Iron Earth, Copper Sky Read online

  Chapter 26

  ‘Let me be your slave, your victim, my Lord Tashbash!’ Fatmadja Woman was saying. ‘Allah himself has sent you to us, a cure for our ills, a hope in our distress. Don’t deny me your mercy! Don’t be mean to me, my beautiful Allah’s messenger. You know it too, my good Tashbash, how my girl has been a cripple for seven years now. No faith-healer, hodja, nor exorcizer could do anything for her, not even the Blue-eyed Doctor of the Chukurova. Just as I was giving up hope, Allah sent you to bring life to my poor luckless girl. But here you are, being mean, refusing to do the work He sent you to do. Well, don’t then! The great Allah is up there, His eyes wide open, watching you, and He sees your iniquities, and if you’re not careful He’s going to pass your sainthood on to Ökkesh Dagkurdu. Listen, my Lord Tashbash, may Fatmadja be sacrificed for just the nail you cut off your little finger! Only put your delicate hand on my girl’s head. Just do that, my brave one, so she can have her share of life too. What have you got to lose? Come, my Tashbash, do this good deed. Open the door! Here’s this poor girl waiting for you to touch her so she will be delivered. She’s been waiting outside in the snow since dawn, and it’s past noon now. She’ll freeze to death. Come, open the door, don’t be mean. What have you got to lose?’

  It was early morning when Tashbash caught sight of Fatmadja making towards his house with her eighteen-year-old daughter on her back, and he hastened to bolt his door. Everyone knew about Fatmadja and her bed-ridden daughter. She was ready to cling to any straw, and it was with zest and faith that she had spread the stories about Tashbash’s holiness, exaggerating them tenfold. But this she had not reckoned with! That he would not even open his door to her!

  ‘Is it because I’m poor? Ah, if a rich man had come to you, you’d have been ready enough not only to lay your hand on him, but to embrace him even. A saint should know better. He should know it’s the rich who’ll burn in Hell because of their sins, together with all their wealth and possessions, and the poor who will go straight to Paradise. Come, lay your hand on my girl’s head and I’ll give you all I earn this year down in the Chukurova. You can have my only cow if you like. Come, don’t be mean, my Tashbash.’

  Inside, Tashbash was making superhuman efforts to keep himself from bawling out at the top of his voice. The blood rushed to his brain, then drained away leaving him yellow and trembling all over. He knew that if he once put his hand on the girl’s head, the villagers would never let go of him again. But the woman was there, outside, in the snow. She had even brought her daughter’s pallet and laid it against the wall. She would not go and kept on pleading …

  ‘Oh Lord Tashbash, our very own saint, the faithful companion of our Prophet Muhammet, blessed be his name! Open the door! I won’t go. I’ll not budge from here for a week, a month if need be, and this poor sick girl and I will freeze to death.’

  She was banging on the door now with her fists. Tashbash lost his temper. He threw open the door and rushed out, ready to grab the woman and throw her as far from his house as he could. But at the pitiful sight of the two women shivering in the snow his anger melted. Fatmadja was already at his feet, kissing his sandals.

  ‘Fatmadja, sister,’ he said with a moan, ‘I’m not a saint, I swear it. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Bless your lovely voice!’ she cried. ‘You spoke to me! Don’t be a saint if you don’t want to. Only put your holy hand on this girl’s head …’

  ‘But why, why won’t you believe me?’ Tashbash cried. ‘I’m not a saint. I’m a sinner, just like Sefer said. I did dirty things with animals. I raped little girls. I robbed …’

  ‘It’s a lie! A lie!’ Fatmadja rose to her feet. ‘You’re as pure as Allah’s light. Pure and clean. Now, please put your hand on my girl’s head, and I’ll sacrifice five cocks for you.’

  Tashbash saw it was hopeless. Quickly he escaped back into his house and drew the bolt.

  Incensed at having let him slip through her fingers so easily, Fatmadja began to pound on the door again.

