Every summer, the villagers’ hopes would rise again, when the tinsmith, a crocus curled around his ear, dawdled past on his mangy donkey to set up his stall in the village square. Before the man could so much as jump down from his donkey, the villagers had begun asking of the mountains and valleys he’d crossed and the villages he’d visited, and whether or not he’d heard anything of Nuri. The tinsmith would frown in silence, as if he were trying to juggle his own pots. And for a time the village square would be a sea of sparkling lights, of copper saucepans, pots, spoons and water bowls, all chained together by their handles, until he packed up his stall again and went on his way. He seemed sad; he had been dragged into the fringes of this story of loss, and now he was damned for having had no useful part to play in it. As he left, he said to the watchman, ‘I’m going back to where I come from.’ The watchman didn’t grasp what he meant by this until the tinsmith had gone beyond the mill stream and vanished.
‘I suppose the tinsmith lives in many different places,’ thought the watchman. Around a week after the tinsmith’s departure, a painter with a cylindrical hat was seen by the mill. He and his grey donkey reached the village just as the sun’s light was waning. He looked just like his donkey, shivering in the heat and playing with its long ears as he jumped down to gaze at the stream. As they made their way across the pasture, the grey donkey became the painter; it had the cylindrical hat on its head and was blowing cigarette smoke from its mouth. The two walked on for a time, and it seemed as though they would die of exhaustion before they reached the village. They parted at the foot of the plane tree; the painter becoming a painter again, the donkey a donkey. The men sitting outside the village coffeehouse gestured to the painter to sit down, and the donkey, laden with two large cans of paint, wandered over to the mulberry tree where they set up shop every year, and there it stood, flicking its ears soulfully in the way of all donkeys.
No sooner had the painter sat down than they began to ask him about Cıngıl Nuri. As they turned their wooden chairs to face him, they were convinced, for a moment, that he was bringing them news. But the painter just said, ‘I’ve heard he’s gone missing.’ He could tell them no more. He might not have needed to know a thing, since he had all the village’s attention. But the next day, as he was warming his paint, Nuri’s wife came with her three children to sit at his side, and she stayed there for some time. The painter told her he had spent the winter painting over weathered woollen carpets, painting them as red as flags, as green as the heavens, as blue as glass beads and as black as dungeons, and in so doing he had painted Nuri into the void.
‘I’m going to tell the State. I’ll go in and do a missing person’s report, so the soldiers and police can start looking for him,’ said the muhtar. With that, he mounted his horse and trotted off out of the village. Thereafter, Nuri became a little more lost and his barber shop a little dustier. The villagers spent days awaiting the muhtar’s return, watching the road from their rooftops from morning till night. In her dreams Nuri’s wife saw the muhtar riding across mountains and plains, highlands and villages; she went to sit on the piles of rocks outside his house, fixing her eyes on the flag flying from the roof. In its bold red and white she saw the mighty gates of the State, and her heart began to pound. She didn’t know whether she was frightened or glad: if she was glad, it was a fearful gladness; if she was frightened, it was a happy fear.
Thousands of years later, the muhtar returned from the State, and his voice was as tired as his horse. ‘It’s done,’ he told the woman. ‘Everything’s done.’
And soon his story spread through the village, exactly as he had told it. He’d knocked on all the State’s doors, fixed Nuri’s name to every noticeboard, left details in every coffeehouse, inn and restaurant he could find, and if there happened to be a hamam, he’d gone there too. Everyone knew everything now: everyone had a share in Nuri’s absence. All that was left was to wait in silence for the red-winged bird of good tidings to swoop down from the skies. If not today, then tomorrow. Hearing these words Nuri’s wife was almost as elated as if her husband had been found. She ran back to her children, crying long and hard, throwing her arms around them and kissing them a hundred times over. Every day, she went back to the muhtar’s house to sit on those rock piles outside it and stare up at the flag. But now she could see the gates of the State more clearly. Sometimes, as she sat in their shadow, the worry returned, and she needed to lean forward to get a better look. There was a great hall behind those gates, and it was plunged in darkness. Long-faced scribes were seated around a long table writing out her husband’s name. Their hands held pens as long as shepherds’ staffs, which caught the light as they scribbled. Then seals were affixed to the papers, seals many times bigger than the muhtar’s. Gigantic seals, the grandfathers of all seals, with stamps that cast long, long shadows. Then the papers were slipped into envelopes, to be placed ceremoniously into the pockets of sharp-faced messengers. Yet one of the envelopes was forgotten, left in the room to crackle as the messengers departed. Fearing that this might be the envelope bearing Nuri’s name, his wife took several steps forward to stand in the path of the muhtar as he left his house.
The muhtar had said that Nuri would come today or tomorrow.
Again, the door creaked open. The cat licked itself. Its tongue called to mind a red handkerchief.
‘Reşit’s still waiting,’ said the muhtar’s wife. ‘Aren’t you coming?’
The muhtar took off his vomit-stained undershirt and threw it at the wall.
‘I’m coming,’ he shouted angrily. ‘Wait!’
5
When the barber turned from the street to the man with the goatee who sat waiting in the chair, his eyes still carried the glint of the executioner’s blade.
