第 78 页

hurry; it was the way my mother would say “hurry” when I was a child.

Mother, my neck aches and all is still.

This is what they call death.

But I knew that I wasn’t dead yet. My punctured pupils were motionless,

but I could still see quite well through my open eyes.

What I saw from ground level filled my thoughts: The road inclining slightly

upward, the wall, the arch, the roof of the workshop, the sky…this is how the

picture receded.

It seemed as if this moment of observation went on and on and I realized

seeing had become a variety of memory. I was reminded of what I thought

when staring for hours at a beautiful picture: If you stare long enough your

mind enters the time of the painting.

All time had now become this time.

It seemed as if no one would see me, as my thoughts faded away, my mud-

covered head would go on staring at this melancholy incline, the stone wall

and the nearby yet unattainable mulberry and chestnut trees for years.

This endless waiting suddenly assumed such bitter and tedious proportions,

I wanted nothing more than to quit this time.

437

I, SHEKURE

Black had hidden us away in the house of a distant relative, where I spent a

sleepless night. In the bed where I curled up with Hayriye and the children, I

was occasionally able to nod off amid the sounds of snoring and coughing, but

in my restless dreams, I saw strange creatures and women whose arms and legs

had been severed and randomly reattached; they wouldn’t stop chasing me

and continually woke me. Toward morning, the cold roused me and I covered

Shevket and Orhan, embracing them, kissing their heads and begging Allah for

pleasant dreams, such as I’d enjoyed during the blissful days when I slept in

peace under my late father’s roof.

I couldn’t sleep, however. After the morning prayers, looking out on the

street through the shutters of the window in the small, dark room, I saw what

I’d always seen in my happy dreams: A ghostly man, exhausted from warring

and the wounds he’d received, brandishing a stick as if it were a sword,

longingly approach me with familiar steps. In my dream, whenever I was on

the verge of embracing this man, I’d awake in tears. When I saw the man in

the street was Black, the scream that would never leave my throat in dreams

sounded.

I ran and opened the door.

His face was swollen and bruised purple from fighting. His nose was

mangled and covered in blood. He had a large gash from his shoulder to his

neck. His shirt had turned bright red from the blood. Like the husband of my

dreams, Black smiled at me faintly because he had, in the end, successfully

returned.

“Get inside,” I said.

“Call for the children,” he said. “We’re going home.”

“You’re in no condition to return home.”

“There’s no reason to fear him anymore,” he said. “The murderer is Velijan

Effendi, the Persian.”

“Olive…” I said. “Did you kill that miserable rogue?”

“He’s fled to India on the ship that departed from Galleon Harbor,” he said

and avoided my eyes, knowing that he hadn’t properly accomplished his task.

“Will you be able to walk back to our house?” I said. “Shall we have them

bring a horse for you?”

438

I sensed that he would die upon arriving home and I pitied him. Not

because he would die alone, but because he’d never known any true

happiness. I could see from the sorrow and determination in his eyes that he

wished not to be in this strange house, and that he actually wanted to

disappear without being seen by anybody in this horrible state. With some

difficulty, they mounted him on a horse.

During our trip back, as we passed through side streets clinging to our

bundles, the children were at first too frightened to look Black in the face. But

from astride the slowly ambling horse, Black was still able to describe how he

foiled the schemes of the wretched murderer who’d killed their grandfather

and how he challenged him to a sword fight. I could see that the children had

warmed up to him somewhat, and I prayed to Allah: Please, don’t let him die!

When we reached the house, Orhan shouted, “We’re home!” with such joy

I had the intuition that Azrael, the Angel of Death, pitied us and Allah would

grant Black more time. But I knew from experience that one could never tell

when exalted Allah would take one’s soul, and I wasn’t overly hopeful.

We helped Black down from the horse. We brought him upstairs, and

settled him into the bed in my father’s room, the one with the blue door.

Hayriye boiled water and brought it upstairs. Hayriye and I undressed him,

tearing his clothes and cutting them with scissors, removing the bloodied shirt

stuck to his flesh, his sash, his shoes and his underclothes. When we opened

the shutters, the soft winter sunlight playing on the branches in the garden

filled the room, reflected off the ewers, pots, glue boxes, inkwells, pieces of

glass and penknives, and illuminated Black’s deathly pale skin, and his flesh-

and sour-cherry-colored wounds.

I soaked pieces of bedding in hot water and rubbed them with soap. Then I

wiped clean Black’s body, carefully as though cleaning a valuable antique

carpet, and affectionately and eagerly as though caring for one of my boys.

Without pressing on the bruises that covered his face, without jarring the cut

in his nostril, I cleansed the horrible wound on his shoulder as a doctor might.

As I’d do when bathing the children when they were babies, I cooed to him in

a singsong voice. There were cuts on his chest and arms as well. The fingers of

his left hand were purple from being bitten. The rags I used to wipe his body

were soon bloodsoaked. I touched his chest; I felt the softness of his abdomen

with my hand; I looked at his cock for a long time. The sounds of the children

were coming from the courtyard below. Why did some poets call this thing a

“reed pen”?

439

I could hear Esther enter the kitchen with that joyous voice and mysterious

air she adopted when she brought news, and I went down to greet her.

She was so excited she began without embracing or kissing me: Olive’s

severed head was found in front of the workshop; the pictures proving his guilt

in the crimes and his satchel had also been recovered. He was intending to flee

to Hindustan, but had decided first to call at the workshop one last time.

There were witnesses to the ordeal: Hasan, encountering Olive, had drawn

his red sword and cut off Olive’s head in a single stroke.

