Читать книгу The Blacksmith's Daughter - Selim Özdogan - Страница 8

‘Don’t make my husband a murderer, I told him. Stop the car, don’t make my husband a murderer. Stop the car and let me out, and then piss off as fast as you can.’

Timur exhales and turns his head away so Fatma can’t see him tearing up. He’s still struggling for breath. He’s grateful, so grateful that fate has chosen this woman for him. She must have been written in his book of life on the very day he was born. He doesn’t know what’s happened to him, where all the time has gone.

Just yesterday he was a little boy in ragged trousers, scrumping pears from the neighbour’s garden with his friends. The neighbour had spotted the thieves, and they’d all jumped swiftly over the wall, pockets and shirts full of fruit. All but Timur, who’d been a little too slow, as usual. Though he could run just as fast as the others, he always missed his chance to make a bolt for it. Now he stood there, rooted to the spot, and the neighbour ran past Timur up to the wall and yelled after the escaping boys: ‘Come back! Come back, and give Timur a pear, at least. Great friends you are…’

Then he turned back to Timur and just said: ‘Run.’Timur didn’t dare go past the neighbour, so he ran all the way across the garden and jumped over the wall on the other side.

Just yesterday he’d been a little boy, not all that good at school, not all that skilled, not all that popular. Until he began to help his father the blacksmith, helped him blow the heavy bellows and fetch big buckets of water for Necmi to quench the glowing iron. Timur had built up muscles in the workshop, had proved himself hardworking and untiring. He had learned quickly, and he’d enjoyed being with his father all day long. He also enjoyed testing out his new strength. The boy who once avoided fights now let no opportunity pass to show off his superiority.

Timur had a sister, Hülya, and he could well recall the night when she was born, even though he was only five at the time. He remembered the excitement in the house, and above all his father’s determined face and his vow to open the girl’s feet, no matter what it cost him. Open, that was the word he used. Hülya’s feet pointed inwards, the big toes touching, and no one who saw them thought she’d grow out of it.

‘God means to test us,’ Timur’s mother, Zeliha, had said in a tear-choked voice, and Necmi had answered: ‘If there is a way, I will find it.’

But the doctor had said he could do nothing for the child, Necmi would have to take Hülya to Ankara if he wanted to get help for her. There were specialists there. He had to take her to Ankara and that wouldn’t come cheap.

Necmi had money, and although Zeliha was reluctant to make the journey, in the end they boarded the train and went to the big city.

‘It’s God’s will that her feet are closed,’ Zeliha had told her husband, but he’d simply ignored her.

In Ankara, the doctor explained the child was too small; they were to come back in two or three years and then he’d operate, but he couldn’t promise anything. And it would cost them.

Zeliha gave Necmi a discreet nudge. They were sitting side by side in the surgery, the baby on Zeliha’s lap. Stepping on his wife’s foot, Necmi stood up and said goodbye, cap in hand.

Outside in the dusty corridor, he said: ‘Wife, I can’t haggle with a doctor, I’m not a carpet seller, I’m a blacksmith. And he’s not a carpet seller either. I don’t care how much it’ll cost, as long as the girl is cured. I made a vow.’

‘We’ll end up going hungry just because you’ve gone and got this idea in your head. If only the Lord had given you a bit of sense to go with your stubbornness,’ she added quietly.

They slept in a cheap hotel and returned home the next day with a lorry driver from their small town. Zeliha had arranged it all. It took longer than the train and was uncomfortable too, but it was cheaper.

Her husband could almost be called well-off, but only because she managed to rein in his extravagance and earn a little extra with a few deals here and there. The evening before they left for home, Necmi had taken her to a restaurant and drunk a small bottle of rakı, and they had eaten kebab. As if bread and cheese and tomatoes and onions and a glass of water weren’t good enough. No, this man could not handle money; only she knew how to save up and multiply it.

So they squeezed into the driver’s cab. Zeliha had the baby on her lap and sat on the far side, breathing in the smoke from the two men’s roll-ups, swallowing the dust from the road right alongside them for almost ten hours. During the short stops, she made tea on a gas flame and prepared cold food while Necmi and the driver played backgammon.

Almost three years later, Necmi took the train to the capital city again, but this time Hülya was old enough not to need her mother to come along. When the blacksmith returned after four days, he carried his daughter on his back; her legs were in plaster up to the knees.

Six weeks passed, during which Hülya cried nearly every day because it was so itchy under the plaster. Necmi was standing in front of the only mirror in the house, shaving. Timur stood next to him, but he hardly dared ask him his most pressing question, afraid his father would tell him off.

‘Can I come with you?’

‘All right,’ Necmi said to his surprise, not thinking it over for long, and he stroked his boy’s blond hair. ‘Run and tell your mother to pack a bit more to eat.’

Timur was waiting impatiently outside the door with the bread and cheese when he heard voices from the kitchen.

‘It’s absolutely unnecessary for him to go. He’s too little, what does he want in Ankara?’

‘An adventure,’ Necmi said. ‘It’ll be an adventure for him.’

‘It’s…’

‘Enough. He’s coming with us.’

Timur wished he could dash off and tell his friends, but he didn’t want to miss the train. The train! He’d never been on a train before.

When a young simit-seller carrying a big tray of sesame rings on his head walked past, Timur piped up.

‘Brother,’ he said, ‘I’m going to Ankara today.’

‘To Ankara?’

The boy, who might have been two or three years older than Timur, smiled and said: ‘Keep your eyes peeled, they have simit there as big as wagon wheels. The people are rich there, they can afford it.’

Timur was excited to see the big city, the incredible sesame rings, and he was excited to see his sister cured.

He looked out of the window almost all the way, and sometimes he hummed along with the clatter of the train. He didn’t want to fall asleep, he was waiting for the moment when the city appeared before them. But the clattering made him tired, that and the endless dry brown of the plains and the hills on the horizon and his father’s snoring. Shortly before Ankara, he fell asleep.

Timur didn’t wake up until the train pulled into the station with a loud screech of brakes.

‘Don’t be scared, and watch out for the cars,’ the blacksmith told his son as they disembarked.

Timur wasn’t scared: he was fascinated by all the people, by the noise, by the big buildings and the cars, which he’d never seen before. When he noticed his sister was afraid, he walked closer alongside his father, who was carrying Hülya on his back. Timur wanted to stroke her, but he couldn’t reach any higher than the plaster.

‘Why do you keep staring at the simit-sellers?’ Necmi asked. And then he laughed and said: ‘Did someone tell you they had simit as big as wagon wheels in Ankara?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ignorant people are always inventing nonsense like that,’ his father said, and Timur was proud he was no longer one of the ignorant.

Later, at the doctor’s surgery, he did hold Hülya’s hand. His sister didn’t cry but Timur could see she was stiff with fear.

‘Close your eyes,’ Timur said, and the doctor added in a warm voice: ‘Don’t be afraid, it won’t hurt.’

Hülya seemed not to hear either of them; she could barely breathe, and when the plaster was sawn open, Timur screamed: ‘Dad, Dad, her eyes are slipping!’

But it was too late. From that day on, his sister had a permanent squint.

Sometimes, when the little girls were playing in the street outside the forge, Necmi would go out and call them over. Then he’d take them along to the grocer’s, where the girls would scoop up their skirts in front of them to receive a handful of sweets. And Timur’s father had enormous hands.

When he began working in the forge, Timur took up this habit from his father. He would often put sweets in Fatma’s skirt. He must have been 14 or 15 at the time, and she 10 years younger. He still remembered the girl’s smile. Nobody knew anything specific about Fatma’s parents; some said they’d been Greeks, some Aramaeans, and others claimed she was the daughter of Circassians. All they could agree upon was that the couple had arrived in the town after the confusion of the First World War. Fatma’s father had died before she was born. One day he had complained of back pain, and two weeks later cancer had taken hold of his entire body. Fatma’s mother began working as a nanny to a rich family to feed herself and her daughter. When Fatma was six months old, her mother was trampled to death by horses in the marketplace. Everyone told a different story, but all anyone knew for sure was that the horses had bolted, and she had fallen. The family who’d employed her mother had taken Fatma in.

Though she was much older, Timur’s sister, Hülya, often played with Fatma, because Fatma never teased her. The other children mocked her squint and her feet, which still turned slightly inwards, making her waddle. But Fatma liked Hülya. Fatma liked almost everyone; she was a happy girl who made friends easily. One moment, Timur had been a teenager, dropping sweets into this little girl’s skirts, and now she would soon be a woman.

‘Shall we set you up with Fatma?’ his mother asked, for the second time. ‘You’re 25 now, it’s time you got married.’

Hülya had been squinting for six years when her father grew sick. He lay in bed for a week and on the morning of the eighth day, he didn’t get up again. The first year had been hard for them all, but Zeliha had rented out the forge and managed to make enough money for food and even a little extra. Timur had continued to help in the workshop, and when he turned 17, he took over the forge and earned a livelihood for the family, which his mother managed.

