Dear Shameless Death E-Book

Latife Tekin

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A strange magical story of a young girl growing up in modern Turkey, from her birth in a small rural village haunted by fairies and demons to hertraumatic move to the big city. It concentrates on the daughter's struggle gainst her overbearing mother and is both fantastic and hallucinatory.

Leseprobe

DEAR SHAMELESS DEATH

Latife Tekin

Translated from the Turkish by Saliha Paker & Mel Kenne

Introduction by Saliha Paker

MARION BOYARSLONDON • NEW YORK

In memory of my mother

This book has been published with financial assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain

Contents

Title PageDedicationIntroductionHuvat Aktas travelled for a whole day and a night,‘Is the boat moving or not?’Translators’ AcknowledgementsPublishers’ AcknowledgementsCopyright

INTRODUCTION

BY SALIHA PAKER

Latife Tekin was twenty-three when she decided to write what she described as ‘a razzle-dazzle novel, a book full of sound and shimmering light, whichever way you looked at it’.1 She had finished high school, was married and had a son. The military coup of 1980 had put an end to all activism, so she devoted herself entirely to her book. When Tekin announced to her family that she would be writing a novel about her village, her father made her write down all the fairy tales, folk epics, games and türküs (folk songs) that he knew. Her elder brother organized a gathering of fellow villagers, now migrants in Istanbul, who had known Latife from childhood and were ready to offer their contribution to a ‘collective novel’. Each man was appointed to give an account of his recollections of the village. But Latife had to remind them first of the painful experience of separation from the village she could never forget, and of the suffering they had all endured in the city. ‘Everyone was silent, their eyes cast down. Finally a very old man addressed me formally and respectfully and began his tale. I listened to incredible stories of poverty and thieving. The most striking account concerning djinns and fairies was about Sarıkız. I dreamt of her that night,’ explained Latife Tekin in a piece she wrote in 1984.2 Sarıkız, the fair-haired witch, would appear in an early section of DearShamelessDeath riding naked on the back of a donkey, terrorizing the villagers at night.

Every culture has its mysteries, ones that are elusive, sometimes impossible to define to outsiders. However, a work of fiction can, in an unexpectedly imaginative manner, find its way into a culture, into indigenous resources, and draw readers into its own universe where mysteries are part of life, no matter how different or alien that culture may be. Latife Tekin’s DearShamelessDeath was recognized as such a work of fiction by a Turkish readership that was at once captivated and mystified by the novel when it was first published in 1983.

Latife Tekin was no doubt aware of how strange her own fictional world would appear in the eyes of the ‘enlightened’ urban Turkish reader, wary of magic and superstition. Yet when she wrote the statement for the back cover of the first edition of SevgiliArsızÖlüm, published by Adam Yayınları, she mentioned her acquaintance with djinns in the same breath, and in the same factual manner, as her place of birth, her early schooling and her family. By introducing djinns among her autobiographical facts, she was calling upon the reader not simply to connect life with fiction but also reality with magic. Her telling statement, never reproduced in any of the subsequent editions of the book, which was an instant bestseller, will be remembered as Latife Tekin’s very first comments on her début as a writer:

‘I was born in 1957 in the village of Karacafenk, near the town of Bünyan in the province of Kayseri. I started school as soon as I learnt to walk. The school was the men’s lounge in our house. I learnt to read and write as I played with the djinns under the divans. Djinns and fairies used to live under the divans in Karacafenk. I spent my childhood among them, secretly joining their community. I went to see their homes, their weddings and learnt their language, their day games and night games. My father used to work in Istanbul. I forget now who told me that my mother was a strange woman with a broken heart. She was literate, she knew how to sew, give injections and speak Kurdish and Arabic. She used to enquire from the gypsies that came to the village about places and people unknown to me. Her searchings for her past were the first pains that touched my childhood. My father used to come back from Istanbul with sacks full of money and gather the villagers around him. There were strange gadgets, magic metals in and around our home: a clock, a radio, a gramophone, a big blue bus, a harvester, a water pump, a truck and a tractor. I didn’t really know what they were for.

‘In 1966 I came to live in Istanbul. It felt like a sharp pain that split up my childhood. Unfulfilled dreams tore apart the people that I grew up with. My father quickly became working-class, then gradually fell into unemployment. Three brothers worked on construction sites. I finished high school, slipping away like a trembling shadow from seven brothers and sisters. I paid the price of going to school in fear and loneliness, subjected to a thousand denials and pressures and buffeted unimaginably. I fought hard to keep up with the city and was bruised all over. During my struggles I fell apart from those that I grew up with. But I resisted so that I wouldn’t lose my own values, my language and the constant and passionate love that those people bore for me. This book is the reward for my resistance, from the people I grew up with. As for the narrative, I wish I had broken it up and written it sooner, and more breathlessly.’

In 1950, seven years before Latife Tekin was born, a school teacher by the name of Mahmut Makal published BizimKöy (OurVillage), a narrative account of his village in Niǧde. It was an unassuming piece, but the first of its kind to attract immediate attention to the hardships of rural life in Turkey.

