Iron Earth, Copper Sky Read online

  Memidik was standing with awe-struck mien as though in the presence of a holy man, scarcely daring to lift up his eyes and only stealing an occasional timorous glance at Tashbash. This tickled Long Ali enormously. Could it really be, he wondered, that our own Tashbash has become holy? Here’s this lad swearing he saw it all with his own eyes. Why should he want to deceive us?

  ‘Memet, brother,’ he contended, ‘why should Memidik lie? Maybe one of the Forty Holy Men did really assume your shape and showed himself to Memidik like that.’

  ‘I didn’t say he was lying,’ Tashbash said almost apologetically.

  ‘I swear I saw Uncle Memet as clearly as I see him now. It couldn’t have been anyone else,’ Memidik reiterated tearfully, like a child deprived of its toy. ‘Sefer promised to find a good wife for me if I said it wasn’t Tashbash I saw. I’ll give you land too, he said, and a house. But I said, how can I tell a lie? I saw him with these two eyes, Tashbash followed by a forest of lights. And look what they did to me, he and Ömer! How it is they didn’t kill me, I don’t know.’

  ‘The lad’s told you again and again that he saw you with his own eyes,’ Long Ali said reproachfully. ‘What d’you want him to do? Lie to you?’

  ‘It’s the truth, Uncle Ali, I swear it. Why should I lie? I’d know my Uncle Tashbash anywhere! And I didn’t dream it either. Here’s the scar where I pricked myself with my knife.’ And Memidik rolled up his trousers for the fourth time.

  Tashbash smiled unbelievingly. ‘D’you mean to tell me,’ he said, ‘that I’ve become a saint without being aware of it?’

  ‘Maybe you’re not a saint,’ Memidik said, sensing something in Tashbash’s voice. ‘Maybe you were just passing by and those balls of light dropped in behind you, and as you never looked back you didn’t notice them. But it’s the truth, please believe me.’ He had begun to be afraid. What if they treated him as Sefer had? ‘Please don’t make me lie! Please! What good will it do you?’

  ‘D’you know what this story of yours is going to do to me, Memidik?’ Tashbash said. His face was sombre now.

  ‘I’ll die this time,’ Memidik cried. ‘If you beat me too, I’ll die for sure. Please, please don’t beat me! Please don’t make me lie …’

  Tashbash drew a deep breath. ‘Aaah Memidik, you’ve destroyed me. Whether you take back your words or not …’

  Memidik was really scared now. ‘Please let me go. I’m ill. They’ve broken every bone in my body. I want to go home to my mother.’

  Long Ali smiled. ‘Go, Memidik,’ he said. ‘Since you’re ill and your mother’s waiting for you, go, my brave one.’

  So they weren’t going to do anything to him after all! Leaning heavily on his stick, he dragged himself out of the house as quickly as his aching limbs would let him.

  ‘How could Sefer have done this to that poor child!’ Ali exclaimed. ‘This business of yours is going to drive him out of his mind in the end. He’s been in mortal terror of you for some time.’

  ‘And now he’s gone to town,’ Tashbash said, ‘to try and make Adil change his mind about the debts and stop him giving us goods on credit. Just because the villagers think they owe their good fortune to me … As for those villagers, really! They must be mad.’

  ‘How could Sefer be such a fool!’ Ali said. ‘Once these people get something into their heads nothing can take it out again. Even if Memidik laughed at them now and said, I made it all up, and you mugs went and swallowed it whole, they wouldn’t listen to him. But Memet, brother, are you sure there isn’t something changed about you? After all, why should the whole village be talking of nothing else?’

  Something went ‘snap’ in Tashbash’s heart, like a cord breaking. ‘Ali, brother,’ he said in a low voice, ‘don’t make fun of me. This is all Sefer’s doing.’

  ‘How can you think that when you see plainly how scared he is of you using your saintly powers against him?’

  ‘I’m destroyed,’ Tashbash said gloomily. ‘If Sefer’s really afraid, he won’t rest until he gets me into trouble.’ He stopped and thought. ‘Now I see!’ he went on. ‘Now I know who the armed men were who came to my house that night, the white-shrouded ones …’

  ‘You’re right!’ Ali exclaimed. ‘We should have thought of that before. From now on you’re to sleep here, in my house. We’ll keep it secret. I’ve got an old gun which belonged to my grandfather … But what if he denounces you to the authorities as a Mehdi? Perhaps that’s why he’s gone to town. He’ll try to have you arrested, or worse still …’

  ‘He’ll stop at nothing,’ Tashbash said despondently.

