The Seamstress of Ourfa

by Victoria Harwood Butler-Sloss

  “I knew I wouldn’t see her again,” Sophia said. “The last time she was here, on the way back to Ourfa, she gave me these,” she flicked the gold hoops in her ear.

  “Mayrig always wore those.”

  “I know…”

  Brother and sister spent a week reminiscing under the sycamores until they were done. Iskender left the Glore Boghos household with bundles of food and letters of comfort for Ferida (along with a recipe for apricot leather that had so far been denied her). Iskender promised to plant the parsley seeds Sophia gave him around their mother’s grave, spurred on his mule, and in another day found himself in Garmuj, Khatoun’s old home.

  He was surprised at the strange sense of calm that greeted him. The dogs lay where they were, barely lifting their ears as he passed. He could hear boys in the distance arguing over a ball –a strangely familiar and comforting sound. It was Ferida who broke it by leaping from the doorway with a sharp slap to his face and a howl of tears.

  “What took you so long?” she cried, “So much has happened without you.” She ran inside and reappeared moments later carrying Afrem. She bundled the baby into Iskender’s arms. “Look at his beauty spot,” she said, “Just like yours – just like Baba’s.”

  Iskender gazed down at his son. There was something in the shape of the infant’s brow that he recognised, like an old photo presented to him again after a long time. He smiled. Looked up. Khatoun stood in the doorway, greeting him with a nod. Shy, like a newlywed after their months apart.

  They took to her old room awkwardly, Iskender scraping the crown of his head in the low doorway as they entered. And there he stayed as Khatoun continued her confinement, infuriating Ferida who made salty soups and served pickles and garlic with everything in an attempt to prise him away from his wife’s side.

  “Why don’t you leave her alone with the baby?” she hissed over lunch. “It’s indecent. You’ll exhaust her. People will talk.” And still, the days passed and Iskender lay cocooned with his young family, watching the room move through the thin layer of muslin that tented them in.

  One night, after pushing another tart stew around the plate, Iskender begged Ferida for something sweet to eat before he went back to the room.

  “Only if you sit with me while I make it,” she scowled.

  Iskender laughed. He perched on a kitchen stool and raked the edges of the fire with a sis while Ferida boiled milk and broke eggs over sugar. She whistled at him and when he looked up, threw an egg in his direction.

  “A house without a door,” she chuckled as he caught it.

  “What?”

  “The egg.”

  “The egg?”

  “It’s a house without a…never mind. Agh, Iskender Miskender, go back to sleep.”

  Iskender turned the egg over in his hand watching his sister. Ferida’s movements were sure and graceful in the kitchen, her lips less pinched. She grabbed a jar of pistachios from a high shelf, shelled them, pounded them into fragments and sprinkled a handful over the dish she’d made. She tested the temperature with the back of her finger, scooped a portion onto a plate and put it on the table next to Iskender.

  He held the egg up to her like a prize. “A café,” he said grinning.

  “A café?”

  “Yes. With a garden.”

  “Now who’s talking in riddles?” Ferida flapped the dishcloth in his face. She took the egg out of his hand and cracked it on the table with a laugh.

  “Boiled. Think I trust your slippery fingers in my kitchen? So, you were saying – a café? I don’t get it.”

  “It’s not a riddle,” Iskender smirked, “it’s an answer. You love cooking. Nobody can make deserts like you. Why don’t we open a little café and sell confectionery?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Ferida said shelling the egg and popping it into her mouth in one go, “you hated the restaurant. You were terrible at it. Why would you want to start again?”

  “It’s completely different. A smaller venture – fewer outgoings. I’m surrounded by women – you all cook. We do it family style. Open it on the outskirts of town so that market people can stop in on their way from the farms. We could make a fortune.”

  Ferida stared at him. “You’ve lost your mind,” she said tapping her temple. “You’ll never find such a place.”

