled.

  The horse neighed.

  The decision had been made. As one, they moved towards the water.

  Hilmi Rahmi pulled at his horse’s reins. It resisted, whinnying, but the colonel paid no attention. He was staring at the mythical pair as if bewitched. Never in his life had he encountered such beauty.

  Unbelievable as it may have been, when the fire horse and the girl with her skirts ablaze appeared, the air no longer stank of scorched flesh but was suffused with the scent of Bournabat jasmine. It seemed that, amid the monster conflagration swallowing his beloved city, there was still a place for hope and beauty. Thanks be to God! Hilmi Rahmi’s soul brimmed over with gratitude, his heart with love. If God was taking everything from him and offering him in return only this one scene to watch for eternity, he had no hesitation in consenting.

  The fire horse and the girl with her skirts ablaze must have come from another world; perhaps like the phoenix born from its own ashes. Maybe they were angels, sent from Allah to put an end to this mad massacre. For there was not a trace of fear or pain on either of their faces. The girl with the crown of sparks around her head was more enchanting than an angel and was smiling at the horse. But what could one say about the smile on the horse’s face?

  The horse, scattering fire, moved towards the sea. The people on the quay cried out and raised their arms in alarm. The girl ran after it. The flames had spread from her skirts to her arms and hands; to her hair and her shawl. She did not notice.

  Hilmi Rahmi spurred his horse forward.

  Everyone turned and stared at the cavalry officer galloping towards the girl.

  She flew over an old man lying on the ground. With scorched hands, she gathered her burning skirts. Her legs were festering wounds. The soldier’s eyes shone as if lit by electricity. People moved aside. The girl lifted her bare, bloodied foot and leapt into the darkness, ready to join her beloved horse, already deep in the murky water.

  Everyone watched as the girl hung in the air like a bird of fire, suspended over the ghastly sea.

  And then, through the gloom, an arm reached out. The bird of fire was caught mid-air. Paying no mind to the flames which leapt at his skin from the waist he’d grasped, Hilmi Rahmi threw Panagiota across the back of his horse. The animal whinnied and tried to buck the flaming creature off his back. Panagiota screamed with all her strength. ‘Ohi!’

  The crowd closed their eyes.

  ‘Do not be afraid – min fovate. Kala ise. Do not fear me.’

  As they galloped away, the hundreds of thousands on the quay parted just as the Red Sea waters had parted for Moses. The mothers and fathers who were watching all had the same thought: if that soldier had grabbed someone else’s daughter, then their own daughter was safe for now. Ashamed of themselves, they turned and stared at the black sea that had silently closed over the fire horse.

  Hilmi Rahmi spurred his horse. The Iron Duke, having taken on its load, was reversing out of the port. Sirens were wailing painfully. As he felt the heat of the girl’s body against his back, Hilmi Rahmi’s heart opened so wide that he began to laugh out loud. He was weak with happiness. The crowd drew back even further to make way for the officer who had obviously gone crazy.

  He wanted to embrace the angel behind him, to kiss her and hold her and tell her that he would keep her safe, that he would love and protect her for the rest of his life. He had saved a life – a whole life! But what was one little life in the face of the monumental tragedy of hundreds of thousands? Captain Mehmet, who’d fainted earlier, had posed that very question. According to him, it was better not to interfere with whatever fate awaited these miserable souls.

  As Hilmi Rahmi entered the labyrinthine streets of the Turkish district where not so much as a spark had taken hold, still carrying the half-conscious Panagiota on the back of his horse, he continued to laugh and shake his head. ‘You are wrong, Mehmet,’ he said, repeating the same words over and over. ‘You are very wrong. A life saved is worth a world.’

  Angel Fingers

  I was lying on soft, moist earth in a dark garden. Silken fingers wandered across my face. I had fallen into paradise. Paradise smelled of honeysuckle and ripe mulberries, like my lost city. Through the leaves above me, I could see stars in the copper-coloured sky.

  Smiling at the stars, I closed my eyes.