Many years before, in 1932, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoǧlu, a major novelist, had published Yaban (TheStranger), also a bleak portrait of a central Anatolian village, set during the War of Liberation preceding the foundation of the Republic in 1923. In Turkish literary criticism it has been important to dwell on the sociological dimension to these texts, pointing out, for instance, that Yaban was written by an outsider, from an outsider’s point of view, while BizimKöy belonged to an insider, a native of the village. The immediate impact of Mahmut Makal’s narrative focused literary attention upon rural life and eventually gave rise to the so-called ‘Village Novel’, a genre that was to dominate realistic fiction for the next two decades. DearShamelessDeath, however, has nothing to do with the conventions of realistic Turkish fiction, rural or urban. Nor does it represent a subsequent literary ‘phase’. Along with Latife Tekin’s four later novels, it is the first in a unique corpus which, in essence, not only defies such conventions but explodes them.

Back in 1950, Makal’s book corresponded with a changing paradigm in Turkish politics. It was published in the same year the Democrat Party, formed in 1946 during the shift to the multi-party system, came to power, where it would remain until the military coup of 1960. In fact, the Democrat Party had won a stunning victory in the national elections on a rising tide of populist promises, heartily welcomed by the peasants. The change in government resulted in various policies which began transforming village and city alike in the 1950s. The most important of these, for an understanding of the background to DearShamelessDeath, were the economic policies that triggered migrations to the cities, which continue to this day, in search of better prospects.

It is also worth remembering, for the same reasons, that the Democrat Party, relying on the benefits of having joined the NATO alliance after taking part in the Korean War during the early 1950s, encouraged with renewed vigour the communist hunts that had begun in the late 1930s and were pursued intermittently into the 1940s. Both NATO and the Korean War find farcical echoes in the collective memory voiced in DearShamelessDeath and Latife Tekin’s second novel, BerjiKristin:TalesfromtheGarbageHills. As for ‘communist’, the unmentionable bogeyman that kept its obsessive hold on Turkish society up until the 1990s, this concept finds its place in DearShamelessDeath, in the fantastic order of things.

Latife Tekin was nine years old and about to finish primary school when she moved to Istanbul with her family in 1966. Twenty-eight years later, in a 1994 interview,3 she described their migration from the village:

‘Our fathers were roadworkers. Mine too. First they built the roads. We came to this city building the roads, travelling the roads our fathers built. Poor and routeless, we had no other way. But that way we settled in houses which had been left to decay by their residents who did not want to live in them anymore, who were so angry about them that they wanted to burn them down and who finally abandoned them. We crowded into those houses in huge numbers. Our fathers then built new houses for the people who didn’t want the old ones any more. And this was a process for much celebration – just like that experienced when Turks first went to work in Germany. It was a joyful encounter. There was no sense of repulsion at first. I, too, experienced the happiness of that joyful encounter. For the people who came to the city promised something and found encouragement. So we settled in those unwanted houses. Their architecture, everything about them, was alien to us. We gazed in wonder at their ceilings, their wood panelling, their ovens. Our fathers built new houses for the old residents, and we paid them back in rent from the money our fathers earnt by building them new homes. Because those people were our landlords, the process had begun so unfairly that the two sides could never really meet; “them” and “us” were two extremities far apart and opposed to each other.’

The unnamed city in DearShamelessDeath is Istanbul. Latife/Dirmit and her family came to live there, not in the squatter huts, described in BerjiKristin:TalesoftheGarbageHills, built overnight, but in the derelict wooden mansions in an old neighbourhood of Beşiktaş, near the Yıldız Palace overlooking the Marmara mouth of the Bosphorus. They were the defacto heirs to the old heritage of Istanbul, about which they knew nothing. It is clear from interviews with Latife Tekin and from the narrative of DearShamelessDeath that impoverishment was the consequence rather than the reason for their displacement from the village.

Latife Tekin has often mentioned that her Istanbul experience is associated in her mind with ‘a sense of want’, which ‘never went away’ and which became acutely important for her when she realized that what ‘shut [her] out’ was language.4 In an interview given on the publication of her fifth novel Aşkİsaretleri (SignsofPassion),5 Tekin argued that ever since her childhood days in the city, power had always meant language to her. All doors seemed open to her and her people, ‘except the language of others, which filled the air with sounds and sentences, words, signs and implications’ that kept shutting them out, shutting them up, leaving them ‘in a fatal struggle for breath’. ‘That is why, when I made up my mind to write, I declared I would write in my home voice, the language we spoke at home,’ she said. Inseparable from this was her mother’s voice, which ‘had sunk in like burning hot lead flowing through her ears’ after her mother’s death.6 The punning Turkish title of DearShamelessDeath, which is dedicated to the memory of her mother, can also means ‘my dear shameless dead one’.