  ‘Look, maybe you’re holy without knowing it yourself,’ Ali said half-seriously. ‘Just say a prayer so that brute won’t get to town, so he’ll be buried under the snow.’

  Tashbash laughed. ‘For heaven’s sake, Ali, stop it! What’s holiness got to do with us poor wretches?’

  ‘Who knows, perhaps there’s something in you that’s pleasing to Allah. Your heart’s pure and you never did anyone any wrong. And you’ve been fighting that Muhtar for seven years now, just for the good of the village. You say that prayer anyway. Maybe …’

  ‘Stop it, Ali, I tell you!’ Tashbash cried. ‘You at least don’t do this to me.’

  At that moment Hasan appeared at the door. He cast an awestruck look at Tashbash and gulped.

  ‘Father,’ he said, ‘we want to go and get wood, Ummahan and I, but Mother won’t let us.’

  ‘Well, you can go, if it’s stopped snowing.’

  Hasan stole another look at Tashbash and ran out to Ummahan who was waiting for him with the axe and rope.

  ‘I saw him,’ he whispered. ‘I saw Tashbash. He’s a saint now. His eyes were strange. He was sitting there with Father, face to face, not talking …’

  They set out at a run towards the forest. Once out of the village, they slowed down.

  ‘Sefer’s afraid for his life,’ Hasan said, ‘because Tashbash, you know, has an army of jinn, a huge army. The jinn are very small, they come only up to my knee, but they’re so strong, so powerful that … Tashbash said, if I just say the word, they’ll lift up this mountain and dump it right on top of the next one. I can tell them to grab hold of both Muhtar Sefer and Adil Effendi, and hang them up on the crags of Mount Tekech …’

  When they came to the forest, Hasan built a fire as usual beneath the jutting rock and settled down to watch the flames. Ummahan fixed her eyes earnestly on the fire too, following every twist and turn of the flames.

  ‘I can’t see a thing,’ she grumbled in the end. ‘I look and look till it makes me squint and still I don’t see anything.’

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ he said with superior scorn. ‘Because you need eyes to see. And you’re only a witch.’

  ‘It’s your mother who’s a witch,’ she retorted.

  ‘She’s your mother too, stupid,’ he said. Then he rose. ‘Now, turn your back, girl, and don’t dare look where I’m going or I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Who wants to?’ she said crossly. ‘You’re going to that stone of yours, where else! As if there’s a single person left in the village who doesn’t know about that! As if there was anything to see there! Just a couple of old roots and plenty of black earth!’

  But Hasan only smacked his lips with relish. ‘Just you wait a bit, wait and see what’ll spring up from under that stone,’ he said darkly as he made off towards the boulders.

  Ummahan ran after him. ‘Please Hasan, let me go with you,’ she said. ‘Aren’t I your sister?’

  He softened.

  ‘All right, come along,’ he said. Ummahan jumped at his beck. Together they ran to the stone. Hasan lifted it up and left it standing. They squatted side by side without taking their eyes off the black patch of earth, as though something of prime importance were about to take place there. After a while, Hasan rose and eased the stone down again. They were happy. He took his sister’s hand.

  ‘Come, Ummahan,’ he said. ‘It’s getting late and cold too. Let’s g
ather some wood and go. We’ll come back some other time, very early, and look as long as we like.’

  ‘Oh yes, let’s!’ she said. ‘It wasn’t long enough this time.’

  The village was all in a ferment again. Why had the Muhtar left for town so suddenly? There was something strange about it.

  ‘My brothers, my own villagers,’ Sefer had said that day, ‘Adil Effendi’s sent word to me that the women are not to enter his shop under any pretext. This year the men’ll do the buying. Not a single woman do I want to see, Adil said, not even a five-year-old child, or I won’t give you anything. Only the men are to go, and in small groups of five or ten. That’s how Adil wants it.’

  What did it all mean? A group of men was making ready to set out for town, but the women were uneasy and suspicious. What was Adil plotting now? Did he aim to palm off on the men some old spoiled goods that had been left unsold on his shelves?