And now he was 25 and he liked his life. He liked working at the forge, sitting at the teahouse and smoking shisha, and every so often he would get drunk. When he did, everything seemed to fall away, he savoured it. He savoured the world, felt nothing but pleasure. It was as if the stars in the night sky rained down on his hair, like sweets dropped into the skirts of a little girl. When he drank, it all became one; beauty and ugliness, heaven and hell, silk and sackcloth, pillows and the hard clay ground. As long as he had this happiness, and his work, nothing could happen to him. And when he needed a change, he would go to the big city and enjoy the sense of adventure he felt since his first visit there. He had no need to get married, but now he was standing drunk in front of his mother on a winter’s night, snowflakes melting on the shoulders of his coat, and he said: ‘Yes. Go and ask if they’ll give her to us.’

And Zeliha said: ‘Blessed be the Lord. I’ll go straight out in the morning and fix it up.’

‘Yes,’ he had said, that night, drunk. Yes, as if fate had placed the word in his mouth. It was not the first time his mother had suggested someone, but this time he’d said yes. But was Fatma even old enough? The next morning, he pulled his sister aside.

‘You know Fatma, the orphan girl?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mum wants me to marry her.’

Hülya went to hug her brother, but he held her back. ‘Do me a favour, will you? Find an excuse to sleep over at hers. You’re friends after all, aren’t you? You know each other well enough?’

Hülya looked at him, uncomprehending.

‘Have a look to see if she’s got breasts. She’s still too young to get married, don’t you think? What am I supposed to do with a wife without breasts?’

Hülya hesitated, so Timur added: ‘Please.’ It was a please which sounded more like go.

‘Okay,’ Hülya said. ‘I’ll try. But believe me, Fatma would make a good wife for you, breasts or no.’

Timur was not convinced, but he couldn’t keep it to himself and so he told his friends the news over lunch.

‘Mum has gone out today to fix my engagement. Fatma and I are getting married.’

‘Fatma, the orphan girl? Get away,’ the barber’s son said. ‘She looks like she’s got swamp fever.’

‘Swamp fever?’

‘Yeah, I don’t know, she’s so yellow and sickly-looking. Have you seen her recently?’

Timur shook his head. But after a moment’s pause, he told his assistant he had something to attend to and would probably be back sometime in the afternoon.

And then, despite the heavy snowfall, he loitered by the big house where Fatma lived until nightfall.

‘In spring,’ said Zeliha that evening. ‘You’ll marry in spring. I arranged it all today. She’s a hard-working girl and good-natured too, she’ll be able to help me out around the house and you’ll be less inclined to go wandering about.’

Swamp fever and no breasts. It wasn’t quite what Timur had imagined. He found it difficult to say anything, but in the end, he managed: ‘It’s all happened a bit fast. I hardly had time to think it over.’

‘You had 25 years to think it over,’ his mother said.

Timur was as strong as a lion, nobody could take him on, he was as strong as a lion and proud – what would he do with a sickly girl? Yesterday, with the stars caught in his hair, he had said yes, but today his feet were back on the ground.

‘So?’ he asked his sister when she came home the next morning. He had slept poorly and had no appetite.

‘So what?’

‘So, has she got…?’

‘It was too dark in the room.’

‘You could have tried feeling for them secretly.’

‘Wouldn’t have worked.’

‘So you couldn’t make anything out under her nightdress?’

‘No, but she’s still very young, they might not be big enough to be obvious yet – that’s if she has any…’

That day, Timur again left the forge in the hands of his assistant, who was surprised because Timur never usually stayed away so long.

Once again, the blacksmith went to the house where Fatma lived, and just when he could no longer feel his feet for the cold, she stepped out the door holding a clay jug. He was standing behind a spot where the wall jutted out, and Fatma didn’t notice him until she was almost standing in front of him. She knew that this was the man whom she’d been promised to the day before, and she turned around and ran back, only to stop abruptly. It had clearly occurred to her that she couldn’t go back into the house without an explanation. She turned around again; she had to visit the neighbour, get some vinegar. She wavered, taking two slow steps forward, hesitantly, her eyes fixed on the ground. Then she took a step back, her cheeks glowing, the snow making an incredible crunch beneath her feet, and stopped. She heard another crunch, then another and another, and as she slowly looked up, she saw the broad back of the blacksmith, walking away.

Timur lit a cigarette and smiled. Maybe she didn’t have any breasts, but she was beautiful. She was beautiful, like a piece of the moon. She was beautiful, as if the stars still hung in his hair. Timur didn’t go back to the workshop straight away, he went to the shopkeeper, to see the one bed he had for sale. He followed the shopkeeper into the storeroom, squatted down and looked long and carefully at the frame.

‘Would you like to buy it?’ the shopkeeper asked, scenting a sale. The bed had sat in the shop for six months. Almost everybody in the small town slept on the floor on mattresses or cushions, or on a divan, and even the rich ones didn’t seem to want to buy a bed – there was no reason to do so.

Timur didn’t respond, so the shopkeeper went on: ‘Are you getting married? Are congratulations in order?’

Timur muttered something incomprehensible without looking up from the bed frame.

‘We can be a little flexible with the price, of course.’

The blacksmith made no sound and his eyes narrowed a little; he nodded briefly, then stood up and slowly walked around the frame.

Finally, he said to the shopkeeper: ‘Yes, I’m getting married. In spring. In spring when everything is green and fragrant. No, I’m not going to buy the bed, but thank you and have a profitable day.’

Timur returned to the workshop in good spirits. There was a lot to do, he would have to stay longer if he wanted to make a start on the bed frame. The bedposts were to be exactly like the model at the shopkeeper’s; knee-high, round and gleaming. And on top of these, he would lay the slats, just as he had seen. But the headboard would not be made out of straight rods, like a prison cell; they’d be curved, like climbing roses.

He worked in the forge until almost midnight and when he finally lay down on his mattress, he closed his eyes, content. A piece of the moon.

Fatma and Timur slept in a real bed for the first time on their wedding night. Neither of them said a word once they’d entered the room. But later, when Timur was just about to fall asleep, Fatma murmured: ‘So this is how kings sleep.’

And Timur was not only proud but also surprised at how exactly her words said what he himself was feeling. He felt richer, more powerful, safer; he felt big enough to rule the world.

It was spring and they were newlyweds, Timur had enough work at the forge, they had money, Fatma brought him something to eat every lunchtime, and then they’d sit together for a while and talk and talk until it was time for Fatma to go and for Timur to get back to work. The food was usually still untouched, but Fatma knew that Timur would’ve eaten it by the evening and that he’d be hungry again by the time he got home; he was a big man who worked hard. It was spring and they had their own room in the house Timur’s father had left his mother.

And that was how the problems began. Zeliha saw her son looking after the young woman, this girl, saw him bringing home a little something for her almost every evening: a length of cloth so she could sew some clothes, a simit, a new headscarf, sometimes sweets or a piece of chocolate. Zeliha saw her son wanting to get close to his wife, saw him in love and caring for her.

One evening, it was summer by this point, she drew him aside: ‘Your wife, she’s lazy, she comes up with excuses not to help around the house. One day she’s sprained her ankle and the next she has a stomachache. And when she does do anything, she never tries hard. On our last washing day, she sat down at the trough and didn’t change the water once in two hours. She washed our laundry in dirty water.’

‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘I did. She sighed and said she had changed the water. She heaved a great big sigh. You need to teach her some respect.’

‘Mother, you were the one who said she was hard-working and reliable.’

‘I must have been wrong. She’s lazy and disrespectful.’

That night in bed, Timur told his wife his mother had complained about her. And Fatma said in a quiet voice: ‘I’m really doing everything I can. I’m trying my best but your mother… She can be unfair, I think.’

The complaints grew more frequent: Fatma sliced the cheese wrong, she cut the dishcloths in two when she washed up knives. When she went out, she dragged her feet on purpose so she’d get new shoes before the winter, she spread the butter too thickly on the bread, and Timur began to work out what the problem was.

‘Listen,’ he said to Fatma one evening, ‘I think I know what we can do. Next time my mother complains, I’ll drag you into our room and then I’ll bash the cushions and yell a bit, and you scream with pain, then I’ll go out and you stay in here for a while longer.’

Now, every time Zeliha complained to her son about her daughter-in-law, the young couple went to their room and the sound of beatings and screams was heard. The complaints tailed off.

Timur showed off to his friends about the trick, and they laughed together, raised their glasses and drank. And by the time autumn was over, the whole town knew about it.

‘We’ll have to come up with something new,’ said Timur as they lay side by side on the mattress one evening. They had lent out the bedstead; a distant cousin of Timur’s was getting married and she wanted to spend her wedding night in a proper bed too. Even the rich envied Timur for this bed, its feet decorated with brass by his own hand.

‘We could leave,’ Fatma said, ‘you could open a workshop, do a bit of trading, I could weave carpets. You’ve got two horses, we could live somewhere else.’