  The small bungalow he found was one of a series that had been abandoned along the market road close to town. They painted it white, cleared the courtyard of weeds and arranged tables and chairs around the old well in the centre. The dirt floors were stamped flat, the furniture scrubbed clean, the walls slapped with lime. For days, until they were done, inquisitive neighbours turned up with scarlet geraniums in pots, eager to look the place over. The courtyard was soon a riot of colour.

  Ferida took over the kitchen and Mertha served the customers. Thooma poured the drinks and Iskender was always there, smiling, greeting everyone with a broad grin. Their busiest days were Saturdays when whole families gathered together to gossip in the courtyard, displacing the usual knot of men who came with their tavli in hand and insisted Iskender build a shelf for their narghile so they could leave them overnight. Suddenly, in the middle of nowhere, the café had become a great place to socialise.

  “See,” Iskender told Ferida, “people pass this way all day. All we have to do is take their money.”

  Perhaps that’s where he is, Khatoun thinks, tucking her watch back into her dress. He’s ‘doing the money.’ Either that or playing chess. He should have been home hours ago. It’s a pattern, she muses. At a certain time in our lives we draw a pattern and then repeat it all our lives – a little to the left, a little to the right, but always falling, eventually, into that pattern. She bends to kiss Afrem and tucks him in. The scent of cloves from the dress has permeated her fingers. She crosses over to the chest to rinse her hands. Above the bowl of water a small hand mirror hangs from a nail by a loop of fabric. The glass has a single crack running across it, splitting her face in two. She shifts from side to side trying to marry the contours of her reflection but somehow, however she stands, one eye obliterates the other. Slowly to the left, slowly to the right and over her shoulder she spies Iskender watching from the doorway. He walks across the room with exaggerated purpose, leans against the wall and slides down it, slow as melting wax.

  “Ahhh,” he settles his back against the plaster and pats the space in front of him, “come here, my little bird.”

  Khatoun sits between his legs, her back to his chest, and bends forwards to unlace his boots. He tugs gently at her headscarf, pulls it away, unpins her hair and lets it drip down her back. She peels off his socks, takes his feet in her hands and massages the thick yellow skin around the big toe. Since they’ve been married he’s changed. Not the taste and smell of him. Not his pattern – that’s steady. It was something else.

  She’d watched him at the café with the customers. His hands always shaking when handling money. If someone mentioned the bills, he laughed and took a drink. Found it easier to wave customers to their seats, telling them to pay ‘at the end of the month’. Only the end of the month never came. He could write down numbers but not take cash. Khatoun had tested him. Handed him money to run over to the bank but he always ‘forgot’, stuffing the bag into a drawer instead. And in the evenings, the small talk around the tonir stretched later and later into the night with yet another and then another bottle. His breath was sour in the mornings and he was no good to talk to until well after lunchtime.

  And while she’d been watching, Khatoun’s hands had been busy. In the beginning, the newborn Afrem had fed voraciously, pinning Khatoun to her room. But before long, he’d become distracted by a menagerie of strange creatures that appeared fluttering above his milky head. Green worms, scarlet spiders, gossamer butterflies. Khatoun cut up all the scraps she could find and made toys for Afrem and Baby Alice. When their room was full, an arkful of stuffed pets found homes with the neighbourhood children and then, since she had needle in hand, Khatoun was so
on doing hems and alterations and just like that she was back on the Singer running up dresses and coats. Little by little, the small change grew. At the last count Khatoun realised she had taken in twice as much money than the café had, in half the amount of time. And all from her confinement in her bedroom.

  “Men are fragile,” her mother had cautioned, “they need to think they hold the world in their hand. Bury the money and pretend it’s a gift from God when the time comes.”

  Iskender is holding Khatoun close, his cheek against the slope of her neck, one hand twisting a strand of her hair as he mutters the same line over and over in English, which she doesn’t understand. The crickets sing. Gently, Khatoun pulls away and stands up in front of him.

  “I want to show you something,” she says. She drags the dress out from under the sheet by the window and shakes it out in front of her.

  Iskender nods his approval, “It’s beautiful.”