As a device that can ‘do and undo our world’,7 language has remained the central constitutive agent in all five of Latife Tekin’s novels. The internal dynamics of her fiction have called upon her to construct a different style for each, which gains an increasingly deconstructive thrust in her later novels. When she decided to write DearShamelessDeath, she could tell that the conventional discourse and dramatic framework for the realistic novel would not work for the kind of fiction she had in mind. About this she said: ‘In DearShamelessDeath, I laid my foundations on the logic of language, and the way it reflects how our people perceive themselves, the world and others. Interestingly, they proceed from the parts to the whole, not the other way around… I discovered this, exploring the logic of Turkish…thinking of my readership. My book had to be understood by fellow migrants, who tended to identify with the heroes in the traditional folk epics, but it also had to offer something to the “enlightened” public, something to which they could relate. In other words, I wanted to catch the universal.’8 The fact that Tekin has often identified herself as a ‘writer outside literature’ becomes more meaningful in this context.9

Drawing on the family idiom, the oral history sessions with the migrant community, their religious beliefs and superstitious practices, Latife Tekin embraced the fantastic and the supernatural in the tradition of Turkish storytelling and constructed a narrative which can accurately be described in the words of Gabriel García Márquez commenting on his own OneHundredYearsofSolitude: ‘A linear history where the extraordinary fuses, in all innocence, with the commonplace.’10 The vulgarized versions of the epics of BattalGazi, medieval Islamic heroic narratives which were Turkicized over the ages and committed to writing, is the only explicit reference made in DearShamelessDeath to anything remotely literary. But the critic Berna Moran has drawn up a list of Turkish and Ottoman sources, whose influence can be traced in DearShamelessDeath. These include tales from TheBookof DedeKorkut, a major pre-Islamic epic which originated in Central Asia, and from Evliya Çelebi’s seventeeth-century BookofTravels.11

Berna Moran has also observed that DearShamelessDeath is as much an outsider’s account of ‘village culture’ as an insider’s. This is in response to the critic Murat Belge, who had convincingly argued that the importance of DearShamelessDeath rests in an authorial perspective that is rooted inside the village. Belge had pointed out that the genre known as the ‘Village Novel’ ‘was a product of novelists of peasant origin who were educated at state teacher training (village) institutes, and who viewed the novel as a political act devoted to explaining rural reality to an urban audience for the purpose of transforming that reality’. In Belge’s view this was a ‘pedagogical approach’, representing ‘an outsider’s view of the village’: novelists who wrote in this genre had ‘internalized the dominant ideology of the urban intelligentsia and assimilated its world-view’, and had therefore ‘externalized the reality into which they were born’. By contrast, Belge argued that Latife Tekin does not write within the ‘westernisation-progress’ paradigm in modern Turkish fiction and that DearShamelessDeath ‘reflects a new reality, that of the social context of rural–urban migration’. Far from having anything to do with escapism, ‘Latife Tekin’s is a fantasy with definite social roots. In this sense, DearShamelessDeath cannot be called an imitation of the Latin American novel’. Like Yashar Kemal, working through ‘villagers’ consciousness’, Latife Tekin has produced ‘an insider’s view of Turkish rural life’.12

Berna Moran, on the other hand, draws attention to the two worlds present in DearShamelessDeath: the sacred world of beliefs and the material world, which overlap and become one in the peasant villagers’ perception of reality. These gradually become differentiated as the narrative follows the migration to the city, engendering ‘an ideological conflict’ between Dirmit and her family. Atiye, the omnipresent mother, is the most conservative and remains firmly rooted in the undivided world. To cope with problems in the city, she relies on the irrational even more than she did in the village: casting and breaking spells, turning on the taps of fountains to open the way for good fortune, consulting hodjas for amulets to protect against evil, pouring molten lead into boiling water to get rid of the evil eye, etc. Ironically, it is Atiye who insists on a secular education for her daughter, so Dirmit goes to school and turns into a headstrong teenager with a will and a way of her own. Moran points out that Dirmit’s gradual ideological and cultural detachment from her family is one that is ‘shared’ by the narrator’s voice in DearShamelessDeath. This voice is intimately rooted in the family’s common language and culture, and duly exploits the supernatural and fantastic devices that belong in the tradition of Turkish fairy tales, folk tales, popular epics in a manner similar to that of Márquez, Asturias and Rushdie, among others, but it can also adopt a mischievous, mocking distance to family perceptions and behaviour.13

However, DearShamelessDeath is not all irony and humour. The narrator’s external perspective also brings in a different dimension, that of the ‘other’. A telling example which became apparent during the translation of this book, is the author’s double designation for ‘God’. In the vocabulary attributed to Atiye and her family, the supreme divinity is the traditional Allah of Islam, which we have kept as ‘Allah’, while in the narrator’s idiom it is the secularized ‘Tanrı’, a word of ancient Turkic origin, which we translated as ‘God’. This can be taken as a further indication of a religious–ideological difference, or of the emerging difference of modernity in a culture that now aspires to rational thinking, with which Dirmit connects herself – even while in the village, experimenting with the radio – through her questionings and passionate desire for seeking and finding reasons.