Yes, he had two horses and a donkey, yes, he had a bit of money, but where were they to go? Leave the town, leave all their relatives and friends, for another small town where they wouldn’t know anybody?

‘A strange place?’ he asked.

‘We could move to a village.’

‘You have no idea what it’s like, life’s completely different there. They don’t even have toilets, they squat down in the bushes.’

‘We could build an outhouse. You could keep the forge and ride into town and back, sell fruit and vegetables at the market on the side. Timur, we could lead our own life.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

And to help him think better, he took a week off and got on a train to Ankara. He wanted to enjoy life in the big city for a few days, look at cars and rich people’s houses, take in the sounds and the scents, the crowds. By day, he sat in teahouses and started conversations with city folk. Some said the war would soon be over, others predicted it would last a long time yet and that the Germans would be at the gates of Istanbul in six months’ time, like the Ottomans besieged Vienna back in the day. For Timur, the war was a long way off nonetheless; he listened but changed the subject at the first opportunity and tried to find out who supported Beşiktaş like he did. He was more interested in football than politics.

What interested him most of all were the evenings in the city. Listening to the scantily dressed singers in a bar for a couple of hours, drinking a glass or two, eating a slice of melon, a few chunks of white cheese, and he’d melt into the music after only the third glass. And later he lay alone and relaxed in a cheap hotel room, his worries lifted, his business far away and his mother too. Nobody knew him there, he’d lost himself in the big city, lost himself by losing his greed, ambitions, reservations – all the chains that bound him. He had lost himself only to find himself again, smiling on a hotel bed, his breathing even and calm.

When he got back, he said: ‘Winter isn’t a good time to move house.’

In the spring, Timur had found a house and taken their possessions there on the backs of the horses and the donkey. He had hired a cart to transport the bed, now returned to them by the cousin, and last of all he had fetched his wife. She’d been on the donkey’s back for two hours by the time they got there. The ride on one of the horses took only half that time.

It had been Fatma’s idea to move to the village, but she only knew villages from stories people told, and she’d only come across villagers as traders at the market.

Lying in bed on her first day in the new house, Fatma asked: ‘Are all the women here related?’

‘No, why?’

‘They all wear the same clothes.’

Timur laughed: ‘That’s the way it is here. We’re in a village now.’

He laughed but he was worried. He wasn’t sure Fatma would get used to it here while he rode into town almost every day to work at the forge. But when he arrived at the village just before sunset a week later, he saw Fatma sitting in the village square, the young women and girls gathered around her, listening.

When Fatma caught sight of him she leapt up, but he gestured to her to stay seated, then he dismounted, led his horse by the reins into the stable and smoked a cigarette on the steps outside the house as he watched the sun go down.

‘Fairytales,’ was the first thing Fatma said when she came over. ‘I was telling them fairytales. They don’t know any. Isn’t that strange? I always thought fairytales came to the town from the villages… You’re back early, I thought you’d be back at the same time as the other days. Dinner’s ready.’

Inside, the blacksmith looked at the carpet on the loom, saw that she’d been working, and smiled quietly to himself.

Timur bought green beans from the villagers, bulgur, and in summer and autumn tomatoes, broad beans, melons, grapes, apples and apricots. He loaded up his donkey to sell the produce at the market, and he made a good cut. He bought two cows, a few chickens, and at Fatma’s insistence, a small vineyard as well; his workshop was doing well, he was earning more than before.

Towards the end of autumn, he sold the carpets Fatma had woven, and now that the successful summer had put so much money in his pocket, he went to the big city again. Not to Ankara, though – this time he went all the way to Istanbul, because that was where Beşiktaş had their stadium, and the women there were even more beautiful and sang even more sweetly, and the wine flowed down his throat like liquid sunlight.

A week later he was back, having left half of the money in Istanbul.

Fatma got on well with the villagers. They all thought highly of her and valued her, and not because she was the wife of the blacksmith, the wife of the man whose strength was extolled by all, and who was also a good head taller than most of them; the wife of a man with piercing blue eyes, who sat proud and straight-backed on his horse. No, the women of the village liked Fatma because she was still so young, because she could tell stories, because she was always friendly to everyone and didn’t think herself better than them simply because she came from the town, or because she had money. They liked her because she was sweet-tempered and always tried to play the peacemaker when arguments arose; they liked that she was soft, but firm.

When Fatma got pregnant in the winter, without having had her period even once, the women of the village shared in her happiness.

The blacksmith had expanded his business, he had made sure word got around the surrounding villages that here was a man who paid farmers a fair price for their wares. One day in spring, when Fatma’s belly had grown big and round, Timur took her along with him to a village almost a day’s ride away, to give her a change of scene. He still brought her gifts, still fussed over her. Not as much as he had in the early days, but that was the way of everyday life; it did not mean that his feelings had lost any of their intensity. In the village, they had slept at a fat man’s house, on a mattress, just as they had recently been doing at home. One of Timur’s friends had got married and was borrowing the bedstead. The next morning, Timur spent a good while haggling with a farmer who was determined to squeeze a few more kuruş out of him. It was already lunchtime once the business was finally concluded, and their host did not want to send them on their way unfed. So it wasn’t until after midday that the two of them saddled up.

They were still some distance from the village as the sun started to set, but it was dangerous to ride on in the dark; it was so hard to see and they had to be on their guard for highway robbers.

‘We’ll have to sleep here and ride on in the morning,’ Timur said.

‘Where are you expecting us to sleep? There’s nowhere safe, I won’t sleep a wink!’

‘I know a place. It’s not far.’

At dusk, they reached a graveyard.

‘No one else is brave enough to come here after dark,’ Timur said. ‘Don’t be scared, trust me, this is the safest place to spend the night.’

That night, Fatma’s sleep was light but peaceful, and from then on, the blacksmith took her with him more often when he had business in villages far away, and she grew accustomed to nights like these. She liked to lie close to her husband in the quiet and the dark, and the ground beneath them seemed to her as soft as down when she lay her head on his shoulder and he stroked her hair and said: ‘My girl, my piece of the moon.’

She felt that she had been lucky with this man. It didn’t matter to her that he frittered away half the money he earned from the carpets she made, even though they had cost her a whole summer of sitting at the loom. There were things that bothered her, of course. On one occasion, he had lent his horse to the boy he employed to help him in the forge. God knows why he’d done it; the boy was a good worker, but he was a rash young man with a habit of flying into rages. In a fit of recklessness, the boy had ridden the horse at a gallop down the main street. People leapt out of the way in shock, cursing him, and eventually the police caught up with him and took the horse away. The police knew how much the horse was worth to Timur, and he’d been forced to pay a tidy sum to get it back; he had practically bought it a second time over.

On another occasion, Timur had helped out a friend who wanted to buy a field but didn’t have enough money. Why was this man buying a field when he didn’t have any money? Timur ended up paying for most of it, the field, but it belonged to his friend.

Fatma wasn’t worried; he earned well and they always had money, but she understood that he didn’t know how to manage it, and she suspected that not all of their days would be like these. But as long as he was by her side, she felt able to face each day with a smile.

On their first night in the graveyard, they lay side by side, eyes open, in silence. Timur thought to himself: Just two more minutes, just two more minutes to watch the stars and feel my wife in my arms, and then I’ll turn over and go to sleep.

‘Gül,’ Fatma said softly into the silence.

‘Hm?’

‘It’s going to be a girl, I can feel it. I want to call her Gül, rose. I want to have a little girl called Rose.’

The blacksmith placed his hand on her belly.

‘Gül,’ he said. ‘And if it’s a boy, we’ll call him Emin.’

‘It’s not going to be a boy.’

Gül was born on a warm September day. When the blacksmith came home at dusk, there was this little creature lying next to his wife in the bed.

‘Are her hands and feet normal?’ he asked first, and Fatma nodded.

He touched Gül carefully, like the weight of his big hands alone might bruise her. With tears in his eyes, Timur kissed his wife and touched his lips to his daughter’s head. Then he went out and sat on the steps outside the house. Something tingled beneath his skin, not like bubbles, more like a warm evening breeze. He felt light, as if the breeze were gently lifting his body, as if he had given over some of his weight to the earth below. He sat on the steps and forgot to smoke.

That autumn, it seemed to him that everything was working out. He bought rich harvests from the farmers and sold them at the market in town; his vineyard bore plenty of grapes; he hired a second assistant to work in the forge; and when it was spring again he bought a summer house with a big apple orchard and a stable on the edge of the town, so that he’d have a shorter journey to work, in summer at least.

Many of the townspeople had summer houses where they would escape the heat, plant a few beds with tomatoes, with cucumbers, peppers, courgettes and corn to eat. They also hoped for a little extra income when their apple trees bore fruit in the autumn. In the summer months, they’d rent out their houses in the town, mostly to rich people from Adana who wanted to escape the heat of the city.

When the heat grew stifling inside the summer house, you could always lie down outside in the shade of a walnut tree. You could listen to the leaves rustling, though it was barely half an hour on foot from the houses in town, lined up side by side with their little backyards with scarcely a tree.