  I was spreading into the earth in waves, becoming one with everything I touched. I realized that the spirit does not rise into the sky as the Holy Book says but ripples out into space in circles, as when a stone splashes into water. Grasses and flowers, worms wriggling under my wounded, expiring body, sparrows singing to the stars in the branches of the mulberry tree, roots reaching out underground – my soul embraced and was embraced by every living thing within its ever-widening rings. We synchronized vibrations; we were one.

  When I was a little girl, my brothers used to throw me up in the air and catch me, making my insides jump. On the one hand I was afraid; on the other hand, I wanted them to continue. As my soul left my body, I had that same sort of feeling. I was afraid of falling and tried to hold on to life with my last breath, but I also felt light and fully trusting of the hands into which I was surrendering myself.

  Soft angel fingers caressed my face. It was like hot halva melting in my mouth. Paradise had to be a field of honeysuckle because the angel’s fingers smelled so fragrant.

  Lips sweeter than sugar touched my earlobes. I giggled.

  ‘Princess… Princess, open your eyes… Princess Scheherazade, wake up. Wake up and tell me a story.’

  I tried to open my eyes. My big brothers had called me princess. Prinkipisa, prinkipisa. They must have come to take me. I had been granted the most beautiful death. How lucky I was! I wanted to tell my dearest mama that my death was not something to grieve over. Take off your black robe, Mama. My brothers have come from heaven to get me. I raised my arms.

  In some far corner of paradise, a door slammed.

  An intense, heavy pain leaked from my arms into my consciousness. I tried to get up.

  ‘Dogan! Dogan!’

  From somewhere in the distance, a woman was shouting. I wanted to tell her that there was nothing to be afraid of. If only people could experience death just once in their life, they wouldn’t waste a single day on earth fearing it. Life is a dream, a short holiday, a break from reality. Death is the only reality.

  ‘Dogan, come here quickly!’

  The sweet lips whispering in my ear withdrew. But I had been going to tell him a tale. A tale about Queen Smyrna and her horse. In the place of angel fingers stroking my cheek came a banging and a clattering. The copper sky masked by leaves was now masked by something else. I tried to move my head.

  ‘Dogan, go inside the house and don’t come out!’ shouted the same woman, now much closer to me. My soul made more circles, spreading into her vibrational space, our waves uniting like two rivers merging. Already I loved this woman I had not yet met. If only whatever was in front of my eyes were pulled away and I could see her. I heard the click of a rifle being loaded.

  When I awoke, I was no longer in paradise. I was lying on a couch. My legs, my arms, my neck were burning up. My heart ached worse than my flesh. So this was the pain one feels when being born into this life. No wonder our first reaction is to cry. I moaned.

  ‘Shhh, shhh,’ said someone. An angel with blonde hair. She was rubbing ointment on my arms.

  Life was such a warm and painful thing.

  I wanted to be taken back to the garden. I wanted to die again
as soon as possible. My brothers were waiting for me. I could still feel those little angel fingers wandering across my cheeks. Maybe I still wasn’t very far from heaven. Maybe if I tried hard enough, I could slip out of this old, scorched dress and, circling, circling, become diffused into the universe, united and complete.

  Whispers. Whispers whispering.

  ‘Mummy, she is Scheherazade, isn’t she? The one Nanny Dilber told us about in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights? Dunyazad’s sister. Look at her hair, her eyes, her lashes. What do you think? Will she tell me a story?’

  ‘Dogan, darling, Scheherazade is sleeping now. We must let her rest.’

  ‘But she will when she wakes up, won’t she? Mummy, did she get burned? Why are her hands and legs red like meat?’

  ‘Shhh.’

  They said I slept on that couch for forty days and forty nights. Sumbul kept watch at my side, soothing my blisters with ointment. Every morning she would go down to the quay, mingle with the crowds and ask about my mother and father. But all she received in return were the empty stares of people whose souls had been stolen by hopelessness.

