Dear Shameless Death

by Latife Tekin

  Halit also had some suggestions concerning Mahmut. He said that his mother should declare: ‘I may have kept losing and finding him, only seeing his face from one night to the next. Even so, he didn’t turn out to be a pickpocket or go really bad. He must have a good heart or he wouldn’t have a business. I have that to be thankful for.’

  ‘Now as for Nuǧber…’ Halit went on but then stopped short. ‘Mother shouldn’t hear about this,’ he said, fixing his eyes on the floor, ‘but I’ve got a feeling that the girl isn’t at all comfortable where she is.’ Huvat’s heart leapt. ‘If you know something, let me in on it, man,’ he said. Halit replied that Nuǧber’s husband was never at home, and, whenever he called on his sister, she only hung her head. ‘Their ways are too much for her to keep up with,’ he sighed. Huvat butted in to say that what Atiye most set store by in this world was her belief that she had saved Nuǧber and, because of that, half her sins would be crossed off the list. ‘We’ve got to explain the situation to Atiye,’ Huvat reasoned. ‘If we don’t, she’ll get it all wrong over there.’

  ‘It’s the only thing she’s happy about, so let her stay happy,’ Halit argued and he urged his father to take an oath not to tell Atiye. But Huvat still held that it would be better if she found out about it from them rather than when she passed over to the other side. At least then she’d be prepared. ‘Once they see how happy she is about Nuǧber, maybe they won’t tell her about it,’ Halit suggested. ‘Nothing’s left unaccounted for over there,’ Huvat countered. ‘They do a lot of hair-splitting.’ Then he fell silent and thought for a while. ‘Let’s see what Dirmit has to say, man,’ he said finally, ‘if you think she’s up to it.’

  Halit called Dirmit over. ‘You’re the only educated one here, girl,’ he began, ‘and, as you well know, our mother’s seeking death.’ He went on to say that while their mother was most certainly searching for death, as far as he could tell she was uneasy about the reckoning. He asked her to think hard and come up with some suggestions. Dirmit fixed her eyes on Halit’s face first and then she turned to Huvat. ‘Can’t the woman spend one single day in this world without being afraid of something!’ she at last burst out. Then she bowed her head in thought for a moment. ‘Wasn’t it Allah who set down mother’s fate?’ she asked, looking up. ‘Who else would it be!’ Huvat scolded. ‘What kind of a question is that, girl?’ Then, replied Dirmit, there was no need for her mother to be afraid. ‘Mother should ask Allah, “What’s all this reckoning stuff about? You wrote down my fate. I only went along with what you had written.”’

  Huvat gave Dirmit a sharp look and asked her if she was at all aware of what kind of advice she was giving. Dirmit said nothing. ‘Is your mind always full of such vileness, girl?’ Huvat asked, and Halit waved Dirmit away. ‘Come on now, Father, don’t be so hard on her,’ he said after Dirmit had left, ‘that was sound advice.’ Huvat retorted that if Halit thought his sister’s advice was any good then he had made a mistake in consulting him as his eldest son. Growing more annoyed, Huvat said that he had sounded out three of his children and hadn’t found an ounce of good sense in any of their advice. ‘If I were in Atiye’s place at the reckoning, I’d deny you all!’ he said.

  Looking downcast, he retreated to a corner. Having concluded that his advice was the best, Huvat beckoned his wife to his side. ‘Atiye, girl!’ he shouted. ‘Just deny you have any children and let it go at that!’ When Atiye came over, he took her under his arm, recounted everything her children had told him and said once more that they hadn’t a shred of common sense among them. One had growled like a dog. The next had come up with perfectly good advice, as if he really cared about the family’s troubles, but when he heard his sister speak, he agreed with her and took back everything he had said before. As for the last one, she had given herself away as soon as she opened her mouth. As Huvat saw it, what Dirmit meant was, ‘Watch out! I’ll deny Allah and I’ll turn into a commonist. Then they’ll come and take me away.’ So Huvat advised that, if Atiye wanted to spare herself agony in the netherworld, she ought to disown all her children and not even mention their names. ‘Make sure you’ve crossed Dirmit’s name off your list first, and if they claim that she’s your daughter just say “Not on your life!”’ he counselled. ‘You’d better listen to my good sense, girl!’