They moved house in early May. Timur had found someone to take the bed and their household goods to the summer house on the back of a small lorry. Once they’d loaded it up, there wasn’t even space left in the cab. The driver suggested he take the things to the summer house, find a couple of lads to help him unload, and then come back for Timur and Fatma. Gül was at her grandmother’s house already.

‘Alright, Timur said, tucking some money in the driver’s shirt pocket to pay the lads for unloading. We’ll start walking, get a bit of a head start at least.

As man and wife were peacefully making their way along the dusty road, a car approached them from behind and the driver slowed right down. He had soot-black hair, shiny with brilliantine, and bushy eyebrows. Once he’d wound down the window, he asked: ‘Where are you heading?’

‘Into town,’ Timur answered.

‘I can give you a lift, get in,’ the man said. Fatma had never been in a car in her life. No one in their town owned a car in those days.

She’d been in lorries, in the driver’s cab or on the back, but never in a car. She sat down on the back seat and felt briefly trapped as Timur pulled the passenger door shut.

The driver’s hands didn’t look like he used them to work, but he had a stocky figure that didn’t quite match his thin, trimmed moustache.

As they drove up a slight hill the car slowed down, and suddenly it jolted forward and then stopped.

‘Damn,’ said the driver, then turned to Timur: ‘Brother, I can tell you’re a strong man. Would you mind getting out and pushing the car up the last bit? It’s bound to start again as soon as we’re going downhill.’

The blacksmith nodded and smiled, his blue eyes full of zest and pride, and he got out and braced himself against the car. It was easier than he’d thought; he hadn’t even broken a sweat by the time they were at the top. The car rolled downhill, the engine started, and the man put his foot down.

He wants to get the engine warmed up, Timur thought first, until he realised the man was simply driving away. His face flushed with heat and he broke into a run, chasing the car. He’d kill that man, he’d kill him. Even if he didn’t get his hands on him now, he’d strike him dead if he laid a finger on Fatma.

Timur doesn’t notice the car stopping and Fatma getting out; he simply runs without registering anything, and now he sees her standing by the side of the road. But he doesn’t slow down, he keeps running until he reaches her. The car is out of sight by now.

‘What happened?’ Timur asks.

‘Don’t make my husband a murderer, I told him, don’t make my husband a murderer. Stop the car and let me out, and then piss off as fast as you can. He’ll find you and kill you, I said, he’s a man of honour. I put my arm around his throat from the back seat and I said: Don’t make my husband a murderer.’

Timur is grateful. He’s grateful and he thinks life will get bigger and bigger and more and more wonderful as long as he has Fatma by his side. Just yesterday he was a little boy, and today he’s married to her and thinks they will conquer all dangers together.

Timur bought another cow, he dug the vegetable patches, hammered in the forge, and in the evenings he swept up his daughter in his arms and cuddled her. Fatma made friends with the neighbours, she milked the cows at dawn and then again at dusk when they came back from grazing. When she was alone with Gül, she talked to her daughter, told her what she was doing and who she was thinking of, told her she hadn’t had a mother of her own but her adoptive mother had taken good care of her, perhaps because she was the girl she’d always wished for and never had. Fatma hadn’t got on well with her three brothers; they’d teased and tormented her, once forcing her to eat a rotten apple, another time hiding her clothes when she was bathing in the river, but all that was long ago. Now she had Timur and she had Gül, and if God willed it, she’d have more children.

Summer passed, and when autumn was almost over they moved back to the village because it had grown too cold in the little summer house without a stove, because there wasn’t much left to do once the apples had been harvested, because the neighbours were moving back to town too, back to their homes, now vacated by the people from Adana who would spend a mild winter in the city, probably without a single glimpse of snow. Timur, Fatma and Gül moved back to the village; in the summer houses, there was no one left to talk to, no one left to lend some flour or a barrowful of manure. They moved back to the village without their bed – they had lent it, once again, to someone who had just married – they moved without their bed, but with cows and chickens in tow.

‘In a few years’ time, everyone in town will know how kings sleep,’ Timur said, acting as if he’d find it annoying. In reality, he was proud of the bed, and when it was lent out he’d look forward to being able to wake up in it in the mornings again, without the hard-trodden clay being the first thing he saw and smelt.

Gül had very quickly started talking. But it took her longer than other children to learn to walk. She was almost two and her mother had started to worry, while the blacksmith simply laughed. Gül crawled, but not like the other children; she crawled backwards and was always looking over her shoulder to see what was behind her.

‘My crazy rose,’ Timur said.

Gül was walking by the time Fatma was pregnant again. One night, Fatma lay once again in Timur’s arms at a graveyard and got that same feeling, quite clearly. It was the new moon, and Fatma felt that the spirits of the dead were looking on her kindly, looking on her kindly from surprisingly nearby.

‘Timur,’ she said, ‘would you rather have a son or another daughter?’

‘All that matters to me is that its hands and feet are in the right place,’ replied the blacksmith, ‘that it’s healthy and grows up with a mother and a father. That’s the most important thing.’

‘You’re going to have another daughter. Do you know what you’d like to call her?’

‘Melike.’

Melike cried through the night, she bawled until her face was purple; sometimes she would nurse greedily, sometimes she wouldn’t want anything at all, and sometimes it seemed she would only sleep if all was well. If Fatma was overtired and exhausted and weak, she could be certain Melike would cry all night long. But Fatma never complained.

‘What kind of child is this?’ Timur asked his wife.

‘It’s a different child, she’s restless and headstrong. You named her Melike, queen, and now she behaves like one.’

Timur laughed, took the baby in his arms, gave her a nip on the cheek and said: ‘We’ll force that out of you yet.’

Fatma smiled. When Timur had fixed the roof, and a raindrop fell from the ceiling into his tea the very next day, he’d hurled his glass at the wall. There was nothing she could do to change it. When Beşiktaş lost, he would be short-tempered for days. When something went wrong at the forge, Timur would hammer away in a frenzy, and afterwards there’d be black bruises underneath his fingernails.

This man would not be forcing anything out of Melike; yes, he loved his daughter, he made time for her, he was besotted with the girl, but he would be as powerless to change his children as Fatma was to change him.

Year after year, they spent the summer at the summer house on the edge of the town and the winter in the village. They made good money and even when they weren’t perfectly happy, even when there was lots of work to do, when the winters were hard, when the blacksmith went days at home without speaking a word and Fatma didn’t know what was bothering him, when they asked each other in bed at night how they would find the strength to face another day, these were good years. Gül learned to walk, she played in the street with the other children in the village. Melike learned to walk before she could talk, she almost never did what she was told, she protested loudly if she didn’t like her food, she yelled if she had the scissors taken away from her. Since developing a big bruise on the back of her head from flinging herself on the floor, whenever she didn’t get her way she’d plop down and carefully let herself fall backwards, and only then would she cry and rage and thrash at being told a three-year-old wasn’t old enough to milk a cow.

‘My little ones are jumpy creatures,’ said Timur, ‘they might kick out.’

And Melike screamed and shrieked, squeezing the air out of her lungs. She thrashed about and stamped the ground, and Timur was already in a bad mood that evening: two customers who owed him had disappeared without a trace, and Beşiktaş had lost three-nil to Galatasaray, a feeble bunch who hadn’t even been on good form. He had fixed the same spot on the stable roof for the third time; the ladder was still propped up against the wall. He grabbed Melike and climbed up to the flat roof with his daughter under his arm. Fatma and Gül stood below, staring up in disbelief.

Arm outstretched, the blacksmith held the still-crying child over the edge of the roof and cried: ‘I’m tired of your bawling, I’m tired of it, you hear? Let the devil take you, you can cry in the depths of hell. Now hush, give me some peace or I’ll drop you, you hear me?’

Melike fell silent for a moment, but once her father’s words had died away she started up again, and in the midst of her cries Gül heard a strange, cutting voice: ‘Timur, stop it.’

Gül looked up at her mother and realised that it was she who must have spoken in this quite unfamiliar voice. Fatma’s face looked strange too. Melike had stopped crying. For a few seconds, the four of them stood there, unmoving.

‘Be thankful for your mother,’ Timur said, and climbed back down the ladder with Melike. ‘One of these days, I’m going to forget myself’, he added.

As soon as he let go of Melike, she carefully lay back on the ground. Fatma seized her by the arm and pulled her into the house. Gül was still standing next to her father, who shook his head, booted the ladder, and went into the stable.

Timur was admired by many in the village; he came from the town, was prosperous, always friendly and generous, and his broad shoulders alone were enough to command respect. But others in the village did not like him – this man who made a profit by selling their harvests at the market, this man who spent the hotter months in his summer house like he was better than them, and who raked in more than enough money come the autumn, when he sold his apple harvest.

One day, the blacksmith received a tip-off from one of the villagers that one of the men who envied him had reported him to the gendarmerie, and they would soon be on their way to search his house. The blacksmith had nothing to hide – he had not grown rich from stealing and flogging stolen goods, he had nothing in his house that he hadn’t earned by the sweat of his brow. He had nothing to fear.