  As I slept, my beautiful, complicated, labyrinthine city burned. Sailors on ships out at sea mistook the smoke shrouding Smyrna for a giant mountain. Journalists in distant countries reported the news, and photographs of our ghost city became headline stories.

  When the fire was finally extinguished, the quay was still jam-packed. Hundreds of thousands of people who only a week earlier had planned to welcome the homeless villagers under their roofs and feed them were now themselves homeless. So much was lost during those days: great fortunes, the fruits of an immense amount of labour, so much beauty and so many lives. In time, ships came, swept up women and children, and left. Men were marched into the interior and shot in the mountains. What remained were waters clogged with corpses and a city in ruins.

  For forty days and forty nights Hilmi Rahmi did not return to his home on Bulbul Street.

  Little Dogan would slip out of his bed at night and come and sleep beside me. In the mornings, he would run barefoot to the kitchen and relate the dreams he’d had while sleeping at my side. ‘Scheherazade tells wonderful stories, Mummy. There’s a queen and a horse and gods and a cloud. The horse smiles and the cloud talks.’

  They hastily started rebuilding the city. Agia Katerina, Agios Dimitris, Agios Tryphonas, our neighbourhood, Frank Street and the joyful world of the quay had all been reduced to ashes. They smashed our houses, our bakeries and our little squares to dust and built huge roads on top of them. There was no one left to call it Smyrna any more. In one night, hundreds of thousands of citizens who had lived there for centuries disappeared into nothingness. After forty days and forty nights, no one honoured them. Church bells were silenced forever. It was only the ghosts that roamed the ruins that remembered the past.

  And me.

  They say that when Hilmi Rahmi came back home after forty days and forty nights and saw me lying unconscious on the couch in the women’s quarters, he collapsed on the rug with the bird and fish designs and cried like a child. Sumbul took him in her arms, rocked him, kissed him, comforted him. When I opened my eyes for the first time, that was how I saw them, on the floor, embracing.

  They never spoke of how I came to their house on that cursed night, how I fell into their garden through the gate which was locked from the inside. Hilmi Rahmi carried my secret until the end of his life. Not minding my muteness, my past, they enfolded me into their hearts and their home.

  That day I was born again.

  They named me Scheherazade.

  Epilogue

  This morning, for the first time in many years, I came down from my tower. Walking along the corridor of the Mansion with the Tower, which smelled of sun-warmed wood, I went into my old room.

  Ipek was staying in there, in my old room. Sumbul’s grandchild’s grandchild. She appeared one day with a huge rucksack on her back and settled into the abandoned Mansion with the Tower, which had fallen into decay because the heirs somehow hadn’t been able to agree on how to share it. She sent away the woman from Turkmenistan her grandfather had hired to take care of me. Now it was she who cooked my food, scrubbed my parchment-like skin with soap and a sponge, and rubbed herbal oil into it. She saw my muteness, which intimidated other people, not as a handicap hidden in my mouth but as a loss I was mourning. Not only did she not find my silence strange, but, like Sumbul, she could read my thoughts. And her curly blonde hair, chubby pink cheeks and languid green eyes were exactly like Sumbul’s. She didn’t know this, because other than myself there was no one left in the world who remembered Sumbul. In all her living days, they never took the poor woman to a studio for a single photograph.

  Ipek and I had been living on our own under the ruined roof of the Mansion with the Tower for quite a while.

  She was still asleep, bathed in the sweet September sun that was seeping through the closed shutters. Her golden curls were spread over the pillow, her pink lips were parted and she was snoring lightly. Who knew what gentle dreams she was enjoying. I sat down on the edge of her bed with the thick leather notebook in my hand. At the head of the bed was the walnut bedside table left from the former owners. For some reason, neither the grandchildren of Sumbul and Hilmi Rahmi nor those grandchildren’s grandchildren had ever thought to change the furniture in the house. Ipek’s bedroom still had the original matching set of heavy walnut bed, wardrobe and chest of drawers. As soon as I went into the room, my nostrils were assailed by the smell of the past. Who says furniture doesn’t breathe?

