by Latife Tekin
‘Is the boat moving or not?’
‘It’s not.’
‘It is, girl.’
The boat was not moving. The huge houses, the trees and the people were all walking backwards. Dirmit looked on, eyes popped wide open, awestruck. This was why she thought that the rusty, blackened park railings they were jumping over were a great sheet of glass shooting off coloured sparks into the sky. For days Dirmit went out searching for the long, long glass slab that she was sure was located very near their house. But she returned each time looking downcast because she hadn’t found it. Resting her chin on her palm, she sat at the window. Just then a fairy girl with a doll cradled in her arms appeared before her. Dirmit’s mouth dropped open as she hung out over the window, looking at the fairy girl, enchanted. She pulled Atiye over to the window. Upon beholding a girl with her mouth half open, standing in the street clutching a raggedy-haired plastic doll, Atiye beat on her knees and exclaimed: ‘Is that the fairy girl?’ Beginning to weep, Atiye wandered about the house, prayer beads in hand, mumbling that Dirmit was seeing things again. While she recited and blew her prayers about, Dirmit forgot about eating and drinking and fixed her attention on the carved wooden eaves of their house. Then she started to wonder what use it was to have great big dishes on top of the streetlights. And when she finally grew tired of thinking about them, she started counting the little black cobblestones that dappled the street like embroidery on a canvas. At this, Atiye’s djinns rushed up into her head in a fit of temper, and she grabbed Dirmit by her hair and legs and sat her down on the divan behind the door. Dirmit stared up at the ceiling, sobbing. She continued to gaze at the carvings there until she passed out.
For many days Atiye was unable to divert her daughter’s gaze from the carvings. ‘There must be something up there that she’s looking at,’ she thought doubtfully, at last, and she too fixed her eyes on the carvings. But no matter how hard she looked, and from whichever angle, all she saw was the wooden ceiling. Growing frightened, she sat down with Dirmit to give her some advice. ‘It’s not good for girls to be staring at the ceiling, good-for-nothing,’ she pleaded. So Dirmit gave up staring at the ceiling and began to pursue her elder brothers and her father with a question. ‘What does it mean,’ she asked, ‘“Don’t fear cancer, fear being late”?’ Upon their arrival in the city, Dirmit, having read this on a huge signboard just as she had descended from the boat, had insisted on knowing what it meant and had never forgotten what she’d read there. Huvat had then interpreted this as a sign that she would be a big shot in the future. But now he shooed away his daughter, who was hanging around him like a dog with a sore paw. ‘How should I know, girl?’ he said. Dirmit couldn’t wring an answer out of anyone in the household. No matter how hard she tried to give up her quest or forget the words she had read, she couldn’t. Every morning, as she saw her brothers and father off, she made them promise to find out during the day and tell in the evening. But it was useless getting them to promise or meeting them halfway down the street to hear what they had found out. Both her father and her brothers told her that there wasn’t a sign twice the size of a man where they had disembarked from the boat. ‘You must’ve just been seeing things,’ they said, laughing in her face, infuriating her.
Dirmit wearied of thinking about the words in her head, of writing them down on pieces of paper side by side, then one under the other, and poring over them as she switched them around. Finally she laid aside the words ‘Don’t fear cancer, fear being late’, and took on the curious habit of leaping out of bed as soon as she awoke and racing straight to the wooded park at the end of the road.