It can, however, also be related to a subversive strategy in the narrative. Some significant thematic links seem to exist between the so-called primitive and modern worlds in DearShamelessDeath, regarding the functions of djinns and communists. Djinns originated in the collective imagination of the pre-Islamic peoples. Passing into Islamic folklore, they were conceived as supernatural creatures that could also assume human or animal form. Studies in Turkish folklore show that such figures in DearShamelessDeath as the fair-haired girl-witch Sarıkız, the exhibitionist Neighing Boy, who is possibly a cross between a young man and a horse, and Dirmit’s imaginary donkeys that bray ‘ninnisare’, a nonsense word coined by the author, could well be djinns in disguise. Djinns are believed to be capable of harm when disturbed by human beings, but also of assisting them under special circumstances, as is the case with Kepse in DearShamelessDeath. In the Koran it is said that some djinns chose the path of Allah while others remained evil, destined to burn in hell. Belief in their evil power is heresy according to official Islam, but in popular practice an exorcist like Djinnman Memet can be called upon to cleanse a person of what appear to be signs of possession by djinns, as happens when Atiye is pregnant with Dirmit.

In DearShamelessDeath, Kepse appears as a particularly powerful djinn whose possible association with Huvat is rumoured to be the cause of Huvat’s exceptionally enterprising travels outside the village. As for Dirmit, her fated affinity with djinns is marked, or ‘notched’, by the exorcising Djinnman Memet, even before her birth.

If djinns belong to the realm of the fantastic in DearShamelessDeath’s, village setting, so does the notion of the ‘communist’. Generally pronounced ‘commonist’ – komonist – by countryfolk, it can alternately be used to identify Dirmit’s favourite school teacher who suddenly disappears, an aeroplane that flies over the village and frightens everybody, and somebody’s son-in-law who flies an aeroplane. These mysterious metamorphoses turn out to be a major source of both confusion and fascination for little Dirmit’s rational way of thinking. Like djinns, ‘commonist’ is implicitly understood to be elusive, sinister and subversive. In the urban setting, however, djinns and communists connect instantly and explicitly when Huvat, on hearing that she is not a believer like he and the rest of the family, denounces Dirmit, the ‘djinned girl’, as ‘commonist’.

As a teenager, Dirmit grows up in the Istanbul of the 1970s, a decade of political repression and unrest. The city saw protests, rioting and violence between extreme leftists, nationalists and religious fanatics like the black-bearded hodja who leads Dirmit’s father, Huvat, into the thick of a violent demonstration against students. Huvat’s intermittent devotion to the holy ‘green books’, the temporary conversion of Dirmit’s elder brother, Halit, first into a hodja dressed in a black shalvar, then into a reader of books on Turkism, the Turkish nationalist movement whose origins date back to the nineteenth century, and Dirmit’s participation in the left-wing teachers’ protest march are further signs of an ideological diversity that is reflected in the family. Simultaneously an insider and an outsider, Latife Tekin forges a certain link between identifying the ‘other’ as ‘djinned’ and as ‘commonist’. This has implications for an understanding of the entire narrative. As Fredric Jameson explained in his essay ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, identifying difference as evil ‘is at one with the category of otherness itself: evil characterizes whatever is radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a very real and urgent threat to my existence’.14 In DearShamelessDeath, it is not only Dirmit who is stigmatized as ‘other’, but Atiye, too, at various points in the narrative, for example when she is pregnant with her first child and later starts speaking a different language, presumably Kurdish. And, most conspicuously, Zekiye comes to represent ‘otherness’ when the witch Sarıkız inflicts upon her – and all the other young brides in the village – the oppression of silence, characteristic of daughters-in-law serving the family. Using the fantastic mode, Latife Tekin has not simply textured an unusual, ‘authentic’ folkloric interpretation of a community’s culture which is both homogeneous and capable of being easily captured in realistic terms for a realistic narrative. By the very use of the fantastic, she has subverted the homogeneity of such an interpretation, making ‘otherness’ visible both within that culture and in the much broader modern cultural framework in which it is located.

It was perhaps just such a feature of the narrative that led John Berger to comment on the French version of DearShamelessDeath: ‘Latife Tekin…too knows that life stories are composed of gestures and murmurs, rather than of words and deeds. This book (about her native village) is a carpet of immutable gestures woven by country women. Each gesture is a white knot, a black knot, or a brightly coloured one, tied fast by four nimble fingers, at the end of our dark century. I know of no other storyteller with hands like Latife Tekin’s.’15

REFERENCES

1‘Dinlediklerim gözyaşıolupakarsa,neyiyazarým?’Gösteri, January, 1984, p. 81.

2 Ibid.

3 ‘Istanbul is hurt about us’, translated by Saliha Paker in Mediterraneans10,Istanbul,ManyWorlds/Méditerranéens10,Istanbul,unmondepluriel, (eds) Kenneth Brown and Robert Waterhouse, Winter 1997–1998. L’Association Méditerranéens, Paris, France and Yapi Kredi Culture & Arts Publications Inc., Istanbul, pp. 128–129.

4 Ibid.

5 Interview with Gamze Varim, Cumhuriyet, March 18, 1995.

6‘Dinlediklerim…’ op.cit.