As long as he hid his guns. He was a man, the head of a family, of course he had to have a gun. He shot birds with it, rabbits, foxes, making money from their skins, and sometimes in summer he’d shoot moles. If he discovered a molehill in his garden, he would snatch up a spade and shovel away the earth until the underground passage came into view. Then he’d lie down on his stomach some distance away, gun at the ready, and wait. Sooner or later, the mole would emerge to tidy up the hole.

He was a man, and he had two guns which always hung on the wall, loaded. But he didn’t have a licence. Timur came home and took the guns down.

‘Gül,’ he said to his daughter, ‘go out and play for a while.’

Gül went out, but once the curtains were drawn, she grew curious. If she stood on tiptoes and tilted her head, she could see exactly what was going on inside. The previous winter, there had been a draught coming from one of the windows and when he repaired it, Timur had noticed a hollow underneath the window ledge. He was a man, yes, he wouldn’t entrust his guns to just anyone. He wrenched the board off the window ledge, hid the guns in the space beneath it and hammered the wood back into place.

As the blacksmith was smiling contentedly, Fatima shook her head and pointed to the hooks on the wall. Timur pulled them out with a pair of pliers and they mounted a wall-hanging over the spot, to hide the holes. Three days passed before the gendarmes came. They heard the clatter of hooves just as they were sitting down to eat one evening. Timur opened the door.

‘Good evening, gentlemen. I hope it’s good news that brings you our way.’

‘Good evening,’ the gendarmes replied, in chorus, and one continued: ‘Can we come in?’

‘But of course, do come in.’

Gül was frightened when she saw the strange men, all in uniform, two of them carrying guns. The unarmed one bent down to speak to her.

‘Hello, little girl. What’s your name, sweetheart? … Don’t you have one?’

‘Gül.’

‘And your little sister, asleep over there, does she have a name?’

‘Yes. Melike.’

‘Gül and Melike.’

He smiled briefly, then straightened up and turned to Timur: ‘You’re the blacksmith, Timur.’

‘At your service.’

‘We’ve heard you’ve been keeping guns without a licence.’

‘No,’ said the blacksmith. ‘I don’t have guns. You must have heard wrong.’

With a nod, the man directed the others to start the search. They began, unhurried, opening the cupboards, peering under the divan, between the mattresses and pillows and under the rugs next to the loom.

‘Can I get you gentlemen anything?’ Fatma asked, ‘Perhaps you’d like a coffee?’

The unarmed man nodded, and one of the gendarmes followed Fatma into the kitchen while the others carried on searching. The unarmed man sat down next to Gül, Timur took the seat opposite them. He looked completely calm.

‘Come here a minute, little one. Come here, Gül,’ said the man, once he’d taken off his cap. He pulled Gül into his lap.

‘Do you get on well with your sister?’

Gül nodded.

‘I bet you’re a good big sister, aren’t you, you take good care of her?’

Gül nodded again.

‘Wonderful, now tell me, how old are you? … Don’t you know? You can’t be five yet, can you? Or six? Are you at school yet?’

Gül said nothing. She didn’t nod, didn’t shake her head; she simply stayed silent.

‘Come here,’ the man said to the gendarme, who was standing about looking hesitant, not knowing where to search next.

‘Have a look at this,’ he then said to Gül, pointing to the gendarme’s gun. ‘Look at it, have you ever seen anything like this before?’

He laughed and stroked her cheek.

‘There’s nothing to be scared of, Gül.’

Gül wasn’t scared, she didn’t even feel particularly uneasy sitting in this strange man’s lap. She simply stayed silent.

‘You’ve seen a gun before, haven’t you? Practically every man has a gun. It’s quite normal, isn’t it? Your dad’s got one too, hasn’t he?’

Fatma came in with a tray, offering the commander a cup of coffee first, then his two assistants, who accepted their cups but set them down without taking a sip. They wanted to finish searching the last room, the bedroom, where the wrought-iron bedstead had been returned some weeks earlier.

Timur received his cup last. His hands didn’t tremble. Even if Gül did say that her father had a gun, it would make no difference, since they’d never find them.

‘One of you check the stable,’ the commander called to the bedroom before turning back to Gül.

‘Your dad’s got a gun, hasn’t he? And you know exactly where he’s hidden it. Be a good girl, Gül, be a good girl and tell me where your dad’s hidden the gun. He’s got two, hasn’t he? You’re a big girl now, I’m sure you know where the guns are.’

Thank God we sent her out, thought the blacksmith. Gül said nothing and shrugged.

It was pitch-black outside when the gendarmes abandoned their search, thanked Fatma for the coffee and left.

‘Go into the other room and stay there until I call you,’ Timur told Gül.

‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow?’ Fatma asked, but Timur just shook his head.

‘Go on, Gül.’

‘But I already know where they are.’

‘Oh really, where?’ her father asked, teasing.

Gül ran to the window ledge and placed her little hand roughly over the spot covering the hollow.

Fatma smiled, lifted Gül up in her arms, kissed her on the cheek and said: ‘You did very well. It’s very important not to tell strangers about what goes on at home. Bravo, I’m proud of you, my darling. You did a great job.’

Timur noticed his hands had started to tremble.

Gül didn’t tell anyone at home what went on outside either. That summer, she didn’t feel like going out to play with the other children. Even when Fatma told her to look after Melike, who always wanted to go out, Gül would often find an excuse to stay in the summer house or play in the garden by herself, building mud houses in the shade of the apple trees or picking flowers to give to her mother.

‘Why don’t you play with the other children?’ Fatma asked. ‘Don’t you like them? You always like playing with the children back in the village.’

Gül shrugged and said nothing.

‘Melike likes playing with them too. They’re nice children, aren’t they?’

Fatma had lifted Gül onto her lap. Gül raised her shoulders again, but she leaned her head against her mother’s chest.

‘Do they tease you? Do they laugh at you?’

Gül nodded.

‘And why do they laugh? Because you always get caught when you play red rover?’

Gül shook her head and said: ‘Wed wover.’

‘You’re just as fast as the others, it’s alright.’

‘Awright,’ Gül said, very quietly.

Now Fatma understood.

‘They laugh at you because you talk like the people from the village.’

Gül lowered her head.

‘But that’s not such a bad thing. If you play with them a couple of days, you’ll soon sound just like them, you’re a quick learner. And they might laugh at you once or twice until then, but they’ll soon get bored. There’s no need to be ashamed.’

Fatma poked her fingers under Gül’s arms and laughed and started to tickle her, first slowly but soon she and her daughter were rolling on the floor. Gül laughed and screeched; she sat on her mother’s legs to tickle her feet. Fatma kicked and struggled a little, screaming, and then she let her body go limp and said: ‘Now you’ve tickled me to death.’

She stayed face-down, motionless. Gül went on tickling the soles of her mother’s bare feet, but Fatma clenched her teeth and kept perfectly still. When there was no response for a while, Gül stopped, sat up next to Fatma and shook her.

‘Mummy?’

Fatma didn’t respond.

‘Mummy, don’t be dead. Mummy?’

Not until Fatma realised Gül was getting scared did she open her eyes with a laugh, hug her daughter and say: ‘I’m still here, don’t worry. If you go out for a bit today, we can play again tomorrow, awright?’

From then on, they played together every day, and sometimes Fatma played dead. Gül cheated. She went out the front to the children in the street, but she’d soon go into the stable, which had one door onto the road and one to the garden. She was scared of the mice in there, but she simply closed her eyes all but a tiny sliver, held her breath and ran as fast as she could from one door to the other. That was how she spent almost the whole summer before she started school, on her own in the garden.

She liked it at the village school, where all 60 pupils from the first to the fifth year sat in one classroom; she liked it even though the teacher would hit them on the palm with his ruler if they misbehaved. The boys got clips round the head or the ear as well, but the girls didn’t need to fear that. Only twice in her first year at school did Gül get hit with the ruler.

Recep, the only blond boy in the village, was in the fourth year and infamous for playing tricks and making trouble. One day he flicked balls of paper across the classroom. When the teacher caught him at it, he smacked him so hard in the face that his cheeks were still red the next morning. But just two days later he started flicking again and hit the teacher on the back of the neck.

Without turning around, the teacher said: ‘Recep.’

‘It was me,’ Gül said; she had no idea why it slipped out. Recep wasn’t even her friend. He was the son of a good friend of her mother’s, and people thought the reason he was naughty was that he didn’t have a father; the man had gone to Istanbul one day and never come back, or so they said.

The teacher turned around and looked at Gül for a few seconds. He knew it hadn’t been her, but he called her to the front and made her stretch out her left hand, palm upwards. He had to maintain his authority. Everyone held their breath, and the slapping sound was almost worse for Gül than the pain. As she sat back down, she knew her mother would hear about it. She’d be angry with her for being naughty, she knew she would. Tears pricked her eyes.

