by Latife Tekin
That night Atiye put her faith in the Almighty and gave birth to another girl. They named her Dirmit. They were cheered that the baby was born healthy and whole but they also beat their breasts because it wasn’t a boy. For a long time the villagers tried to soothe Huvat’s troubled heart. ‘Man, your family’s got all the boys it needs!’ they consoled him. But the truth of the matter lay elsewhere. While still in her mother’s womb the baby had twice cried out in the voice of Atiye’s mother: ‘Mother! Mother!’ Atiye was sifting flour in the storeroom at the time. ‘May death take you!’ was all she could mutter when she heard the voice from her belly. Then her jaws locked tight and she collapsed over the sieve. They fixed her a sherbet, fed her a few drops, and then shouted in her ear, sprinkling water on her face while slapping her a few times. But no matter what they did, Atiye didn’t move. ‘We might as well call in Djinnman Memet,’ Huvat said to his mother. ‘That cursed bastard will bring down his pack of devils on us,’ she replied. But Huvat ignored her warning and set out to fetch him. When Djinnman Memet arrived, he shut himself up in another room to compose a charm. Then he threw the charm in boiling water, blew his mutterings on the water as he spooned it into Atiye’s mouth and opened her eyes. Before he left, he carved a notch in the pastry board. ‘Aha!’ he announced. ‘Mark my words! If the child is born healthy and whole, there’s no telling what’ll befall it!’ From that day forth, Atiye carried in her belly an ever-growing fear that nudged and shifted. At night she awoke from dreams of a noseless baby with eyes on top of its head and, during the day, she listened to the devil, thinking that if the baby wasn’t born healthy and whole she would turn it face down and smother it. When at last Atiye felt the first contractions her heart heaved and missed a beat.
Atiye gave birth, and, three days later, djinns strangled Djinnman Memet on the mountain. His body was dragged down and dumped in the middle of the village. His smirking face had gone completely black, and the bastard looked the very picture of the devil. He had raped many wives and young girls after tempting them up the mountain with a charm. ‘Black fiend, struck down at last,’ said all those who spat on his face. And all those who spat felt the chill of relief.
But then one evening a man who looked exactly like Djinnman Memet showed up in the village. Wearing a black suit and hat, he smiled as he walked by under the curious gaze of the villagers. Without saying a word, he went up to the men’s lounge at Corporal Durdu’s. That evening everyone in the village was invited to dine there on arabaşı.
‘On this side of the village there’s a mine on Taçın Mountain,’ the man announced. ‘We’re going to open a pit there, build a school and lay asphalt roads for the village. We’re going to plant sugar beet in all the fields and gardens, pour tons of fertilizer right at your doorsteps and pile oil cake before your animals.’ To celebrate this news, sheep were sacrificed, musicians were called up from Circassian villages and everyone danced the halay. One village competed with another at horse racing or playing jereed.
‘Atiye girl, I was the first to sign up for the Party,’ Huvat said after coming home one day. Another time he didn’t even let her finish her meal. ‘Quick, sweep up the men’s lounge,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a school.’ That day, her endless work began. She cooked arabaşı, rolled and squeezed mantı pastry and spread out beds for the male visitors from seven villages, who flocked to her doorstep every evening. ‘Come on, Huvat,’ she finally pleaded, too weak even to raise her arms. ‘Leave the Party. I can’t manage.’ But she couldn’t stop the people parading in and out. ‘Curse the man who brought all this down on our heads,’ she said of Corporal Durdu. At last, falling ill, she took to her bed. Her eyes popped open when a swelling as big as a turkey’s egg slipped out of her belly and down her legs. ‘Snow! Snow!’ she raved for days. If the school teacher Bayraktar hadn’t told them to take her to a doctor, Atiye would have been done for, leaving four children behind her.
