Issue 22

Berna Durmaz
Translated by Dayla Rogers

Jemafer set the zurna’s wet mouthpiece against the iron headboard and lay down to give his soul easy passage out his throat. He waited. As he lay there, he didn’t bother shooing away the things rushing through his mind and from his tongue. His words spilled forth, without order, without beginning, without end. They were his last, after all, so how was he supposed to know which was what?

Thus, in that hour began Jemafer’s talking, which droned on and on, humming like a bucket of bees. His jaw broke loose from his skull and dropped to his chest.

Meanwhile, his wife Semine was hunched over, shearing off splinters as she scrubbed the wooden floor of the hall. Her flannel pajama bottoms soaked up to her underpants, her hands and feet beet red. She was so used to Jemafer shutting himself up in his room and blowing on the zurna that her ears had gone deaf to his wailing tunes. What startled her was the sudden silence and the mumbly sounds like praying that floated to her ears.

“What’s wrong, old man?” she shouted. “Who you talkin’ to?!”

She went on pulverizing the floor with the stiff brush. She paused and listened again. That sound could be the radio, the next-door neighbor, or the vermin nested under the wood … But no. Something wasn’t right.

“Girl, go check on the man,” she muttered to herself. “He’s goin’ on seventy. At his age, they’re like to go senile, no idea what comes out their mouths. God forbid they become a public spectacle.”

Little did she know, that’s just what would happen.

Semine stomped down the hall, dripping dirty water along the way. When she opened the door, she had neither the mind to grasp nor the tongue to tell what she saw.

“Lord …,” she gasped, “let the world come to ruin! It wasn’t made for us!”

There lay her man, motionless in the bed, his chin unhinged with nothing holding it on. However he got this way, he had no idea he was dead and, by God, did he talk.

Semine grabbed her scarf off the back of the door and ran to the bed. She folded it and tried to tie the chin back on.

“What you doin’, woman?!” barked Jemafer. His eyes locked on the ceiling, his hands and arms still. His chin was the only part of him that moved.

“Just let me tie your chin back on …,” she insisted.

“Leave it!” roared the chin. “Let it be!”

This sent Semine rushing frantically to the kitchen. She returned with an armful of onions and dumped them in the middle of the room. Tears streamed from her eyes as she split them in two and placed the halves here and there throughout the room. After all these years, she still remembered her mother saying that the smell of onions could drive off a spirit that doesn’t realize it’s dead. Now it was time to put it to use. But instead of fleeing, Jemafer’s spirit only got riled up even more.

“Girl, make the food in the kitchen!” snapped the chin. “And don’t bring me any. I don’t want it …”

Earlier that day Jemafer had stopped short just as he was about to step out the door. The awareness of death struck him like lightning. His mother used to get those kinds of hunches, but this was the first time it had happened to him. The stilted wooden door swung shut behind him, but he didn’t budge. The wind flung the stench of horse filth into his face. A handful of sand swept off the ground and flew, whirling, into his eye. There’ll be no getting well, he thought. It was rotten, the way it happened all of a sudden. Were the tears running down his cheeks from the grit in his eye or his pained realization? Damn sand always made people tear up. Whenever it flew, he became helpless as a child in the face of how pathetic it was, the life of the pitiful human. He always cried. Just like this. Like a kid who’d lost his mother, become an orphan, become a waif. It was as if his love had run away, leaving him with nothing but longing. Whatever it was that brought on his tears, there was no getting around it: His time had come.

He took one last look at the neighborhood, a blurred vision from behind a screen of tears. The orange and lilac paint of the squat houses glowed with a brilliance only he could see. It looked more beautiful than ever. The women sitting on a row of rugs in the street, chewing gum, swearing, having rowdy arguments, hungover. The children with them, playing, naked from the waist down, their cheeks dashed red from eating bread slathered in tomato paste. At the end of the street some musicians sat perched atop a mound of tires, instruments in hand. Guys who’d blown the cash they’d made the night before hung around like vultures, sitting on a sheet of vinyl spread on the street. Ali’s wedding was that night, and he was bound to throw plenty of dough the players’ way—money he probably ripped off, but that was his business. It wasn’t even nightfall, and already everybody was smashed. Jemafer had planned to go out with his zurna, and the thought of it made his heart ache. Without him, the pipe would just sit there. Who would play it when he was gone?

