The Women Who Blow on Knots Dance School
So in that lilac hour when the birds were chattering in the jasmine tree his sign was drying. When the Siamese kitten wasn’t rubbing against my leg she would go over and sniff at the sign, driven away by the scent every time. As Lilla continued trimming branches a shower of jasmine flowers fell on the sign. Naturally Lilla didn’t last very long, bored with such a mundane activity: first she was angry at the scissors, then Eyüp Bey, then the jasmine and finally she put her clippers down on the table. She saw me sitting on the two-seat swing with papers before me and a pen in my hand. Something crossed her mind. She came over.
“Are you writing?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “nothing for now.”
“You will,” she said, “I know.”
I just looked at her and said nothing.
Upstairs Maryam was shouting to Amira from another room.
“When did you last change her nappy? And when did we last give her milk?”
Amira laughed as she answered.
For a moment I thought Maryam and Amira were the same woman, half man and half woman. As for Madam Lilla standing above me…
“Don’t write about what we did to Jezim Anwar,” said Lilla, sitting down next to me on the swing. “What happened happened. Do you understand that I did it all for you?” She put her arm around my shoulder and I put my head on her chest. She patted me on the shoulder in an awkward show of compassion. “You can make up a good ending for the bastard anyway…”
And so I made up such an ending for the bastard. At the end of the day Maryam, Amira and Madam Lilla were more than just a story. They were more precious than characters in a novel. You see that’s why I didn’t write Maryam’s last tablet and Amira’s last letter. I left them before they rounded out at number seven. I left them as they were. I left them as they should be.
Maryam and Amira were in the kitchen looking for glasses for jasmine rakı and soon the glasses were clinking. I was in Lilla’s arms. Dropping a glass, Maryam cursed and Amira laughed. The baby woke up. In a white dress Amira walked over to us barefoot. She stopped, leaned over, tucked her hair behind an ear and merrily said, “There is this incredible purple bug. Did you see it?”
We were still. Madam Lilla knew her breath was falling over my eyelashes like a prayer. It was the first time a ticket to Istanbul seemed to be the right choice. It was the first time I understood what Madam Lilla had done for us all. We did not need a god to love us if we had a courageous mother…
Maybe this wasn’t why we had set out in the first place but we had made it to this garden. In the end you make a decision to leave but you never know where you’re going to end up. When you decide to write a road trip story the road surely writes the ending for you. Thinking of everything we had been through I’d have to say I have trouble believing it all really happened. I hope you won’t have such trouble…
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English Pen's “Pen Translates” programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org
Parthian, Cardigan SA43 1ED
www.parthianbooks.com
Originally published in Turkey as Düğümlere Üfleyen Kadınlar (2013)
© Ece Temelkuran
Translation © Alexander Dawe 2017
All Rights Reserved
ISBNs print: 978-1-910901-69-4, ePub: 978-1-912109-95-1, mobi: 978-1-912109-94-4
Cover design by Utku Lomlu
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Women Who Blow on Knots Page 45
