Some of the villagers, who had not yet recovered from the mobilization and hated the godless with a passion, holding them responsible for their personal losses, wanted to take revenge on the unhappy people who, trying to save their own lives, were travelling through hostile territory. Some of the elders, some of the pious in the village, tried to temper their aversion and loathing, hoping to prevent them from taking irreparable action. But there were men who ignored their advice and set off in pursuit of the caravan.
They caught up with the group near the rock, and committed the unforgivable. A dozen of those seen as godless succumbed to their blows. They piled the bodies inside the rock, which has since kept their name alive. The others escaped to the plain. But the plain offered no safety; it meant losing the protection offered by the mountain, being exposed to view, defenceless, with no refuge. Their losses multiplied, said the blind uncle. The caravan of the godless moved onto the plain, but the news that came back to the village about those trying to cross it to reach the south told of more and more rapes, plundering, and killings. Caravans were decimated, men, children, and old people were tossed into rivers that swept them to the south they were desperately trying to reach – not to the south they wanted, from which they could continue on toward more welcoming horizons, but rather to an ultimate south, with no elsewhere and no return. They tossed into the rivers those they had no use for and kept the women and young girls, with whom they would forge a new lineage, said the blind uncle, who saw this procession anew behind his closed eyelids. He who kept track of all events, large and small, in the territory and its surroundings was, along with his own uncle, one of the two men in the village who had never served in the army. His uncle was the sole deserter.
In horror and cruelty, man can outdo animal; he can become worse, said the grownups, who as children had lived through these horrors or had heard the stories. Man has a sense of his destiny, but often errs in the means to its accomplishment. Man cannot raise himself up and achieve greatness at the expense of those who are making the same journey and facing the same hardships, the grownups told us.
But men had forgotten this episode, it was erased from their memory. The Rock of the Godless, alone, still held the secret of their death throes through the testimony of the blind uncle. Those Christians of the East who should have been our fellows had paid with their lives for their passage to the south at a dark moment in history. Those who approached the rock no longer knew what it exhaled, whether it was our childhood fears merged with its shapes, or the odour of the dead permeating the rock’s flesh.
The Cavern of the South faced the Rock of the Godless. It must have borne witness to those death throes and decay, whose exhalations, reeking of decomposition, still clung to its cool and humid depths. From close by or from afar, it terrified us with its opening shaped like a wolf. It was a fear that endured, even when we found the courage to slip into its den, half-believing that a wild beast was going to appear and pounce on us. Outside, we were fearful that a wolf would emerge from its gaping maw. It faced our vineyard, which explains our visits, frequent but fleeting, given the terror it inspired. At the same time, it was a kind of revenge we took on our fear. We emerged more proud of ourselves than when we had ventured in.
The Cavern of the North looked down on this small world. It was carved into a high, forbidding cliff that led to a terrace on Mount Kêmêl, this mountain that reigned, benevolent, over its surroundings. The cavern opened majestically into the smooth wall. Those who walked along the cliff face and ventured a look inside saw the blackness that made it appear as though it went on forever. Within, it was brighter and more welcoming. But we were frightened to death by the idea of drinking from, or even coming close to its spring, which seemed to us like a dragon lurking in depths that remained dark despite the ambient light, and whose vague contours only intensified their mystery. They were frequented by local pigeons and doves that attracted serpents and dragons, we were told. They also attracted amateur hunters who, little inclined to go in search of real game, were happy with these relatively abundant fowl, and were roundly mocked by the real hunters, who would never, even as a consolation prize, have fired on these doves and pigeons, considered close to man, and thus to be respected and protected.
The cavern and its surroundings served as an autumnal resting place for our herds of goats, which left their summer quarters toward the end of the harvest, and began a new year with new shepherds or with those prepared to take on another seasonal round. The herd’s new year began in the areas around this cavern, which offered shelter from the harsh weather, and where enclosures were set up, to be shared by the two parts of the village.
Like the springs that were spread around the village in three directions, encircling it and becoming the lairs of djinns, dragons, and monsters thanks to the grownups’ tales, these rocks and caverns surrounded our village and became, depending on the circumstances, hideaways where our hopes could prosper, or fountainheads for our fears.
Fears are a bit like fog, as are memories. On the one hand, one dreads to go forward and plunge into a future without end, and on the other, one is afraid to retreat into the past and lose oneself in a plethora of events and tales. I often visited the centre of the village where my paternal uncles and aunts lived, where there were more children of my age, and more games. Living outside the village did not make relationships or games any easier. The Red Rock, where the children – and even the grownups – gathered, was at the village centre. A half-crossing was easier than a complete crossing, or an escape into the unknown world of trees and fields. And even if one felt a bit foreign, the adventure was simpler in the centre of the village. And so from time to time we made the effort and took ourselves into the village for some relief from our marginal solitude and from those confrontations with the unknown that were a constant concern near where we lived.