7Milliyet, February 23, 1995.

8Gösteri, March, 1984, p. 89.

9Hürriyet, September 5, 1988.

10 Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. 1988. TheFragranceofGuava,ConversationswithGabrielGarcíaMárquez. London/Boston: Faber & Faber. p. 74.

11 Berna Moran, ‘10 yılsonraSevgiliArsızÖlüm,Gösteri, February, 1993, p. 12–13.

12 Murat Belge, from the English summary of ‘The Turkish Novel and SevgiliArsızÖlüm (Dear Impertinent Death)’, ToplumveBilim, no. 25/26, 1984, p. 69.

13 Berna Moran, op.cit., pp. 14, 16.

14 Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical narratives: romance as genre’, NewLiteraryHistory, 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1975), p. 140.

15 John Berger, ‘Livres – HommagesdesAuteurs’‚Libération, January 1, 1998.

Huvat Aktas travelled for a whole day and a night,

Huvat Aktas travelled for a whole day and a night, ending his journey at noon by the sheepfold in the village of Alacüvek. This time he brought a bright blue bus with him. The bus had collected quite a bit of dust along the way but it still stood gleaming like a mirror in the fiery rays of the sun.

At first the villagers were horrified by this outlandish contraption the likes of which they had never seen. But in that moment of pure amazement, while some blew prayers to the right and left or panicked and almost wet their pants, a few risked touching the bus gingerly. Huvat Aktas was so childishly delighted with the effect the bus had on the villagers that he didn’t even mind that they ignored his smoke-coloured suit and felt hat. With the help of the driver he embarked on a long explanation about the bus and its virtues. He opened the baggage compartment to show off its interior and lifted the hood so they could take turns inspecting the engine. Most of the villagers, however, except for a few adventurous souls, mostly children, refused to set foot in the bus.

Before then, the inhabitants of Alacüvek hadn’t done much travelling, even on donkey-back. They only went short distances from the village. And to get to town, which they didn’t visit all that often anyway, they had come up with an ingenious way to shorten the long trip. As soon as they left the village they used to break into a run as if a wild bull were breathing hard down their necks. Once exhausted, they would heave a huge rock onto their backs and trudge on for a while, puffing and panting. Then they would throw down the rock and, feeling as light as a bird, dash on again. So when they first saw the bus they weren’t immediately able to shake their fear of it. However, once they had tasted its pleasures, they began to see how tiring and pointless it was to walk. Then they started taking the bus to the fields, the vineyards and even the sheepfold.

Of all the novelties Huvat had brought to the village up until then, the bus was undoubtedly the best. The first time he had shown up with a stove. He thought it was an important invention that would save people from having to crowd round the tandır oven all winter. But the villagers were so uninterested in the stove that Huvat lost his temper.

Before he had even wiped the dust off his shoes, he let loose a bellyful of words, trying to explain the stove’s benefits to those who had gathered around him. After burning up half a hayloft of vetch-grass in it, he grew so angry that he left the village, firmly vowing never to set foot there again. But one day he did show up again, this time with an enormous box under his arm. It was a talking box, and all of Alacüvek was thrown into an uproar over it. Everyone stopped eating, drinking and sleeping. Two women were so scared that they miscarried, and over half the villagers felt faint whenever they stood near the radio. But it wasn’t long before Huvat arrived with something that made them forget all about the talking box. This time it was a woman, with flame-red cheeks and milky skin. And her head and legs were bare.

For days on end the poor woman was surrounded by a crowd of women and children, who never stopped pawing her. They rubbed her face with the edge of their yashmaks moistened with spit to see if the redness was real and they tugged at her hair and skirt. She was soon worn down to skin and bones. Finally she collapsed and fainted. Then they knew why three sheep had bloated up and died one after the other, why the hen who laid double-yolked eggs had stopped laying and why Huvat’s mother had fallen off the wooden veranda. All were caused by the ill-omened woman who was possessed by a djinn. Their first thought was to strangle her and dump her body somewhere, but they were afraid of her djinn, so they threw out her mattress and bedding and, after a lot of talk, shut her up in the stable.

On her first night in the stable the woman dreamt she was bending over an iron cradle to kiss a sleeping baby. Then she left through an iron door. From that time on, whenever she closed her eyes she had the same dream until she was having it while she was awake. This went on until a long-haired, snow-white talking goat charged at her. She shouted at the top of her voice, but the goat muttered some incomprehensible words instead of backing off, and hurled itself straight at her. Just then a ball of light dropped from above and the goat’s hair turned pitch black. Slowly the goat backed away and disappeared. From then on the saintly Hızır Aleyhisselam never left the woman alone in the stable. Sometimes he appeared as an old man with a radiant face and snow-white beard and at others as a ball of light. Sometimes he was only a voice. One evening, when the woman had been in the stable almost nine months, she was seized by stabbing pains from her waist down to her tailbone. She writhed about on the ground and bellowed like a calf as tears streamed from her eyes. The pangs were so powerful that after a while her bones cracked open and her waters broke, gushing hot from her womb. And there on the straw at her feet lay a girl-child as big as the chimney of a paraffin lamp.

