Then the inhabitants of the neighbourhood decided to put a stop to this, saying it wasn’t right for anyone’s corpse, even a cat’s, to be subjected to so much indignity. They all rolled up their sleeves and started shaking the tree, with Zekeriya still in it. Within a few seconds, first dozens of cherries, then the rolling pin, and Zekeriya, and finally the dead cat, came tumbling down in a cloud of dust, accompanied by cries. Everyone bent down to look. Without any doubt, this was Elsa’s bloody body. It had been blindfolded with a cherry coloured muslin cloth that had little sea shells sewn into the corners. The cat’s open mouth was full of baby flies whose origin no one knew. There were no wounds anywhere, and it wasn’t clear where the beads of blood on its whiskers had come from.
When the muslin cloth was untied, everyone bent down and examined Elsa’s eyes with curiosity. They didn’t look as if they were dead. With the eyes encrusted with sleep, it seemed as if at any moment the cat might get up and stretch, yawn, and then climb into someone’s lap.
At this point, the people of the neighbourhood found themselves bringing their hands to their eyes to rub the sleep out of them. No one wanted to resemble a dead body, even if it was that of a cat. Suddenly, a wave rippled through the crowd. K1ymet Han1m Teyze, her wrists tied with cologne-soaked handkerchiefs, cologne-soaked rags wrapped around her head, nauseated from having drunk water laced with cologne, diving into the crowd with an agility unexpected from such an enormous body, with two neighbour women chasing her with bottles of cologne, threw herself on Elsa’s dead body. As she wailed in grief, tears began to form in the eyes of the people who had gathered in the garden. After having rubbed the sleep out of their eyes, everyone was now wiping tears from their eyes, and bottles of cologne were being passed from hand to hand. After a long while K1ymet Han1m Teyze raised her head. With a look of anguish and hatred, she carefully examined those who had gathered around. Then suddenly, her eyes, bloodshot from weeping, settled on the child.
‘She did it! That bug-eyed child did this! She’s treated Elsa badly ever since she got here. She’s a devil. A devil, a devil!’
There was complete silence. As if they had received very strict orders, no one moved or spoke. As it drew on, the silence became so deep that you could hear the itinerant peddlers’ ice-cream dripping as it melted, their
simits
crackling as they dried, and their balloons hissing as they slowly let out air. Only K1ymet Han1m Teyze, only she had the audacity to break the silence.
‘Say it! Tell everyone! Tell them that this muslin cloth is yours! You brat. Talk.’
After the sleep and the tears, ‘I wonder’ began to gather in the eyes of those gathered in the garden. I wonder if this is true? I wonder if such a little child could do such a terrible thing? Children loved cats, after all. I wonder if this child loves cats? The stern head-teacher of the primary school, who organized frequent meetings as an opportunity to tell people that television was a bad influence on children and that if he had children they wouldn’t watch television, was examining the child carefully. ‘I wonder’ had gathered more in his eyes than in anyone else’s.
With difficulty, grandmother managed to convince K1ymet Han1m Teyze to come to the bottom floor of the house the colour of salted green almonds and take a little rest. Meanwhile, the neighbour women were bumping into one another in their haste to prepare the meal. In the blink of an eye, a young girl had put out the plates, a slightly older girl had put out the knives and forks; just behind them, two large-bellied women, carrying the two enormous pots, began spooning the dumplings onto the plates; a step behind, a tall woman poured garlic yoghurt from a long, narrow-mouthed vessel, and another, tiny woman dribbled melted butter over the white dumplings from a little pan. Everyone was called to the table. But it was as if no one had any appetite left. If you don’t count a few nibbles from the dough at the edges of the dumplings, no one ate a bite. K1ymet Han1m Teyze, seated at the head of the table, was weeping inconsolably. As she wept, several women, standing by on duty with bottles of cologne that never left their hands, were trying to rub her wrists. Grandmother was looking absent-mindedly at the neglected dumplings. It seemed as if the table would remain the way it was, and all that work would be wasted. But suddenly, at a completely unexpected moment, K1ymet Han1m Teyze stopped crying, and started spooning up the dumplings in front of her. She ate with such speed that the rest of the women in the room were left with their mouths hanging open. She ate noisily. Every time K1ymet Han1m Teyze finished her plate, it was filled again immediately; every new plate of dumplings had lots of garlic yoghurt poured over it, and was dribbled with melted butter.