  ‘May you join all those others with such good sense, and I hope you never find your way back home again!’ Atiye hissed when she heard Huvat’s advice. Then she assured him that he shouldn’t even think of parting with his precious advice for her sake. ‘Unchain her hands and feet! Stop torturing this poor woman!’ Allah would command, if she were somehow able to express all the agony Huvat had put her through and could find some way to tell Allah how, unlike other husbands, he had never thought to take her out anywhere or even ask if she were upset about anything. ‘Don’t let my fears fool you!’ she went on. ‘If I really start talking, I’d turn the netherworld upside down.’ ‘I hope you die soon,’ Huvat grumbled, offended. ‘Then I can get back to the village.’ But Atiye replied that even the village wouldn’t take him back. ‘Don’t imagine you’re going back there to save yourself,’ she said. ‘Because with all your good sense, you’d never be able to fit in.’ Huvat replied that he most assuredly did imagine himself going back as soon as she was dead. Moreover, he was already planning to build himself a house no bigger than a chicken coop and take a fresh Circassian bride for himself. Atiye suggested that he had best not wait around for her death: Circassian girls were already crying wildly with desire to put on the bridal veil for Huvat, and all the talk among the Akçalı folk was about their pitiful tears. ‘Get on with it, man,’ jibed Atiye. ‘Don’t keep the girls crying!’ Looking at her sternly, Huvat shook his head from side to side as he begged God under his breath to rescue him quickly from Atiye’s foul malice.

  Meanwhile, Atiye had picked up her prayer beads and withdrawn to a corner. With each bead she thumbed, she wished that, after her death, Huvat wouldn’t be left on his own and driven to visit her grave every day of the week to harass her spirit. Prayers ran silently through her mind that her husband would pack up and go back to the village immediately, wipe her name from his mind and be granted his wish to make a Circassian girl dance across the wide plains. Atiye then remembered what Huvat had said about Dirmit and fixed her eyes on her daughter, who sat hunched over the sewing machine with her back to her. As if struck by a sudden thought, Atiye said, ‘Come over here, girl!’ When Dirmit came over to her side, Atiye sounded her out. ‘That piece of advice you gave, girl, it’s really good!’ she said, pretending to be pleased. Dirmit eyed her mother suspiciously. ‘I mean it, girl!’ Atiye swore. Then she asked if Dirmit had any more good advice for her mother. If Dirmit didn’t hold back, Atiye would question Allah as she lay dying about how her daughter would end up. Then she would tell Dirmit all about it. ‘I’ll even let you know who you’re going to marry, girl,’ she swore. She explained that those who were about to give up their spirit could get answers about anything they liked. Although it was a great sin to disclose what they had found out, she was prepared to risk it for her daughter’s sake. ‘Don’t sin on my account, girl,’ Dirmit replied.

  But, Atiye argued, she had taken an oath that before she shut her eyes for good she would give away a few secrets of Allah, who refused to consent to her death. ‘But why d’you want to die, girl?’ asked Dirmit. Atiye grabbed Dirmit’s hand and held it against her heart. ‘Feel that,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s beating like crazy!’ When Dirmit felt the madly throbbing heart, she drew back her hand with a start. ‘That’s not so serious, girl!’ she replied. Then, without a word, Atiye bared her belly and pointed at the swelling that ran all the way down from her chest. ‘And that’s the other one, good-for-nothing!’ she exclaimed. Feeling frightened, Dirmit ran her fingers lightly over her mother’s greatly swollen lung. ‘You must be feeling tight inside, girl,’ she said. ‘If I could only get my hands on it,’ Atiye grumbled. Dirmit lowered her eyes, unable to look any longer at h
er mother’s belly and quivering body. ‘When you go up for the reckoning,’ she advised, ‘first show them your insides.’ ‘As if they haven’t seen through me already!’ Atiye replied, hanging her head. Then she assured Dirmit that they wouldn’t be swayed by such a show. If they only held her accountable for herself, she said, her good deeds would make up for her sins, but she was also responsible for the children she had borne. ‘But none of us has done anybody any harm, girl,’ Dirmit responded. Atiye sighed that it wasn’t enough just to keep from doing evil. They were going to ask her which of her children she had raised to belong with the good.