  ‘God damn you, what kind of a saint are you anyway?’ she howled. ‘Son of an infidel! Enemy of our religion! Pig! Whatever possessed Allah to send you as a saint to plague us?’

  Suddenly she stopped short. It was a saint she was railing at! And saints were notoriously capricious. One had to be very patient with them. What if Tashbash caused her tongue to wither? What if he turned it into wood? She took fright and began to cry.

  ‘Please, please don’t hold it against me, my Tashbash! I’ve said unforgivable things, I know, but it’s your fault. Why don’t you put your hand on my girl’s head? Please, please! Let me kiss the soles of your feet … If you don’t forgive me I’ll kill myself.’

  Her head against the door, she sobbed and howled and her voice rent the skies. A large crowd had gathered in a half-circle about Tashbash’s house. They waited, watchful, silent. In the end she dropped down before the door, exhausted. There was a long silence. The crowd stood by. No one spoke, no one moved. Then Fatmadja came to and began all over again.

  ‘Look, Tashbash! Look at the weather,’ she wailed. ‘There’s a storm coming. If you make us stay here tonight, outside your door, my girl and I will freeze and die, and before Allah you’ll be our murderer.’

  She rattled on while Tashbash from behind the door endeavoured to pacify her. ‘You’re wasting your time, Fatmadja, sister,’ he repeated all the time. ‘I swear to you I’m not a saint. May Allah strike me blind if I am. People are saying it on purpose. Go away. Nothing I could do would be of any use.’

  ‘I don’t care! Just lay your hand on my poor sick girl’s head …’

  Tashbash already knew he was defeated. This obstinate woman was quite capable of spending the night there, outside his door, and of freezing to death too. And he would be responsible. He would really be the murderer of these two women. But there was something else that plagued him, a question in his mind which he hardly dared put to himself. What if the girl really recovered at the touch of his hand? He stood there, irresolute, ready to cry, alone … Then he opened the door and went to the sick girl. He laid his hand on her head and held it there for a while. Suddenly his eyes filled with tears. ‘Allah,’ he said, ‘whatever I may be, this girl is full of faith. Make her well.’

  Fatmadja saw his lips moving. She threw herself at his feet.

  ‘Blessed be He who sent you to us, my Tashbash!’ she cried. ‘It’s Allah Himself who’s smiled on my poor girl at last.’

  She scrambled up and grabbed his hands. Tashbash extricated himself from her clutch and rushed into the house. Whether the girl got well or not, he knew that the sick would begin to flow in on him now. He must do something to prevent it, but what?

  Outside, Fatmadja was kissing his door again and again. Finally, she shouldered her daughter, picked up the pallet and made away triumphantly. As soon as she was out of sight, Tashbash dashed out and called to the crowd of onlookers.

  ‘Wait! Don’t go. I’ve got something to say to you all.’

  The crowd froze, all eyes on him as though he were a creature no one had ever seen before. Tashbash began to sweat.

  ‘Look,’ he began, ‘I’m not a saint, believe me. The stories people are spreading about me and my ancestors aren’t true. I’m just a poor sinner like all of you. Besides, I’m not even a good Moslem. You know I never make the namaz prayers, nor do I keep the Ramazan fast. I’ve stolen cotton down in the Chukurova, worse than Old Halil ever did. I’ve drunk raki and wine and raped young girls, and I’ve done things with animals. I’ve committed the worst sins you can think of. Even Old Halil would make a better saint than me! Why don’t you leave me alone? Why don’t you pick on someone who’ll be of some use to you, like Ökkesh Dagkurdu for instance, a good Moslem who makes the namaz not only five times, but ten times a day, who keeps the fast not only during the month of Ramazan, but for six months of the year. As for all that nonsense about me and the balls of light at my heels …’ He laughed. ‘Well, here I am, look at me! Where are they, the lig
hts? Can you see anything at all? Look, neighbours, you’ve known me so long and we’ve always got on well together. Don’t do this to me. If this thing gets around they’ll come and arrest me or they’ll drag me off to the madhouse. And what if they hang me? Would you like that?’

