‘Where exactly did you come from?’ he asked. ‘And where are you going?’ The man’s face fell, or rather, his real face slipped into his second, earthen face. ‘I’m a barber,’ he said. ‘I come from afar. Across lands already forgotten . . .’
Upon hearing these words, the village square fell silent. A few moments passed, and the muhtar sat down next to the man. Prayer beads snapping, the muhtar ordered him a glass of tea and, knowing that a barber was best placed to follow the scent of another barber, asked him if he’d seen Nuri.
‘I knew someone called Nuri,’ said the barber. ‘His hair had grown into his beard. A tiny little man. Every once in a while, he’d come to me for a shave.’
The villagers were stunned by these words: they moved not an eyelash. It wasn’t long before the news had reached Nuri’s wife at home. When she ran into the village square, she found the barber still sitting with the muhtar. For a moment, their eyes met; the woman looked at the barber, the barber at the woman. The barber seemed secretly guilty, almost. Though the watchman was squatting some distance away, he could read this in the man’s face. He looked at him again, through narrowed eyes, and churning doubt. Nuri’s wife was as shocked and tearful as if she were standing face to face with her husband. Fearing that she might fall to the ground to cling to the barber’s feet, the muhtar took her by the arms and sat her down. ‘This is Nuri’s wife,’ he told the barber.
The barber looked at her as though he’d known her for forty years. In his eyes, there was first the glint of an executioner’s blade, and then nothing. For a moment, the shoemaker wondered if this man before them could actually be Nuri. ‘What if Nuri abandoned every familiar part of him somewhere far away,’ he asked himself, ‘to return to the village in a different guise?’
The woman had fixed her mournful eyes upon the barber. She was waiting for him to start from the beginning, and explain everything. But the barber did not say another word. It was left to the muhtar to calm her down. The two men shared a name, he told her, but there the similarity ended. It wasn’t clear how far she believed him; she just sat there staring at the barber. It was almost as if she had made a connection with this man, succeeding where all others, apart from the shoemaker, had failed. This may explain why, when the muhtar suggested that the barber stay on in the village, she immediately offered Nuri’s old shop. He could use it, she said, until Nuri returned.
‘So it’s agreed?’ the muhtar asked.
Without saying a word, the barber nodded.
And now it all came back: the string of preposterous rumours that had followed on from this agreement. Only yesterday, there’d been a pedlar, claiming to have seen Nuri driving a blue truck. This was impossible. Even Nuri’s wife could not imagine it: this was a man who struggled to keep hold of the reins of his own donkey. However would he manage with an enormous truck? She ran straight to the village square, to tell the pedlar he must be wrong, but when she got there, he was gone. In actual fact, no one in the village could tell her when this pedlar had arrived or departed. The watchman had gone so far as to whip his rifle out from underneath his chair and race out to the mill, but he’d seen no one either.
The muhtar and Nuri’s wife had both been in the village square that day, along with the shoemaker, Rıza the shopkeeper, and a few others. Cennet’s son kept insisting that he’d seen the pedlar, telling anyone who doubted his word he’d swear it on the Koran. Gıcır Hamza did the same, insisting over and over that he was prepared to put his hand on the Koran and say he’d seen the pedlar at the coffeehouse around mid-morning: they’d even sat down in the coffeehouse together, to chat over a glass of tea.
The watchman was not convinced. To his mind, the pedlar could not be just a pedlar. Most probably, he was a scout, sent by the deputies from the National Assembly. Who could know what he’d discovered before disappearing, or what he’d write in his report?
Perhaps he’d come to the village to spread the news that Cıngıl Nuri was now driving a truck: perhaps this had been his sole mission. Perhaps he’d been lumbered with this task for months now, growing ever wearier under its weight; which had, in the end, become so very heavy that, after delivering the news, he’d risen up into the air, as light as a baby chick’s feather, and floated off. He’d left a great lie behind him. For it was clear now that the State had devised this lie so as to remove all trace of Nuri; he must have been long dead. But somehow, he’d been registered as a driver, and driving was what he now did. Day and night, he was on the road, as tired as the sleepless roads themselves. No one would ever know where he was at this moment, or where he might be a little later, or where he had been a while before. He carried his house upon his back; wherever he was, wherever he was headed, he made that place his home. And that was why, when the State set about inventing a likely alibi for the man, it had chosen to make him a driver – this was a job without an address! The State wanted to make sure the villagers never found him, while continuing to believe he was alive.
