Sins & Innocents Read online

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  Copyright © Burhan Sönmez/Kalem, 2014

  This English translation copyright © Ümit Hussein, 2013

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by

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  storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing

  from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote

  brief passages in a review.

  First Edition

  ISBN: 9781859643860

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset by Samantha Barden

  Jacket design by Andrew Corbett

  Cover images Collage by Andrew Corbett. Photograph of tiles © Tanuki Photography, courtesy of istock

  Printed and bound in Lebanon by International Press: [email protected]

  For Kewê

  1 Ferman

  A Lost Star

  My motherland was my childhood; as I grew up I became distanced from it; the more distant I became the bigger it grew inside me. In those days Uncle Hatip, who hoarded all the secrets of Haymana Plain like a poor dervish, would drop in on us on spring mornings before the household was awake. Before switching on his radio he would fill my mother in on the latest news of murders, women who had left their husbands to run off with their lovers and newly orphaned children. Life for him was a road that crossed sunken bridges. He would take his tobacco case out of his shoulder bag crammed with pistols, prayer beads and lighters and, standing at my bedside, roll himself a cigarette. His fingers were cracked like soil. As he drank his tea from a patterned glass I would think about the sounds that collected in his radio. I wondered whether he had brought me the end of last summer’s half-finished story that I was afraid of forgetting. I suddenly remembered he would only be staying a week, before setting off for distant destinations once again. My heart would swell with a melancholy that would haunt me into adulthood, and which I believed I had inherited from my mother.

  I coveted the happiness flowing from my uncle’s slender hand as he stroked my hair.

  My mother would sing Ferman’s folk-songs to my uncle. If you included all the dead, there were a lot of people in our small village. My uncle would listen to the songs and reminisce about the old days.

  Years before I was born Ferman had given his heart to a timid girl called Asya. The moment he returned from his military service he dispatched the village elders to request her hand in marriage. The girl’s brothers opposed the match with head-spinning vehemence and hurled insults at the elders acting as intermediaries. Upon receiving the bad news Ferman recalled the sea he had seen during his military service. He realized that the dread of obliteration, common to all steppe-dwellers and that had assailed him when his ship had remained at sea for three consecutive days, was about to become a reality here in his own village, and he resolved to abduct Asya. But the next day his cow failed to return from pasture. They found its corpse by the stream. The following night twenty lambs disappeared from the pen and the pile of straw on the threshing floor went up in flames. When, one morning, he discovered his dog’s body riddled with knife wounds and its amputated tail tossed onto the roof, he knew his turn would be next.

  An enduring grudge, of the type that adolescent boys relish, had led Asya’s two brothers to keep Ferman at arm’s length after some petty squabble they could barely remember. This harmless hostility may have gone on forever had that rogue not set his sights on their sister, escalating bitterness into bloodlust and threats. That knife called honour concealed in every heart was ever ready to spill blood. Asya, who for years had built her hopes on dreams of Ferman, was now as desperate as a child who has fallen into a well, weeping as she listened to cries from the outside world.

  It was the end of winter and the ground was covered with snow. Ferman now slept during the day and hid amongst the rocks in front of his house at night, ready for the next attack. The night he saw that one of the two youths approaching from the direction of Asya’s house was carrying a gun, he was convinced they were coming to spill his blood. He pointed his rifle and shot the tall one first, then the other one. My father knew a ballad about a similar tale. In the song he used to sing, trying to emulate the beautiful voices of the village epic tellers, a young boy quarrels with the family of the girl he loves and kills six of her brothers, leaving only one alive to continue their line, then lives happily ever after with the girl, who is called Kejê. “Kejê Mirzobege, gul sore, por drêje,” my father sang.

  Strange though it seems to me now, having reached the age I’m at after living in densely populated cities, studying in large schools and travelling in foreign countries, in those days I never tired of listening to this ballad in which men didn’t think twice about killing the brothers of the girl they loved. Each time I listened to it I would fall asleep, locked in the embrace of tradition, as content as if I had reached the stars. But Ferman did not sleep, not that night, nor any other night thereafter. He ran with everyone else who had got up at the sound of the gunshots and saw that the two people lying on the ground were his own brothers. According to eyewitnesses he lost his mind on the spot and, howling like a dog, vanished into the darkness.

  Ferman’s two younger brothers had gone to Haymana to study. Ferman had no other family and, proud to be the brother of the first boys in the village to go to school, had started to dream of their future. He hadn’t been expecting them to suddenly appear before him one night. On the first day of the school holidays the two brothers had travelled halfway in a horse and cart, spent one night in the house of the cart owner and set out the next day with a gun he had lent them to protect them against the hungry wolves. They had walked all day, and were on the verge of collapsing with cold when they met their deaths at the hand of their brother.

