What sin? What god? No more, Hairig, No more. Hush now. Please, Hairig. Hush.
Kemal kisses her eyes first. His lips rest on one eyelid, then the other, stamping each with the warmth of his love. He cradles her face in his hands and kisses her lips. In response, Seda’s lips seek him out. They part and let him in. She takes a deep breath, taking in the scent of his body and his breath all at once. Then, tilting her head back, she offers her neck to him. Kemal moves slowly, unwrapping this gift, sacred and sensual all at once. Her hands move down from the back of his neck to his shoulder blades, then lower to his back. Before he enters her, she holds him in her gaze and between her legs. Holding all of him. Limbs, thoughts, and unspoken prayers all find shelter in that embrace. When he thrusts, an unexpected current of warmth and pleasure moves through her. Her body feels as though it’s swallowed the sun. She takes him in, again and again, each time with new hunger. Seda opens her mouth and lets out a moan. Kemal cries out then and collapses onto her. Seda presses her nose into his neck, wraps her arms around his middle, and weeps. The moan is gone and the heat that filled her body, that made her feel whole just for a moment, that too is slowly disappearing.
The next thought that comes to her is unexpected and obscene, for at that moment, she thinks that perhaps, maybe, there really is a god.
PART V
1990
CHAPTER 32
Exile
THE SOUND OF Seda’s breath rises and falls, gentle and melodic, in sharp contrast to Orhan’s own frantic heart. Did the old woman just confess to murder? And if so, whose? He leans his body closer, taking in the contours of Seda’s sleeping face. He can see the still straight and narrow Roman nose, the almond-shaped eyes as they must have been before the upper lids lowered with age. Suddenly Orhan is certain that this is the woman in Dede’s black sketchbooks. Where does the chain link of this woman’s harrowed past attach itself to his own family history?
Seda opens her eyes slowly, smiling when she sees him.
“White days,” she whispers.
“Yes,” he says. “A white day sheds light.”
“Not always,” Seda says. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, pulling the bedsheet up under her chin. Orhan pours water from the pitcher on her bedside table into a cup and offers it to her. She purses her lips and drinks from it with her eyes closed. When she opens her eyes again, they are fixed, trancelike, on the opposite wall.
“I too lived in Karod once.” Her Turkish is old and rusty, but the dialect of the interior, rural and rugged, is unmistakable. She is from that “other Turkey.” His Turkey. “Until recently, I could remember very little from that time. I spent a lifetime forgetting it.”
This information does not surprise him. Where else would she have met Dede? As far as Orhan knew, Dede left Turkey only once, in World War I, when he fought as an Ottoman soldier in Baghdad.
“Maybe that is why I hate it here,” she says.
“Here?” he asks.
“The nursing home. It’s everywhere. They won’t let you forget it. It’s in the music, the damn sculpture in the garden, in schools and living rooms. You can’t open a book or sip a cup of coffee without confronting it.”
“Confronting what?” Orhan asks.
“The past.” The word comes out like an ancient curse. “Everything is soaked and mired in its bitter liquid. Our young people want us to live in it. They can’t get enough of it. Where did you come from? How old were you? How did you survive? They make you tell it over and over again, write it, record it, make videos. It’s exhausting,” she says. And he believes her. She looks thoroughly exhausted.
“Maybe they think it’s therapeutic,” Seda continues, “this sharing of past horrors. But not for me. I don’t want them poking their fingers into my wounds.” She jabs a finger into the air. “All these years, I was praying for a scab, a hardened piece on dull skin that would cover it all up. But I’m ninety years old, and still the thing festers like an open wound in my chest.”
Orhan thinks of his own past, the photographs and his time in exile, hidden under some hardened scab he has no intention of picking.
“I thought I could put it away,” Seda continues. “Abandon it like I abandoned everything else. But then here you are.”