All well and good – but what had made Nuri so important as to require elimination? This the watchman didn’t know. He might well have been the first victim of a campaign of eliminations that would last until the end of time. The State might well have said, ‘Let’s eliminate one person from each village.’ Nuri might have been its test case, in preparation for the challenges ahead. And the pedlar who had vanished, faster than a ghost – well, who could be sure he wasn’t sitting on the other side of those mountains, sketching their faces from memory. Saying: this is what they look like. These are their eyes, their noses and their mouths; this is the shape of their faces and the size of their homes. This is the plane tree in the village square, and this is the muhtar, standing next to it. This is Rıza the shopkeeper. Next to him Cennet’s son, and next along is Reşit . . .
But the barber was nowhere to be found in this crowd. Instead he was standing at his shop door, staring. In the shoemaker’s opinion, he was a monster of silence, an interloper who had stolen Nuri’s shop and livelihood; unless he was another Nuri, dressed in different clothes – a Nuri who nursed a grudge against everyone and everything in the whole wide world. When the imam turned up in the village square that day, he had fixed him, no doubt, with the same stare.
The imam, meanwhile, saw nothing. He was bent over double, so much so that his nose scraped the ground as he walked. Only when he had joined the crowd did he straighten up to fix the muhtar with his penetrating gaze. Nuri’s wife jumped forward to tell him what had happened, until the muhtar silenced her with a single sweep of the hand.
‘Let’s not make things any more complicated than they already are,’ he barked. ‘Let me do the explaining!’
This he did, and the longer he spoke, the straighter the imam stood, and the more gravely he shook his head. His eyes searched the crowd, stopping from time to time to cast suspicion on Cennet’s son and Gıcır Hamza. Then he started muttering. It wasn’t clear what he was saying, but it was clear from his furrowed eyebrows that he was angry.
Suddenly he bellowed, ‘Are you mad? No pedlar has come to this village in years!’
Now everyone was shocked. Even the children who had chased after the pedlar were shocked. The shock passed through them to combine with the elements. In the time it might take to crack a whip, almost, the atmosphere changed. Now villagers shuddered at the very sight of each other, as if they’d seen a ghost. They wandered the streets like sleepwalkers; they heard no words that were not uttered twice. Even the streets tied themselves up into knots, turning and tangling and looping back on themselves. Front doors seemed to shrink, as nooks and crannies multiplied, and courtyards silently widened. Half of everything was lost, and half the time not even a broom could be found. A spade in the corner of the courtyard would pick itself up to hide itself behind the piled sacks of chickpeas. Spoons and trays and pots would go missing, only to turn up months later in a neighbour’s house. Even the chickens seemed no longer to know if they were chickens, or something else. The trees, meanwhile, crossed
over into the animal kingdom. Sometimes, when a flower opened, it lowed like a cow, or bleated like a sheep. A clump of wisteria might suddenly leap across the courtyard to fly down the street. Even the muhtar – he who thought that he ought to be the last person in the village to be shocked – was shocked. Every time he made love to his wife – even as he stripped off his clothes – the imam’s words came back to him. And there it would end: the kissing and caressing. The moment would be lost. Shrinking back into himself, he would fix his eyes on the wall. His wife attributed this behaviour to Ethem’s daughter Gülcan; every time her husband caught sight of the girl, he shivered from head to toe. This had been going on for a year now. The girl’s budding breasts had dazzled, even crippled, the man.