That afternoon, under the surprised eyes of the others in the room, K1ymet Han1m Teyze ate perhaps fifteen plates of dumplings. When she’d finished the dumplings in the pots, she polished off the plates that the neighbour women insisted on passing to her. Finally, when she realized there was not a single dumpling left, she leaned back, said a half-hearted thank you, and added, ‘Elsa would have loved it too.’ Before she’d even finished the sentence, all of the women in the room shrieked as one. K1ymet Han1m Teyze’s mouth was full of blood.
That afternoon, seeing K1ymet Han1m Teyze eat for the first time, the child became confused. It was clear that K1ymet Han1m Teyze wasn’t a robot or anything. She ate food just like everyone else; she was a person like everyone else, after all.
But if she wasn’t a robot, how could she eat so many dumplings without exploding?
‘You and I will become very good friends. And you know that friends talk about everything.’
The doctor was young and had no moustache. He wore thick-lensed glasses, and had bright blue eyes. The child was his first patient.
As the lorry loaded with furniture left the neighbourhood, grandmother, who was sitting next to the driver, turned to look back with tears in her eyes at the house the colour of salted green almonds where she had lived for twenty-two years. That morning, she’d knocked on the door of the second floor to try her luck one last time.
‘K1ymet Han1m! Please don’t throw me out of my house. After all these years as your tenant, what fault do you find with me? Haven’t we been good neighbours all these years? We’ve looked into each other’s eyes. Tell me if there have ever been any problems between us. Believe me, she’s going to go. I’ve sent news to her mother and father. They’re going to come and get her. “You know, things are a bit confused at the moment. Let her stay with you for a while,” my son said, and I didn’t say anything. “We’ll come and get her later,” he said. “She’s my grandchild”, I said, and I accepted the situation. I’d never even seen her before. How was I to know she’d be such an imp? She must take after her mother. If I’d known, would I have wanted her to stay with me? Please, K1ymet Han1m Teyze, don’t throw me out of my house at my age. I swear on the Koran. She’ll be leaving soon.’
K1ymet Han1m Teyze didn’t go back on her word.
The truck loaded with furniture pulled up in front of a five storey apartment building on the other side of the city. This was where grandmother’s daughter lived; with her husband and three children. As she climbed the steps, grandmother cursed the reasons why, at her age, she would have to live as an unwanted extra person in her son-in-law’s house. The child followed one step behind.
This house had no garden. It only had a balcony with empty flowerpots. At one point, the child went out onto the balcony and put several cherry pits into one of the flower pots. She knew that there was no earth in the flower pots. This wasn’t important. In any event, she was going to leave this place soon.
‘If something bad happened, you can tell me about it.’
The doctor, whose anxiety increased as the silence drew on, took off his glasses every two or three minutes and cleaned them with a soft piece of velvet. When he took off his glasses there was a glimmer of shame in his bright blue eyes, with which he couldn’t even see beyond the end of his nose. The child liked him when he was like this. She liked to watch him.
‘All right, all right, OK.’ Said the doctor, opening his arms wide in a gesture of surrender. ‘But just tell me this. Before you moved out of your grandmother’s house you climbed onto the roof. You made everyone very worried. Do you want to tell me why you climbed onto the roof?’
When the child arrived at the house the colour of salted green almonds, the summer season was just beginning. Grandmother opened the child’s suitcase, and arranged the contents one by one on the divan. Shorts, socks, underpants and hats came out of the suitcase. As well as multi-coloured marbles.
‘Don’t you have anything else to wear?’
On the evening of the day the child put on the long-sleeved brown dress her paternal grandmother had bought for her.
‘Now you look more like a girl!’
Grandmother closed the suitcase and put it on top of the closet. The clothes in the suitcase could be worn neither outside nor inside. The child could understand why she shouldn’t wear shorts outside, but she couldn’t understand who she would be hiding from inside. Who was going to see her at home, within the four walls? Her grandmother didn’t answer this question that day.
‘What do you see in the picture?’
In the picture, next to a stove on which chestnuts were roasting, there was a puffy cushion and a red ball of wool.