  No one ever mentioned the brothers’ names, neither Asya’s rancorous brothers nor Ferman’s brothers, who had died before they could read all those unknown books. They loomed over evening conversations like nameless gravestones, incapable of making everyone accept that they were the real protagonists of the tale.

  For years Ferman lived in caves, valleys, at the base of rocks. Afraid to sleep in the dark, he would scream in pain greater than that of the wounded soldiers he had seen in his childhood, singing mournful songs. Asya’s velvet-toned poet encountered coffins during the night; he was not only separated from his beloved, but his brothers’ blood was also on his hands. A destiny we all fear more than death hung around his neck like an indelible inscription. In one of his laments he sang, “I don’t know where the sun comes from/Or where it now sets.”

  Mecnun meant someone possessed, and was used to describe the love-crazed, those who had been cast to life’s furthest bank. If Leyla’s Mecnun had been possessed by love, lost his mind and finished up in the desert, then Ferman was twice mecnun, having fallen victim to the demons of both love and death. He became acquainted with every hollow, mountain and deserted spot on the plain, wandering in the darkness and only succumbing to sleep at dawn when the tight knot in his heart gave ever so slightly. Gazing at the stars he would pray for his pain to ease. Ferman had never been a saint, and entertained no such notions when he lost his mind and took to the plains. He was simply possessed by love and death, living with his own demons and aw
aiting death in his own darkness. As the poet said:

  Just because you toil and slave night and day,

  Do you fancy yourself life’s creator?

  Listen to the tales of all whom time has turned to dust,

  Destiny rules all hearts,

  It opens every door and slams it shut at whim.

  One summer’s day, while crossing the east side of Mangal Mountain, Tatar the photographer came upon Ferman asleep behind a rock and, recognizing him not from his appearance, but, like everyone else in the region, from his destiny, stood there in the blazing heat for a while without moving. Then, concluding he had nothing to fear, he took his camera out of his bag.

  When Ferman awoke from one of his anguished dreams to the sound of the photographer’s shutter, the two men were as startled as two lost Turkish and Greek soldiers coming face to face during the war that had raged on that mountain twenty-five years earlier. They stood taking deep breaths under the rising sun as though they had journeyed thus far together. When their eyes met, each knew the other would not harm him. Tatar told him he had spent the past two years on the plain wandering from village to village, taking cut-price photographs, and was now on his way to deliver the photographs he had taken the previous summer. Ferman uttered the name “Asya”.

  Tatar the photographer arrived in the village in the afternoon and, ignoring the curious gazes of the girls and young brides by the fountain, headed for Kewê’s house. My grandmother Kewê and her last husband Haco were sitting under the apple tree. Tatar mentioned Ferman, who had stared at the photos, transfixed. Ferman, who had seen that the people he knew had changed and aged, believed a mirror would appear under each photograph and show him his own face, which he no longer remembered. When he had lived in his village his world had been a simple one, circling its timeless orbit day after day. But now he was lost, shooting from one place to another like a star that didn’t know where to rest.

  “When he saw Asya’s picture he sat as still as if he too had tumbled into the black and white photos,” said Tatar. “Then he left all the other photographs on the ground, stood up and walked off into the distance, leaving his gun and saddlebag behind. When I told him I was going he didn’t answer or notice that I had left the bread, cheese and tobacco in my bag beside his saddlebag. It was only then that I saw the black horses behind the rocks.”

  The photographs Ferman was holding in his emaciated hand and studying at leisure were as distant and as frightening as that winter night sixteen years ago when he had shot his brothers. Before he knew that the past would haunt him forever, he had hoped to escape from its horror by running away. He believed that place conquered time and that time conquered pain. They buried his two brothers without him and locked up his house. As if in atonement, Asya’s parents died within one month of each other, the old wounds they had attempted to push to the back of their memory throughout their lifetimes still fresh in mind. Those were times during which it was a virtue to ransom your children’s sins. Asya, now prone to fainting fits, no longer spoke to her brothers, who, for their part, had abandoned her. Instead of living in trepidation of Ferman returning to wreak vengeance at any moment, they chose to depart to a land about which little was known except its great distance, and soon their names were deleted from the common memory. Although their early lives were governed by where they were born and bred, they later joined the ranks of those who denied that was the case.

  When my mother, aged ten on the day Tatar the photographer arrived, told these stories years later, she referred to everyone, good or bad, as “innocent”. Particularly when talking about Ferman, Kewê and the Claw-faced woman.

  When the Claw-faced woman arrived at Kewê’s house to ask if she had seen her daughters who had been missing all day, everyone knew she was afraid of photographs. However, trying not to let it show that she was afraid of the photographer too, she took the purslane she had picked from her garden out of a corner of her dress and put it in a bowl. She looked at Kewê and said, “My girls are nowhere to be seen, Asya hasn’t seen them either. I thought they might be with you.” Although the Claw-faced woman’s two daughters were now adolescent, they ran around the village all day, giggling and behaving in the flighty manner that everyone was now used to instead of sitting demurely at home and awaiting their destiny. Of all the elderly people in the village Kewê was the one they respected most.