Despite all her winking and blinking, Atiye had so far failed to induce her daughter to join the children playing in the street. So when she saw Dirmit racing off to the park of her own free will, she was delighted beyond words, and her fears were allayed. But now Dirmit wouldn’t come home from the park. While the children played at hopping over the railings, Dirmit was bending down to look for plants with which she was familiar. Atiye again grew frightened when she followed her daughter to the park and saw her creeping along the ground, searching. She became even more scared when Dirmit returned home one day, clutching a piece of birdie-bird plant and shouting. Atiye buried her face in her hands, reflecting darkly that Dirmit’s two braids of hair, each as thick as her wrist and trailing below her waist, weighed too heavily on her brain for Dirmit to think straight. So she chopped off Dirmit’s braids at the roots. She was also irritated by the brushed cotton dress that Dirmit had stubbornly insisted on wearing ever since she left the village, so one night she tore it up in secret and threw it out, then withdrew to a corner, leaving Dirmit to scream her lungs out. Having lost her hair and her dress, Dirmit never left the side of the birdie-bird plant that spread itself wantonly beneath the horse chestnut, its fine leaves fanning out. She went over and sat by it in the morning. At night she pressed her nose into her quilt, which smelt of milk and dry dung, breathing in deeply. Gathering hope, she looked for anything that she remembered from her village, those odds and ends that lay trapped between house and street. And as she sought those things out, she lost what she already had. The birdie-bird plant shrivelled up, and the milk and dry dung smell on her quilt faded into thin air.
After that, Dirmit went back to her old habit of eating soil. Because it would eventually infect her with worms, Atiye had broken her of this with some difficulty by beating her, so she consumed the soil in handfuls, fearfully guarding her secret. No one in the house found out, because she would position herself beside the flowerpots at night, after the others had gone to bed. Dirmit did worry that worms might grow in her stomach but, stubbornly swallowing her fear, she filled her stomach each night with soil.
One day, after Atiye had already begun to wonder about the disappearing flowerpot soil, she took Mahmut and Dirmit by the hand and led them through the doorway of a huge school building. Then she left them, with a thousand and one warnings, and returned home.
However, neither her warnings nor the prayers she blew all around did any good. Dirmit came rushing home in tears after Atiye. She threw herself down on the floor and started to kick and yell: ‘I won’t go!’ In the wake of this tantrum, however, Atiye came up with a thousand and one words, and just as many tricks, to lead her daughter back to school and hand her over to the teacher. Blowing her prayers on Dirmit’s face, the classroom door and all the streets she walked along, she begged God to fasten Dirmit’s feet to the school’s ground. But Dirmit wouldn’t warm to her class and kept running back home. Hanging around Atiye, she continued to yell that she wouldn’t go back. ‘But you will go poking around that birdie-bird plant, won’t you, good-for-nothing?’ Atiye shouted back at her and then beat Dirmit black and blue. Not caring at all if Dirmit ran out of both tears and breath with all her crying and sobbing, Atiye angrily grabbed her daughter’s hand and dragged her off to the school again.
Seeing that she had no other choice, Dirmit calmed down. During class and breaks she laid her head on her desk. She wore herself out by constantly asking the girl sitting beside her, ‘What does this mean? What does that mean?’ Then she gave up asking and started to weep once more. Her teacher, no longer able to tolerate Dirmit’s blank looks and tears whenever she was asked a question, stormed indignantly out of the classroom one day and returned a few moments later with the headmaster. Pointing Dirmit out, she stepped aside as the headmaster came over, planted himself beside Dirmit, opened a page from the book lying before her and asked her to read it out. Staring blankly at the page, Dirmit shrugged, but the more she tried to shrug him off, the more he insisted – ‘Read!’ – and the more the other children giggled. Finally they gathered up her books and notebooks, put them back in her satchel, tucked it under her arm and took her away from her desk. She was the wrong age for that class, they informed her, and moved her back to a lower one, where she was assigned a seat in the very back row, next to a large girl. When Dirmit met her classmate, she showed more interest in the shin
y wire on her teeth than her name. And no sooner had they had got acquainted than Dirmit received a resounding slap on the face because she had asked the girl why she wore wire on her teeth.
