Honour (5 page)

A Place near the River Euphrates, 1977

Pembe was gone now, her mirror image, her reflection in still waters. She slept under a different sky and every so often sent Jamila letters and postcards with pictures of red, two-tiered buses and immense clock towers. When she came home for a visit, her clothes smelled differently, and felt soft to the touch. That was the part that struck Jamila the most: watching her sister open her suitcase, bringing in aromas, tastes and fabrics from foreign lands. Pembe had left with the unspoken assumption that everything would be as it was upon her return. But nothing had remained the same. Nor had she come back for good.

For years Pembe had been sending Jamila letters, telling her about her life in England. The children, too, jotted down a few lines every now and then, Yunus more than anyone else. Jamila kept these missives in a tin tea box under her bed, like hoarded treasure. She wrote back regularly, although she had less to tell, or so she believed. Recently she had asked Yunus if he had seen the Queen and, if so, what she looked like. He had responded,

The Queen lives in a palase. So big she gets lost in it. But they find her and put her on her throwne again. She wears a diferent dress every day, and a funnee hat. It has to be the same colour as the dress. Her hands are soft because she puts on glouves and lots of creamz, and she doesn’t wash the dishes. I saw her picturse at school. She seems nice.

Jamila could not understand how the family had been on
that
island for so long but still not set eyes on the Queen, save in magazines and newspapers. Sometimes she doubted whether Pembe had ventured from the neighbourhood where she lived at all. If she always ended up confined between walls, what was the use of her travelling to a faraway country? Why couldn’t human beings live and die where they were born? Jamila found big cities suffocating, and was daunted by the thought of unknown places – the buildings, the avenues, the crowds pressing on her chest, leaving her gasping for air.

In her letters, usually towards the last paragraph, Pembe would write, ‘Are you angry at me, sister? Could you forgive me in your heart?’ But she already knew what the answer would be. Jamila was not angry with her twin or with anyone else. And yet Jamila was also aware that the question had to be asked over and over, like a wound that needed to be dressed regularly.

They called her Kiz Ebe – the Virgin Midwife. They said she was the best midwife this impoverished Kurdish region had seen in a hundred years. Pregnant women felt relieved when she was in charge, as if her presence would ensure an easy labour, keeping Azrael at bay. Their husbands would bob their heads knowingly, and say, ‘The Virgin Midwife is in command. Everything will go well. Thanks first to Allah, then to her.’

Such words amounted to nothing; they only deepened Jamila’s fear of not living up to people’s expectations. She knew she was good – as skilled as one could get before starting to decline from old age, poor eyesight or sheer bad luck. Like every midwife, she was aware of the danger of her name being uttered in the same breath as the name of God. When she heard the peasants speak such blasphemy, she would murmur to herself,
Tövbe, tövbe.
*
They didn’t have to hear her; it was enough that God did. She had to make it clear to Him that she was not coveting His power, not competing with Him, the one and only life-giver.

Jamila knew what thin ice she was walking upon. You thought you were experienced and knowledgeable until you came across a delivery that filled you with dread, making you almost like a novice again. Every now and then something would go wrong, terribly wrong, despite her best efforts. At other times she couldn’t make it to a labour in time and when she arrived would find that the mother had just given birth on her own, sometimes even having cut the umbilical cord with a blunt blade and tied it with her hair. Jamila took these incidents as signs from God in which he was reminding her of her limitations.

They came from distant villages and forsaken parishes to fetch her. There were other midwives closer to their homes, but they sought her out. She was quite popular in this part of the world. There were dozens of girls who had been named after her –
Enough Beauty
.

‘May she carry your name and be half as chaste as you,’ prayed the fathers of the girls she brought into this world.

Jamila nodded, saying nothing, conscious of the insinuation. They would like their daughters to be modest and virtuous, and yet they wanted them to get married and have children in due course. Their daughters’ names and dispositions might be similar to the midwife’s, but their fates had better be different.

