‘What? Now?’
‘Yes,’ and then looking her mother straight in the eyes she said, ‘Perhaps you could take me to Tahtakale Caddesi.’
‘To your lover, Aryan!’ her mother spat.
‘That’ll be enough of that!’ Tepe warned Aliya with a rudely upraised finger. ‘Are you sure, Engelushjia?’
‘I want to go there, Sergeant,’ she said, her eyes bright with conviction. ‘I want to be safe.’
‘You’ll never be safe with the Vloras!’ her mother sneered. ‘They’ll kill you. They have to, it’s blood.’
‘You’d better get a coat,’ Tepe said, ignoring the older woman. ‘It’s still snowing.’
And despite the pain of her bruised face, Engelushjia Berisha smiled.
For once, İkmen had actually managed to telephone Fatma in order to let her know when he was going to be home. This, at the time, had seemed to please her. But when he did finally arrive at his apartment he found that not only Fatma but all of his children were absent. He experienced a moment of panic. Could it be that she had finally lost all patience with his erratic lifestyle and left for good? Or had she, in a rush of overwhelming earthquake panic, decamped to Konya and a more spiritual existence? The first indication that she hadn’t in fact deserted him was a large plate of hot dolma with fresh bread set at his place on the kitchen table. The second came from his Uncle Ahmet as İkmen was about to cut into the leathery vine leaves that surrounded Fatma’s very own ‘secret’ dolma mixture.
‘Your wife has taken the children over to her sister’s for a few hours,’ Ahmet said as he smoked his way into the kitchen and sat down.
İkmen put his knife and fork back down on the table and crossed his arms over his chest.
‘In the snow?’ he said incredulously. ‘Has she gone mad? Or have you just driven her out with your bloody stories about death and revenge?’
‘She has indeed gone out because of me, yes,’ the old man said with a smile. Then he tipped his head towards İkmen’s plate. ‘But eat now, Çetin. When you have finished your food, all will be made clear to you.’
Unbeknown to Ahmet, İkmen was, after the day that he had had, a little tired of having to wait for answers to anything, particularly things which, like this, seemed to promise only further aggravation. After all, if Uncle Ahmet could be believed, the man was a self-confessed murderer. Not really, İkmen felt, the sort of person he wanted to talk to when he got home from a frightening and emotional day at work.
‘More revelations about my mother, is it then, Uncle?’ he asked bitterly, ‘you and her and acts of genocide back in the old country, perhaps?’
‘Çetin, I can see why you’re bitter—’
‘I’m a policeman, Uncle Ahmet, and you’re a murderer!’ İkmen pushed his wife’s lovingly prepared food to one side and lit up a cigarette. ‘What do you want me to say? Well done? As for my mother—’ He stopped suddenly, his eyes widening as he stared towards the kitchen door.
The old man turned to follow his nephew’s gaze.
‘Oh, Emina,’ Ahmet said with a smile and beckoned the elderly, overweight woman forward. ‘Please, do come in. This is my nephew, Çetin.’
‘Ayşe’s younger boy, right?’ the woman asked in a voice that was both deep and heavily accented.
‘Yes.’
The old man pulled a chair out so that she could join them at the table.
‘You have your mother’s eyes,’ she said as she sat down, staring intently at İkmen. ‘I can see witchcraft there.’
‘Oh, he has that, Emina!’ Ahmet laughed. ‘Oh yes! Unlike his brother, may Allah protect him, this one is in touch with forces.’
‘Yes, the police force!’ İkmen snapped, but he managed to smile at the woman with something approaching warmth. ‘I take it you are the Emina Ndrek of whom I have heard?’
She inclined her head, which was wrapped in a headscarf.
‘And so tell me, why are you here?’
‘I’m here to tell you the truth about your mother. To clear away the poison spread about by that whore Angeliki Vlora.’
‘I see.’ İkmen leaned back into his chair and sighed. ‘And which version of the truth am I to be treated to today? The heart attack, the suicide or the—’
‘Your mother was murdered, young man! Ahmet here, in obedience to the laws of
gjakmaria
, killed my brother İsmail, and in response my other brother, Salih, killed your mother Ayşe.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard all of this!’ İkmen said with a quick and furious glance at Ahmet. ‘What I don’t understand is why your “inviolable” laws suddenly allowed the killing of a woman.’
