Kemal feels as if he’s swallowed a piece of shrapnel. His tears, so often shed for paltry birds and strangers, are no longer at the ready. It is Hüsnü who breaks down, hiding his face in his sleeve.
The three friends carry Tekin’s body to a hilltop facing the arch of Ctesiphon. The imam is nowhere to be found so Mehmet directs the cleansing of the body and wraps it in a shroud made from the shirts of fallen soldiers. It is the best they can do in these circumstances. Kemal tucks the wooden finch meant for his son in Tekin’s lifeless hands. These are hands that killed the enemy and also whittled a toy bird for his child, he thinks.
“Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” Mehmet chants in Arabic. “To Allah we belong and to him we shall return.”
Kemal listens as Mehmet’s voice washes over Tekin’s body before being carried away by the wind. The words speak of the same god who sanctioned this war, this war that took away Nazareth and then Lucine. This war that has now claimed Tekin and is slowly claiming bits of Kemal’s own soul. And for what? For some pasha or war minister they’ve never even seen and for some god whose identity and nature no one can agree upon. Kemal is now certain there is no truth or beauty in this god, just as there is no truth or beauty in this war.
CHAPTER 24
Place of Sin
“HOW MANY?” FATMA asks. The boy, Ahmet, grunts in response.
“How many today?” Fatma demands to know.
“Three,” the boy answers.
“And is he among them?”
They begin every morning in this fashion. Fatma asks the first question and quickly follows it with the second. When the troops were first garrisoned in Malatya, Fatma saw it as a sign of God’s mercy. The Almighty had taken her husband, taken her parents, and left her with an invalid mother-in-law whose dependence on her was continually increasing. Desperate for money, she had gone to the lieutenant governor of Malatya to offer the troops lodging and meals. Nabi Bey had a reputation for being a just and moral man. The rumor was that he had initially defied the deportation orders, sparing hundreds of Armenian women and children. Fatma, who had expected a portly, balding man, was taken aback by the lieutenant governor’s bright green eyes and freshly pomaded hair. For his part, Nabi Bey took one look at Fatma’s black curls and full lips and appointed her innkeeper of an abandoned khan just outside the city proper, with only her mother-in-law and a boy named Ahmet as helpers. The troops arrived shortly thereafter, which is also precisely when Nabi Bey began his daily visits. Being married did not slow down the lieutenant governor’s courting of Fatma. A courting that began on his first visit, to which he brought with him a sack of pistachios and asked only for tea, and ended a few visits later, when he gifted Fatma with two herrings and a gilded hand mirror in exchange for her body’s warmth.
At first, her mother-in-law treated the lieutenant like a proper suitor, hoping against hope that the widow girl, who had brought her nothing but bad luck, was finally going to be useful. And though Fatma could sense her mother-in-law’s disapproval, she also noticed that the old woman’s moral outrage didn’t prevent her from enjoying the herring. All the snorts and grimaces stopped with the arrival of deportees from the eastern provinces, the sight of them reminding the old lady that as Kurds their loyalty could also be questioned. The deportees marched through town like the walking dead, clothed in rags, stinking so badly that the old woman put carbolic acid on the windowsill to keep the stench away. Dogs and birds followed them wherever they went, tracking the scent of death. Bodies were carted away in the darkness, buried, their possessions burned or stolen. The people of Malatya looked on in horror or hate, feeling better about their own lot. A few risked their lives to save a child here, feed a mother there, but soon they returned to the business of their own survival.