She sees merchants eating their watery porridge, their cunning eyes darting from one side of the room to the other. They rarely ever sleep indoors, preferring to stay with their animals and goods. The soldiers are an entirely different matter. Most are officers who, tired of the earth and sun, crave the comforts of a clean yorgan and a hot meal. She does her best to avoid them. Even when they are asleep or unconscious, they make her wild with fear and hate. She wants to cram their discarded shits back into their postcoital slack-jawed mouths.
The American missionaries politely sip their tea, not knowing that hiding in the shadows is someone who can hear and understand the insults they lob at Turkish soldiers in hushed English whispers. At night, she presses her ear to the curtained wall of their chambers, drinking in the sounds of their English words. They speak and pray. They liken what is happening in Anatolia to hell. This almost makes her laugh. What do they know of hell? Hell is to witness all this and still soak the cracked wheat in water, to empty the chamber pots of fools and murderers. She wants to scream at them, Your mighty god is a joke, but to do this she would have to give up her silence. And that she will never do.
CHAPTER 26
Altar of Contrition
EARLY EVERY MORNING, Ahmet goes to the well to fetch water. He leaves well before the cock crows, before the women of the village trickle down from the valley. When he comes to Seda’s little room to fetch the water pails, he makes a point of waking her with his noise.
“This is women’s work,” he complains.
Seda does not rise or respond. She does not tell him how the well beckons to her, how when she wakens in the middle of the night, cursing the breath that enters her lungs, it is the well’s promise of solace that soothes her. How she regularly imagines slipping out of her room, bare feet on wet grass, past the orchard, climbing the low stone wall and falling into the depth of water until it fills her lungs. She tells him none of this.
She turns to the cooking, instead. Beneath the cauldron, flames lick the weathered cast iron, heating the water until it scalds the cabbage leaves, releasing a putrid smell. Pungent. Not like burning flesh. No, not like that. Seda lifts the wooden spoon and places the boiled cabbage leaves, piled one on top of the other, in one corner of the tray. She lifts one, with her fingers, letting the steam prick her fingertips. The hot leaf, its translucent skin the color of rain, gives her the gift of pain, of feeling. She flattens the leaf, then places her burned fingertips in the cool mixture of the filling, but it offers her no pleasure.
There is always plenty to eat here. Fatma’s bey makes sure of it. And though Seda spends almost all her time in this little room that is half oven, she eats little or nothing. She sees no reason to sustain this body, prolong this life.
Sometimes the baby still visits her. She cradles him, soft and pink, inside her arms. But when she opens her mouth to sing him a lullaby, nothing comes out. Her mouth is no longer a portal. Nothing but breath comes out and very little goes in.
A few morsels slide down her throat but only when Fatma insists upon watching.
“Don’t you dare bring that back up,” she says, waving a stout finger in her face. “There are people starving everywhere.”
I know. I know. I know.
The third winter of her visit has come and gone. They say the war will soon come to an end. And yet she has hardly enough on her bones to distinguish her as female. The head scarf is the only thing that gives her away. Not that it is necessary. She is almost always hidden. A ghost vanishing into the stone walls and hidden chambers of the ancient inn. Her body receding, her voice gone.
Hairig, I would give all my teeth and fingernails to see you again. It would be a small price.
And he does come. Not in her sleep, like she would prefer, but while she is awake, chopping the parsley or beating the wool. He whispers in her left ear. Always the left. But instead of solace, he brings her more worry for he speaks in the foreign tongue of the dead.
What are you saying? Please, please, tell me what you are saying. Say it in Armenian, Hairig. I would do anything to hear it in Armenian.
On more than one occasion, Fatma has witnessed her silent begging. “Do not spend your time with ghosts. Trust me, I know what I’m talking about.” But what does she know? The closest thing she’s come to a man like Hairig is her bey, that patron saint of whores and sinners.
Nabi Bey, who thinks she’s a poor Kurd, pays no attention to her. She is like the mule in the stable, the pail in the well, a useful thing to be tolerated. He forgets she is there. Or so she thinks.