The Seamstress of Ourfa

by Victoria Harwood Butler-Sloss

She feeds the fire, burying fresh coals under the embers. The distant clock finishes the hour but Serpuhi makes no move to leave.

  “Easter next week,” Khatoun says, nodding at the twirling onion in front of her.

  “Hm,” Serpuhi shrugs. Flap, fold, fold, smooth. Eyes intent on her lap. “I hate Easter.”

  “You hate Easter?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s an interesting thing to hate.” Khatoun sits down again and waits.

  Flap, fold. Fold, flap.

  “They gave me an egg.” Serpuhi’s hands are still now. “A red egg. It was Easter. Easter, eighteen hundred and ninety-six.” She looks up at Khatoun. “I was two years old and I don’t remember much. But I do remember the egg. And the cold. The rest is mixed up. Things I remember, dreams, bits I’ve heard from people over the years.”

  “The nature of all stories.”

  “I definitely remember the cold,” Serpuhi’s fingers pick at bits of fluff stuck to her dress, “and his smell. Wood. He was a carpenter, my father. Strong. Quick. Like the fire, they said. And my mother; she was the wind that fanned his flames. Yes, she was beautiful. They say her eyes were bought from a merchant on the Silk Road. Lapis, was the colour. We lived in Zeitoun, friends with our Turkish neighbours and then suddenly not. How does that happen, Digin Khatoun? One day you love each other, the next, you’re enemies. Infidel, they called us. Giavour.”

  “Yes,” Khatoun nods, “giavour. That’s what we are to them.”

  “And my father went to the mountains with the others, the Hunchaks, so that if trouble came, they could defend the town,” Serpuhi sighs. “And it did come. First the villages burnt to the ground. Then our town. It went on for months, and in the end the Six Powers intervened. The Europeans. And in the amnesty the Turks said that if the leaders of the ‘uprising’ went into exile, the ordinary people would be left in peace. But that didn’t happen. Not for my family, anyway. They wanted ‘the Hunchak, the troublemaking giavour.’ So they came to our home looking for my father.

  My mother threw the washing over me, still damp. There was a gap and I could see. They pushed past her, took my brother from the crib by his foot and swung him against the wall. He never made a sound. Nothing. Then, small bangs, click, click, click, click, like that. Her eyes. Her heart. Her head. Her belly. My mother fell down and was quiet. There was blood everywhere. All over our just cleaned clothes. I stayed where I was. Quiet. My father never returned. It was Armagan Hanum, the Turkish neighbour who found me and cleaned up the mess. My mother’s friend. She already had seven of her own and she couldn’t keep me so she sent me to Marash, to the Protestant Orphanage. It was Easter. Eighteen ninety-six. I was two years old and when I arrived they gave me a red egg and straight away, a boy with no hair smashed it. I lived there ten years and they taught me to sew. My handwork was good so they found me a place with Digin Aghavni and she sent me here. The rest you know.” Serpuhi’s fingers pick at the long thread of lint she has rolled out on her dress. She looks up at Khatoun. “I like it here,” she says. “Next time, I don’t want to see anything.”

  “Next time?”

  “Yes. There’s always a next time. Each time they tell us it’s over, they lie. Look at last year. Half of Cilicia burned to the ground. Adana ruined. The schools, missions, churches. And all the people who took refuge, gone in the flames. Why would they do that? Why would they run to a place like a church for safety when they know the Turks will burn the place down?”

  “Perhaps they think the church is safe. They have faith.”

  “That’s not faith; it’s stupidity. To the people that don’t have faith, it’s just a building. What do they care if they burn it? Anyway, it’s because of our faith that we’re persecuted.”

  Khatoun thinks for a while before answering. “Yes,” she nods. “Faith, like everything, has its shadow. Darkness has light. Heat, cold. Summer is followed by winter. But it’s the winter rains that give life to everything we grow the following year. It’s not a straight line – it goes round in a circle and you have to reach the bottom before you can go up again – like a water wheel. Empty, full, empty, full – it has to go under before it can go up again, full. Like you. You are incredibly fortunate. Blessed, in fact.”

