When Fatma finally relented to her suitor’s wishes, Nabi Bey suddenly insisted upon paying her for what she had already given him more or less freely. He placed three paras on the indentation of the mattress where his body had lain. Fatma stared at the coins for a few moments, knowing their power over her life, before curling her fingers around them. Soon after, in a moment of despair, after another one of his visits procured barely enough to feed a mouse, Fatma told the bey that any soldier willing to pay was welcome to her services. Her mother-in-law, who until then needed bread more than she needed a chaste daughter-in-law, expressed her disapproval by practically climbing into her burial shroud and dying.
For her part, Fatma now thinks of her sex as a cabinet of sorts. Men open and shut its doors, putting things in and taking things out. When the cabinet between her legs hums and gyrates in response to a rough caress or a slow kneading, she tells herself that it is separate from her. Inside her but separate, like a piece of furniture she’s inadvertently swallowed. She gets up, determined to see if Nabi Bey is among the three waiting for her. She feels drawn to him despite how he has treated her. He is one of only two men who have ever piqued her interest. The first turned her into a widow; the second, into a whore.
Drawing her shoulders back and donning a haughty expression, she walks into the main room where, indeed, Nabi Bey is seated across from two other rather scrawny-looking soldiers leaning against the wall. Upon seeing her, he rises from the divan. But Fatma strides right past him, extending her hand to one of the young soldiers in the back of the room. Nabi Bey stands red-faced while the soldiers mumble something about not minding the wait.
Fatma claps her hands at the boy, saying, “Come, come. Neither God nor the devil recognizes rank in these walls.”
When his turn finally comes, Nabi Bey is more interested in giving Fatma a lashing than receiving any pleasure from her.
“You ungrateful whore! What kind of pleasure do you get from belittling me, huh?”
“I wasn’t a whore until I met you,” Fatma says.
“That’s true. You were a lowly Kurdish cunt leaching off your dead husband’s mother. Without me, you’d be starving or dead. Do you know what is happening right now to thousands like you?”
It is a rhetorical question. She is no Christian and he knows it. Still, Fatma is determined to find out more about what is happening in the world. The troops of the Tenth Army Corps, who started as her guests and became her clients, have provided Fatma with a great deal of information. Bit by bit, as men dropped their pants, prodded her with their fingers, or reached into their pockets for a few paras, she’s learned about Malatya and the empire. But she can no longer stay in the little house blind and dumb to what is happening outside, spreading her legs by day and sniffing her dead husband’s ghost by night. For now, she concentrates on making Nabi Bey forget her offenses and remember her many “virtues.” She leans back on her divan, exaggerating the arch in her back and letting her heavy breasts go their separate ways on her torso.
Nabi Bey lowers himself on top of her. She lies inert, letting his considerable weight press her back deeper and deeper into the straw mat until she can feel the stalks pressing into her flesh. The straw is bothersome, as is the moistness that turns his body into a slippery whale of a fish. But what is intolerable is the scent that accompanies the ordeal. The man’s gastro-intestinal adventures waft out of his pores and into Fatma’s flared nostrils. Garlic, pistachio, and cured meat. Aman Allah. Dear God.
Her sight is the only one of her senses that dances to the rhythm of a distant harmonious melody, far away from here. She fixes her eyes upon a spot in the ceiling. It looks like an oil stain just above the bed. Now how did an oil stain make its way up there? If a splotch of oil could find its way up seven feet and lodge itself permanently to a ceiling, then surely Fatma could find herself far away from this room—in an equally unpredictable spot in the universe.
Hours later, with her customers all gone, Fatma sits on the floor, away from the dreaded divan where she spends her days. She places the basin between her spread legs and begins her nightly cleansing ritual. She spends every evening like this, cleaning her place of sin. As a child, she hadn’t noticed the mystery in between her thighs. She skipped and climbed trees with all the other girls and boys, but then the two dark cherries on her chest grew into apricots, then melons. She was covered in a head scarf and hidden, forbidden to play and told she was shameful. She hated that place between her legs until Ibrahim, her husband, came to worship there nightly.