Orhan's Inheritance (23 page)

Now she hunches over herself, carefully cleaning the folds of delicate skin that make men weep and quiver, and keep her alive and well. She pays it its proper respects but knows that like everything else it mustn’t be overused. When the ritual is over, Fatma remains seated on the floor, contemplating her trip to the Armenian Quarter, or what is left of it. Those who left with nothing more than an oxcart are said to have buried their gold in courtyards and orchards. There, in the abandoned homes of her former neighbors, she might find some hidden treasure that will help her escape this life.

Given the climate in the village, Fatma has left the inn only twice in the past year, once to the mosque and once to the
hamam.
Both times she took care to cover herself and was accompanied by her mother-in-law. At the
hamam,
the village women had taken pleasure in taunting her. A few refused to share the bathhouse with that
orospu,
dirty whore.

Her husband had been the only son of the town butcher. When his father died, the mothers and aunties of the village paraded their daughters around him expectantly, but it was far too late. By then Ibrahim had fallen under the spell of his youngest and toughest customer. He liked to say it was Fatma’s haggling tongue that did him in, but Fatma suspected it was the way she let her head scarf drop every time she smiled at him. His mother’s illness gave Fatma a rare opportunity to rule the house. Where other young brides bowed their heads in submission to their husbands and mothers-in-law, Fatma made decisions and gave her opinion freely. Outside the house, she shrugged off the insults. Ignoring the jeers and hisses from the villagers, she laughed her loud laugh and spat at those who dared cross her. When confronted about his wife’s behavior, Ibrahim only smiled and encouraged anyone who disapproved to take their oxcart to the only other butcher in the region, located some twenty kilometers to the east.

It has been two years since Ibrahim left for the Balkan front and two months since Fatma buried her mother-in-law. If Ibrahim appeared to her now, she would beg his forgiveness. She pulls her veil down, making sure the dark wool covers her entire face and body. She extends her hand, pretending to reach for something and notices that this exposes a sliver of skin where her hand meets her wrist. The fabric, concealing everything but her kohl-rimmed eyes, is meant to provide a measure of modesty but covering herself always gives Fatma a surge of power. Under its folds, her past is erased and her sins absolved. Besides, these days there is nothing modest about her. Like the veil, which separates her body from the world, she exists now only in the in-between places. Between modesty and seduction, damnation and deliverance.

Once on the street, Fatma keeps her eyes lowered and her steps quick. Using her sense of smell to guide her, she strides past the scent of dead skin and soap outside the
hamam
and through the back alleys of the spice market where the smell of mint and garlic almost makes her stop. When she reaches the merchant’s stalls that mark the beginning of the Armenian Quarter, Fatma thinks that perhaps her trusty nose has finally betrayed her. Where once the blacksmiths, cobblers, and tinsmiths released clouds of copper, sulfur, and leather dye into the dusty air of Malatya, Fatma now smells something entirely different. She is sure the devil himself has vomited onto the earth’s crust, producing an odor so vile and permeable that it burns her eyes and throat.

Gone too are the sounds of clanging metal, the scraping of soft bristles on leather, and the excitement of human voices straining above the clamor of the once-bustling market. Fruit flies swarm past her, swooping up before her eyes, daring her to look up. The shock is not in what she sees but what she doesn’t see. The merchants are all gone, their overturned stalls and broken windows offering silent testimony of hasty departures. The door of the Armenian Church is splintered, as though some demonic animal with large horns has pummeled through it.
Someone must have tried to take shelter here
. She says a silent prayer even though she is quite convinced by now that there is no god, not in heaven and certainly not here in Anatolia.

She places an acid-soaked handkerchief to her nose and quickens her steps, veering as far away from the river as possible, thinking only of survival. A sea of twinkling stars, blasphemous in their majesty, illuminates the dark night. How dare they shine on so much suffering? And then it occurs to her that these stars have borne witness.

“What have you seen?” she whispers, looking up. She is half waiting for an answer when her foot collides with something and her body falls to the ground. It is a body, sickly smelling but not yet ripe with death. Fatma rolls away at once. The body groans. It turns on its side, away from her, clutching what looks like an infant’s swaddling cloth. From the long wild mane, she knows it is a girl.