  My mother, who was a quiet, introverted child, said, “I didn’t see them paddling in the stream today.”

  “Ah Kewê, if only my daughters were as sensible as this girl of yours,” lamented the Claw-faced woman. Kewê reminded her that it wasn’t the first time the girls had been late home and told her not to worry.

  Once the girls had sat until the early hours with a ewe who had lambed the previous month. Then they had chased after the horse and cart of a pedlar because he hadn’t been impressed by any of the curses they had been hurling at him for hours. The pedlar collected clever curses, paying children for them with treats. The girls, who had been pursuing the pedlar all day, refused to return home with the villagers they met at the top of the hill, only consenting when persuaded by the Claw-faced woman and Kewê, who had got wind of the story. They complained that they had been compiling curses for weeks but that the pedlar had rejected even the really good ones like: “May the black donkey’s stick beat your ma and after seventy whacks may she beg for more!” It meant going without roasted chickpeas and carob. They continued to curse at the top of their voices, swearing on the life of the father they had never met that next time they would come up with better rhymes.

  The villagers had heard there was a terrible war raging some place as far away as the country where Asya’s brothers had gone. Several countries had invaded each other and Germany was trying to take over the world, but they knew nothing of Stalingrad, D-Day or the fall of Berlin and thought that beyond this arid steppe the war was still going strong in 1946. When Tatar the photographer told the people who went to see him that the war had ended, no one paid much attention to him because they couldn’t contemplate Germany being defeated. They were amazed to hear that Mustafa Kemal had died eight years previously and asked him why he hadn’t mentioned it on his last visit the year before. “How was I to know you hadn’t heard? The whole world was in an uproar, kings from all over the globe came and wept at his funeral for three days and three nights.” When he went on to assert that the commander who had defeated a huge army on this very steppe all those years ago was none other than Atatürk and that he had not died of war wounds or been poisoned by foes but had expired in his bed like any other mortal, instead of believing him the villagers remembered the words of the old man Os the previous year: “Be wary of these photographers who want to play God with their fake human likenesses.”

  2 Feruzeh

  The Western Front

  "This is the only photograph I’ve got of my uncle. It was taken in a coffeehouse. The man next to him is Tatar the photographer. As Tatar is holding his camera someone else must have taken it.”

  When I finished speaking Feruzeh picked the photograph up.

  Outside it was raining gently.

  I had known Feruzeh for three days. On Tuesday I had gone into the antique shop in Mill Road called The Western Front. The elderly woman who owned the shop was watering her plants in the interior patio at the back. She mistook me for one of those undesirable customers who wander into antique shops to kill time rummaging amongst old objects and wander back out without ever buying anything. She carried on watering her plants, to allow me to browse at my leisure. I walked up to her.

  “What beautiful weather,” I said.

  “Yes it is. We really needed it,” she said.

  “It’s very sunny for April,” I added.

  “I’ll bet it’s always sunny in your country at this time of year.”

  She had assumed I was Mediterranean from my accent and dark skin.

  She put the empty watering can on the table.

  I showed her the photog
raph I was holding. I told her I was looking for the camera in the picture.

  She took it and looked.

  “Are these men still alive?”

  “No,” I said.

  My Uncle Hatip and Tatar were sitting on stools on the pavement outside the coffeehouse. There were several empty tea glasses in front of them. You couldn’t see the make of Tatar’s camera; it was the size of a hand, its protruding lens folding like bellows.

  “Was he a photographer?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She looked first at my face, then examined the photograph more carefully.

  “He doesn’t look like you,” she said.

  “No, he doesn’t,” I replied.

  She sat down on a chair by the table and pointed out a stool for me.

  “I wish this warm weather would last a few days,” she said.

  She raised her head. Her drooping eyelids were ready to doze off into a sweet sleep.

  “Hopefully it will,” I said.

  Clearly she had time for a chat.

  “Do you like Britain?” she asked.

  “I like Cambridge,” I said.

  “It’s a lovely city. I was born here,” she said.

  “You’re lucky,” I said.

  She smoothed her hair with her hand and contemplated the sunlit garden.

  “You’re right, no one grows old in the place where they were born anymore,” she replied.

  “That’s true,” I said.

  She told me her name was Stella. I introduced myself.

  She laughed. “I won’t try to pronounce it, I’m terrible at foreign names.”

  The bell on the door rang and a young woman wearing a blue dress entered. I hadn’t realized the door had a bell. The woman flashed me the easy smile of a hostess greeting a guest and went into the kitchen. She was carrying a carton of milk and a jar of coffee.

  Stella turned back to the photograph.

  “Who’s the other man?” she asked.