  As for Tashbash, a strange mood had come upon him. That night, he purified his heart and prayed till morning that the Muhtar should somehow be prevented from reaching town. If something does really happen to him on the way, he thought, then I really will believe everything Memidik said. After all, there is no smoke without fire. Perhaps there really was something in what the villagers were saying … What were saints like, he wondered for the first time. Maybe they were only men, just like him …

  Chapter 25

  In the end Tashbash decided to sleep in his own house. If he went to Long Ali’s he might get his friend into trouble too. There was no trace in him now of the past few weeks’ defiance and thundering abusive anger. He had become as one of those passive dervishes, acquiescent to whatever fate had in store for him, smiling on the world with a strange detachment. He hardly set foot out of his house and the only people he let in were Long Ali and Meryemdje. What upset him most was the peculiar way people had begun to look at him, timorous, wary, fascinated. He had a special affection for his youngest son and often used to hold him on his lap and play with him, so it hurt him when one day as he tried to take him in his arms, the child escaped screaming into his mother’s skirts. There they were, his wife and children, huddled as far from him as they could, awe and wonder in their eyes. He felt his isolation more than ever.

  ‘Have you gone mad, all of you?’ he shouted suddenly. ‘You can’t believe all that nonsense tool What business would I have on the top of Mount Tekech in the middle of the night and in this snow and cold too? Why are you staring at me like that? Can I help it if the villagers have gone raving mad? Look at me, a man like any other, no lights in my arse, no forests, nothing! That Memidik’s weak in the head. He sees things that aren’t there.’

  He stopped short, ashamed of himself. What was the use of shouting, nothing would make any difference. He decided to take the situation lightly.

  ‘Listen, woman,’ he said with his tongue in his cheek. ‘I’m a saint, of course! Such a powerful saint that every morning I lift up Mount Tekech in my right hand and plant it in the middle of the vast Chukurova plain. The people of the plain are astounded when they see the huge snowy mountain rearing up to heaven where there was nothing before. They can’t believe their eyes. They come flowing in from far and wide to see this sight. And then, my dear, at sunset I take up Mount Tekech again, in my left hand this time, and put it back where it was before … Yes indeed! And I’ve never told a soul.’

  He roared with laughter as he told his tale, not noticing that his wife was taking it differently.

  The next day he learnt that his joke was all over the village …

  ‘Our Lord Tashbash said … He said, each morning I lift up Mount Tekech with this hand of mine, and … he said … I command the rushing waters, saying, stop o ye sacred waters, and the waters are arrested in their course. Not a drop flows by. I tell them to dry up and they vanish into the earth, which becomes an empty desert … When serpents threatened the village, our Lord Tashbash said, stop, don’t move, o creatures of God, and we were saved. Our women would have been barren this year, but he prayed to our beautiful Allah and we were saved. Then our Lord Tashbash said, Adil Effendi must not come to the village, lest he die on the way …’

  ‘What are you doing, woman? Have you gone mad? Don’t you realize all these lies are going to get me into trouble? They’ll send me to a madhouse, just as they did with Mad Murtaza of Yonja village. You know perfectly well I’m not a saint or anything like that.’

  She untied her kerchief and bent her head towards him.

  ‘What about my wound, then?’ she said. ‘The minute you laid your hand on it, it healed. Is that a lie too?’

  Tashbash lost his temper. ‘You goddamn woman, I heal your wound? What about Meryemdje’s ointment? The devil take you.’

  ‘But my head …’

  ‘Damn your head!’ He pushed her away. He had to put a stop to this woman’s talk or he was lost. He curbed his anger and began to think.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last, very calmly. ‘I’m a saint. It’s only that I don’t want anybody to know.’

  ‘Ah, my Memet,’ she cried proudly, ‘you are, you are indeed! Such a saint, you soar high over the seventh heaven. People say that saints never recognize themselves as saints.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘From now on you’re not to speak about me to anyone in this village.’

  ‘But they ask me! And when they ask …’

  ‘I tell you, woman, that if you breathe a word about me, if only to say he’s in good health or bad, he slept or he didn’t sleep, he did this or that, I’ll cast the crippling spell on you. I’ll do worse. I’ll see that it’s Hell for you and no other place in the next world.’

  She took fright. ‘My Memet! My Lord! Please don’t do this to me! I swear I won’t open my mouth.’

  Tashbash was pleased with his stratagem. ‘At least let this sainthood of mine be of some use,’ he thought.