  Khatoun brings the dress over to him, letting the full skirt billow to the ground – a deep sea of shifting blues. She crouches down, slides her hand under the mattress, careful not to disturb Alice, and pulls out a cloth bag. She unties three knots and empties a rain of coins onto the dark silk. Iskender looks at it, bemused. Khatoun reaches back under the mat and brings out another bag and then another. She unties them both and empties the contents into the pile. Iskender laughs, searching her face for clues.

  “What is this?” he asks.

  “It’s…a gift from God,” Khatoun mumbles. She clears her throat, “It’s money I’ve made without thinking. Taking in sewing.”

  Iskender’s hand reaches up to his lips. “Oh,” he smiles, “I didn’t know you were…doing anything.”

  “There’s enough here to pay off our debts.”

  “Our debts?”

  “Yes. There’s enough here to pay off our debts and buy another machine.”

  “Another machine?” Iskender’s fingers search his breast pocket.

  “I could teach some young girl,” Khatoun nods. “Or Ferida could help me.”

  “Ferida?”

  “Yes. She can cut and baste. Do the ironing.”

  “But she’s busy,” Iskender says, opening up a pouch of tobacco and rolling himself a cigarette. “She works for me at the café. She’s the chef…the pâtissière.”

  Khatoun is silent. Iskender stands up with a sigh and crosses over to the window. Only he is tall enough to look out of it. He taps the unlit cigarette on the wall. Outside in the courtyard a pair of slippers shuffles across the floor. Baby Alice stirs under her quilt, her eyes opening wide, searching the room for a moment before rolling back in her head as she turns to the wall.

  Iskender fingers the polished glass on the window ledge. He blows imaginary dust off the collection then picks up a perfectly spherical aquamarine pebble and presses it into his forehead for a moment before returning it to its place. When he turns to face Khatoun his tears are already lost in his thick moustache. She crosses over to him, picks up the hem of her dress and wipes his face, offering him a corner to blow his nose on.

  “I’m your husband, not your son,” he laughs, but blows anyway.

  “It’s a bad idea,” Khatoun says, “forget it.”

  Iskender shakes his head, “No, it’s a good idea.” He pulls her in. She can hear his heart beat, his chest rumble.

  “You’re not angry?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure as an egg is round. Or oval – elliptical, actually – but as sure as an egg is an egg. It’s a good idea. I’m just…thinking about my father. What he would have said.”

  Khatoun pauses. “You won’t have to handle money again. You can just add it up. Like you were taught to. That’s what you’re best at.”

  Iskender laughs, “True. And you’ll rake it in, I know.” He clutches her tight, pressing her face into the scratchy wool of his waistcoat and clears his throat.

  “Somewhere in the world the sun is already rising. Hearts are being broken. Love is being found. The sea laps at the shore. We’re lucky if, in our lifetime, we find one thing that is constant. I pray that whatever sands the wind may lift and carry with her, she will leave you at my side.” Iskender lifts Khatoun’s chin and strokes her face where a button has imprinted into her cheek. “Take Ferida,” he says, “I’ll figure out something about the café. Maybe even a pâtissière with a smile. It is your small stitches that will keep us together.”

  Aram Bohjalian

  The Pink House, Assyrian Quarter, Ourfa, Easter 1910

  Khatoun

  The onion is surely King amongst vegetables. The luminous skin wrapped around the fleshy inner layers comes in many shapes and colours. There’s the red onion, sharp and nutty and excellent in salads. The yellow – your general kitchen helper that makes you cry the most. The fist-size onion you can crunch into like an apple, or silverskins so small they look like God’s pearls dancing in a pickling jar with coriander seed. Some onions come rainbow hued, the bulb bursting with purple, the tapered ends fading to a milky green, while others shine pure white, the delicate, papery leaves fluttering to the floor like unwritten letters. Ferida’s favourite is, of course, the simple brown; a misnomer as its golden skin glows like the sun in a perfect dawn.