Thank God he had his position to think of. He was intimately connected to every family in the village. So of course he was beholden to them – to the white-bearded old men, to the babies and their sky-blue beads, to his friends and his neighbours, the wolves in the mountains and the birds in the trees, not to mention his own future and good name. Had it been otherwise, nothing – not even prophets raining down from the heavens – would have stopped him. For as long as the man had breath in his body, he would have chased after her, until those sighing lips and budding breasts were his. And yes, maybe he was fretting about Nuri just a little, but even so, there was also this girl. He’d taken to leaving his sentences half-finished. He’d ask a question and then wander off before anyone could answer. And of course, from time to time, he’d lose himself in his thoughts. Now that the repairs to the muhtar’s office were finished, there were days when he sat all alone there, from dawn to dusk, staring at the walls.
Happening as it did so soon after his election, Nuri’s disappearance preyed on him. He had no idea how to behave. As much as he wanted to pluck Nuri out of whatever hell he was in, and hand him over to his wife and children, he knew it was his duty to bring calm to the village, no matter what the price. But they had all been thrown off course; before anyone even had the chance to comment on the latest rumour, it would be replaced by another. It was almost as if a host of alien creatures had descended on the village as it slept, to sprinkle the mulberry trees and the roosters’ tails and the courtyard gates with a thousand and one rumours. They’d feed on the darkness like leeches, and by morning they’d have taken on the aura of truth. And in the morning, when the village rose from its slumbers, it would meet these rumours before it met itself. And it would recoil in shock, in ignorance of the darkness that had nourished these untruths, caught between belief and the thought that there was nothing left to believe in.
This was what happened when the village heard that Nuri had gone to Germany. For a time no dog barked, no cock crowed and no horse whinnied. In every orchard and garden, they were telling the story of how Nuri had crossed over the border. They seemed to know every detail, from the size of his suitcase to the stripes on his shirt, from the shine of his shoes to the smile on his face. The only thing they didn’t know was who had seen all this, but hardly anyone wondered what this might mean; caught up in the torrent of tiny details, they were blinded, with no time to ask.
Then came the news that Nuri had won the lottery. This prompted his relatives to call for another search party, but the muhtar managed to talk them out of it. There was no need; if Nuri wanted to be found, he’d come back on his own two feet. If he wanted to stay hidden, there was no hope of ever finding him. If they set out yet again to find him, they would, meanwhile, feel the loss all the more keenly.
Truth be told, Nuri’s wife could not fathom the muhtar’s logic. Just the thought of all those other women who had spent her husband’s money was enough to send her into hysterics. In time, all the other women in the neighbourhood would flock to her house. Together they would slap their knees and wail. So wild were those wails that the imam could no longer climb his wooden minaret knowing that his voice would be heard far and wide. No man could rest his head on his pillow, or sit down in the coffeehouse and string two words together in the confidence that he would be understood. But equally, no one could find the heart to have a word with Nuri’s wife.
When they heard that the deputies they had been expecting for so long had left for the capital, the women suddenly stopped wailing. It was when they were taking down the banner on which the muhtar and watchman had spent a thousand and one labours. News came that Nuri’s wife had locked herself into her house. At once the muhtar sent over his wife for an eyewitness report. If she had locked herself in, exactly how had she done so? And where were the children? Were they, too, condemned to this fate?
In a flash, his wife was back at his side. It was an utter disaster: the woman had nailed all the doors and windows shut. She wouldn’t let her uncle in, or her father.
Those little lambs were inside, too, bleating away. Not a sound from their mother. No one knew if there was so much as a crumb of bread in the house, or water.
‘Let’s just leave her to it,’ said the muhtar. ‘Let the woman do what she has to do, and maybe she’ll calm down.’
But the stubborn woman kept it going longer than he expected. Every two days or so, the watchman would walk around the house, staring at the windows. Inside, it was as silent as a grave.
In a mumble worthy of a Koranic verse, he said, ‘What this house needs is Nuri.’
With that, he raised his rifle and set out for the muhtar’s office.