‘It doesn’t hurt any more, does it?’ Recep asked after school.

‘No,’ Gül murmured, looking briefly up into his blue-grey eyes.

‘Here.’

Recep took a few apricot stones out of his pocket and pressed them into Gül’s hand.

‘See you tomorrow,’ he added, and then he turned away and left.

At home, Gül smashed the apricot pits open with a stone and ate the nutty innards, not asking Melike if she wanted any.

Gül didn’t cry the second time she got hit with the ruler. No one was allowed to be late, not even the girls. And if you came late on Monday mornings, when they were singing the national anthem, you’d get a whack with the ruler. On other days, you had a chance of getting away with it.

When Melike had a bad dream or woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, she’d get into bed with Gül, snuggle up and fall asleep again. At night, half asleep, Gül liked to feel her sister’s body curled up next to her.

Sometimes, though, Melike would wake up because she’d wet the bed. She’d soon be four but she still wet the bed regularly. The covers were clammy, the mattress was damp and cold and stank, and Melike would get up and simply lie back down in Gül’s warmth.

The night before Gül got her second punishment, Melike woke up from a bad dream and got into Gül’s bed. By the morning, however, she was back in her own. And when Gül awoke from the sounds in the kitchen, she thought she had wet her own bed. Her pyjama bottoms were wet, her legs were damp, the cold spot on the mattress was right underneath her.

Gül undressed and thought about where to hide her pyjamas. She wanted to dry them in secret; she was a big girl, she went to school now, she didn’t wet the bed any more. At first, she stuffed the trousers under Melike’s bedding, and when it was time to go to school, she took them with her to hide them in the stable.

But when she opened the stable door and heard the mice squeaking, sensing rather than seeing their scurrying in the hay, she didn’t dare go in, into the dark stable where the cows and horses and the donkey were too. The stable at the summer house had seemed less scary.

Gül stood at the door in her school uniform. She had already smuggled her pyjama trousers out of the house, and she couldn’t take them to school. And she couldn’t hide them anywhere else, because someone might steal them. It took a long time, a very long time, for Gül to gather up the courage to dash into the stable and hide the trousers in the hay. It took about as long as the national anthem.

A few weeks later, or – more precisely – on the day when their mother told Gül and Melike they would soon be getting a new sibling, Recep was late to school. You could have sung the national anthem 50 times before he arrived. The school day was almost done. It would’ve been smarter of him not to turn up at all. If you didn’t turn up, you wouldn’t get caned. The day after, you could always say you’d had to help your parents.

But Recep knocked, opened the door, presented himself to the teacher and simply held his hands out in front of him. And the teacher didn’t take much convincing.

Afterwards, Recep squeezed himself onto the bench where Gül was sitting and whispered to her: ‘Your dad’s got into a row with Tufan, there’s going to be a fight in the village square. Your dad’s strong, but Tufan has more men.’

Gül was agitated, she felt hot, she felt like she couldn’t sit still any longer, but she didn’t move. Her father was going to fight someone.

‘Why have they fallen out?’ she whispered to Recep.

‘I don’t know. Are you coming with me?’

‘Yes,’ Gül said. She had never seen adults fight before.

You could’ve sung the national anthem for a full year before the school day was finally over, that’s how slow time seemed to pass. There was whispering and gossiping; the news spread, and when the teacher declared school over for the day, the pupils streamed out of the classroom faster than ever before and ran, breathless, towards the village square. Everyone wanted to grab a good spot.

‘Come with me, they’ll chase us away from the square,’ Recep said.

They climbed up a ladder onto the roof of one of the houses that had a good view of the village square. Two groups of men were standing below them, a stone’s throw away. Gül instantly recognised her father in the smaller group. The men were shouting, hurling insults at each other. The blacksmith didn’t have the loudest voice, but he towered over the rest of them and stood with his head high, his shoulders slightly back, his chest pushed out: he didn’t seem afraid at all.

The men picked up stones off the ground and flung them at their rivals; first someone from Tufan’s group would throw one and the others would retreat, then Timur’s men would throw and Tufan’s friends would put their arms in front of their faces to protect themselves and take a few steps back. One of Timur’s mates was hit on the brow, and the left side of his face and his neck were covered with blood, but he shouted the loudest of all. On the other side, even No-Nose Abdul squawked out a few swears. Nearly all the children were afraid of him; his nose had been shot off by his brother when the two of them were young. They’d been playing with their father’s gun, thinking it wasn’t loaded. Abdul only very rarely left the village, so as not to be at the mercy of strangers’ stares. In the village, at least the adults had long grown accustomed to his scarred face, the bridge of his nose ending abruptly just beneath his eyebrows.

‘Dishonourable dog!’ Abdul shouted, and from behind him Tufan yelled: ‘Crook, dirty pig!’

Timur split off from his group and made towards the others. He was lucky, a couple of stones missed him, one clipped his shoulder. When he was standing a good ten strides away from his group, the others stopped throwing stones.

‘What’s your problem, Tufan, you son of an ox? If you’re a man, come over here and fight like one. Don’t just throw stones like a woman.’

‘In case you didn’t already know: in this village, we throw stones to chase off dogs,’ Tufan yelled back. ‘And what are you but a pesky little dog? What business do you have in our village?’

‘A good dog doesn’t bite people in his own village,’ Timur said. ‘Now come and fight like a man.’

Gül would have liked to shout out loud – she would have liked to do something to make them all get along again, but she sat on the roof and held her breath like all the other children who had gathered up there in the meantime, having been chased away from the village square. A few of the children recognised their own fathers among the groups. Recep wished he had a father who could be standing there too, or at least a brother old enough, but he just had four older sisters and a mother. Tufan took a few steps forward, not as energetically as Timur had, then turned around to look at his men. Now there were perhaps 15 strides between Timur and Tufan. The first upright and proud, the other a little shorter, his shoulders sunken.

‘You ripped me off,’ Tufan said. ‘You robbed me blind. I’ll tell you again: I want my cut.’

‘Cut? We agreed on a price for the beans, you got it. We shook on it, but now you want to go back on your word.’

‘You conned me – it was far too little.’

‘I gave you a good price. And you agreed to it.’

‘You owe me double.’

‘Fuck you! Come and fight me.’

Timur took another two steps towards Tufan, who was clearly willing himself to stay standing. And suddenly a stone hit Timur in the middle of his forehead. Nobody saw who’d thrown it, because they had all been mesmerised by the sight of the two rivals. Timur hesitated only briefly, wiped a hand over his brow and then ran at Tufan. But Tufan turned and ran to his men, who were now all flinging stones at Timur to keep him away. Once he’d been hit a few times, the blacksmith stopped and walked back, slowly. When he was far enough away, he turned around again.

‘You cowards. Can’t even fight like men. If I get hold of any of you, I’ll use you to plug the hole you crawled out of.’

He yelled the air out of his lungs, and a single trickle of blood ran between his eyebrows and then down the left side of his nose, disappearing into his thick, blond moustache.

‘We’re going,’ he said.

Tufan had run away, the matter was closed. Gül ran home excitedly and told her mother what she’d seen. Fatma simply nodded; she didn’t seem worried.

‘Gül, don’t mention it to him when he comes home, don’t ask him why it happened. Don’t ask him. Will you do that, little one?’

It was dark by the time the blacksmith came back. Melike hadn’t wanted to go to sleep and was still romping about the room, doing somersaults and trying to climb up onto the window ledge. Once her father had eaten, she plonked herself down in his lap. Gül sat on the floor pretending to do her homework.

‘What’s that?’ asked Melike, poking a finger into the little wound on her father’s brow.

‘It’s where a little girl poked me in the head,’ said Timur. ‘I was at work and in came a little girl, the same age as you, and she poked her finger into my head and asked if she could be my daughter. And I said I already have two daughters. And maybe soon I’ll have a third. And I said my daughters are very kind. But the next time you’re naughty, I’ll make the little girl my daughter and give you away instead.’

He laughed and kissed Melike, and Gül was sitting close enough to smell his laugh. It smelt hot and sour, it smelt like something forbidden.

At night, Gül heard her parents whispering, but she couldn’t understand a word. She would’ve liked to get up and lie next to Melike, but Melike would wet the bed and her from top to bottom. That’s what had happened last time. When her mother had found her pyjama bottoms in the stable, she’d confronted Gül.

‘Why did you hide your pyjama bottoms?’

Gül had shrugged.

‘Did you think you’d wet the bed? It wasn’t you, it was Melike again. And even if you do wet the bed, it’s not that bad. It can happen to anyone. Just like the business with the teacher when he smacked you. It happens. But it shouldn’t happen too often, understand? I want you to be a big girl, one who can take care of her little sister. Now, do you want to help me wash these bottoms of yours, my love?’

Fatma had heated the water and poured it into the big portable copper basin, and while she sat on a low wooden stool washing the pyjamas and the sheets, she let Gül scrub along a little.

