by Latife Tekin
That night Atiye laid out a bed for herself away from Huvat’s, in the tandır room. Immediately upon getting into bed, she said three prayers in succession and blew them once over her right shoulder and once over her left. Then she raised her hands and implored God to permit her to talk with her father. Finally she picked up her prayer beads and, murmuring, began to wait. After three days without sleep, Atiye was so exhausted that she kept dozing off although she tried very hard not to. Her eyes ran, her head drooped onto her chest and her prayer beads slipped from her hand. A moment before falling fast asleep, she was startled by a rustling noise. She opened her eyes and fixed them on the door. Then, just before sunrise, when she had lost all hope, her father crept up from behind her. ‘Atiye, Atiye!’ he whispered. He touched her on the shoulder very lightly, then proceeded with slow movements to seat himself at the foot of the bed. ‘Why are you so very pale, Father?’ Atiye asked. Her father lowered his head. ‘They’re tormenting me greatly, my daughter,’ he sighed. ‘Because of you and your mother,’ he added before falling silent. Atiye turned her eyes towards her father’s pale face. ‘I’ve forgiven you, Father,’ she whispered. Then she took her father’s shrivelled and shrunken hands in hers, pressed her head on his bosom and wept long, very long, as if drawing water with a winding wheel from a deep well. When it was light, Atiye’s father hugged her and smelt her hair. ‘I’ll come again if you call me, Daughter,’ he said. ‘I’ve got such a craving for pomegranate syrup!’ he added, sighing deeply, and left as quietly as he had come. No sooner had her father gone than Atiye ran to Huvat’s bedside. ‘Father wants pomegranate syrup. Wake up!’ she cried out. ‘There must be some at Rızgo Agha’s. Go and get it,’ she said and sent Huvat off to her sister Sose’s. The next night, Atiye went to bed by herself in the tandır room. After saying her prayers she called upon her father and awaited his arrival with her prayer beads in one hand and a bottle of pomegranate syrup in the other. Agonized, begging God, she waited for him for the next eleven nights exactly. ‘My father is Mahmut,’ she kept invoking, but, no matter what she did, her father never returned. Atiye never saw his face again. Huvat couldn’t bear to see Atiye go into the tandır room every night, emerge in the morning holding the bottle of pomegranate syrup, then wander around all day long muttering deliriously to herself. He realized that he had feared his wife needlessly and even began to take pity on her. He thought she’d completely lost her mind and was gone from his life forever when she took the pomegranate syrup to the village graveyard, buried it in her mother-in-law’s grave and begged Nuǧber Dudu to give the syrup to her father. But Atiye gradually recovered and, by the time they were due to celebrate Zekiye’s engagement, she had started running around the house like a wild mare.
A week before the engagement the women of Akçalı came together to help Atiye. They rolled out mountainous layers of thin pastry, stewed all kinds of fruit and made plenty of baklava. Then Atiye took a trip to the city to arrange her daughter-in-law’s dowry. She sold her bracelets, earrings and necklace, then carefully picked out a ring and bought bracelets clustered in sets of five, velvet and fine woollen fabrics, tins of helva, sacks of rice, dried fruit and nuts. Upon her return she laid out meals for everyone who came to see Zekiye’s dowry gifts. She also made an engagement gown for Zekiye and provided her own daughters with all the necessary fineries. She hennaed the ram that was to be taken to Zekiye’s family, daubed it with paint and sent it off with Huvat, along with Zekiye’s wrapped-up gifts, to her in-laws. ‘My boy Halit’s away,’ she sometimes wept, ‘it’s just not right.’ But generally she kept her composure. She knew that the villagers who had already been invited wouldn’t come unless they were called upon one last time, so she dressed Nuǧber up early on the morning of the engagement day and sent her off to make one final call. On this last round, Nuǧber didn’t miss a single door in the village.
Before noon all the men and womenfolk had arrived. The women collected in the house, the men outside. Then Huvat brought the trucks with the musicians right up to the gate. The band was met with applause and seated in the garden. While Huvat, with a kerchief in his hand, was taking his position as the leader of the halay, Atiye came and placed gift packets on the musicians’ laps. ‘Köroglu’s Boys’ fired off a tune, the village youths their guns. By noon everyone was at Rızgo Agha’s doorstep. The girl’s village welcomed the boy’s. Standing shoulder to shoulder, menfolk from both started dancing the halay.
‘What’s she got, this gift-giver?’
‘A son and a daughter.’
‘May they have such luck!’
‘From Yazı Ayşe of Huvat Agha’s village, nylon stockings and enough fabric for a dress.’
‘May her Memet be the next to take a bride like Zekiye!’
While the men outside were dancing the halay and firing their pistols in the air, the women escorted Zekiye inside and seated her at their centre. They summoned a tambourine player from the girl’s household and a caller from the boy’s. As the tambourine chattered and the caller shouted, a large empty tray was held above Zekiye’s head. Trays full of gifts were collected for Zekiye, as the platter was passed from hand to hand right out of the room. Atiye took her daughter-in-law by the arm, stood her up and presented her hand to be kissed. Then she strung all the gold around Zekiye’s neck and fitted the bracelets on her arm. ‘May it be my Seyit’s turn to be engaged next and then my Mahmut’s,’ she said as she slipped the engagement ring onto Zekiye’s finger. She then brought the musicians upstairs and danced face-to-face with her daughter-in-law.