Even before the imprint of the big blonde girl’s fingers faded from Dirmit’s cheek, they had become fast friends. Dirmit soon acquired all the girl’s habits. She learnt how to cheat and to make drawings of nude women and display them to the boys. She also learnt that kissing boys was really nothing to be ashamed of. As Dirmit relayed, bit by bit, everything she had learnt, Atiye’s heart jumped into her mouth. It didn’t take her long to conclude that the big blonde girl would grow up to become a whore and she tried to frighten Dirmit, swearing that she would report to her father everything that Dirmit had told her. She was also forbidden to talk to the blonde girl after school, because the girl put on airs as she nodded and showed off her legs to the boys. Dirmit was too scared to ask the girl over and instead she went to visit her house after school. As a result, she started to take up all sorts of odd habits. She switched on the radio and danced, causing the whole household to giggle. And as they sat there giggling, the dog snow fell. Dirmit left off dancing and ran over to the window, amazed to see how the flakes disappeared as soon as they had fallen. Fixing her eyes on the ground, she watched the snow as it melted. Then a dark spotty faced boy came and stood right where she had fixed her gaze. Dirmit looked for a long time at the boy and fell in love with him.
The dog snow brought the dark boy with the spotty face to Dirmit and deprived the household of its prosperity and order. On the day of the dog snow, Huvat came home early looking sulky. Halit and Seyit arrived shortly afterwards. Then they all joined together in cursing the snow. That winter left them without employment. Nuǧber slipped off her bracelets and handed them over to her father. It was Zekiye’s turn by mid-winter, and she parted with all she had, retaining only the pair of gold earrings her father Rızgo Agha had given her. Huvat left with the bracelets, swearing to his daughter-in-law that she would get back more than she had handed over. After all the gold had been taken and spent, Huvat started to roll up the carpets and haul them away. Halit and Seyit began to quarrel, and the colour faded from Zekiye’s cheeks. Trying to intervene in the quarrel, Atiye asked over and over, ‘What do you own that you can’t share?’ until she grew weary and at last fell ill. Everyone’s nerves were set on edge by Nuǧber’s routine of stretching out her canvas on a hoop and embroidering all day long for her dowry. Mahmut’s slingshot was broken and flung aside. Dirmit feared for her rag doll and hid it under the divan. She dared not pick it up to play with it but kept checking every once in a while to see if it was still there. Then she forgot all about the rag doll as she fell more and more into thinking about the dark boy with the spotty face. And as her preoccupation grew, she ran to the bathroom secretly, leant against the wall and measured her height. As she was making a notch on the wall, she suddenly recalled the notch Djinnman Memet had cut into the pastry board after she was born. Then she softly drew up her lips in a smile. That winter everybody felt cold except Dirmit. She burnt deep down as she thought about the dark spotty boy. She flung herself about in the house crazily, sleeping and waking with the spotty boy in her mind, eating from the same spoon, drinking water from the same glass. If one day she didn’t see him, she snapped like a dog at anyone that came near, shouted, banged the door in Atiye’s face and sulked. Because she wandered around with her hand pressed hard on her heart for fear that it would fly away, she became known in the household as ‘Leyla’.
‘Hey, Leyla girl, get over here with a pencil and paper,’ Huvat called out to her every evening that winter. Sitting her down by his side, he made her write a different business proposal each time, then asked her to read each letter out loud again and again, from beginning to end, before taking it away with him the next morning. Every evening he came home full of hope, but the branches he reached for dried up one by one. Wherever he took his letters of proposal, they whittled down his estimates; at every company he applied to, the door was shut in his face. He didn’t lay a single metre of insulation that winter and was unable to pick up a contract to paint a single wall. He longed deeply for the smell of the woolly fibreglass that always used to make him itch so hard he couldn’t sleep.