These forays were for a long time restricted to the vicinity of the Red Rock and the school. I didn’t dare go any farther into the village.
When I think back on these places, my only distinct memory is of a half-crossing that went from the middle of the village toward the extreme west. It had been given me as an assignment. I was to deliver a message from a paternal cousin to a maternal cousin, older than me by twelve and fifteen years, both of whom had reputations as smugglers. The paternal cousin, who had lived with us for almost a year with his young wife, had just finished building their house, and had just had a new daughter. As a good cousin, I was preparing for the future by hovering about him, when he noticed me and gave me the message. He too already saw me as a son-in-law. And his confidence in me in this situation was that of a father-in-law in his son-in-law, that of an almost-father to his almost-son. He had to introduce me to the intricacies of this vocation, starting by giving me little assignments. Of course, it was the daughter, my promised one from the cradle, who interested me, and that did not necessarily make me a good messenger. In the first place, I had not understood the message, which involved arrivals, departures, the names of gentlemen which conjured the galloping of horses through dark nights, the names of distant villages that I couldn’t remember. In addition to that, what with my confusion and fear in making the crossing, I garbled the message on my arrival, and was not able to deliver it. The reproach was not long in coming – a reproach without consequence, but one that nevertheless left me with the bitter taste of something at which I had failed.
One of these expeditions involved the schoolmaster who had just set up shop in the centre of the village. It was his second year.
Before that there had been no school, no schoolmaster in the village. And no relationship with the written word whatsoever. The women might have had no experience with printed matter during their lifetimes, other than a few inscriptions on packaging. The men sometimes came into contact with it during their military service or when they went into town, without being able to understand how these marks on paper like those of ants or insects could be read and could pass on what one wanted to
say. How, from these black flecks, could one derive sounds and words? But everyone knew about the existence of books, where, the grownups said, you could find the essence of all that existed on earth. And for this reason, everyone had deep respect for what was written, especially if it was in the Arabic alphabet. We saw women, in particular, kiss the wrappings of cigarette papers that smugglers brought back, whose inscriptions were in Arabic, and lift them to their foreheads as a sign of respect, hiding them out of reach, preserved and clean. When they were reminded that this was only packaging, and that what was written did not even concern food but cigarettes, they replied that if they waited to learn what was written before showing respect, it might then be too late. And it is true that nowhere in the region could anyone be found who was able to decipher such inscriptions. Because to read Arabic did not mean you understood it. Some had learned to read a text, a book, but not texts and books, and even less to comprehend them. In most cases they had learned the alphabet without learning the language, without learning to write. And those who succeeded in reading the text of a sacred book were rarer than the fingers on one hand.
But this absence of dealings with letters did not mean there was no interest in what had been set down in these writings. Everyone tried to learn some fragments of the sacred book by heart. Fragments that, when those who knew a little taught them to those who did not know them, were altered from mouth to mouth and took on the colourings of our different regions. Everyone used these verses for prayers and invocations. They drew on their verses in times of trouble, when they were fearful or joyful, in poverty or wealth, in famine or abundance. The verses on their tongues took the place of angry insults, cries of desperation, or the murmurings of hope and happiness.
When the harvests were good, the villagers sometimes found money for a man literate enough to lead the prayers during Ramadan, the month of fasting, and to make them more acquainted with what was in the Book. One of these itinerant masters was asked to settle in the village and he spent three years there with his wife and children. While the children in the village were being introduced to the letters of an alphabet, the grownups grappled as best they could with the verses they had learned by heart.
The master showed the Book to the children, who for the most part had never seen it. A book preserved in a case, itself protected by a cloth. He told them that the Book was divided into suras, the suras into verses, the verses into words. And the words were made up of letters that formed the alphabet. He brought out a booklet and showed them the first page. They saw the different shapes that covered it. It was the alphabet and it was different from the page of a book.
And so they set about learning the alphabet, whose first letter resembled a reed, the second a waxing moon, the fifth a rounded belly with a flattened head on top, the eighth a jaw, the tenth a goat’s horn, the twelfth a trident, the fourteenth a lamb’s ear, the sixteenth a broom with a handle, the eighteenth an open mouth, the twentieth a curve with an eye, the twenty-second a cliff upright on its base with a head hanging in the air, the twenty-third a hook, the twenty-fourth a hammer, the twenty-fifth a shepherd’s bowl, the twenty-eighth the space between the index and the middle finger. And the twenty-ninth was something wavy. Letters that resembled each other were differentiated by dots above and below. The boys and some of the girls in the village spent time with this alphabet during the three years the master was present, and began to read the sacred book. They even travelled with the master to the surrounding villages, reciting, at each stop, fragments and prayers they had learned by heart, sharing them with those nearby, encouraging the children in the villages to do the same, and even more. Because you had to nurture a desire for the good, the grownups told us.