Approaching the window, a knitted shawl on her shoulders, a lamp in her hand, Jamila squinted into the dark. Under the deep mantle of the night, the valley was sleeping, bare and barren, bleary with tangled bushes and arid soil. She had always imagined a softness beneath this harsh landscape, which she likened to a rough man who hid a tender heart. Still, she didn’t have to live on her own in so remote a place. She, too, could have gone. Somewhere. Anywhere. Not that she had the means or any relatives who were willing to help her start anew elsewhere. Already thirty-two, she was past her prime and beyond proper marriage age. It was too late for her to start a family.
A dry womb is like a melon gone bad: fine on the outside, desiccated inside, and good for nothing
, the peasants said about women like her.

Even so, she could marry a disabled or elderly man, just as she could agree to become someone’s second wife – or third or fourth, though that was rare. Only the wife who had been married first was legal, of course, and could go to a hospital or courtroom or a tax register office and claim to be a married woman with legitimate children. But in this part of the country no one went to such places anyway, so long as you weren’t in serious trouble or dying of an infection or out of your good mind, in which case what difference would it make whether you were the first wife or the fourth?

Her house – if house was the right word for this shack – was nestled in a hollow near a ravine in the outer reaches of Mala Çar Bayan. Down below one could see a cluster of rocks that resembled petrified giants from afar and glowed like rubies when the sun cast its rays on them. There were many legends about these rocks, and behind every legend a story of forbidden love. For centuries Christians and Muslims and Zoroastrians and Yazidis had lived here side by side, loved and died side by side. Their grandchildren, however, had long ago left for other lands. All but a handful of peasants remained in the area – and Jamila.

Deserted places that once teemed with life had a kind of sadness, a ghost grief, which floated in the breeze, seeping into every crevice. Perhaps that was why, after a while, the people of derelict landscapes resembled the places themselves: silent, subdued and sullen. But that was what lay on the surface, and with people, as with the earth, the surface was rarely the same as the core.

Underneath the layers of clothes that she wore to keep herself warm, there was another Jamila – young, pretty, jovial, with a laugh like the tinkling of glass upon glass. She rarely went out these days, hiding behind the practical woman who chopped wood, scythed the fields, drew water and made potions. At times she feared for her sanity. Perhaps this much loneliness had finally got to her, nibbling away at her mind little by little.

When the wind blew in from the faraway mountains, it carried with it the aromas of wild flowers, fresh herbs and blossoming shrubs. But at times it also brought a cloying smell of roasted meat that hovered over everything, clinging to her skin. There were smugglers and brigands in the area – wandering about the caves and precipices, never staying in any one place for more than a day. On moonless nights she could see their campfires twinkling in the dark like forlorn stars. The smells in the air altered depending on what they were eating and how close they came.

There were wolves too. Jamila could hear them during the day, late in the evening, deep in the night. They would snarl and growl, and sometimes yip in high-pitched barks or howl in tandem. Every so often they would appear on her doorstep, so close and furtive, sniffing her solitude. Then they would leave, their jaws set in a scowl, looking disappointed, as if they didn’t find her inviting enough to feast upon. Jamila wasn’t scared of them. The wolves were not her enemies, and, as for the bandits, they were interested in bigger rewards than her. Besides, Jamila took heart in her belief that danger always came from where it was least expected.

The smouldering heap in the fireplace stuttered to life when a twig caught fire. Jamila’s face glimmered, even though the rest of the house was sunk in shadow. She suspected the peasants didn’t love her, but they did respect her. Travelling on horse, donkey and mule, she was allowed to set foot in places no other woman could enter. She was often accompanied by people she knew, but also by complete strangers.

A man she had never seen before might knock on her door late at night, and plead, ‘Come quickly, I beg you! My wife is giving birth in the village of so and so. We need to hurry. She’s not doing well.’

He could be lying. There was always the possibility, however slight, of evil disguising itself. As she followed the man into the still of the night, Jamila was aware that he could kidnap, rape and kill her. She had to trust. Not him but Him. Yet it was also true that there were unwritten rules nobody in his right mind dared to violate. A midwife, someone who brought babies into this world, was semi-sacred. She dangled between the invisible world and the visible one, on a thread as delicate as a strand of spider’s silk.