  But from that moment, his wife changed completely towards him. Even the sound of his voice would send her into trembling fits. There seemed to be no way out for him. The only person left in the village who did not want him to be a saint, who did not believe in it, was Sefer. What if he joined forces with him? Together they might be able to stem the flood.

  ‘O Lord Tashbash, the chosen of the Forty Holies, if this base, this corrupt world is still standing, it is only for the grace of your holy presence! We don’t see it, but we know that night and day, before our Lord Tashbash’s house, there burns a sacred fire which is never extinguished, for it is kindled by the forty white-clad, green-turbaned Holy Men. And every night, from over yonder ocean-like steppe, from its snow-wasted winter, its flower-decked spring, come thousands of blossom-clad maidens, like white-blooming almond trees. They come and gather before our Lord Tashbash’s door and dance all night long, flitting around the sacred fire. And as they dance, thousands of youths, bright as the stars in the sky, come and join them.

  ‘Who can they be, these sprites of the night?

  ‘One night, our Lord Tashbash wished he were in Paradise. No sooner said than done! Out of the blue, before he had time to think, three long-winged maidens stood before him. Close your eyes, Lord Tashbash, they said. And an instant later they told him to open his eyes, and what should he see – Paradise! Our Lord Tashbash said, his own wife told me, he said, I never want to leave this Paradise again. The nights are bright as day, milk and honey pour down its hills as in the land of Canaan. Its waters flow as wine, pleasantly intoxicating, fruit trees abound and it is always spring. But our Lord Tashbash did not stay. He summoned the winged maidens. Quick, he said, take me back to my village, for in my absence a pestilence may strike it or serpents rain upon it. Of what avail is it to me to save my own soul, if my villagers are left alone and wretched. And that’s how our own Tashbash gave up Paradise just for our sakes …

  ‘Our Lord Tashbash sets out when it’s dark and reaches the Kaaba at midnight. He prostrates himself before the turbeh of our Holy Prophet, then returns to the village before dawn. His whole
body is green now, the sacred green … Who’s seen it? Only a man whose heart is pure can see that.

  ‘You know the Holy Walnut, the tree the Golden Maid brought from Mount Ida and planted here? Well, one night, one pitch-black winter night, when the snow was softly falling, there was a cracking sound in the west, as though the mountain had split asunder. People ran out of their houses and saw a huge tree all aglow, carving its way through the darkness, gliding nearer and nearer until it came to stand right over our Lord Tashbash’s house. And there it began to turn around slowly, just like a whirling dervish. At that moment our Lord Tashbash came out of his house and saw the tree of light, its every leaf and branch aglow, whirling there over his roof! He cast himself to the ground crying, o sacred tree, holy tree of our Mother, the Golden Maid! And the tree came to our Lord Tashbash and prostrated itself before him. Then it straightened up and swept off towards Mount Tekech …

  ‘One day our Lord Tashbash had a hankering for honey. He opened his eyes and there before him was a honeycomb. But he could not bring himself to touch it. How can I eat you, honey, he said, when my villagers are hungry, when they’ve never even tasted honey in all their lives?

  ‘Our Lord Tashbash doesn’t eat anything at all. He doesn’t need to. Every day there comes to him, all the way from Baghdad, a single date, and that’s all our Lord Tashbash eats. That single date is more than enough for him.

  ‘Oh, my Lord Tashbash, the chosen of the Holy Forties, let me prostrate myself on your threshold! My Lord, my Sultan, my Beautiful One! If this village has not been destroyed by earthquakes, it’s for your sake. If the grass greens and the flowers bloom, the crops ear and the waters flow, if spring comes again …

  ‘Who was it who went up the mountains of Bingöl in quest of Köroglu’s immortal white horse and discovered the fountain of life among the thousand springs of the mountain? And drank of its waters and fell there in a faint for three days and three nights? Our Lord Tashbash himself! And when he came to, he walked down the mountain with a cloud for canopy, and everywhere he stepped the earth grew green and light. And he came to the cave of the Forty Holy Men where they were all seated in a green glow. And the highest among them rose and greeted him. Welcome, he said, take my place, it is yours. And now our Lord Tashbash is the first among the Forty Holies, and the peris have built him a palace of pure crystal right on the summit of Mount Tekech … But he laughs at all this, our Lord Tashbash, just laughs and says, will you have me be as Spellbound Ahmet and Mad Murtaza? That’s how humble he is, our own beloved Lord Tashbash! The mainstay of the earth and the sky and of our blessed religion …’