After three years the master had to leave our village for another in the plain where he had vague family connections, and except for two, the children bit by bit forgot what they had learned, even the alphabet. The parenthesis was closed, and the village was once again without a master and without letters.
Seven years later things took a more serious turn. The State, which until then had been more associated with memories of war, military service, and police presence, wanted to present itself differently, and sent a teacher to the village. He came with his wife and two children before a school was built, and installed his family along with the school in an abandoned house below the Red Rock. He taught children from five to twelve years of age in the same class. He divided the class in two: one group in the morning, another in the afternoon. The parents went into town to order school clothes for their children: a black shirt and pants for the boys, a black dress for the girls, a white collar in both cases, plain for the boys, embroidered for the girls. A new species emerged in the village, an object of curiosity for the villagers, for the little ones not yet enrolled, and for the grownups because they weren’t the right age. Curiosity leads to spectators. The school and its master gave the villagers a new pretext to visit the village centre – to peer through the windows at the pupils seated at their desks, reciting and writing under the watchful eye of the teacher.
Two of my brothers were enrolled. The eldest had already left the village. He knew how to read and write both the Arabic and Latin alphabets. I saw him rarely. He had become a legend to me. My father, one of the two literate people in the village who spoke Turkish, had learned the alphabet from a villager who himself had learned to read and write in Turkish during his military service, and had been accidentally killed by a bullet during a wedding celebration on the roof terrace of my grandfather’s house. My uncles were accused of murder. Fortunately there were witnesses, and the adolescent who had shot the gun by mistake was caught. My father was literate, my two brothers went to school, and the older one knew how to read and write. That put me in a good position for learning things at school. And, something rare in a Kurdish village, at the age of about four I knew how to count up to fifty in Turkish. The teacher, who didn’t speak a word of Kurdish but was on very good terms with the village, could not have been indifferent to that.
It was my father who sent me. He told me to ask the teacher if he could let my brother leave early. He made me repeat several times the words I should say. I found the teacher sitting on a chair in front of the house that served as the school. It was recess, and the pupils were outside. I went up to him and recited my sentence in Turkish. He took me in his arms, stroked my hair, and asked me if I wanted to attend the school the following year. I answered: yes. Meanwhile, my father had left his work and followed me, in case I wasn’t able to repeat his request. He smiled when he saw me talking with the teacher. The teacher told him I spoke Turkish well, and that I should start school when it reconvened. My father agreed. We left with my brother, who had to take the blade my father used for cutting tobacco to the blacksmith in a rather distant village.
The next year I began school. The village was still bubbling with the activity of the grape harvest. All around, fires were being stoked to transform grape juice into food for winter. As was the case every year, five to seven families had grouped together and were making the rounds of the vineyards with large baskets for the grape picking. The beasts of burden went back and forth between the village and the vineyards with the baskets and children on their backs, taking advantage of the moments when they were not being watched to treat themselves to mouthfuls of the grapes they rarely had within their reach. The grape harvest was the year’s last time of abundance, and everyone, both people and animals, wanted to live it to the full. Because afterward came the cold; and life became leaner. It was also the time when the children, largely freed from their tasks in the fields and with the animals, were able to start school.
And so began the time of my workaday crossings along with my brothers, my scholarly crossings, which linked the two ends of the village with no pause in between, from our house in the east to the school, which was no longer in the centre of the village but now in its own building in the west.
As soon as the teacher arrived, the construction of the sch
ool building had begun. A construction that arrived from elsewhere. With materials whose transport was preceded by clouds of dust, deafening noises such as we had never heard, and enormous machines that shifted earth and rocks with an ease that would have been beyond the capacity of the fiercest monsters of our tales and nightmares. In fact, to bring in the building materials and open the village to the world, a road had first to be built. The teacher had done as the villagers did, passing through the narrow passage on the west to enter the village. But the school could not take the same route. It could not be built with what was available in the village. It came from outside and its intrusion would not be without consequence. While the teacher was working in a house in the village, he was part of the village, and shared in its strengths and weaknesses. The school could not continue to be surrounded by all this activity for fear of being overwhelmed; it had to be moved from the centre to a location outside the village, its structure brought in from elsewhere. And for the move, a road was needed, not a passage.
After the explosive charges and the bulldozers, the passage had to be widened for vehicles to pass – so much more impressive than our donkeys, with or without loads. Strange machines, operated by men who seemed just as strange, led the way into the village. They were closely followed by trucks that transported what was needed for building the school-house: piles of bags of cement, stone, wood, and also tools foreign to the village. The din from the machines filled the air all around. For a time the village children’s favourite game was to scurry to the tops of the mountains on the southwest as soon as a vehicle, especially a light one, arrived in the village, and to wait for it to leave so that they could watch it roll away, raising plumes of dust, and disappearing on the roads through the plain leading to the distant city.
To the Spring, by Night Page 16