  “Blessed?” Serpuhi is stunned.

  “Yes. Not many people can say their mother gave them the gift of life twice. Once, the day you were born and again the day she died.”

  Serpuhi stares at Khatoun, her face incredulous for a moment and then she erupts into laughter. “They told me about you. They said ‘Digin Agha Boghos says very little and what she says comes from another place.’”

  “They said that about me? Another place?” Khatoun chuckles and draws a circle in the ashes with the sis. “Who said? I didn’t know I was interesting enough to be the subject of gossip.” The onion swings lopsidedly, its white feather pulling it to one side.

  “No, hanum, not gossip, just talk.”

  “Of course.” Khatoun pokes the ash. “There’s a difference?”

  Through their laughter, neither of them hears the door crack open and someone slide in behind them.

  “Serpuhi!” Ferida snaps, the grey shape peeling away from her knees and padding over to Khatoun for a pat. “What are you doing here? Get to bed, now!” She heads over to the fireplace, her hair plastered to her skull, and Serpuhi flees the room leaving the laundry behind. Grundug yawns, turns a little circle at Khatoun’s feet and settles down on the sheet next to the clean clothes.

  “Stupid girl,” Ferida says, nudging the piles of washing with her foot. “Look at how this has been folded! I’ll have to do it all over again in the morning. And what are you doing? Hanging about like a kitchen-maid. Don’t you need your sleep with three children and a husband to look after? Oosht! Off to bed!”

  Khatoun stands up and stretches. “Ferida, Ferida, Ferida,” she sighs, “I was having my first conversation with Serpuhi and now you’ve frightened the life out of her. The way you treat her, she will shatter like a tea-cup!”

  “The way I…? Barab glir! She has the balls of an ox that girl. This house is too full of girls and if you give one of them special treatment they’ll all take advantage. You’re the one that should keep them in line – not chit-chat-chit-chat with them till the sun comes up.”

  “Feed them carrots, you breed donkeys.”

  “Let them eat our seed and lay their eggs in another barn. Then you’ll see.”

  “Not these girls. They’re family now.”

  “Yes, one big happy family. The girls? Pah! You didn’t have enough of your own, you had to add half a dozen orphans? Lie down like a carpet and the whole world will walk over you.” Ferida bends down, hissing like an old boiler. “Go on, go to bed. Take my lamp – I’m half blind anyway. Grundug can show me the way. Go.” She starts transferring laundry to the tabletop, tut-tutting the whole time. She bends down for more, kicks a coal into the grate and notices the onion.

  “There’s only one feather!” she cries, casting around to see if the other one has fallen. “When I left it there were two. Someone has taken the feather out. That’s my job. I count the feathers till Easter! This is going to confuse all my calculations.” She whips around irritably but apart from Grundug, the room is empty, the door clicking shut.

  Khatoun takes two steps along the corridor and stops. Asdvadz! She’s forgotten the lamp. Never mind, she can make her way. There’s enough light spilling in through the windows to light up the corridor. Angular chunks of moon splash across the tiled floor that runs alongside the enclosed courtyard. Khatoun stops at the French doors, looking across the damp flagstones. The patio is filled with ferns that thrive in the shade, elegantly grouped around the stone fountain that sends rainbows dancing across the wall at a certain hour each day. Right now it is dark except for a thin strip of light flickering under a door on the opposite side. The girls must still be awake, sitting up in bed, giggling and telling stories. Probably deciding which poor boy to torture this week. Sh
e’ll have to watch them in church tomorrow. Her girls. Poor Ferida.

  “You’re not a matchmaker!” she can hear her say. “They’re girls you’ve hired to help you. That’s what they are supposed to do – help you. It’s enough that you provide for them without encouraging their frivolity. Anyway, God chooses spinsters to do his work. If everyone got married who would take care of the chores?”

  Khatoun stands watching the moonlight play across the courtyard. Ferida’s right, of course. All people on earth have their own path. Everything we do has been done before, but each time it’s different. Like having a child. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world, giving birth, and yet each time, each baby born, is a miracle. How can a single act of love curl flesh into shell-like ears that hear, open eyes that see and beat a heart that is inhabited by a soul? How many lives are being created right now, as she stands here? And how many are on the way out?