  Sweat an onion in oil and it will thicken any sauce. Slice it thinly enough and it will turn into butter in the pan. Onions can be grated, sliced, stuffed, preserved or eaten raw to bring in mother’s milk and purify the blood. Cut one in half and place it in a dish, the wound exposed, and it will suck up bad smells. Wrap a grilled onion to your chest while you sleep and it will loosen your phlegm. Bound to the soles of your feet for flu? Nothing better. An onion should be firm on the outside but yield to your wishes when cut. It’s important to select wisely, to discern what may lie under the glossy exterior. Imperceptible soft patches on the surface will reveal black mold under the fragile skin, rendering the onion unfit for consumption. An onion, like most things, can lie.

  Khatoun leans forward and plucks a feather from the onion hanging in the fireplace. The onion spins on its thread for a moment then swings like a pendulum. A single feather remains impaled in the flesh next to six pinpricks from which the feathers have already been plucked. One a week since Lent began. Next week, the last feather will go and it will be Easter with Mass, a string of visitors and egg fights in the church square (some dyed, naturally, with the skin of an onion). Khatoun sniffs the tip of the feather she’s plucked, wipes it on her skirt and sticks it in her hair. She takes the sis and turns the coals over in the grate to release their heat. A warm eddy spins the suspended golden orb once more, the skin reflecting the glow of fire like a miniature planet.

  Suddenly, the door behind Khatoun opens and a tower of laundry enters, collapses and hits the floor. Khatoun startles and the coals tumble and spit in the grate.

  “Agh!” Serpuhi tuts, standing over the pile. “Oh, sorry…Digin Khatoun, I didn’t see you.” The young girl holds the door open with one foot and hops in after the clothes, the remaining laundry in her arms. “I thought everyone was asleep.”

  “Me too. You surprised me. Come. Bring a chair, sit and we’ll fold together.”

  Serpuhi gathers up the scattered clothes and drags a stool next to the fire. Flap, fold. Fold, pick. She pulls the pile of clothes apart nervously, her fingers worrying at countless imaginary specs until Khatoun reaches out and stops her scraping a shirt collar raw with her fingernail.

  “It’s only a little dirt,” she says, her voice dropping to a whisper, “I promise not to tell Ferida.”

  They fold and stack the clothes into neat piles on a sheet covering the floor. Dresses to the right, breeches in the middle, diapers all over.

  Flap, fold. Fold, smooth. Serpuhi’s slipper jiggling on her foot.

  She wears the same blue and white checked smock that saw her through her last three years at the Protestant Orphanage. Still buttoned up to the neck, the white collar framing her delicate features, only now the dress
is held in at the waist by a sash and no longer skimming her ankles. Her unruly hair is tamed into a simple braid and she wears small gold studs in her ears, a legacy of her mother’s along with her startling blue eyes.

  “She must have been beautiful, your mother” Khatoun says, watching the young girl work by the light of the fire.

  “I have a photograph.” Serpuhi draws a crease down the edge of a napkin with her thumb and adds it to the pile. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  She’s one of the new girls; been living with Khatoun’s family for a month now, creeping around the house like a wraith and getting under Ferida’s feet.

  “Like an English tea-cup,” Ferida had complained after the first week. “One day she’ll shatter, mark my words. She needs bone-marrow soup to ground her!”

  Khatoun hands Serpuhi more diapers. “Do you remember her?” she asks. “Your mother. Or your father? Do you have any memories of him?”

  “No.” Serpuhi’s hands are busy with the flannel squares. Flap, fold, fold, smooth. The tangle of sleeves, bibs and hems is quietly tamed. The coals in the grate crumble and Iskender’s clock laboriously begins to strike the hour across the other side of the house.

  “Well,” Khatoun says, patting the last vest on top of her pile, “it’s getting late. You must be exhausted. Leave the laundry now and go to bed. Everyone else is already tucked in.”

  Flap, fold. “Except for you.”

  Khatoun laughs. She stands and reaches for the sis. “This is my time. The house is quiet and I can think without people tugging at my skirts. This is when I get to be myself.”