  More and more people came flocking out of their houses to listen to Tashbash as he stood there reviling himself.

  ‘Is it possible for a person like me to be a saint?’ he kept repeating. He was sure now that he was bringing them round and he felt easier.

  No one spoke or stirred. It was nearly dark now. Tashbash broke through the crowd and entered his house. The villagers stood there, petrified, looking after him with seething hatred in their eyes. They had built a whole world around Tashbash’s holiness, and now it was falling apart, their beautiful, enchanted world of hope … Long after he had shut the door in their faces, they still stood there motionless and silent, oblivious of the freezing wind which had risen from the steppe and was lashing ever more forcefully at the village.

  It was the old woman’s voice, a voice undaunted as life itself, that roused them, or they would have remained there, before Tashbash’s house, motionless and silent, all through the night.

  ‘Are you mad, all of you? Whoever heard a saint say he’s a saint? These saints are the humblest of creatures, they’ll always deny they’re saints …’

  Her words were like a sudden ray of light breaking the darkness.

  ‘Who ever heard a saint say, yes I’m a saint?’

  ‘What fools we are!’

  ‘To think we were all ready to believe Tashbash!’

  ‘We were going to sin …’

  ‘Forgive us, Lord Tashbash! Forgive us our sin! But you led us astray …’

  ‘Half the sin is yours!’

  Chapter 27

  Thank God, he’d extricated himself at last! He’d never imagined he could get off so easily. Well, that was that, they would never have let go of him if he’d had the slightest spark of sanctity in him. He recalled all the awful things he’d accused himself of and not a single one among them came forward and said, ‘Why are you vilifying yourself in this way, Tashbash? You’re not like that. You can’t be. We’ve known you all our lives!’ No, they’d just listened and gone away quietly, like lambs. Maybe they’d found another saint for themselves, since it seemed they were determined to have one. Or maybe they’d decided it was better for them to have recourse to the Rain Father, whose shrine lay a long way off on the crest of a bald hill where the steppe ended and the mountains of the Taurus began. In years of drought the peasants of the steppe villages would go to the shrine and sacrifice cocks and pray for rain. The Rain Father accepted only cocks. With any other offering he was liable to do exactly the opposite of what was required of him. The stories and legends about his powers were endless. He held sway over all the forces of nature. Snow fell at his bidding. He raised up storms and floods, he measured out the rain and could bring dearth or plenty. And woe to the Rain Father if it was dearth that year! His shrine would be assailed by hundreds of hungry peasants, praying, weeping, cursing … Yes, surely the Rain Father was what Yalak village needed, or maybe Ökkesh Dagkurdu. Well, anyway, they could do what they liked now. He was well out of it.

  But what monsters these villagers were, raising a man to high heaven and making a saint of him one moment, then casting him down into the mud the next, at the bidding of the saint himself even. Tashbash could not help being piqued. After all, didn’t the villagers know he’d never raped anyone, or robbed, or drunk wine, or done any of the things he’d said? Yet not one of them had uttered a protest.

  It was dark in the house though Yalak village was better off than the villages of the steppe, since they had plenty of wood from the nearby forest, pinewood too, and this gave them some light at night. In the steppe, people did not know what wood was. For fuel they used cow dung, which burnt without any flame, so that when night came a heavy unrelieved pall of blackness descended upon the villages up there. It was, as the Kurdish poet had said, a darkness fermented for a thousand years that weighed over their nights. How terrible it must be, Tashbash thought, when even our pinewood here gives out so feeble a light …

  ‘Woman,’ he called out, ‘haven’t we got another stick or two of pinewood? It’s so dark in here we can’t see one another.’

  She rose without a word and went to fetch the pinewood. Tashbash thought about the story of the brightly shining Holy Walnut alighting on his roof. If the tree came down my chimney now, he thought, it would at least be of some use …

  ‘Eh, woman,’ he said aloud, ‘thank goodness this sainthood business is over. And if they begin again I know what I’ll do to them.’