‘When a woman is pregnant with a male child it is permissible. The male makes her part of the Tree of Blood.’
In the stunned moment that followed this statement, none of the occupants of the kitchen so much as drew breath. When sound and movement did eventually come, they were quick and violent.
‘No!’ İkmen shot up from his chair and started to leave the room.
‘Çetin . . .’
‘No! No, this is too much now,’ he narrowed his eyes to peer venomously at his uncle. ‘I don’t know why you people have decided to torture me, but . . .’
‘We are telling you nothing but the truth, Çetin,’ Emina Ndrek said as she rose to go up to him.
İkmen flinched away from her. ‘Don’t touch me! You’re sick. Don’t speak to me! Get out of my home!’
‘Çetin!’
‘My mother would never have harmed a child, especially not her own! It’s all lies!’
‘My boy, I can, believe me, understand why you cannot accept this,’ Ahmet began, ‘but . . .’
‘Get out of my house!’ İkmen screamed, his eyes now streaming with tears. ‘Get out!’
Ahmet rose to join Emina, ‘Çetin it’s true. On the Holy Koran.’
‘No!’
‘She was carrying a male child,’ Emina said sternly, ‘a being of bone and of blood.’
‘No!’ İkmen said as he moved agitatedly back towards the table again. ‘You’re lying! It’s nonsense. Apart from anything else it was 1957. Doctors couldn’t determine a baby’s sex in those days.’
‘Ah, but your mother was different,’ Ahmet said, ‘she didn’t need doctors, your mother was a witch!’
‘Oh, for . . . Look . . .’ İkmen raked his hand through his hair and then banged his fist down on the table.
‘If you will silence the policeman and allow the Bajraktar in you to listen, you will both know and understand,’ the old woman responded firmly. ‘I have a story to tell you, witch’s child, which is both true and,’ she looked briefly at Ahmet, ‘in the end a thing of goodness for us all.’
Nodding his head in agreement, Ahmet muttered a few religiously inspired words in Albanian.
Emina Ndrek moved back towards the table and sat down. She then crossed her small, crinkled hands in front of her and looked İkmen squarely in the face. ‘Are you going to listen, young man?’
The violence of his outburst at an end, İkmen just shrugged as he lit yet another cigarette. Taking this as acquiesence, Emina said, ‘Well sit down. You too Ahmet. I can’t keep on looking at you both, I don’t have the strength.’
The two men, pointedly looking away from each other, did as she asked.
The old woman smiled. ‘Good,’ she said, and began her story.
‘I won’t go into how or why Ahmet here killed İsmail. Like all instances of
gjakmaria
, it all goes back far further than any of us can remember. But with İsmail’s shirt hung in our windows, your
fis
knew that it was only a question of time before the Ndrek retaliated. Now, as I know you are aware, men are usually the targets in our tradition. And that means all males,’ she raised a finger to emphasise her point, ‘including boys. The male members of the Bajraktar in this city at that time were your uncle, your cousin Mustafa, your grandfather, who was by that time confined to his bed, you and your brother.’
‘But my father was Turkish!’
Emina Ndrek waved a dismissive hand. ‘I know, and your father meant nothing, but you and your brother meant a lot. You were the witch’s children, still are. The magic was passed down to you through your mother from your grandfather. It was something that my brother Salih would have liked very much to destroy.’
‘Your mother let it be known that she was pregnant,’ Ahmet interjected sadly, ‘and she made contact with Salih.’
‘Your father never knew,’ Emina said, watching the play of emotion on İkmen’s face. ‘Ayşe and Salih came to an arrangement – her life and the life of her unborn child for the lives of you and your brother. That afternoon, while your father was at work and you and your brother were at school, Ayşe Bajraktar lay down upon her bed and offered her neck to Salih Ndrek, like a sheep at Kurban Bayram. He slit her throat with one sure and swift movement of his knife.’
İkmen, his face now grey with distress, wiped a stray tear from the corner of his left eye.
Ahmet reached across the table to take his nephew’s hand. ‘Your father always believed it was suicide – Ayşe even wrote a note – and so did your father’s doctor. They both took that belief to their graves.’
‘Did you know?’ İkmen said, suddenly turning violent eyes upon the two old people in his kitchen. ‘Did you know about this arrangement?’
‘No, we didn’t,’ the old woman said, ‘not until it was all over. Salih told us. But when we did learn . . .’ She shook her head. ‘Even my father, may Allah preserve his soul, was shocked when he heard of it.’