As Atiye recovered, Huvat coddled her for a while, waiting on her hand and foot. He helped her by milking the cows, setting the lambs to suckle and running back and forth from the stable to the oven to the well. He won back her heart, and Atiye was soon with child again. She took naps wherever the mood struck her, using her arms as a pillow. Huvat let her sleep and went back to his egg games, ring games and Party business. Dirmit followed his lead and turned away from her mother’s breast, finding the milk too bitter. Now Atiye’s hands lay empty and, with no one at her side and left alone with nothing but the fear that had racked her while she was pregnant with Dirmit, she looked for a means of abortion. She tried everything from eggplant root and hen feather to broom bristle. She pressed on her belly as hard as she could with both hands and tried lifting heavy stones but couldn’t shed the child from her body. In the end she shut herself in the storeroom with a big bar of solid black dye. She worked at it all day long and by evening it was worn down to a fine point. That winter she gave birth to a boy as black as black could be, like a baby rat. Huvat was so delighted to have another son that, when he heard the good news, he got up from his game and went down to the tandır room, where Atiye was lying. However, he had no sooner uncovered the child’s face than he covered it back up again. ‘Girl, let’s name this boy after your father,’ he said, then left. So they named the boy Mahmut. ‘Most likely this child won’t live, though, God willing, his name may bring him luck,’ said those who came for the naming. But they also started to worry, afraid that this baby rat-boy’s birth wouldn’t augur well for the village. Later, when Bayraktar was attacked by djinns, and the school closed down, they blamed it on Mahmut.
*
No sooner had Mahmut opened his eyes, rolled them around and fixed them on the ceiling, shrieking like a crazed sheldrake, than word spread that school teacher Bayraktar had pissed on the djinns in the ash heap. The villagers met together and headed off to see Bayraktar, who lay in the ash heap with his mouth and eyes all twisted up. As the villagers gathered around him he crouched like a rabbit, frozen to the spot. He lay ill for days afterwards in Huvat’s men’s lounge. Although Huvat sent word to Pannı, Bayraktar’s Circassian village, no one turned up either to enquire about him or to claim him. For a while, Bayraktar wandered about in the fields and dales, twittering like a starling. Then, one day, he fell in love with a fairy girl. With a pickaxe on his shoulder and a length of rope swinging from his waist, he set off to look for gold so he could marry her. He dug in the mountains and hillsides, using his feet and arms to measure the base of one rock after another. After spending more than a year measuring the land around Alacüvek, he finally stopped at the bottom of the hill by Grimy Rıfat’s field, where water was plentiful, and built a house for himself out of pebbles. Tying a black dog to the door, he swore and flung stones at whoever came by, or swung his pickaxe and sang sad songs. One day, by the side of the well he had been digging, he breathlessly started dancing ‘The Lousy Shepherd’. That’s how the villagers knew that he had struck gold. Bayraktar secretly carried the gold to the fairy girl, and they were married at the end of the harvest. After once more dancing ‘The Lousy Shepherd’ up and down the burnt-off fields, he escorted his fairy bride to the pebble-stone house at the bottom of the hill.
The fairy girl bore Bayraktar a son and a daughter. He sometimes took them by the hand to the village to visit Huvat and Atiye. ‘Come on in, have a seat,’ the villagers urged, prodding him to talk. ‘Look, look!’ he exclaimed as he dug ancient coins from his pocket. But they snatched them away, making him weep. Then they made him strip off his clothes and dance to their clapping.
On the day the villagers of Alacüvek were about to start harvesting in the Savmanı pasture, sticks of dynamite exploded on Taçın Mountain. Birds retreated to the sky, hens prickled up in fear and children rushed home. Huvat’s voice could barely be heard over the smashing of the rocks.
‘Didn’t you used to let those rocks fly up on the Taçın, you little stinker!’
‘Yeah, Dad. I flung ’em really hard! And boy how we ran w
hen we saw the dragon!’
‘Fibber! What d’you mean we ran off!’
‘Didn’t we run like crazy then, last year?’