As Zekiye and Atiye danced, Sarıkız, the fair-haired nymph who lived in Buǧlek cave, was bursting with envy over all the praises sung about Zekiye and the gold and gifts bestowed upon her. She descended on Akçalı the day after the engagement and stood stark naked at the fork in the road for Dizgeme with her eyes flashing sparks and a black whip in her hand.
The village women knew that no man who saw Sarıkız could ever resist her beauty. They also knew how many men she had lured into her cave, so they locked their husbands and sons inside and sat down for collective prayer. By dawn, they had driven Sarıkız out of the village, pelting her with stones. Sarıkız stood at the head of the mountain pass, cracked her whip on the ground and hurled curses at the villagers before she vanished at the foot of the lone poplar.
By mid-morning the next day, Akçalı had been invaded by donkeys. First, two donkeys with clipped ears and tails crossed the stream at a leisurely pace and climbed up the slope behind the graveyard. Then suddenly donkeys started turning up everywhere in the village. Hundreds of them, with sores on their feet, bare-skinned and mangy, passed through the village, braying, then gathered on the hillside behind the graveyard. Seizing their pitchforks, the men gathered there too. ‘Who sent you here, fairies or djinns?’ they yelled a few times at the donkeys. However, the men would not approach them for fear that Sarıkız had sent the donkeys to plague the village. They only waved their pitchforks, cursing and shouting from a distance, as the donkeys stretched out their forelegs and settled comfortably back against the slope. Before the men could sling the pitchforks over their shoulders and return to the village, the elders were on their feet. Leaning on their sticks, they went from door to door, expressing their views on the matter. The herd of donkeys by the graveyard, they argued, should be seen as a sign from their saintly ancestor who was buried there. He had resentfully brought the donkeys down on them because they had changed the village’s name. If they didn’t change the name back at once who could tell what other disasters might befall them?
That night, Sarıkız reappeared in Akçalı, tossing about her fair hair, which reached down to her heels. When the villagers saw her slipping towards the graveyard from the sheepfold, they went home and locked themselves in. ‘Come on, drive out that witch!’ the men implored their wives again and again. But the women refused to stone Sarıkız once more. They knew that she had come back for revenge, they said, and in her anger she had loosed the donkeys on th
em. All night long Sarıkız wandered through the village on donkey-back, stark naked, her whip in her hand, then withdrew to the mountain at first light. The next day the elders made their rounds of the houses again but were unable to convince anyone that the donkeys had been brought down on the village by the saintly man buried in the graveyard.
The stray, ageing donkeys hadn’t the slightest idea why they hadn’t been stoned at Akçalı. They had been pelted and driven away from all the other villages as soon as they were released into the field. They made the most of what they took to be a welcome and accepted Akçalı as their home the morning after Sarıkız had ridden them through the village. From that day on, any donkeys who were liberated from the saddle came, one by one, to settle in Akçalı.
The villagers eventually got used to the donkeys, but couldn’t step out of their homes at night for fear of Sarıkız. Men wore charms around their necks and were kept under lock and key at night. Women didn’t go to sleep until they had whispered a special prayer forty times over and blown it on their husbands’ faces. However, they weren’t able to drive Sarıkız out of the village before the coming of the dog snow.
No one saw Sarıkız for some time after the first snow. It was widely believed in the village that she had retreated to her cave, so men began to come out at night to shovel snow off the roofs and attend night prayers at the mosque. Once more the bone-flipping games started in men’s lounges. However, on the morning following one of these game nights eleven dogs were found dead in the graveyard. Then came the news that Vahti’s elder son Mirror Memet had disappeared after going up on the roof to shovel the snow. After a three-day search he was found dead at the foot of a rock near the cave at Buǧlek.
As the swirling snowfall turned into a blizzard, the men brought Mirror Memet’s frozen corpse back to the village. Covering their heads with shawls, the women gathered in the dead man’s house, where they mourned him with dirges. ‘It was Sarıkız who led Memet to his death,’ they wailed. ‘If it hadn’t been her doing, wouldn’t the wolves have torn up his body on so grey a day?’ they asked each other as they sifted flour for the helva. ‘She must have kept him in her cave for three days, then strangled him and thrown him out,’ they mused as they sewed a shroud for him. Towards evening the women met together. ‘Let’s go,’ they said, mounting their sledges. ‘If we don’t destroy her cave, Sarıkız will keep preying on our husbands. If we don’t drive her out, she’ll drive us out.’ They stuffed the cave with vetch-grass, set it ablaze, then blocked its entrance with black stones. They left before dark, whispering and blowing prayers all the way back to the village. As soon as they dismounted their sledges, they saw black smoke rising into the sky over Buǧlek stream. ‘Memet, his mirror in his pocket, his body frozen, riddled with holes,’ they keened upon their return to the dead man’s home. But inwardly they rejoiced because they had got rid of Sarıkız.