  ‘Only two things we can be sure of in life. One, we’re born. Two, we die.’ That’s Seyda’s voice in Khatoun’s head now.

  And still, even though our lives share the same bookends, every story in the world is different. Like a river splitting, joining, sinking into sand. Even if people go through the same experience collectively, each person will have a different story to tell. A hundred men herded together and shot – each one will have a different death from his neighbour’s, and yet, in the reporting, it would just be another hundred men herded together and shot.

  A hundred men herded together and shot. Khatoun presses her forehead against the cool glass and closes her eyes. These days it was not unusual for women to lose all the men in their family – father, brother, husband, son – in the same sharp moment. They seemed to have come full circle.

  For as far back as she can remember, it’s been the same. Harmony. Massacre. Uprising. Reprisal. Repeat. Just two years ago, in the summer of nineteen hundred and eight, Armenians had taken to the streets with their Turkish brothers to celebrate the downfall of the Red Sultan, Abdul Hamid, liberté, égalité, fraternité! The caliphate was dead, the constitution restored. The Young Turks were in power. The bloody days of massacre and uncertainty that had orphaned thousands like Serpuhi over the years were supposedly over. They were friends now, facing a new, democratic Turkey together, their past ‘differences’ forgotten, and then…

  Khatoun opens her eyes. No more strip of light under the door. The girls will be whispering those boys’ names into their pillows. Boys that will most likely ‘disappear’ one day.

  “Next time,” Serpuhi had said. How many nights had Khatoun lain awake herself, imagining her sons dragged away under the pretext of something or other, never to be heard of again? Call out a man’s name in the dark of night. It could be pleasure, it could be pain. Hate turns its ugly head towards men, but it is women who get stung by the tail.

  And how strange this house would be without men. Her sons; one still on the breast, the other already learning to read on Grandpapa’s lap. Grandpapa Thooma, her father; interested only in politics these days and smoking hashish and talking nonsense. And Iskender, her husband who smiles, who nods, who uses his hands, but whose words to her have all but disappeared. He drinks more and has a smoker’s cough and their lives, although spent together under one roof, are simply like phantoms that inhabit the same air. And yet…if his presence were gone, how empty this house would be.

  She remembers the night Iskender held her in his arms and she watched him cry for the first time. Back then she’d thought it was wounded pride that had made him weep, only now she wonders if they could have been tears of relief.

  It had taken months to close down their café with its pretty, walled garden. Each week they told their customers that the following Saturday would be their last. But somehow the warm weather dragged on, and it wasn’t until the chill air of winter made sitting in the courtyard uncomfortable, that the customers had drifted away, leaving the hard-core whisky crew to their backgammon until a heavy snowstorm in March stranded even them at home. The shutters finally came down in April. The yard was swept clean, the potted geraniums replanted and the order for ice blocks cancelled.

  Iskender paid off their loan and with the small amount of capital left, sent Khatoun to stock up on fabric and buy a second machine. He made Ferida go with her, telling her to stay ‘practical’ and not let his wife come home with armfuls of exotic stuff. Khatoun, of course, had other ideas.

  “Why make day dresses for little profit?” she’d argued. “Everyone can sew those. I want to get the stuff people dream of and turn it into reality.” And so, despite Ferida’s vigilant stance under the shelves of striped cotton, they came back with armfuls of shimmering tissue and jewel-coloured silks.

  She started with wedding gowns and was soon dressing whole families of guests, who trooped over to the house for fittings en-masse, filling the small courtyard with filthy jokes and cigarette butts. The news spread and before long, a never-ending stream of ornate wagons arrived to spirit her into town. Khatoun spent long days behind the fine grille-work of the women’s quarters in Ourfa, entertaining the Pasha’s wives with her designs. She’d return late at night, reeking of perfume, her head full of stories, her arms full of gifts.

  It was Digin Aghavni, her old sewing teacher, who’d suggested she take on ‘some of the poor misfortunates from the Protestant Orphanage’ to help.