The dog snow, the year’s first big snowflakes like dogs’ teeth, piled up, covering the hollowed-out Taçın, and trucks stopped rumbling in and out of the village, raising dust clouds behind them, their drone replaced by the blizzard’s demonic whistle. But the trucks returned on the day the first blades of freckled-leaf herb sprang up from the earth. Dynamite exploded once more on the Taçın. Rocks that gleamed in the sunlight were loaded onto the trucks and taken away. Over half the men of Alacüvek went to dig and sweat on the Taçın, and their wives and daughters brought them food. Then one day screams rose out of the Taçın. Laying aside babies and pitchforks, everyone scrambled up to the mountain.
‘Heartless Taçın! Bloody earth of Taçın!’ Picking up her yashmak, Blind Fadime knelt down by the hollowed-out Taçın and waved it as she began to sing a dirge. Women tore at their hair and scratched their faces until they bled. Falling to their knees, they flung themselves again and again onto the earth. Huge tears coursed down the men’s faces.
‘Whose spit will fade faster, yours or mine?’
‘Yours will.’
‘So spit, and let’s see.’
‘Kıymet, has your dad died too, girl?’
‘I think he has.’
Atiye drew Dirmit aside and struck her with her fist. Kıymet and Dirmit left the wailing on the mountain and made their way down to the vineyard where they built a shady playhouse of weeds and stones. From the purple-blue thistle flowers they knitted themselves crowns and they rubbed rock henna into their hands.
Side by side on the earth were laid three corpses. No one sang at Alacüvek for days. No one laughed.
Sugar beet was planted everywhere in Alacüvek that year. It fell in love with the place. Clinging to the earth, its roots spread out networks of lacy fringes, and each beet grew to the size of an ox’s head. At home instead of potatoes they roasted beets in the tandır ovens. Instead of cabbage they pickled beets. Children hung onto the backs of trucks loaded down with beets and rode out as far as the sheepfold.
One morning the children bounded out of bed, rushed out into the street, then came back, shouting that gypsies had camped at Dölek. ‘Don’t go there,’ their mothers shouted as the children ran back to the gypsies. ‘They’ll carry you away.’ In a little while the children returned, begging for eggs. ‘Out, you good-for-nothings!’ their mothers shouted, chasing them off. But the next day, man or woman, whoever got hold of an egg queued up before the tents. The gypsies had brought the cinema to Alacüvek. For only one egg you couldn’t peep more than twice. Before you could close one eye and adjust the other, the device was drawn back. Sergeant Osman’s son saw a hyena pup. ‘Mine was a woman and, by God, stark naked too!’ marvelled Vehbi, the midwife’s son. Huvat saw boats floating on the sea, and Atiye saw three men and a woman sitting at a table. Birds, houses or mountains appeared before some, while others couldn’t even find the words to explain what they had seen. This time around, the gypsies left Alacüvek without a single egg to its name. They had told fortunes, sold sifters and collected sacks full of flour and bulgur.
Then, two days before striking camp, the gypsies erected a red tent. At its entrance sat an elderly man and a tied dog. For two days the men of the village didn’t move from the side of the tent. One morning the gypsies left as suddenly as they had come, and it wasn’t long before all the men who had gone into the tent began to feel weak. Their faces paled and their necks grew thin as worms. Within two days news spread to seven villages that red-tent disease had broken out in Alacüvek. No strangers were seen in the village for a long time thereafter.
Alacüvek leapt back to life when a stranger with a black case under his arm appeared by the sheep-pen. Those who said, ‘I knew it from the twitching of my eye, I dreamt it,’ poured out onto the road. Unable to make out why the villagers were so jubilant, the stranger wandered about for a long time, confused. ‘This must be the school,’ he declared at last. ‘I’m the teacher.’ He went up to the men’s lounge in Huvat’s house, and Huvat explained to him, all in one breath, everything that had happened to poor Bayraktar. There no longer was a school. The children had forgotten about it and gone back to tending the sheep, knocking down birds’ nests and stealing pigeon eggs. The teacher stayed at Huvat’s lounge for days. In the evenings he played the egg game and the ring game with the menfolk and, during the day, strolled with them in the vineyards and gardens and lounged with them by the spring. At last he persuaded them to dump some stones at Dölek. And so a school was built for Alacüvek. A flagpole was erected in the schoolyard and the flag hoisted to its top.