  Then Atiye went on to list her complaints. Not one of her children had done her proud, nor did they get on with each other the way brothers and sisters should. They were useless to each other and to their parents because they were headstrong and all went their own way. ‘If I die,’ Atiye swore to her, ‘you’ll all drift apart and be scattered to the four winds.’ To mark her words, she wet a finger and stamped it on the wall. Dirmit looked at the spot left by her mother’s finger. Then she ran her eyes across the four walls and counted all the marks that had been stamped there to predict that they would be abandoned, they would go mad, they would be left to starve without a roof over their heads, or they would fall into evil ways. ‘We’ve made so many marks for one another!’ she reflected. Then she got up and started to scratch off all the spots. As Dirmit worked her way along the walls with her fingernails, Atiye asked, ‘Have you started seeing things on the wall again, girl?’ Dirmit turned back to her mother. ‘Well, you know, girl,’ she chuckled, ‘I see things wherever I look!’ Atiye felt her heart heave. ‘What sort of things, girl?’ she asked, pretending to be casual. ‘Would you like me to tell you what I can see from the rooftop?’ Dirmit responded. ‘Go ahead,’ Atiye moaned apprehensively, thinking, ‘My home is ruined. The girl must really be seeing things.’ All the same, she managed to keep a fixed expression on her face as she heard Dirmit out.

  ‘You can see so many houses from our roof, girl, especially at night when they’re all lit up!’ Dirmit began. No sooner had she started than Atiye’s heart was struck with fire. While she burned inside, her hands and feet turned cold as ice. Unseen by Dirmit, she swayed her head from side to side, signalling Halit and Huvat to shut up and listen. Lowering her eyes, Dirmit explained that most of the houses she saw from the roof had their curtains open. At first she couldn’t understand why this was so, but after she had questioned the stars, the moon and the sea about it, the answer had come to her. ‘They’ve got flowery paper on their walls, girl,’ she continued, ‘and most of them have lamps that hang from the ceiling, gleaming in every colour!’ ‘You questioned the stars and the moon?’ Atiye asked, smacking her hand on her knee. ‘So you talk to them too, girl?’ ‘Sure I do,’ Dirmit said. Atiye glanced quickly over at Halit and Huvat, biting her lip to hide her feelings. Then she pressed her hand down on her heart, and her face turned ashen. Hardly noticing that her words had brought Atiye to the verge of a stroke, Dirmit went on to say that the people in those houses kept their curtains wide open at night, while they themselves closed them before dark. ‘Why do you think that is, girl?’ she asked.

  Atiye’s distraught gaze hung on Dirmit’s lips as they formed the word ‘why?’ and she waited silently for the answer. ‘Because we have finger-marks on our walls, girl. That’s why!’ Dirmit concluded. She said it was out of shame that Seyit shouted for the curtains to be drawn as soon as he got home. ‘Girl, whoever gave you the idea that your brother felt ashamed?’ Atiye asked as she touched Dirmit on the shoulder. ‘The curtains did, girl,’ Dirmit replied. ‘One day I counted up the houses with open curtains and those with closed curtains.’ Then she gave a detailed report of how she had counted eleven houses, their own included, on their street where the curtains were drawn before dark. She knew who lived in the houses, where they worked and how many children they had. ‘Right now I can see into the houses on our street,’ she explained, ‘but just wait, it won’t be long before I’ll be seeing into all the houses.’ Atiye suddenly felt weak and her heart gave a thud.

  Dirmit pressed on. ‘One morning, while you were still sleeping, girl,’ she said, ‘I went up on the roof.’ As she sat there, her back against the chimney, she didn’t see a single person at any window or on any balcony. And at that moment everything appeared strange. ‘All of you had vanished from my mind,’ she went on. ‘I was up on the roof all on my own in this huge city. And I was scared to death, girl.’ Never before had those multi-storeyed buildings, the row upon row of roofs, the trees and the distant sea appeared to her as they did at that moment. ‘After that, I no longer wanted to go up on the roof to watch the houses, the streets and the sea,’ she confessed. And while she had thought about it endlessly, she couldn’t figure out why she felt so scared. At last it had come to her that all those houses, streets and the sea were keeping an important secret from people. ‘When the city saw me on the roof while everybody else was asleep,’ she explained, ‘it thought I would discover its secret. So it deliberately scared me away.’

  Atiye’s eyes grew as wide as saucers, and she began panting. ‘It deliberately scared you away,’ she moaned. ‘Is that right, girl?’ ‘Sure, it was deliberate,’ Dirmit replied, and assured Atiye that, if she herself were to go up on the roof early next morning and watch, the city would do the same thing to her. ‘See if I don’t find out its secret and tell everyone about it, just out of spite!’ she declared. Hearing that Dirmit had wanted to see into the houses in order to spite the city, Atiye stared woefully at her daughter’s face and started to cry. ‘Stop this talk about the city and the roof, girl,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m feeling sick!’ Then she turned around to look at Halit and Huvat. ‘Now where can I go if I have to leave behind a girl with no more sense than this?’ she asked, as the tears streamed down over her trembling chin. Then, wiping away her tears, she declared that she had done well to question her daughter, since now, at least, she was certain that Dirmit had lost her mind. Consequently, she could shift the burden onto those questioning her in the netherworld by asking them how she could have been expected to deal with a child who counted curtains, talked to stars and spited a city. ‘But what did I say, girl?’ Dirmit asked, fluttering around Atiye the rest of the day. But Atiye just said, ‘Be quiet,’ and moaned over and over, ‘My home is ruined!’