As she recounted, I thought about where my unfortunate father was.

Learning that the murderer had received his due punishment at first put my

fears to rest. And revenge lent me a feeling of comfort and justice. At that

instant, I wondered intensely whether my now-dead father could experience

this feeling; suddenly, it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace

with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to

pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and

imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities,

and forever remained in the same room.

“Don’t cry, my dear,” said Esther. “You see, in the end everything has

turned out fine.”

I gave her four gold coins. She took them, one at a time, into her mouth

and bit down upon them crudely with eagerness and longing.

“Coins counterfeited by the Venetians are everywhere,” she said, smiling.

As soon as she’d left, I warned Hayriye not to let the children upstairs. I

went up to the room where Black lay, locked the door behind me and cuddled

up eagerly next to Black’s naked body. Then, more out of curiosity than desire,

more out of care than fear, I did what Black wanted me to do in the house of

the Hanged Jew the night my poor father was killed.

I can’t say I completely understood why Persian poets, who for centuries

had likened that male tool to a reed pen, also compared the mouths of us

women to inkwells, or what lay behind such comparisons whose origins had

been forgotten through rote repetition—was it the smallness of the mouth?

The arcane silence of the inkwell? Was it that God Himself was an illuminator?

Love, however, must be understood, not through the logic of a woman like me

who continually racks her brain to protect herself, but through its illogic.

So, let me tell you a secret: There, in that room that smelled of death, it

wasn’t the object in my mouth that delighted me. What delighted me then,

440

lying there with the entire world throbbing between my lips, was the happy

twittering of my sons cursing and roughhousing with each other in the

courtyard.

While my mouth was thus occupied, my eyes could make out Black looking

at me in a completely different way. He said he’d never again forget my face

and my mouth. As with some of my father’s old books, his skin smelled of

moldy paper, and the scent of the Treasury’s dust and cloth had saturated his

hair. As I let myself go and caressed his wounds, his cuts and swellings, he

groaned like a child, moving further and further away from death, and it was

then I understood I would become even more attached to him. Like a solemn

ship that gains speed as its sails swell with wind, our gradually quickening

lovemaking took us boldly into unfamiliar seas.

I could tell by the way he was able to navigate these waters, even on his

deathbed, that Black had plied these seas many times before with who knows

what manner of indecent women. While I was confused as to whether the

forearm I kissed was my own or his, whether I was sucking my own finger or

an entire life, he stared out of one half-opened eye, nearly intoxicated by his

wounds and pleasure, checking where the world was taking him, and from

time to time, he would hold my head delicately in his hands, and stare at my

face astounded, now looking as if at a picture, now as if at a Mingerian whore.

At the peak of pleasure, he cried out like the legendary heroes cut clear in

half with a single stroke of the sword in fabled pictures that immortalized the

clash of Persian and Turanian armies; the fact that this cry could be heard

throughout the neighborhood frightened me. Like a genuine master

miniaturist at the moment of greatest inspiration, holding his reed under the

direct guidance of Allah, yet still able to take into consideration the form and

composition of the entire page, Black continued to direct our place in the

world from a corner of his mind even through his highest excitement.

“You can tell them you were spreading salve onto my wounds,” he said

breathlessly.

These words not only constituted the color of our love—which settled into

a bottleneck between life and death, prohibition and paradise, hopelessness

and shame—they also were the excuse for our love. For the next twenty-six

years, until my beloved husband Black collapsed next to the well one morning

to die of a bad heart, each afternoon, as the sunlight filtered into the room

through the slats of the shutters, and for the first few years, to the sounds of

Shevket and Orhan playing, we made love, always referring to it as “spreading

salve onto wounds.” This was how my jealous sons, whom I didn’t want to

441

suffer beatings at the jealous whims of a rough and melancholy father, were

able to continue sleeping in the same bed with me for years. All sensible

women know how it’s much nicer to sleep curled up with one’s children than

with a melancholy husband who’s been beaten down by life.

We, my children and I, were happy, but Black couldn’t be. The most obvious

reason for this was the wound on his shoulder and neck that never completely

healed; my beloved husband was left “crippled,” as I heard him described by

others. But this didn’t disrupt his life, other than in its appearance. There were

even times when I heard other women, who’d seen my husband from a

distance, describe him as handsome. But Black’s right shoulder was lower than

the left and his neck remained oddly cocked. I also heard gossip to the effect

that a woman like myself could only marry a husband whom she felt was

beneath her, and how as much as Black’s wound was the cause of his

discontent, it was also the secret source of our shared happiness.

As with all gossip, there is perhaps an element of truth in this as well.

However deprived and destitute I felt at not being able to pass down the

streets of Istanbul mounted tall on an exceptionally beautiful horse,

surrounded by slaves, lady servants and attendants—what Esther always

thought I deserved—I also occasionally longed for a brave and spirited

husband who held his head high and looked at the world with a sense of

victory.

Whatever the cause, Black always remained melancholy. Because I knew

that his sadness had nothing to do with his shoulder, I believed that

somewhere in a secret corner of his soul he was possessed by a jinn of sorrow

that dampened his mood even during our most exhilarating moments of

lovemaking. To appease that jinn, at times he’d drink wine, at times stare at

illustrations in books and take an interest in art, at times he’d even spend his

days and nights with miniaturists chasing after pretty boys. There were periods

when he entertained himself in the company of painters, calligraphers and

poets in orgies of puns, double entendres, innuendos, metaphors and games of

flattery, and there were periods when he forgot everything and surrendered