Three weeks later, at the insistence of both the muhtar and the imam, Nuri’s door finally opened. Everyone in the village was there to watch; the rooftops and the courtyards were teeming with people, and there were more lining the walls of nearby houses. Even the dogs came to watch. Boys watched from their doorways, catapults hanging from their necks, their eyes so wide you would think they expected a flock of sparrows to come surging out in one great rush. They were dry-mouthed, every last one of them. Somewhere in the crowd were women saying that there was a dead child inside. The news spread in whispers, until everyone stood ready for the chill of death. The muhtar and the imam lingered at the door, tapping on the window from time to time, speaking to someone inside. Giving up, they would return to the crowd, shaking their heads. But soon they would be running back to the door, looking hopeful. Whenever they did that, the villagers would fall silent: even the ones who’d been talking about a dead child fell silent, and spoke with their eyes instead. The muhtar hid his anger from the woman inside, but the crowd outside could see his anger in every sweep of his hand. Then suddenly children looked up at the sky. And there, through the parting clouds, came an aeroplane; a shiny, metal bird . . . Soaring high in the sky, beyond the reach of stones and catapults, and in its wake it left a trail of smoke as long as Nuri’s wife was stubborn.
Slowly, the door opened.
‘Reşit is losing his patience,’ said the muhtar’s wife. ‘Are you coming down or not?’
The muhtar nodded as he bent over to pull on his socks. Caressed by the sweet aroma of aniseed, he left the room. Reşit was waiting with his hands in his lap, silent and resigned as a disciple. First they exchanged greetings. Then the muhtar had a foreboding; a whiff of something bad. It was, he thought, like the moment before an explosion, the moment before everything around him shattered. The greenflies would start buzzing; they’d buzz louder and louder, until, with a great clap of thunder, the greatest the living world had ever known, they succumbed to an unholy din. Until they had sent tense, tight fire trails crackling across the sky, defying the line between this world and the next. Meanwhile, they all braced themselves: the ox-cart wheels in the courtyards, iron-ringed cattle, the walls, the shadows of the mulberry trees and the sky. They braced themselves against the growing hum.
The muhtar looked back at the village. He looked back because he was afraid, as afraid as he’d been during his first days as muhtar. He couldn’t remember exactly when, but just after he was elected for the third time, three people had died on the same day. One was a young shepherd – a child, almost. He’d fallen while trying to take
dove eggs from a nook in the cliffs. His head had been dashed to pieces, scattering bits of his brain across the ground, like yoghurt. The next was a widower who had eaten mushrooms: one minute he was standing outside the coffeehouse, the picture of health. The next moment he was a large and foaming mouth in a revolving head. The third death bore no resemblance to any death he’d ever heard of; a seventeen-year-old girl, who, in the hope of assuaging some unknown pain, had affixed two whole bottles of leeches to her body before retiring to bed. As she slept, the leeches ballooned with blood, until all that remained was a pile of yellow meat.
‘So,’ said the muhtar, ‘what’s wrong, Reşit?’
Reşit swallowed. Hat in hand, he looked straight into the muhtar’s eyes.
‘Güvercin the Dove has disappeared,’ he whispered, as if from the depths of a canyon. ‘She’s gone. Lost.’
7
Then it was time for the man with the prayer beads that were as black as dungeons. He rose slowly, as if it were not a chair awaiting him, but his own execution. The barber’s apprentice stood ready with a yellow-and-white-striped towel. But the man didn’t see this, nor did he wish to see it. He just plumped himself into a chair, in defiance of his executioner. It was clear that he loathed being shaved.
The barber moistened his brush with hot water and rubbed it on the soap until it lathered. I held my breath, transfixed. His hands moved so fast that they, and the soap, looked as if they weren’t moving at all. As if they had turned to ice, almost. And maybe the barber had turned to ice with them, and with the man in the chair, and me . . . It seemed as if we were all living somewhere else in that moment, in a different time, and a different place. It was as if we were, without knowing it, just imagining that we were here. Together we let out a deep sigh. And perhaps this was because, in that other place, we were caught up in some endless struggle. Perhaps, in that other place, we were grappling with all manner of things; running, shouting, ranting, drenched in sweat, but never with a moment to rest. Perhaps that was why we had all turned to ice. Perhaps, when we began to move again in this place, in that other, faraway and unknowable place, we would turn to ice.