The next morning the black smoke over Buǧlek stream drifted towards the village and settled right on top of it. It was just then that all the engaged girls and newlywed women in Akçalı found themselves tongue-tied, speechless. The smoke hung over Akçalı for three days. Then, on the evening of the third day, it drifted towards Dizgeme, swept along very slowly to Hazerşah, Sıǧgın, then the Circassian villages and finally arrived at the Avşar and Türkmen villages. It perched on top of one village after another for the duration of that winter, and left all the betrothed girls and newlywed womenfolk tongue-tied.
After that winter these girls and women began to speak in signs. To free them from this plight, the villagers soon convened the hodjas, who possessed the deepest lore. But the hodjas were helpless in the face of this problem since they couldn’t find it anywhere in the book.
Having lost all hope of speaking, the girls and women tied their facecloths tightly over their mouths. For a while they wept and beat their breasts but, in time, they found an easier way to gesticulate. They learnt forty different ways of shaking their heads, lifting their eyebrows and making eyes, and they contrived all sorts of signs with their hands. The means of communication devised by the women and girls who had lost their tongue became known as ‘doing the bride’, an expression that met the approval of all seven villages.
During the time that Huvat feared Atiye might be losing her mind, he had sworn to her that, soon after the engagement, he would go and see his sons. However, he forgot his promise the first night Sarıkız descended upon the village. He put up with Atiye’s weeping, whimpering and constant nagging: ‘Go on! Sarıkız doesn’t blockade the roads in broad daylight as well, does she?’ He also endured her mocking and taunting: ‘Hey, man, they’ve heard Sarıkız say that she’s after Huvat!’ But when he saw Zekiye, pretty as a slice of moon, bowing her head, tongue-tied and voiceless, Huvat was overcome. He couldn’t bear her wide-gaping eyes and touching look, the way she walked around nodding and shaking her head and especially her old manner of moving her lips and gulping desperately while gesticulating with her hands. Early one morning Huvat harnessed the horses to his sledge and left the village.
On the day Huvat left, before he was out of sight as he crossed the mountain pass, a tall stranger on horseback rode into Akçalı. Only his eyes could be seen from the hood he wore over his head, and his clothes were covered entirely in snow, so the villagers at first took the stranger to be someone from a distant village. They wondered at which door he would tie his horse, and went up on their roofs to watch. When they saw that he was heading for the schoolhouse, which lay buried in snow, they were sure he was the new teacher. They retreated inside and kept their doors shut.
When the teacher drew near to the schoolhouse with all but its flagpole sunk in the snow, he dismounted his horse, pulled back his hood and stroked his chin. After his moustache had frozen stiff, he pointed his horse towards the Headman’s door. While the Headman didn’t welcome the teacher heartily, he bade the man enter and took his horse to the stable to feed it. Then he left to round up the village imam and the elders so they too could meet the teacher. Early the next morning, shovels over their shoulders, the villagers gathered at the gate of the schoolhouse. By noon all the snow had been cleared away, and the villagers handed over the school to the teacher.
That very day the villagers sent their boys to school, each with a dung cake to fuel the stove. But out of all the villagers, only Atiye sent her daughter. As soon as the teacher had arrived at Akçalı, Atiye took her seat at the sewing machine and, in the blink of an eye, produced a uniform for Dirmit. The next day she braided Dirmit’s hair, pinned a white bow to her head, tucked a dung cake under her arm and led her by the hand to school.
‘Water pump, water pump, I’ve got some good news for you.’
‘What’s your good news, Dirmit girl?’
‘There’s a teacher in the village.’
‘He’s here for you, then.’
‘Guess what he said to me.’
‘What did he say, what did he say?’
‘He said I didn’t look like a peasant.’
‘Were you pleased?’
‘I was pleased.’
Each day Dirmit entered the schoolhouse with a dung cake in her hand, while the rest of the village girls stood tearfully at their doorsteps, watching her. It wasn’t long after the teacher arrived that the gendarmes, led by the teacher, visited Akçalı and called at every door. The villagers showed them Menşur’s grave and hid their daughters in the haylofts and stables.
The second time the teacher called in the gendarmes, the villagers stopped speaking to him and no longer offered him food or lodging. Because he was so tall, they also thought up a nickname for him: ‘Broken Minaret’. And so they waited for him to leave the village for good. But he didn’t. Not only did Broken Minaret stay on but he kept his head high and settled down in the nearby village of Hazerşah. Every morning he rode his horse to Akçalı, tied it to the school gate and taught his classes. When school was out, he mounted his horse and went back to Hazerşah.
Then the snow grew tir
ed of falling, the wind died down, and spring arrived. Fields turned green. Puffing and wheezing, the old village stork arrived and built her nest in the oak tree by the stream. It was then that Broken Minaret was rumoured in the village to be a ‘commonist’. The children gathered either in the schoolyard or by the sheepfold to wait for him. ‘Teacher will come and bring us our reports,’ they chanted as they held hands and danced round and round in a circle, keeping a lookout for him.
‘Water pump, water pump,