‘Your hair has grown into your beard,’ he said, in a voice that cast a veil over those eyes.
The man with the goatee said nothing. He just sat there, eyes shut, as if he feared seeing himself in the mirror. It was almost as if he was not the one whose hair had grown into his beard; as if part of him was living in another place, a place no one had ever heard of, while the rest of him sat dozing in this chair. But when the barber’s scissors started clicking, he woke up.
‘Cut the moustache so there’s no more hair going into my mouth, and stop there,’ he said, as he stared up at the charcoal sketch of the dove above the mirror. ‘Did you draw that picture?’
‘Yes, I did, and you’ve asked me this before,’ replied the barber. ‘Every time you come in here, you ask me.’
The man with the goatee shrank into himself like a scolded child, as he lowered his gaze to the mirror. The apprentice went behind the curtain at the back of the shop; returning with a broom, he began to sweep up the hair on the floor.
‘Leave it,’ said the man with the goatee. ‘Leave it!’
The barber’s apprentice froze; wide-eyed, he watched the man rise from his seat. It wasn’t clear who he was talking to.
The man rushed to the door. Before plunging into the crowded street, he turned around.
‘The money’s run out,’ he said to the barber. ‘It’s full of skeletons out there.’
The barber shook his head. He watched sadly as the man with the goatee hurtled across the pavement. He kept his eyes on him until he had zigzagged through the traffic to vanish around the corner. It was as if this man’s departure had deflated him somehow.
‘Who was that?’ I asked timidly.
‘His name’s Nuri,’ said the barber. ‘I have no idea who he is, or where he’s from.’
6
As he slowly buttoned up his shirt, the muhtar gazed with tired eyes out of the window: the village lay under the sun like a white wounded animal. It seemed to be breathing its last breath, its shiver passing through every house and every street. And now he could hear the squeak of an ox-cart, as a flock of chirping sparrows rose up from the mulberry tree. Then the flock divided down the middle, with the first half diving fast as rain towards who-knows-whose cour
tyard, and the second flying straight up to Cıngıl Nuri’s house.
Back then, they’d gathered at Nuri’s house for a meeting. It was evening. In the hope, perhaps, that they might guide Nuri home, his wife had lit two candles in the corner of each room. Their smoke rose in spirals to the corncobs hanging from the ceiling. Nuri’s relatives, meanwhile, were sitting side by side on the divan. From time to time, the old men stroked their beards in consternation, while others stared at the candles, thinking deep thoughts. Some clicked their prayer beads with an impatience which suggested that any problem under the sun could be solved just as fast.
As Nuri’s wife saw it, the muhtar wasn’t taking this business seriously enough: he’d just handed the matter over to the State and washed his hands of it. He hadn’t bothered to keep in touch with the district headquarters. He hadn’t even asked that a barber be sent from a neighbouring village to take over the shop that Nuri had abandoned. Whatever needed doing, they needed to do themselves, and that was why they had decided to go back to the beginning and reach a proper agreement.
The men on the divan listened solemnly as the woman spoke, and then they shook their heads. Each time they moved, the shadows they cast on the wall grew longer, until suddenly they shrank. It was almost as if these shadows were conversing with each other, almost as if they were searching for another Nuri in another world.
The meeting lasted until the rooster’s first crow. The children curled up along the walls and slept as their white-bearded elders held forth. One of their number began by offering examples from the past – naming names unknown to them in death, as in life. A few nodded in agreement. Then another old man repeated the same stories, but in greater detail. The rest fell into line, following his crackling voice into the distant past. Soon they were amongst their own grandfathers. But it didn’t last long, this return to their history’s most secret page. Before long, the crackling voice was rounding them all up. Returned to the room, they gazed at each other in terror. For they could see in each other the bloody tally of the secrets that Nuri’s disappearance might reveal.
Towards dawn, they drifted home, each one quivering like notes plucked from the morning call to prayer. Leaving the half-lit streets behind them, they lay down to a troubled sleep. They rose with the birds, of course. Whereupon some downed a glass of mountain tea, and some did not, before packing their saddlebags with bread, cheese and underwear and setting out to find Nuri.
The muhtar sent them off with a stern warning: should they pass through the city, on no account were they to call at district headquarters to ask about Nuri. There was no need to waste the State’s time: its functionaries could be merciless with those who did. The State was the State, and so not to be bothered. Upset the State in any way, and it would persist in what it had been doing for fifteen years now, which was to refuse to acknowledge their village even existed. And that was why they should on no account knock on the doors of the State. It was fully aware of the situation, and the bulletin boards of every quarter had been fully bulleted – they could be sure of that. Instead they should concentrate on ordinary people. They should ask after Nuri at restaurants and hotels, coffeehouses and hamams. And barber shops, of course: Nuri being a barber, other barbers might have a way of sniffing him out. And anyway, barbers were men who thrived on chatter: they kept their eyes and ears peeled. They missed nothing. And one more thing: when they asked after Nuri, they should not describe him as he was on the day he disappeared. So many years had passed since then, so much could have changed. They could be sure he would not still be wearing the same shirt; his nose might have changed in shape – his mouth, too; his hair might be longer and his beard fuller; even his gaze might have changed. And that could be the reason why they’d not yet found him.