The teacher taught the children of Alacüvek the fable of the golden bird, the song ‘Shepherd, Shepherd’ and a game called ‘Who Can Stop the Ball?’ Then he left and was replaced by another, who brought a whole suitcase full of books, some device called an ‘iron’ and the rule: ‘Those who know will beat up those who don’t’. Consequently, the most faint-hearted of the children were the first to start reading. They memorized their multiplication tables as quick as running water, avenging themselves at the blackboard on those who beat them up on the roads. However, as soon as school was out those who were beaten at the blackboard turned on the others and bashed their heads with stones. The following day, those with bloodied heads knew the answer to every question the teacher asked. In the end, all the children of the village were at odds with one another. They had become so involved with stuffing their pockets or skirts with stones and watching out for each other that they had no time left for school. Then the grown-ups took up the fighting too. Down by the spring, Dangle-arm Dudu and Drippy-nose Möhübe challenged each other. ‘Come on then! Come on!’ they cried, slapping their bottoms and lunging at each other with the sticks they used for washing. Möhübe came out of it with a bloody head, and Dudu’s dress got torn. In three days, all the donkeys in Alacüvek had had their ears or tails clipped, the wells had all been pissed in and all the doors smeared with pig’s fat. Atiye sent word to Huvat via Pedlar Osman, hoping that he would return when he heard of the goings-on. Huvat, meanwhile, was busy accepting hospitality from the villages he visited to gather support for the Party. Occasionally he sent word back, saying he was well, staying at such and such village as the guest of such and such landowner. Sometimes he sent back his dirty clothes with the pedlar to have them washed and asked for clean ones to be delivered.
Atiye washed Huvat’s soiled garments with water in which she had soaked charms for breaking love spells. Each time, she had prayers recited over his drawers and undershirts before she gave them back to the pedlar. ‘I can’t cope with the children or handle the animals, Osman. By my death and salvation, tell him to come home,’ she begged the pedlar again and again. Despite her vows to make votive offerings, this last message did no good either. Instead of coming himself, Huvat sent three elderly men from Sıǧgın to Alacüvek to reconcile the villagers. The day they arrived, Atiye gathered all the charms she had sewn into the quilts, buried under the thresholds and pinned onto the collars or the fronts of her children’s clothing. ‘I’ll never again put my faith in charms or breathing cures,’ she swore as she tossed them out. In her anger she forgot to feed the chickens and fill the water trough. While she was skimming the milk, she upset the churn and, when baking bread, she let a big bowl filled with dough spill onto the tandır and burn. Then, grumbling to herself, she finally retreated to the veranda. From that day on, she sent out warnings to Huvat never again to set foot in the village. But when she at last heard his cough – he had a way of gasping as he coughed – she jumped to her feet and ran to meet her husband. She hugged him tightly but held to her vow not to let him approach her for forty days. Huvat tried to start conversations with her. ‘Why does mother hit everyone with her walking stick when they go near her?’ he enquired. ‘When did Nuǧber’s breasts start growing? Why does Halit’s voice sound like a buff
alo’s now?’ But no matter what he said, she refused to speak. After hugging him once, Atiye withdrew and left his questions unanswered.
On the day they arrived, the three old men from Sıǧgın who had come to reconcile the Alacüvek folk tramped about in the village until the evening. With them they carried three black sacks filled with the seeds of a flower unknown to Alacüvek up until then. It was customary for the people of Sıǧgın to take flower seeds to the places they visited instead of toasted wheat, crab apples or wild pears.