‘You didn’t even look properly,’ said the young doctor as he thrust the picture back into the child’s hands. ‘Please look more carefully.’
In the picture, on the puffy cushion next to the stove on which chestnuts were roasting, there was a cat playing with a red ball of wool.
‘Do you know that I have a cat too? Perhaps I can bring it here one day. Do you like cats?’
Grandmother was tall and wiry. She chewed so slowly that when she finally swallowed the mouthful that her toothless mouth had dissolved into strands from which the taste had long since been leached, she’d forgotten what she had eaten. It didn’t matter anyway. Being picky about food amounted to ingratitude. That’s what she used to say. That’s what she used to say sometimes, and she would deliberately cook badly. Sometimes she didn’t add any salt, or else put in too much hot pepper, or didn’t use oil. The child had to become accustomed to eating everything. And also, of course, to not eating.
Grandmother fasted frequently. The days she had to make up for from past and future Ramadans never lessened. On these days, even though it wasn’t stated openly, the child was expected to keep the fast with her. She wouldn’t put anything into her mouth when she was in her grandmother’s presence, but the moment she went into the back garden she went straight to the cherry tree. But one day, at a completely unexpected moment, she had to give up this mischievous game. Because that day, taking the child’s cherry stained fingers and squeezing them tightly, grandmother looked straight into her eyes. When she finally spoke, her lips, which were as hard and mottled as a pomegranate rind, twisted into a mottled smile.
‘Let’s say, for instance, that you managed to deceive me. Did you think that Allah wouldn’t see you secretly eating cherries?’
‘Don’t talk if you don’t want to. But if you don’t talk that means you’re not my friend. If you’re not my friend, that means you won’t see me again.’
He took off his thick-lensed glasses and set about polishing them. The threat had worked. The child, whose mouth could not until now have been pried open with a knife, started to talk hurriedly. She told the doctor all of the fairy tales she knew. After that, she started to make up her own fairy tales. She talked and talked and talked, without minding that her mouth was drying up and without worrying that her tongue might bleed.
As she talked, the young doctor’s bright blue eyes clouded, and his face darkened.
The child opened the package her grandmother had given her. She had been expecting a new dress, but this time a muslin cloth emerged from the package. It was a cherry-coloured cloth with little seashells sewn in the corners.
That day she learned how to pray. As she copied what her grandmother did on the prayer rug, she listened to the voices of the seashells. The seashells always spoke with one voice. When grandmother folded up the prayer rug and put it in a corner, the child followed her.
‘When does he watch me, then?’
‘Isn’t God’s time different from yours or mine?’
God was timeless. Even during the hours when time naps, he doesn’t sleep, and continues to watch people. The child folded up her prayer rug and put it on top of her grandmother’s prayer rug.
‘Why does he watch, then?’
‘This is your mother and father’s fault,’ said grandmother in an irritated tone. ‘They didn’t teach you anything. They wanted to make you the way they are.’
It was as if the child hadn’t heard what had been said. It was as if her thoughts were elsewhere. Just as her grandmother was about to leave the room, she shouted after her.
‘What about the night? When it gets dark? Can he see in the dark?’
Grandmother turned and examined the child from head to toe as if she had never seen her before. That’s when she said those words.
‘People should hold their tongues. Talkative people’s tongues bleed.’
When grandmother left the room, a thousand sentences formed from the letters of the answer she hadn’t received flocked through the child’s mind. She understood that during the day, whether she was inside or outside, she had to be careful about what she did and to keep in mind that she was constantly being watched. But perhaps the night was different. Perhaps at night God didn’t watch the world. This was why the night was so dark. The night was as black as coal. Coal shed black…
After that day, she started to go to bed later at night.
‘You’re eating a lot these days. Isn’t that so?’
The child nodded with a heartfelt smile. Because she didn’t want to lose her friend, she leaned back and started talking. Without hurrying, and without taking a break, and in great detail, she told the story of Hansel and Gretel, who fell under the power of the world’s most wicked witch, while they were nibbling at the glazed sugar windows, and the door made of marzipan, and the chimney of dough, and the lawn of strawberry pudding, the fences of double whipped cream, the rooms of nougat, and the chocolate roof.