Gül lay awake long after her parents’ whispering had died away. Her heart still seemed to be beating as fast as it had that afternoon on the roof. It pressed against her chest and wouldn’t let her sleep.

One day, Fatma left Gül and Melike with her mother-in-law so she could take care of something in town. While Melike slept, Gül kept jumping off the divan, over and over. She climbed up on one side, walked the entire length of the divan and jumped down at the other end.

‘If something gets broken, you’re in big trouble,’ Zeliha called more than once from the kitchen, where she was rolling stuffed vine leaves with Hülya.

On what must have been her 50th jump from the divan, Gül got cocky, took too much of a run-up and landed in a bowl of minced meat she hadn’t noticed was there. She was scared of her grandmother, and didn’t want to be in big trouble, so she picked herself up, slipped her shoes on and ran out of the house. There were about as many houses on one street here as in the whole village. Or at least it seemed that way to her. It wasn’t five minutes before she lost her way. It was winter, she was freezing cold, and after a quarter of an hour she stopped on a street corner, so scared and cold she couldn’t even cry.

A tall man with green eyes and black hair spoke to her: ‘Are you lost, little one? I’ve not seen you around here before.’

Gül nodded.

‘Shall I take you home? Come on, first we’ll put this jumper on you. That’s right… Where do you live then?’

Gül shrugged.

‘Whose daughter are you?’

‘The blacksmith’s daughter.’

‘Right, then I’ll take you to the blacksmith.’

The young man hoisted Gül onto his shoulders, and Gül enjoyed the perspective from up there; she enjoyed the feeling of being carried for so long and listening to him asking the way of two passers-by. Eventually, the man knocked at a door, lifted Gül down and waited. A woman opened up, and they could see a man and children in the background, eating their dinner.

‘A blessed evening and a good meal to you,’ the man said, and then he went on: ‘Blacksmith, I’ve brought your daughter back to you.’

‘My daughter?’ said the man who’d got up and come to the door. ‘Don’t be silly, that’s not my daughter. I’ve already got four girls, what I want is a son. The merciful Lord hasn’t granted me a single son. You get out of here with yet another girl.’

‘Oh,’ the green-eyed man said.

After the door shut behind them, the man asked Gül: ‘What’s your father’s name, then?’

‘Timur.’

‘Timur, not Tolga. You’re the blacksmith Timur’s daughter?’

Gül nodded and said: ‘We live in the village.’

‘I know,’ the man said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take you to your father, we’ll just have to borrow a horse.

And so the man, who later turned out to be a sieve maker, took Gül home to her parents in the village and had to stay overnight in the end, because he couldn’t ride back in the dark. Gül had thought her mother would tell her off and her father would shout, but neither of them said a thing.

Once the sieve maker had set off for town with her father the next morning, Fatma took Gül aside and gave her a clip round the ear.

‘You are never, do you hear, never to run away like that again, no matter what happens. And never, never go anywhere with strange men again. They might do bad things to you, very bad things. Promise me you’ll never run away again. Promise me!’

Gül got her second clip round the ear then and there, and she saw the tears in her mother’s eyes. There was something in Fatma’s face that scared her, scared her more than her grandmother’s voice.

Fatma pulled Gül into her embrace, stroked her hair and said: ‘My dove, never again, promise?’

‘I promise.’

It was a hard winter, though they always had enough wood, they had plenty of flour, bulgur and beans, they had thick grape molasses which tugged at the bread when you dunked it in. It was an unusually hard winter, and there were days when the blacksmith did not ride out to work but stayed at home with his pregnant wife instead. It was the first winter that Fatma and Timur had their own bed from the first snow to the last. Relatives and acquaintances married, but there was no chance of transporting the bed through the snow-packed streets.

At school, it was so cold that the firewood ran out. Every day, two children had to bring wood from home, but even then, it was never really warm in the classroom. Fatma spoke to Timur, and one day he rode to the school, taking as much wood as his donkey could carry. Many of the children had fallen ill by then, and the children from the surrounding villages sometimes stayed home because the snow had blocked the roads, and when they’d burned through the blacksmith’s wood in no time at all, the teacher shut the school until the snow queen’s crown finally shattered; until the snow melted.

Early one morning in the first days of the thaw, Sibel was born. Gül had gone to bed the night before, and when she woke, she had a little sister; a tiny, ruddy little sister, small enough that Gül thought she would probably fit inside her own little belly. Her mother’s belly had been so big and her sister was so small. Sibel.

Melike glanced at the new arrival only briefly, apparently uninterested. She was much more interested in breakfast being ready at last and in all the hubbub at the house. People were coming and going, there were well-wishes and little presents, and Timur said again and again: ‘Her hands and feet are normal, thanks be to God.’

Good wishes rained down from friends and neighbours: May she be healthy, may she always have her mother and father, may she be granted a long and happy life.

By the time Sibel was 40 days old, the snow had melted, the brooks and rivers had burst their banks, the sun was warm – and sometimes Timur sat in front of his house and closed his eyes, rubbed his neck under his coat collar, then held his head still and enjoyed the warmth on his face. And soon the birds were singing, the trees were coming into bud; he had another daughter, named after a fertility goddess. Life was always getting bigger and it had no banks to burst like a river. It simply grew – it grew like his children, and one of these days his life and his heart would grow so big there’d be room inside for everyone, his friends and his foes; there would even be room for Tufan, who’d snitched on him to the gendarmes.

But in the last few days he’d felt a little weak, like he was coming down with the flu. He hadn’t had the slightest cold all winter long, so he couldn’t understand why he now felt weak and drained, and every morning it got worse, not better. One day his limbs were aching so badly that work was out of the question. Even his clothes made his skin smart, so he left the forge not long after he’d arrived, had a glass of tea at the teahouse and then went to the baths to sweat out the sickness. The next morning, he could hardly get up; he dragged himself to the forge but all he did was spend the day at the teahouse, sitting there in a daze.

‘You’ve not looked at all well these last few days,’ Fatma said that evening.

‘I think I’m getting sick.’

Fatma felt his forehead.

‘I’ll make you some broth, you’ve got a bit of a fever, and tonight we’ll wrap you up nice and warm and you’ll just sweat it out.’

Timur didn’t mention that he’d been to the baths, but that night he sweated again. Fatma gave him fresh pyjamas, and when he was changing by the light of the petroleum lamp, she saw reddish blotches on his chest and back.

‘Timur,’ she said, ‘you should tell the doctor about this, it doesn’t look like a cold.’

Timur looked down and he saw the blotches too, if not as clearly as Fatma did. He was completely dazed; everything appeared to him as if through a haze which wouldn’t clear, no matter how much he shook his head or rubbed his eyes.

But he said: ‘Nonsense, what’s the good in seeing the doctor? You’ll see, in two days I’ll be well again.’

Two days later his fever was even higher. He no longer had the strength to stand, and in his rare lucid moments he listened for his heart. It seemed to be beating very slowly. With each day, his fever worsened, and the rattle on his lungs was enough to frighten Fatma. Through a farmer who had business in the town, she got a message to her mother-in-law about her son’s condition. And she made no secret of the fact that she had begun feeling ill herself and feared she would soon be unable to tend to Timur and the children.

The very next day, Zeliha had the whole family brought from the village on a lorry. Timur was so weak that the driver had to help him up into the cab. His fever had raged uninterrupted for over a week, and now he had diarrhoea too. His skin was yellowy and seemed stretched over his cheekbones, his shoulders fell forward wearily, he could no longer stand upright, and there was a glint in his eyes, a crazy, if exhausted glint.

Melike and Gül had only ever seen him lying down to sleep, and now they were both silent at the sight of the weakened man they knew had once been able to carry them both with no effort at all.

The whole way to the town, no one said a word. The only sounds were the hum of the lorry, matches being struck and the driver taking a deep drag. Fatma felt dizzy and unwell, and a few times she tried to ask if they could stop for a moment, but then her stomach seemed to settle again and the queasiness was bearable.

‘Typhoid,’ the doctor said. ‘I assume it’s typhoid.’

‘Are you feeling ill too?’ he asked Fatma, who gave only a slow nod as an answer.

‘It’s an infectious disease. You’ve come from a village?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have a toilet? Or do you go in the bushes? Typhoid is transmitted by gut bacteria.’

‘We do have a toilet, yes. The only one in the village… Is it dangerous?’

‘It’s not not dangerous,’ the doctor said. ‘Take your children to relatives; it doesn’t look like they’ve caught it. It’s almost the last stage of the illness, your husband will probably be over the worst in a few days. He has a robust constitution, don’t worry.’

Zeliha sat at the head end of the bed and dabbed her son’s brow, shiny with fever. Once the doctor had packed his bag and left, she said to Fatma: ‘Take the children to Hülya’s, they’ll be well looked after there.’

Hülya had married a prison guard last spring, but she still wasn’t pregnant. In the coach with her daughters, Fatma had to ask the coachman to pull over. She got out and vomited by the side of the road. The coachman gave her a sip of water after she’d wiped her face with her handkerchief. Melike and Gül sat in the coach, watching in silence. Their little sister lay between them, asleep.