At that moment, Hızır Aleyhisselam came to the baby’s rescue, this time sending Akkadın, White Woman, in his place. For years Akkadın had been awaiting her day of fulfilment. ‘Hu Allah!’ she would call in winter by the tandır and from the veranda in summer. She came through the stable door holding a bowl of milk and a lantern. Then she picked up the baby, snipped its umbilical cord and rubbed it with rock salt. ‘May you have blood-red cheeks, a smiling face and a benign fate,’ she prayed as she daubed the infant’s cheek with two fingers dipped in blood. Then she departed, never to be seen in this world again.

After the woman had her baby in the stable, the villagers saw that her fainting spells had really been caused by the load in her belly and not, as they had thought, by djinns or sprites. So they moved the newborn child and her mother upstairs to the tandır room. And, because she was confined, they wound a red cloth around the woman’s head and hung a pair of scissors at the head of the bed. On the same day, with unheard-of ceremony, they named the child. They boiled up water in an enormous black cauldron, and the women and children of the village brought bunches of dried flowers and plant roots of every kind to toss into the boiling water. The disabled, the newlyweds whose husbands had died and the infertile departed as soon as they had cast their flowers into the water. Those remaining drank up the water, cup after cup. Then they formed a line and spat in the newly born infant’s mouth, one by one. ‘May you take after me!’ each one wished as she bent above the baby’s ear. That evening, the face of little Nuǧber – they had named the baby after Huvat’s mother – turned red as a beetroot and burned feverishly for days.

Soon after this ceremony, Huvat returned to the village, this time with a water pump. At the villagers’ request, he left it in front of the double-winged gate of his house. At first the villagers gathered curiously around the pump, but after a while they didn’t even dignify it with a glance, as if it were a dead dog sprawled out on the ground. Their scorn so angered Huvat that on the morning he was due to leave he got up before dawn and connected the pump to the well. Its awful creaking roused the whole village.

The woman Huvat had brought from the city turned out to be surprisingly clever. In no time at all she learnt to bake bread in the tandır oven, to shear sheep, to dry cows’ dung, to get the lambs to suckle and to bring on a miscarriage with a hen’s feather. Her erişte pastry was as perfect as tiny pearls, and she outdid the young girls and women of the village at weaving colours into carpets. She even started composing dirges in houses where there was a death. After a while her speech changed too, and she began to speak just like the other villagers. One thing she never learnt, however, was how to stop and give way to the men she met on the road. Instead, she marched straight ahead with firm steps. After her daughter, she gave birth to a boy and at last settled in. As a reward for a son, Huvat brought her a sewing machine on one of his visits home. So she put aside the carpets, sat down at the machine and took in sewing in exchange for eggs, fat or a bowl of wheat. When she had first seen Huvat she hadn’t much warmed to him because he was so dark. But later on his name was always on her lips, and she made up türküs about him shamelessly. Whenever and wherever she felt like it she warbled out, ‘Oh, Huvat! My Huvat!’

Atiye – that was her name – was delivered of another son as big as a yearling sheep. And so she continued to bear children but she gave them no peace. The village children roamed about wearing nothing but a greasy bib, but she clothed her own in a very odd manner. Young Nuǧber gambolled about in the village dust and dirt dressed in nylon garments, with a ribbon in her hair and a dummy in her mouth. The boys climbed into the topmost branches of the walnut trees wearing dungarees held up with braces, and they chased the oxen and donkeys with coloured whirligigs in their hands. They were as confused by village games such as ball-pitching at stone heaps, pretend picnics and shooting slingshots as they were by hard balls, water pistols, balloons, plastic dogs and whistles. On top of all that, their mother had invented something called ‘soap’, and once every two days she nearly flayed them alive scrubbing them with it. And then one day, instead of the slender father who had left them, a giant of a man returned and thrust something called ‘orange’ into their hands. That did it. Nuǧber gasped once and lost her voice. Halit, the eldest son, caught a djinn. ‘Straws, red and green straws, women with swollen bellies!’ he cried out as he thrashed about on the ground. Seyit, the youngest, was never the same from then on, either. He started to snap like a dog at anyone who came near him.

For a long time the Alacüvek folk didn’t know what to make of all the tales Huvat told them or the things he brought with him and left in the village. Eventually they came to believe that he had captured Kepse. ‘Come on, tell us how you collared that djinn!’ they begged as they rubbed his back. The djinn Kepse was invisible at first but later it appeared as a fever, followed by sweating and shivering. Finally it pounced on your chest and sat there, a black ball with neither hands nor feet, and with eyes like lentils. If, just at that moment, you were quick enough to reach out and grab Kepse, it immediately became your faithful servant. But if you missed, and it escaped, you never got another chance.