CHAPTER 25

Rebirth

THE DRY DIRT
of the desert covers the open sores on her feet. Huddled in one corner of the abandoned shed, Lucine shuts her eyes and tries to pray, but the words, so carefully etched into her mind by Mairig and their priest
,
have escaped her. Fragments and short phrases from ancient prayers rise above the fog, empty and impotent: the crazed ramblings of a misguided race. She pushes the words aside and presses Aram’s blue swaddling cloth to her chest instead. The smell of Mairig’s milk is long gone, but inside its soft folds she can still smell the sweetness of him. She burrows her face in the tattered blue wool of his swaddling cloth, sniffing at the lingering scent of his sweat and licking its center where she still tastes the salt of his tears or hers, she isn’t sure. Soon his screams, long melodic wails, followed by a staccato of angry reprieves, fill the empty shed, and she is glad. She will do nothing to stop them this time.

A dusty beam of daylight filters through the small crack in the back wall through which her keeper, the plump woman, regularly wedges small pieces of cured lamb and bread. Lucine tries to relieve herself as far away from this opening as she can, but the chamber pot sits festering in the opposite corner. The excrement, like so much suffering, is ongoing and unpredictable. It leaves her as Mairig and Anush and Bedros left her, permanently and without warning. In her arms, a silent witness to all this exorcism, Aram’s ghost gives up his screaming and sucks impatiently at her breast, the only part of her body incapable of excretion.

At nightfall, the plump one arrives carrying her stale bread. She talks about how the gendarmes liked to lick her back and pull her hair as they thrust themselves in and out of her.

“How are you today?” she asks Lucine, but Lucine does not answer. She hasn’t spoken since the river.

“How is the child?” the woman tries again.

Lucine continues rocking the phantom Aram.

“What does he eat?” the woman asks.

Lucine lays a hand on her concave chest.

The woman sings,
“Dandini, dandini danalı bebek. Ellerı kolları kinalı bebek.”
It is a lullaby to an infant resting in a secret hiding place. When the infant dies, its mother goes mad and buries it in a golden cradle, then offers herself to the waves. A fitting ditty, only this wasn’t the exact order of things.

Some days later, when the plump one is once again delivering her bread, Aram is gone. His screams recede from her ears to the back of her head, like church bells in a dream. The swaddling cloth lies weightless on her lap. Lucine is searching its folds for any evidence of him: a hair, a stain, but all that remains is the smell of her own vomit and shit. Still, she searches for his spirit in the now-coarse fabric of the swaddling cloth. The plump one finally pries the blue wool out of Lucine’s hands.

“You can come out now,” she says. “You’ll live with me. I’ve arranged it.”

Lucine cries out at the words
you’ll live.
A hot liquid anger courses through her veins. She strikes the woman over and over again, in the face, shoulders and chest. The woman wraps her plump arms around Lucine’s body and squeezes. She writhes and thrashes until her strength gives out and her limbs go limp with grief. There, with her head pressed into the woman’s ample bosom, and her arms pinned to her sides, Lucine succumbs to life and to living. She slides down to the earth with the woman’s arms wrapped around her.

“We are not what is done to us,” she whispers in Lucine’s ear. She pulls something silver and smooth from the pocket of her dress. Lucine stares at the blade with relief, thinking the woman will now end all her suffering. Lucine tilts her head back, offering her exposed neck to the stranger.

“My name is Fatma and Allah has placed you in my protection,” she says. “Gold doesn’t lose its value by falling into the mud,” she mutters to herself, scraping the flat, cool blade against Lucine’s scalp. Clumps of hair, like small rat’s nests, fall to the ground and soon she can feel the wind prickling the back of her head.

“Now we burn these rags,” Fatma says, peeling the tattered dress off Lucine’s body. She gives her a smock to cover her nakedness and burns the dress right there on the spot. Lucine thinks of the lice in her hair and in her clothing burning to their deaths. Perhaps this was how God sent death to our door, without a single thought.