The men nodded in agreement. Mounting their horses and their donkeys, they gazed with weak hope at the mountains beyond the plain, their shoulders already sagging with the fatigue they would carry home with them.
Weeks passed, and months, and endless years. Every two or three months, the searchers would send a telegram, which a district postman would deliver by motorbike. First he would circle the plane tree in the village square, ignoring everyone he passed. Rising mournfully from the great cloud of dust, he would ask for the muhtar, and with these words he would send the entire village into mad anticipation. The fields would empty as crowds congregated in the village square. These postmen never stayed long, though: as soon as they had delivered the telegram they would leap back on to their motorbikes and, after doing another loop around the plane tree, disappear. It was almost as if they feared taking the blame for what had happened to Nuri and wished to escape before the latest news spread. They did not even glance over their shoulders as they fled. For months afterwards, the children would play in the tracks they left, puttering like motorcycles as they ran circles around the plane tree. Usually, it was Cennet’s son who chased them home. He would charge at them, as if he were a child himself, despite his great size, and send them scattering.
In the muhtar’s opinion, these telegrams brought nothing but disappointment. With the commotion they caused, the village would have been better off getting no telegrams at all. Because sometimes a new telegram would contradict all the telegrams that had come before; sometimes the last word would undermine the first word so as to leave a telegram’s true meaning entirely in doubt. The village was left not knowing what to believe. In time, it was left to the night watchman to decipher their hidden meanings. Because he read each telegram many hundreds of times. Nuri’s wife began to treat every telegraph as though it were a part of her husband’s body. She would hide them between her breasts, until, on a whim, she sauntered off to the watchman to have him read them out to her.
A good three years had passed by the time the searchers returned from wherever on earth they had been all that while, with their lined foreheads, sagging shoulders, and shrivelled hopes. They said not a word: it was as if they’d not been away all those years, and not seen a thing, or if they had gone somewhere, they’d come back as other people. Or maybe they’d left part of themselves behind – maybe that’s why they were so taciturn and distant. Nuri’s wife was at her wits’ end. She raced from house to house, flapping her arms, chasing after answers like a chicken chasing newly hatched chicks.
But in the end, it was the village’s new barber who brought the first news of Nuri. This was the year Gıcır Hamza got a chickpea stuck in his nose; the villagers were still talking about how much the chickpea had swollen, and how, in his violent efforts to blow that chickpea out through his other nostril, and falling to the ground, he had also expelled a dead fly. That same year, the muhtar had given up trying to run the village from his house. And on that particular day, he was in the village square, working on the barn that was to become his office. He had taken down the flagpole that had once graced his own roof and planted it in front. It had been rumoured that deputies from the National Assembly would be making a visit that day to discuss digging irrigation canals on the plain, though the muhtar himself had received no official confirmation. He had, in fact, received nothing in writing from the men in high places since first being elected muhtar, but he still wanted to be ready for them, just in case they chose that day to make their appearance.
The watchman was sitting out in front. Stretched before him was a length of linen on which he was painting the slogan that the muhtar had, after long deliberation, deemed suitable: Our Village Is Grateful to You. His hands were now painted red up to the wrists; he looked, for all the world, like a murderer with blood on his hands, guarding the muhtar’s doors.
It was at this very moment that the barber arrived. Rounding the creek next to the mill, he was nothing more than a tall and blurry shadow shimmering in the heat; at first glance, he could have been anything, but as he came closer it became clear that he was human, whereupon the villagers gathered in the shade of the plane tree began to crane their necks. But he must have sensed the stir he was causing, because he was walking ve
ry slowly. You might even say that he going around in circles, staring and stopping, and sometimes even hopping one step back, so that by the time he reached the village square, many hours had passed, and though they didn’t show it, the villagers had lost patience. The barber, by contrast, was exceedingly calm. Having at last set down his suitcase, he found himself a chair. His face was drawn, as if there were a second face attached to it – a face made from a mixture of skin and bones and dirt, which glowed, now and again, like a dusty mirror lost in time. The watchman, recalling the crooked lettering of his banner, reached for his rifle with his blood-red hands. Placing it between his legs, he planted himself in front of the barber. There was something odd, he thought, about a man who could just turn up like this, holding just one suitcase, and then keep himself to himself by stubbornly responding to questions with the shortest possible answer. Could he be a scout, he wondered, sent in advance by the deputies from the National Assembly? Was he here to give them a thorough inspection, before submitting his report?
Through narrowed eyes, he looked the man over. It was almost as if he’d grown up in this village; his ears seemed untouched by the swaying of the plane tree, his eyes by the white heat rising from the rooftops, his skin by the furiously burning soil. Perhaps this was why the watchman was the only one that day who did find him unsettling. The others picked up where he had left off. Some of the old men were skilled at guiding a conversation in the direction they desired, and never so much as when they were conversing with a stranger. They kept giving him openings, and then pulling back. But still the man would not talk. Their questions rose up unanswered into the branches of the plane tree, until the shoemaker lost his temper:
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