‘I swear, if I were able to catch Kepse I’d bring all the places I’ve ever seen right here to the village!’ Huvat declared whenever the villagers brought up the subject of Kepse. ‘May I be blinded for life if I could catch Kepse or anything else!’ he vowed again and again. But one day he happened to say, ‘If you think I’ve been pulling your leg come along and I’ll show you.’ All the youngsters who loafed about the village throwing stones at the walnut trees followed him. And that’s how over half the inhabitants of Alacüvek came to set foot on city soil. Some became central heating installers, some house painters and some whitewashes. None of them returned, except for Huvat.

After a while Huvat’s bus, with its fiendish whistle and bright polish that mirrored the dry plain with its wild pears, henna-coloured rocks and shrubs with prayer rags, became a mangy cur limping along the roads with a wounded paw. It could no longer take the slopes without stopping for breath. Even on a flat road the engine boiled and the bearings started to seize up. One by one, its mirrors, wipers and door handles dropped off. Its driver finally gave up one day and abandoned it. So the bus settled back against the garden wall and sat there peacefully at rest.

After the bus, which he had brought to the village with so many hopes, had collapsed, Huvat went into a sulk with the villagers. Only a very few people were lucky enough even to have set eyes on a bus, he said. The villagers had actually had a chance to ride in one, and even to take it out to the sheepfold and the pastures, but they had never really appreciated it. For days he paced angrily about his house, shooing away those who called to wish him good health instead of worries. At last, irritable and worn to a shadow with brooding, he started plucking hairs from his nose until suddenly it swelled up like a drum. In his grief, he sat in the garden under the cypress trees, from morning until night, gazing at the mountains and sighing. Then he would break off a big branch, chew off all the leaves and spit them out on the ground. After that came a time when he couldn’t be approached because of the smell of gunpowder. He shouldered his gun at dawn, set out with his dog and returned at dusk with blood dripping from his game bag. He ate only the flesh of hare and, in the evening, when he had eaten enough and rested a little, he aimed his gun at the doors and walls. Atiye grew tired of picking up empty cartridge casings everywhere, of cutting out paper discs that would fit into the casings and of filling the shells with buckshot. She grew tired of villagers constantly showing up at the door to ask for some hare fat to cure their sore ears. Finding that she couldn’t feed her animals properly, bake bread in the tandır or get on with her sewing, one night, after she had soothed and stroked Huvat to sleep, she gathered up all the cartridges and threw them down the well. The next day Huvat searched everywhere, shouting and pleading, but after a long sulk with Atiye he calmed down and built a pigeon loft on the roof. He also took to rearing partridges in a corner of the garden. All day long he shuttled between the garden and the roof, and in his sleep he started to sing like a partridge and coo like a pigeon. Atiye grew anxious, concerned about her husband’s condition. First she plucked three hairs from his beard and asked the hodja to recite a few prayers over them. Next, without Huvat knowing, she had some charms made and concealed them in the pigeon loft and the partridge pen. ‘Such doting isn’t good for you! They say it’s a sin!’ she warned, trying to pry her way into his thoughts. The charms saved Huvat from his passion for pigeons and partridges, but soon he started to play the ‘egg game’. He competed with the young men each night and bashed eggs together until morning. ‘My egg’s a good one, yours is rotten,’ he wagered, losing sight of everything but the game. Huvat was so enthralled with the egg game and singing its accompanying türkü that when his eldest son turned up at his side one night and pleaded, ‘Dad, Mother’s calling you. She’s given birth!’ he snapped, ‘Get out of here, you lying pup!’ and shooed him away.

That night Atiye put her faith in the Almighty and gave birth to another girl. They named her Dirmit. They were cheered that the baby was born healthy and whole but they also beat their breasts because it wasn’t a boy. For a long time the villagers tried to soothe Huvat’s troubled heart. ‘Man, your family’s got all the boys it needs!’ they consoled him. But the truth of the matter lay elsewhere. While still in her mother’s womb the baby had twice cried out in the voice of Atiye’s mother: ‘Mother! Mother!’ Atiye was sifting flour in the storeroom at the time. ‘May death take you!’ was all she could mutter when she heard the voice from her belly. Then her jaws locked tight and she collapsed over the sieve. They fixed her a sherbet, fed her a few drops, and then shouted in her ear, sprinkling water on her face while slapping her a few times. But no matter what they did, Atiye didn’t move. ‘We might as well call in Djinnman Memet,’ Huvat said to his mother. ‘That cursed bastard will bring down his pack of devils on us,’ she replied. But Huvat ignored her warning and set out to fetch him. When Djinnman Memet arrived, he shut himself up in another room to compose a charm. Then he threw the charm in boiling water, blew his mutterings on the water as he spooned it into Atiye’s mouth and opened her eyes. Before he left, he carved a notch in the pastry board. ‘Aha!’ he announced. ‘Mark my words! If the child is born healthy and whole, there’s no telling what’ll befall it!’ From that day forth, Atiye carried in her belly an ever-growing fear that nudged and shifted. At night she awoke from dreams of a noseless baby with eyes on top of its head and, during the day, she listened to the devil, thinking that if the baby wasn’t born healthy and whole she would turn it face down and smother it. When at last Atiye felt the first contractions her heart heaved and missed a beat.