Feeding the flames in the fireplace with more wood, Jamila put the copper
cezve
on the fire. Water, sugar and coffee – all these items were in short supply. But families brought her presents all the time – henna, tea, biscuits, saffron, pistachios, peanuts, and tobacco smuggled from the other side of the frontier. Jamila knew that if she had received money, she would have been paid once and that would have been it. But if you were paid in trinkets, such giving went on for a lifetime.

She mixed the coffee carefully, gently.
Coffee was like love
, they said,
the more patient you were with it, the better it would taste.
But Jamila didn’t know much about that. She had been in love once, and it had tasted sour and dark. Having scalded her tongue, she never spoke of it any more.

As she kept her eyes on the rising foam, she pricked her ears to sounds near and beyond. The valley was alive with spirits. There were creatures here no bigger than grains of rice, imperceptible to the naked eye but potent and perilous nevertheless. Birds tapped on the windows, insects bounced off the water in the buckets as if skittering across the surface of a lake. Everything had a language, she believed. The thunderstorm, the morning dew, the ants crawling in her sugar bowl . . . Sometimes she thought she understood what they said.

She loved nothing more than she loved being a midwife. It was her mission, her one fortune. So it was that in the fog, or scorching sun, or thirty inches of snow, any time during day or night, she was on call, waiting for the knock on her door. This nobody knew, but in her heart of hearts she was married already. Jamila was married to her destiny.

*

Outside the night wind rattled against the windowpanes. Jamila took the coffee off the flames and poured some into a small earthenware cup with a chipped handle. She drank it in slow sips. The fire was a bit like her life, smouldering within, not letting anyone come too close, precious moments burning into embers, like dying dreams.

Far away a bird cried out – an owl, which the locals called the mother of ruins. It hooted again, this time more boldly. Jamila sat there with her eyes clamped shut, her thoughts wavering. Despite the hardships, she remembered her childhood as a happy one. At times one of the twins would pretend to be the Mummy and the other the infant. Though older by three minutes, Pembe would always be the baby while Jamila would be the mother, trying to constrain, control and comfort her. She would rock her little one, singing lullabies, telling stories. Looking back on those games, Jamila was surprised to see how serious they had been.

She recalled how once her father, Berzo, took them to a town where they discovered a Wish Fountain. Women who longed to have babies, mothers-in-law who wanted to put a spell on their daughters-in-law, and virgins who yearned for well-to-do husbands came here, tossing coins into the water. When everyone had left, Pembe rolled up her hems, climbed into the fountain and collected the coins. Then they both ran, as fast as they could, shrieking with excitement, to the closest shop, where they bought boiled sweets and sticks of rock.

Much as Jamila enjoyed the adventure, she felt guilty afterwards. They were thieves. Worse. Stealing people’s wishes was far more despicable than stealing their wallets.

‘Don’t be sentimental,’ Pembe said, when Jamila revealed her worries. ‘They had already let go of those coins and we pocketed them, that’s all.’

‘Yes, but there were prayers attached to them. If somebody had stolen your secret wish, you would be upset, no? I mean, I would.’

Pembe grinned. ‘So what is
your
secret wish?’

Jamila faltered, feeling cornered. True, she wanted to get married some day – a wedding dress and a buttercream cake like those they made in the city would be wonderful – but it wasn’t that important. She would love to have children, but was that because she really yearned for them, or because everyone told her she should? It would be nice to own a farmhouse and cultivate the land, but it was a fancy rather than a passion. As she thought harder, Jamila was glad that she was only a thief and not a visitor at the Wish Fountain. If she had been given a coin to make a wish, she might not have come up with one.

At her hesitation Pembe scoffed, her eyes aglow. ‘I’m going to be a sailor and travel the world. Every week I’ll wake up in a new harbour.’

Jamila had never felt more alone. She understood that as identical as they were in all respects, there was one vital difference: ambition. Pembe wanted to see the world beyond the River Euphrates. She had the nerve to pursue her heart, and not pay attention to what others thought about her. For a sinking moment it dawned on Jamila that she and her twin were bound to spend their lives apart.