  That evening she gathered everyone around her, appointed Halit and Huvat witnesses, then seated Dirmit before them. Dirmit turned her eyes to her mother. ‘What’s happening, girl?’ she begged, starting to weep. ‘I’ll be passing away soon, but my hand will be on you,’ she stated, laying her hand on each one of them in turn. Then she asked each of them to look for a way to deal with Dirmit. She went on to tell them all about Dirmit, starting with their life back in the village. How she knew when to come and sit by the radio because she could tell the time by the shadows. How she held a notebook against her tummy and went to school, pretending that her teacher was calling her even when there was no teacher around. How she felt a sudden pity for the water pump and how she slept in the stables because she thought the calf was crying.

  After hearing Atiye’s account, one by one they all came and sat on the floor facing Dirmit. Now it was she, not Atiye, who was suddenly called upon to face a grand reckoning. Her interrogators either looked at her mournfully, intent upon their task, or let a snicker slip out from under a moustache. One moment they shouted and the next they whispered, and Dirmit hadn’t a clue what to say. ‘I can see and hear them all the time!’ she finally yelled. Then she explained that wherever she looked she felt herself quivering inside, as her heart lurched about. Just seeing a bird in flight made tears well up in her eyes, and a flower’s fragrance could almost cause her heart to burst. ‘I can feel the pull of the sea and the call of the sky!’ she said, heaving a sigh. Then she blurted out, ‘Don’t pull the curtains, man!’ and was immediately slapped as a reward by the interrogator, who felt ashamed of his home. On her cheek a rose bloomed, which
she caressed with her fingers and hid with the palm of her hand, as Halit jumped up and angrily drove Seyit from the room. Then he walked back over to Dirmit.

  ‘I’d like to back you up,’ he said. ‘But you keep going on about the clouds and the stars and the rain and the sea, so what can I do, girl?’ Dirmit shrugged her shoulders, bowed her head and began to weep. Meanwhile, everyone had withdrawn to a corner, where they sat cupping their chins in their hands. Then each in turn spoke his piece, and a joint verdict was reached. First, Dirmit was forbidden to go up on the roof and to write poetry. Next, because she meddled with the stars in Allah’s firmament and the waters that sprang from Allah’s earth, she was forbidden to speak to anyone in the household for seven days. Sniffling and wiping away her tears, Dirmit listened in silence to their decision. ‘Well, then, could I write you a letter?’ she asked. No one responded. Dirmit looked at her brothers, her mother and her father one by one. Then she got up, took her seat at the sewing machine and, placing a sheet of paper before her, turned to them and smiled. ‘I’m writing this to all of you!’ she said. ‘Be sure that you read it carefully.’

  And so she composed a letter that began: ‘I talked to the stars and the moon, I went to school in the village with my notebook against my tummy when the teacher was absent, the city scared me early one morning, when I was up on the roof because…’ It was a long, long letter that took her six days and seven nights to write. Dirmit took all the papers and attached them together, as one by one she arranged her thoughts. At night she hid the papers in her bosom and during the day she kept a close eye on them. On the morning of the seventh day she arose from bed before anyone else and strung the pages of the letter from one corner of the room to the other, like a rope. The rest of it she stuck up on the nails in the walls. Then she picked up one end of the letter-string and out of sheer spite went up on the roof and dangled the string of pages over the edge. Having done that, she quietly crept back to bed and pulled the quilt over her head. A long time later she heard her mother proclaim, ‘There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s doing it all on purpose.’ Next, Halit came over to her bed, pulled back the quilt from her head and asked, ‘Where’s the rest of the letter, girl?’ When Dirmit pointed to the roof, Halit climbed up to look but couldn’t find the rest of the letter. He searched the entire roof, including the underside of the tiles and the inside of the chimney. After a while he noticed a long white ribbon sailing out over the city. He shaded his tearful eyes with his hand and watched it for a long, long while. ‘What has my sister written about me?’ he quietly asked the city.