‘Are you ill too? Does it hurt?’ Gül asked her mother.

She wanted Fatma to say that there was no need to be scared, that everything would be fine. She didn’t understand what was happening, and she wanted her mother to make the world smaller with her words, to tear it into pieces that didn’t seem so threatening, pieces she could grasp.

‘No, my darling, it doesn’t hurt. I think I’m getting ill but it’s nothing bad.’

‘Are we going to Auntie Hülya’s?’

‘Yes, I’m taking you to Auntie Hülya and Uncle Yücel. You’ll just stay there for a few days. And be good, alright? Look after your sisters, Gül. We’ll come and pick you up soon, and then we’ll all go back to the village together. Your father is sick, but there are doctors here in town. We’ll get better and then we’ll go back to the village.’

Hülya welcomed them very warmly. She kissed her sister-in-law and the girls, made tea and offered pastries, but Fatma wouldn’t stay.

‘I must get back,’ she said. ‘I have to be with Timur. Please take good care of the girls. Keep both your eyes on them so I don’t have to keep looking around.’

‘Don’t you worry.’

Fatma kissed Gül and Melike, and just as she was about to kiss Sibel, the baby started screaming, and Fatma said: ‘I want to feed her one last time.’

Hülya looked her sister-in-law in the eye, and she would have liked to reassure her; she would have liked to say, You’ll have plenty more chances to feed her, and she’d have liked to laugh as she said it. Fatma was still as beautiful as a piece of the moon, even though her cheeks had caved in, but her eyes seemed to be looking inwards, into a darkness longer than the evening sun’s shadows. Then her gaze turned outwards again, and she smiled, put Sibel to her breast and let her suckle. Gül was still scared. Her mother had made the world smaller, but it hadn’t helped.

The next day, Fatma couldn’t get up either. The fever had seized her, and the mist had folded in around her, but she did see that her mother-in-law took much better care of her son than of her. There was nothing she could she do about it, left to lie in her sweat-soaked clothes, not getting clean sheets every few hours, no more than half a cup of broth being spooned into her mouth because she swallowed so slowly. There was nothing she could do, and little changed over the next few days. She lay next to her husband, who got better and better from day to day. He could already get up and take a few steps, while she lay there in fever dreams and was incapable of almost anything.

In a moment of clarity, she said: ‘Timur, get them to take me to hospital. Your mother’s not caring for me like she is of you, and I don’t have anyone else. Get them to take me to hospital, please, I’m very sick. You can get better faster, your mother can take better care of you, and then you can come and pick me up from the hospital and nurse me back to health. Timur, I beg of you, for the love of God, get them to take me to hospital. I’m very sick… I’m scared.’

Timur kissed her brow and nodded.

Sibel cried all through that first night in the strange house. Yücel, who had work in the morning, walked back and forth through the house with her in his arms; he rocked her, placed a hand on her back and hummed songs to soothe her. Melike wet the bed three times that night, and Hülya, who couldn’t sleep either, changed the bedclothes three times, while Gül lay there and pretended to be asleep. She liked her aunt and her uncle, who was a quiet man and often seemed quite serious.

Early in the mornings, Hülya would take Sibel to her mother, so that Fatma could nurse her at least once a day, and each time Hülya would say: ‘See, there’ll be many more times like this.’ But Fatma’s milk had all but dried up.

The sisters had been at their aunt’s for a few days when Yücel went to the mosque for Friday prayers.

‘Come here,’ Hülya said to Gül. ‘You know how we wash ourselves before prayers, don’t you?’

Gül nodded, her mother had taught her how, so they did their ritual ablutions together and then they prayed. While they were praying, Melike came into the room and, though she knew she wasn’t to disturb them, said: ‘Look, I can do a backward roll now too.’

Gül tried to keep going, unfazed like Auntie Hülya, but she was distracted by Melike’s fidgeting, and hissed: ‘Go away!’ But that only made Melike keener to perform her latest trick. And when they had finished praying, Auntie Hülya didn’t scold Melike; she acted as if she hadn’t noticed. She changed her clothes, took Sibel in her arms and told Gül not to let go of Melike’s hand.

‘We’re going to Nene’s.’

Fatma was being taken to hospital that day, and Uncle Yücel was already at Zeliha’s, as were a few neighbours and friends of the family. There were so many people there that Gül was completely bewildered and forgot to keep an eye on Melike, who ran around trying to find someone to play with. Gül knew which room her mother was in, but she didn’t dare go in.

Eventually, Zeliha brought Fatma out of the room. The carriage was waiting outside, and when she saw her mother, all Gül could say was: ‘Mum.’

Fatma smiled and said: ‘Gül, my rose.’

Then she kissed her children one more time, and her voice cracked as she spoke to everyone around her: ‘Friends, forgive me if I have sinned against you.’

Gül didn’t understand what this meant, but she knew that it couldn’t be good. There was so much she didn’t understand. At first, her mother had been the one who made the world smaller with her words, but it didn’t help, and now the words she spoke made the world big again, so big she didn’t know what to do with herself. The world grew so huge that Gül just stood there.

She just stood there again when they went to visit her mother in hospital seven days later. For seven days Hülya went with Sibel to the hospital, for seven days Melike wet the bed every night, for seven days Sibel cried half the night in her aunt’s arms without her losing her patience, for seven days Uncle Yücel rocked Sibel back and forth on his feet, as was the custom. He sat down with his legs outstretched, placed a cushion on his feet and Sibel on the cushion and rocked the little one back and forth gently to soothe her. Seven days in which the blacksmith felt a little better each morning. He could soon feed himself again, he was able to walk a few steps and slowly he found his strength. He had been able to visit his wife three times, and soon they’d be out of the woods. Soon they’d return to the village and be together at home as a family, soon he’d be back at the forge and hold[ing] the heavy hammers in his hands, soon he’d be able to ride his horse again – soon, so soon.

Seven days passed and it was Friday again. Auntie Hülya and Gül did their ritual ablutions together and Melike joined in this time, copying the motions of prayer and giggling, failing to get anyone’s attention.

Then Uncle Yücel, Auntie Hülya, Sibel, Melike and Gül went to the hospital together, where Zeliha and Timur were already waiting. Gül was frightened when she saw her mother. Fatma had violet rings around her eyes; the colour was almost garish, like the methylated spirits they kept in brandy bottles at home. Like lilac mixed with dark green, then illuminated.

‘Don’t get too close,’ Zeliha hissed at Melike and Gül. ‘It’s catching.’

But Melike didn’t listen. She climbed up onto the edge of the bed and then simply sat there.

Gül felt that her mother’s eyes were almost disappearing into the rings around them and they looked sad, sad and like they were trying to hold onto something. Gül wanted to be a good girl, so she stood there, she stood on the same spot the whole time they were in the hospital room, unmoving, and nobody seemed to notice. Since Timur was nearly better, Gül and Melike went back to their grandmother’s. Sibel would spend a few more days with her aunt. Gül couldn’t sleep that night and wanted to get into her sister’s bed, but Melike woke up as Gül crept under the covers, and just said: ‘Go away.’

Gül went to her father.

‘What’s wrong, my girl?’ he asked.

‘I can’t sleep.’

‘Go to your Nene, I toss and turn all over the place.’

So Gül went to her grandmother’s room, and her grandmother groaned but took her into her bed. The same image lingered in Gül’s mind’s eye; how she had stood in the corner of the hospital room and how wretched her mother had looked. It took a long time before she finally fell asleep, and she woke in the middle of the night to her grandmother snoring. She turned away from Zeliha’s body and closed her eyes and waited until the images faded away at last, until the darkness came and took her.

It was usually only in winter that they had soup for breakfast, a warming soup that gave them energy for the day, a thick lentil, yoghurt or tripe soup. But Timur had to regain his strength, so they had beef broth the next morning. Melike, Zeliha, Timur and Gül were sitting on the floor, where the cloth lay spread with the steaming pot, bread, bowls, cheese and olives. Zeliha ladled out the soup until they all had a bowlful, but Timur didn’t have a spoon.

‘Run and fetch a spoon for your father,’ Zeliha told Gül, and Gül leapt up.

On her way to the kitchen, she passed the front door and recognised her aunt’s voice outside. Hülya seemed to be talking to the woman next door. They’d soon be finished, and she’d hear the heavy door knocker. Gül stopped to listen.

‘I don’t know if it’s better to have them bring her home first, or if they’ll take her straight from the hospital…’

‘May the Lord give you all strength,’ the neighbour said. ‘May the Lord give you strength. What will become of the poor children, now that their mother is dead?’

Gül walked briskly into the kitchen, took a spoon and then ran back to the other room, hearing her aunt cry as she passed by. She gave her father the spoon, and at that moment she heard the door knocker.

‘Mummy’s dead,’ Gül said.

For an instant, Timur remained motionless, then he slung the spoon in his hand against the wall, with all his might. A trickle of plaster fell to the floor.