‘Ali Ndrek called me to his house,’ Ahmet said. ‘Of course at first I was suspicious but . . . when I discovered what Ayşe had done . . .’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘What had been done to her . . .’ He closed his eyes against the pain of the memory.
‘Salih went back to Albania,’ Emina said matter-of-factly, ‘where he eventually died. But neither Ahmet nor your grandfather went after him. We all decided – my father, Ahmet, your grandfather – that with the death of your mother and her child, that was enough. It was too terrible. It had to finish.’ She lowered her gaze to the floor and then reached across to take Ahmet’s free hand. ‘And so it did.’
‘Neither the Bajraktar nor the Ndrek have been in blood since.’ Ahmet looked at Emina with what appeared to İkmen to be affection. ‘People like the Vloras occasionally have a go at us, like that pathetic attack upon my Mustafa, but nothing serious. Only old people like us remember these things now – and that includes Angeliki Vlora, of course.’
‘That bitch being the only one to speak of it in all these years!’ Emina said hotly. Turning to İkmen she added, ‘It was an ill-omened day when you were called to her home, Çetin. She used her knowledge of what you should never have known to hurt and confound you.’
İkmen put his face in his hands. ‘But if what you say is true,’ he said his voice muffled, ‘then she was only doing what my mother did for us. She was only protecting her children.’
‘Yes she was,’ Ahmet replied, ‘in her own way.’
For a few moments they all sat in silence, the sound of cars and trams, deadened by the thick snow on Divan Yolu, reaching them faintly from outside. İkmen, wrestling with feelings of disbelief and disgust, tried to digest the horrible details of what he had just been told about his mother. Allah, if she had been pregnant, what kind of hellish sacrifice was that! The poor child, unrealised, unborn and . . . He couldn’t think about it! It was so awful he really couldn’t think about it!
How could you do it, Mother? he screamed inside the wild tumult that was his brain. How could you do that to your baby? Why . . . But you did it for us, didn’t you, Mother? For me and for Halil. For your children, your live babies. You lay down willingly on your bed and you let that man cut your throat without a sound. Vahan Sarkissian was right in a way about your death. It was a kind of suicide. Silently İkmen started to cry.
‘Your mother loved you very, very much,’ Emina Ndrek said softly, wiping tears from her eyes.
Nodding his head in agreement, Ahmet added, ‘You and Halil were what she used to call her jewels – her diamonds and emeralds. If it’s any comfort, Çetin, what she did was done joyfully – thinking of all of you safe after she had gone.’
‘But I missed her!’ İkmen cried and gripped his uncle’s hand until his knuckles showed white. ‘I still do!’
‘Yes, I know, my boy. I know.’
‘What am I going to tell my brother now? What am I going to tell Halil?’
Chapter 23
The drive from Karaköy to Ortaköy had not been easy on the icy roads. Not everybody deigned to drive with due regard to the conditions, with the result that several accidents, plus more than the usual number of near misses, had dogged Suleyman’s journey. And there had been his own weariness to contend with too. Despite the horrendous events of the previous day, he had still been obliged to go to that meal with his father and brother – hours of listening to his father bemoaning his ruined finances, going on and on about having to sell a box of jewels nobody cared about any more. The old man had drunk almost half a bottle of lemon vodka – the family weakness. Murad, as Mehmet knew he would, had acceded to all of their father’s unreasonable demands. There had been no rapprochement between them, not in any real sense. The old man had lied. Why it had to be like this, Suleyman didn’t know. The fact that his father had taken him in so easily was galling in itself. At least the Cohens had been of some comfort to him over the events in the Aya Sofya. Berekiah had pointed out that had Ali Evren lived, he would probably have spent his life in an institution, which was a kind of death. Worse, if Balthazar was to be believed. But whether Zelfa would agree was another matter. It was therefore with some trepidation that he pressed the bell on the door of the Halmans’ old wooden house and waited for someone to answer it. Luckily that person was his fiancée’s father.
‘You’ll have to wait until she’s off the telephone,’ old Dr Halman said as he led Suleyman past Zelfa’s office and into the family living room. ‘Sit down, Mehmet.’ He gestured towards one of the chairs placed around the log fire.
‘It’s an important call then?’ Suleyman asked as he seated himself near the comforting warmth.