Winter left, spring came in. Atiye forbade her children to sit with their hands stuck between their legs in case this would bring bad luck and bind up their good fortune. Whenever Huvat went to the coffee-house, she prayed and blew her prayers after him. She untied every single knot she could find at home. As Huvat sat with his hands over his face, she prohibited her daughters and her daughter-in-law from braiding their hair for fear that by doing so they would knot up the household’s prospects. She went so far as to proclaim that drinking water while sitting down, dallying too long in the toilet, going to bed or waking up too late would also block their good fortune. Above the door she hung a large inscription of a prayer for plenty and declared that she would renounce any child of hers who stepped over the threshold without saying the besmele. But the cold days had long since been replaced by fiercely hot ones, and Huvat’s promises that jobs would crop up with the warm weather vanished into the air to mingle with the spring breeze. No jobs were to be had.
From then on Huvat couldn’t swing a single business contract. Letting his thoughts drift back into the past, he began to reminisce about how he had made suitcases full of money as a road-building contractor, and how he had laid in the plumbing for nitrogen plants, steel plants and radio broadcasting houses. ‘Contracting wasn’t your only destiny in life, love,’ said Atiye as she hovered about him. ‘You’re strong in wind and limb. Why can’t you work for a daily wage?’ Even as she stroked his back and smiled for him, she grumbled morosely behind his back. But she couldn’t get her husband to work for daily wages like the husbands of other women. ‘I won’t do day labour,’ Huvat told Atiye fiercely. ‘I won’t have everyone laughing at me.’ Atiye finally left him alone and gave herself over to her prayer beads. Dropping her head and moping, she hissed out prayers all day long, blowing them all over the place and forcing Huvat to beg God for patience as he picked up his felt hat and walked down to the coffee-house, from where he wouldn’t make a step towards home before dark.
On one such evening, Huvat came back accompanied by a man with a long black beard. He offered the man a seat in the most prominent corner and knelt on the floor beside him. After dinner the man broke open the green books he’d brought with him and read aloud from them. As he read, Huvat listened, occasionally sighing and wiping a thin trickle of tears from his eyes. Hours passed but the man didn’t budge. Zekiye nodded off to sleep in one corner, the children in another. Even though Atiye made signs and sulked, she couldn’t stop Huvat from kneeling before the man, who spent the whole night reading aloud and blowing about prayers from the pages of his green books. Still Huvat knelt, his eyes fixed on the man, brushing away his tears, sighing and listening. When it was light, he set off with the man, leaving Atiye feeling flustered. Atiye could do nothing to prevent Huvat from inviting the man home with him every other day or from patting him on the back and leaving with him in the early hours. Moreover, Huvat started to bend and bow before the man, in spite of Atiye’s grumbling, and kiss his shalvar.
Soon Huvat lost his senses completely and cultivated a beard on the very tip of his chin. In his jacket pocket he kept a fine-toothed comb, and clasped under his arm two green-covered books. Pulling the comb from his pocket from time to time and combing through his beard, he would prop the books open on his knees and begin to preach to anyone present, whether he was sitting for a meal or paying someone a visit. He also enrolled Dirmit and Mahmut in the mosque school, ordered Atiye and Nuǧber to cover their heads, forbade his children from lying down in his presence and lined up everyone in a row before he left in the morning, then offered them his hand to kiss. He crammed the house full of black sheep pelts, prayer beads, heavy essences and even issued a fatwa: ‘Spiders are said to be sacred, so don’t ever kill
one or touch their nests.’ The cobwebs made the house unfit for habitation, and the beds and cushions gave off a heavy odour.
All of this was too much for Atiye. Afraid that unemployment would drive her husband over the edge, she went out of her way to ensure that Huvat would find a job and go back to his old ways. She heard everyone out and set forth, accompanied by anyone who would go with her, to visit all the dervish houses. She visited all the mosques, where she turned off and on each tap in the founts. She collected water from the sea’s seven waves and poured it over Huvat’s head. She clicked locks open and shut above his head as he lay sleeping. And she ran out at daybreak to stick a knife in the earth. But it all blew back in her face. Huvat continued to make daily progress in his vocation as a spiritual teacher, shutting himself away from everyone in the mosque for seven days and spending the other days fasting. He utterly forgot his home and family.