Dressed in the plain smock, her feet bare, Lucine’s apparel is a far cry from the rustling dresses Mairig forced upon her. Fatma wraps a dark head scarf around her bald scalp and face.

“You need a Turkish name,” she says. “From now on you will answer to Seda. It means ‘echo,’ so that you may find your voice again.”

Lucine chews the pair of unfamiliar syllables in between her teeth and in the space between the roof of her mouth and the tip of her tongue. The name, like her silence, is comforting. It allows her to disappear from a world where children die and mothers lose their minds, where the sun continues to climb the sky and the rooster’s screech still grates against morning sleep. And for this and only this, she is most grateful. Everything else, from the head scarf to the breath going in and out of her lungs, is unwanted. All these she would gladly give back, but the name is different. The name she keeps, along with her silence.

She follows Fatma into the moonlit night. They walk out of the orchard that housed the shed, and past a field, then into a courtyard. A boy, only a few years older than Bedros, is lying on the floor with nothing but a
yorgan
to keep him warm.

“That is Ahmet,” says Fatma. “He takes care of the animals of our guests.” The boy looks at her without turning his head. His eyes are dull like an old man’s.

The khan is a dark building made of stone and timber. Fatma walks around the main entrance and leads her to a small room in the back of the building.

“This is where you will spend your days, ” she says, opening the little door. The lilt in her accent reveals that she is Kurdish. “Through that door is the main chamber, where the men eat their meals and drink their raki. You must never go into that room. They can’t know you are here. I’m risking my life by keeping you here. Understand?”

Seda understands.
They
are the soldiers, the ones who mix suffering with sport. The Kurdish woman could be hanged for helping her. The room is no bigger than a closet. A
tonir,
just like Mairig’s, sits at the center of the floor, except its open mouth threatens to swallow her whole. There is a small wooden table and a single chair facing a paneless window that looks more like a hole than a proper opening. Under the table is a wooden crate. It holds two knives, a ladle, four pots of varying sizes, and clay jars of pickled cabbage. Sacks of wheat, rice, and bulgur lean against the remaining three walls. A wooden ladder rests against an opening in the ceiling.

“Up there is my room,” says Fatma. “At night, when a soldier is visiting, you stay away. In the morning, when he’s gone, I’ll knock on the opening four times. You can come up then and clean or put away the bedding. The bedding has to be cleaned every few days. You will also be in charge of the meals. Ahmet and I will serve them, but you must prepare them.

“Can you cook?” Fatma asks.

Lucine has never cooked a meal all by herself. She has shelled peas, dried figs, and salted meat but doesn’t know what comes before or after any of these steps. These things were relegated to the servant, Ayse, and sometimes to Anush and Mairig and to all the other women whom she has loved and lost. But Lucine remembers that she is Seda now and nods her head yes.

In the days and weeks that follow, Seda follows Fatma closely, does what she is told. She cleans. She cooks. She delouses
yorgan
s. She waits for death to visit her in the night. All the while Aram’s wailing rings in her ears. The sight of his flailing arms, Anush’s waist cinched by a uniformed arm, Bedros lying prostrate on the grass, and Mairig with her crumpled Bible pages, all these she sees in the daily wash and at the bottom of the barley soup.

Twice a week, she climbs up the stairs to the three little rooms on the second floor but only after Fatma gives her the signal. These are the rooms where Fatma entertains the gendarmes and her bey and where a wandering traveler will stay for more than one night.

Soldiers, merchants, and the occasional missionary travel through these walls without ever seeing her. She is a spirit—a ghost—soundless and practically invisible. Existing only in the in-between spaces—between daylight and darkness, in the narrow wall between the main mess hall and the inner chambers. And though they cannot see her, she sees them.

She sees merchants eating their watery porridge, their cunning eyes darting from one side of the room to the other. They rarely ever sleep indoors, preferring to stay with their animals and goods. The soldiers are an entirely different matter. Most are officers who, tired of the earth and sun, crave the comforts of a clean
yorgan
and a hot meal. She does her best to avoid them. Even when they are asleep or unconscious, they make her wild with fear and hate. She wants to cram their discarded shits back into their postcoital slack-jawed mouths.