Atiye gave birth, and, three days later, djinns strangled Djinnman Memet on the mountain. His body was dragged down and dumped in the middle of the village. His smirking face had gone completely black, and the bastard looked the very picture of the devil. He had raped many wives and young girls after tempting them up the mountain with a charm. ‘Black fiend, struck down at last,’ said all those who spat on his face. And all those who spat felt the chill of relief.

But then one evening a man who looked exactly like Djinnman Memet showed up in the village. Wearing a black suit and hat, he smiled as he walked by under the curious gaze of the villagers. Without saying a word, he went up to the men’s lounge at Corporal Durdu’s. That evening everyone in the village was invited to dine there on arabaşı.

‘On this side of the village there’s a mine on Taçın Mountain,’ the man announced. ‘We’re going to open a pit there, build a school and lay asphalt roads for the village. We’re going to plant sugar beet in all the fields and gardens, pour tons of fertilizer right at your doorsteps and pile oil cake before your animals.’ To celebrate this news, sheep were sacrificed, musicians were called up from Circassian villages and everyone danced the halay. One village competed with another at horse racing or playing jereed.

‘Atiye girl, I was the first to sign up for the Party,’ Huvat said after coming home one day. Another time he didn’t even let her finish her meal. ‘Quick, sweep up the men’s lounge,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a school.’ That day, her endless work began. She cooked arabaşı, rolled and squeezed mantı pastry and spread out beds for the male visitors from seven villages, who flocked to her doorstep every evening. ‘Come on, Huvat,’ she finally pleaded, too weak even to raise her arms. ‘Leave the Party. I can’t manage.’ But she couldn’t stop the people parading in and out. ‘Curse the man who brought all this down on our heads,’ she said of Corporal Durdu. At last, falling ill, she took to her bed. Her eyes popped open when a swelling as big as a turkey’s egg slipped out of her belly and down her legs. ‘Snow! Snow!’ she raved for days. If the school teacher Bayraktar hadn’t told them to take her to a doctor, Atiye would have been done for, leaving four children behind her.

As Atiye recovered, Huvat coddled her for a while, waiting on her hand and foot. He helped her by milking the cows, setting the lambs to suckle and running back and forth from the stable to the oven to the well. He won back her heart, and Atiye was soon with child again. She took naps wherever the mood struck her, using her arms as a pillow. Huvat let her sleep and went back to his egg games, ring games and Party business. Dirmit followed his lead and turned away from her mother’s breast, finding the milk too bitter. Now Atiye’s hands lay empty and, with no one at her side and left alone with nothing but the fear that had racked her while she was pregnant with Dirmit, she looked for a means of abortion. She tried everything from eggplant root and hen feather to broom bristle. She pressed on her belly as hard as she could with both hands and tried lifting heavy stones but couldn’t shed the child from her body. In the end she shut herself in the storeroom with a big bar of solid black dye. She worked at it all day long and by evening it was worn down to a fine point. That winter she gave birth to a boy as black as black could be, like a baby rat. Huvat was so delighted to have another son that, when he heard the good news, he got up from his game and went down to the tandır room, where Atiye was lying. However, he had no sooner uncovered the child’s face than he covered it back up again. ‘Girl, let’s name this boy after your father,’ he said, then left. So they named the boy Mahmut. ‘Most likely this child won’t live, though, God willing, his name may bring him luck,’ said those who came for the naming. But they also started to worry, afraid that this baby rat-boy’s birth wouldn’t augur well for the village. Later, when Bayraktar was attacked by djinns, and the school closed down, they blamed it on Mahmut.

*

No sooner had Mahmut opened his eyes, rolled them around and fixed them on the ceiling, shrieking like a crazed sheldrake, than word spread that school teacher Bayraktar had pissed on the djinns in the ash heap. The villagers met together and headed off to see Bayraktar, who lay in the ash heap with his mouth and eyes all twisted up. As the villagers gathered around him he crouched like a rabbit, frozen to the spot. He lay ill for days afterwards in Huvat’s men’s lounge. Although Huvat sent word to Pannı, Bayraktar’s Circassian village, no one turned up either to enquire about him or to claim him. For a while, Bayraktar wandered about in the fields and dales, twittering like a starling. Then, one day, he fell in love with a fairy girl. With a pickaxe on his shoulder and a length of rope swinging from his waist, he set off to look for gold so he could marry her. He dug in the mountains and hillsides, using his feet and arms to measure the base of one rock after another. After spending more than a year measuring the land around Alacüvek, he finally stopped at the bottom of the hill by Grimy Rıfat’s field, where water was plentiful, and built a house for himself out of pebbles. Tying a black dog to the door, he swore and flung stones at whoever came by, or swung his pickaxe and sang sad songs. One day, by the side of the well he had been digging, he breathlessly started dancing ‘The Lousy Shepherd’. That’s how the villagers knew that he had struck gold. Bayraktar secretly carried the gold to the fairy girl, and they were married at the end of the harvest. After once more dancing ‘The Lousy Shepherd’ up and down the burnt-off fields, he escorted his fairy bride to the pebble-stone house at the bottom of the hill.