  “Feed them and put a roof over their heads while you train them. When they start to sew for you, give them a small commission. And don’t be too soft; you’ll already be giving them family and that is priceless.”

  Lolig was the first to come. A chubby teenager with cheeks like ripe tomatoes. She worked hard, finished early and spent the afternoons playing with Baby Alice and Afrem. She had an uncanny way with babies and was the first to notice when Khatoun fell pregnant for the third time, presenting her with a little red hat she’d crocheted before the news was officially out. With Lolig in the house Ferida happily dropped sewing (“My poor stabbed fingers! Kaknem!”) and returned to the kitchen, shooing Khatoun’s customers away from her swept floors.

  Iskender, with no café to distract him, retreated into the background behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. It suited him to stay at home surrounded by books, occasionally poring over the accounts. He was proud of his wife. There was something about the way she cut fabric, allowing it to breathe and settle around the body like a caress. If love was needed, it was stitched tight into the bodice. If happiness was missing, a giggle could be slipped into a soft gossamer décolletage.

  Before long, Khatoun had exhausted the fabric stalls in the Gumrik Khan in Ourfa and had to take to the road, travelling to Aleppo or Damascus (and once as far as Haifa) to find materials for her voracious customers. Iskender stayed cloistered at home during these trips. He hadn’t the stomach for travel any more and so he hired Khatoun a bodyguard with his own mule, instead.

  No one knew exactly where Bulbul came from, he spoke so many languages. Khatoun once saw him converse with an old nomad woman who had no ears, using his hands the same way she did. Bulbul was as tall as Iskender but filled his height out with weight. He had the barrel chest of an athlete and lean muscular hips. Dark skin, black eyes. Quick in movement, slow to anger. Bulbul never spoke about family and since no one knew if he’d ever been married, a certain amount of evil gossip followed him everywhere, which he gracefully refused to acknowledge.

  As time passed, Khatoun’s clientele grew so numerous, the walls of her parent’s compound were hard pressed to contain them. Ferida was sick of the constant traffic and claimed the disruptions were ruining her cooking. With fabrics taking over the storage space and buttons landing in the soup, the talk of moving dominated the fireplace each night but was somehow always forgotten in the whirlwind of activity the next day. Khatoun’s roots were in this little place with its clear mornings and hazy afternoons and so life continued as normal, in a jumble of people and sewing and food, for several years until the spring of last year. Nineteen-oh-nine.


  It was heading towards Easter. First the migrating birds began to sing wrong – their songs high and brittle. Then the storks got confused about their nests, many of which had been thrown from the rooftops in a recent effort by the municipality to clean up the skyline. As Easter approached so did an ominous air. People began to have bad dreams and the market place slowly turned hostile.

  The Young Turks, their ‘brothers’ they had fought side by side with to restore the constitution barely a year earlier, had split into two factions. Both believed that all Ottoman subjects were equal under the new constitution. But only one faction, the Modernists, considered the minorities subjects; the Armenians, the Assyrians, the Kurds, the Greeks, the Jews – all the peoples that had populated this land for generations.

  The other faction did not. Headed by the ultranationalist triumvirate of Enver, Talaat and Jemal, the party jockeyed for, and then took control.

  “Turkey for the Turks,” they called. The chant began, spread like fire and soon the whole country sang it.

  “Türk için Türkiye! Türk için Türkiye!”

  The killing began in Adana at the end of March. In one short month, twenty-five thousand Armenians were killed by blood-crazed mobs that swept through Cilicia in a wave. In nearby Mersin harbour, the warships of seven nations watched the massacres from sea but did nothing to help. The newly formed government turned a blind eye; took no steps to stop the killing and claimed no responsibility. And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it was over and life went back to the same as before.

  Neighbours continued to do business with each other, people said hello, but friendships had stretched thin and it was impossible to tell what lay beneath the surface of a smile. It was no longer safe to travel and Bulbul took a leave of absence, promising Khatoun that Iskender knew where to find him if he were ever needed again. Her travels abroad curtailed, Khatoun decided it was finally time to pay a visit to her old friend, Aram Bohjalian.