  She was like the others, staring at him as though he were a strange creature from the Taurus forests.

  He laughed at her. ‘And to think you believed it. The things that have happened this year. Who would have believed that Adil Effendi would acquit us of our debts, and give us credit as well? And the Muhtar leaving in such a hurry, and still not back … I don’t like that at all. He’s going to bring fresh trouble on our heads, I’m sure.’ Suddenly he flared up. ‘Why don’t you say anything, woman?’ he shouted. ‘Have you lost your tongue?’

  She averted her eyes.

  Would people never be able to look at him as they had in the past? He saw again the bitter hatred in the villagers’ eyes and the slow realization began to dawn that for him there could no longer be a middle road. It had to be one of two extremes now, the crown of the saint or the crown of thorns. What did tomorrow hold for him? Maybe people would just snub him. Maybe they would insult him, swear at him … But never, never would they forgive and forget. To them he would always be the man who had played them false, who had dashed their fondest hopes, a murderer just as surely as if he had killed their children. And one day, at the bottom of a gully, the shepherds would find his dead body, his head crushed by a stone, and everyone would believe it was the jinn and peris who had done it …

  He shivered. What a fool he’d been! ‘You’re an ass Tashbash,’ he told himself. ‘Did you have to look a gift-horse in the mouth? Here you were, all-powerful, the villagers ready to come and go at your command, and you had to destroy it all with that accursed tongue of yours. You fool, how d’you know you’re not a saint when all the villagers are sure you are?’

  The strain of the past few days had been too much for him. ‘God,’ he said, suddenly tired, ‘come what may now! Let them arrest me for a Mehdi and hang me tomorrow morning. I don’t care….

  Then he relaxed for the first time in days. The children were fast asleep and his wife sitting by the fire, beautiful in the light of the flames. She was still one of the prettiest women of the village, her body virginal, her breasts firm, her slanting eyes dark and soft. Desire stirred within him. Quickly he went and took her in his arms, but she twisted away and escaped into a far corner, cowering, trembling, she who used to melt at his very touch, giving herself without restraint, eager, warm and soft and loving.

  He realized what was happening and laughed.

  ‘Woman, are you mad?’ he said. ‘Even prophets go to bed with their wives! All the saints had wives, even Hizir, the patron of all saints. He went with his wife so often that she had enough of him and ran away. As for our Holy Prophet, he possessed a spate of wives and forty concubines as well and he went to bed with all of them too.’

  He grabbed her again, but she broke loose and ran to the door.

  ‘Woman, are you mad?’

  This time he held her fast, pulling off her clothes, kissing her breasts, while she struggled for dear life and tossed and threshed about like one possessed. Suddenly she went limp. There was foam around her mouth. He let go then, frightened, and sprinkled water over her face, hovering about her anxiously. After a while she came to and he drew a deep breath.

  ‘What came over you?’ he whispered. ‘Have you gone mad?’ He tried to take her hand, but she began to tremble again.

  They d
id not sleep until morning and all through the night Tashbash argued with her. With a few words he had convinced the whole village that he was not a saint, but this woman of his would not be swayed.

  He was still talking as the day began to dawn and light seeped in through their tiny window.

  ‘Aaah, if only I really were a saint, I’d show you! I’d cast the crippling spell on you. Or better still I’d turn you into an old woman of seventy. The least I could do would be to stick some sense into that stupid head of yours. But I’m not a saint, more’s the pity. I can’t do anything, neither for good nor for bad.’

  He went out, but almost instantly he threw himself inside again, his face pale.

  ‘What’s happened? What is it?’ she gasped, frightened at the change in him.

  ‘The sick!’ he moaned.

  She went to the door. They had laid them on pallets on the snow against the wall of the house and were waiting there, patient and silent. It was snowing softly, insubstantially. From afar, she saw more of them approaching, men and women bearing the sick on their backs.

  She looked back at Tashbash, proud, expectant. His eyes were fixed on the ash-soiled fire. After a while he turned to her.