  When she opened her green eyes and saw me sitting on her bed, she smiled without raising her head from the pillow, as if I came down from my tower every morning to wake her.

  ‘Good morning, Aunt Scheherazade!’

  Since Dogan, all the children of this house have called me ‘aunt’, for some reason.

  ‘What’s that notebook in your hand, Aunt Scheherazade?’

  She reached out and I handed her the leather notebook full of pages that had swallowed the ink of my fountain pens. Ever since Avinash Pillai’s last visit I had been writing constantly. I don’t know that ‘writing’ is quite the right word. The words just came out of my deep silence and scattered themselves on the paper. Forty years have passed since then. Forty years might seem like a lifetime, but for people like me who have knocked back a whole century, forty years is as short as the breath it would take to read this story.

  At first she flicked through the pages indifferently, but then her fingers began moving with curiosity and excitement. She sat up properly, buried her elbow in the pillow and turned the pages with a rustle. As she attempted to read the text I had written in four different alphabets and three different languages, she faltered, tilted her head and looked at me in amazement. After forty years of service, the notebook was falling apart. At least let her rough fingers not crumble it to pieces now.

  ‘What’s this, Aunt Scheherazade? Where did you learn to write Arabic? What are these letters – are they Greek? Ah, I have a Greek friend who’s moved here. Can I take it to him and get him to read it? And here you’ve written in French – you!’

  The Sumbul-faced child had pushed aside the covers and was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the white sheet, squirming. Then, all at once, she stopped fidgeting. An odd thing happened. She lifted her small nose and sniffed the air. It was as if a stranger, a third person, was in the room with us. She waved her hand in front of her face, trying to catch a beam of light.

  ‘Aunt Scheherazade?’

  ‘What, yavri mou?’

  The green eyes in her chubby pink face widened, just as Sumbul’s had done when she was listening to stories about Edith Lamarck. She cocked her head as if straining to hear a sound from far away.

  ‘Aunt Scheherazade!’

  I was startled. She’d shouted that very loudly. I turned and stared fearfully at the corridor. There was nothing there. The two of us were, as usual, alone in the vast mansion. Or had Sumbu
l’s ghost appeared to the child? God help us! The girl was gazing at my face as if bewitched.

  The sound she’d heard was not that of a ghost.

  ‘You’re speaking, Aunt Scheherazade! You’re speaking… I mean… I mean, you’re speaking with your own voice! Not your inside voice but your outside voice. Oh, I can’t believe it. I-can-not-be-lieve-it! Are you really speaking or did I dream it? Say something else!’

  I bowed my head and stared at my stomach as if she’d said, ‘There are horns sticking out of your belly, Aunt Scheherazade.’ Then my hand went to my throat. My voice? Had I really spoken?

  ‘What are these writings in your notebook?’ Ipek said again, as if it was her questions that had unravelled the knot caught in my throat for a century.

  The answer came into my head, but my voice caught the sentence in the air and released it into the room. ‘This, Ipek mou, is the tale of a young girl who was born three times before she was eighteen. It is yours to take care of.’

  My hand was still at my throat. Anxiously I turned towards the corridor. My heart was beating so rapidly, I thought it might stop altogether. I wanted death to find me in my tower, in my bed with the peeling pink paintwork. Avinash’s prediction was about to come true:

  ‘Those people who saved you and took you in did not give you the name Scheherazade for nothing. Until you tell this story, death will not come knocking at your tower.’

  I reached for the hidden doorknob in the wall with the rose-patterned wallpaper.

  It was hard to believe, but my voice had not changed at all! Was it because it hadn’t been used, or what? It was still the innocent, deep bass of my seventeen-year-old self.

  Ipek’s green eyes widened even more. Holding my notebook to her chest, she jumped off the bed. She was wearing pyjamas with lambs on them. I had my foot on the first step of the stairs going up to my tower when she caught my hand. Light was streaming down the empty stairway, and with the shadows falling on her face she looked exactly like Sumbul. When she began to speak, it was in the same nurturing and determined voice.