He felt dizzy and swayed on his feet. He made his way back inside, holding on to the wall along the way. The soap Semine smeared by the handful on the floor made him light-headed. Jemafer opened his mouth, but didn’t have the strength to complain. Entering his room, he picked up his zurna and blew on it for the last time. He looked at the deer woven into the carpet hanging on the wall. The hunter’s five dogs pounced, but couldn’t bring it down. He lost himself in the deer’s frozen expression, and a painful strain rose from the zurna—melodies that overtook the house and then the street, the neighborhood and then the whole city. Black clouds moved in, and that day Jemafer’s breath rained over the town of Kel.

That’s the last time I’ll play, thought Jemafer with a sigh as he placed the zurna against the headboard. It was a part of his body, an extension of his fingers. He felt all twisted up inside, but what could he do? It was the way of the world, a bitter taste lingering in the mouth. He rested his head on his pillow and stretched out. His arms dropped to his sides. His chin fell off and started talking.

Unable to get the help she hoped for from the onions, Semine flew outside. She cried from the doorstep that Jemafer was dying. She snapped at those sitting and those standing around joking. Her voice was half cross and resentful, half pitying herself for being all alone in this world from now on.

“Why don’t you ask after your abi Jemafer instead of hanging around like yak shit?! He’s laid out in there like a pole with a shirt on, nothing but a living corpse!”

Jemafer’s drummer Topuz was the first to get word and rush to his bedside.

“My abi! My brother!” he howled.

The others heard but didn’t believe at first. Hadn’t the sound of his zurna just buzzed all the way across town?

“The playing was that playing,” said Semine as she greeted a troop of visitors. “Form a line. You know this house ain’t no bigger than an arsehole. Where am I supposed to put all you?”

They got in line. In this fashion, Jemafer’s room filled to the brim and overflowed for days. People streamed in from the next neighborhood over, even. Some rifled through the shoes on the doorstep, picking out the new ones and taking off. This made the visitors start bringing their shoes in and holding them in their laps.

The man in the bed was no more than a gaunt-faced corpse, but he sure had more than enough to say. Just when everyone thought he’d gone quiet, he’d start up again and set to mumbling a story that went on for hours. Some got bored and left, and newcomers took over the listening vigil. Though no one understood a thing he said, they were all ears, figuring that Jemafer must be imparting some final words of wisdom among the babble. But then the talking would suddenly go haywire. The chin would yell and shout. Then it would go quiet before starting up again. Jemafer’s body melted and shrank as he spoke and spoke.

Even if he disintegrated, mingling with the wool dust of the mattress that had become flat and mushed beneath him, he would speak on.

“You can’t shut me up! Send your seventy winged angels of judgment! Come yourself and rip my soul from my flesh! Take it, throw it to the dogs! It’s no use! Dead or otherwise, I want the word to find its place. Until I find the one to carry the word, roast me in fire, I ain’t goin’ still!”

It was his grandpa that left the word in his keeping, and Jemafer carried it his whole life. Some days it felt like too great a burden for such a young lad. Other days he was mighty proud of the purpose it gave him. Anyone else would have said, Eh, it’s nothin’ but a silly old tale, then forgot it and went on their way. Had it been his brother who’d snuck into Grandpa’s room, he wouldn’t have heard or cared. But his grandpa had the wisdom to tell him. And so he wove the word into his soul like the Kelam-ı Kadim, the great, cosmic book from which all the holy books were born. And his grandpa also left him the zurna. You see, it all started with his love for that pipe.

When he was a boy, he always heard how his grandpa, “Sergeant Stingy” they called him, had lots of gold. Instead of eating through it, he hid the coins all over the place. He never failed to leave a piece of gold hidden between the beams of the roof, the cracks in the walls, beneath rocks, in the wool stuffing of the quilt, or in the pocket of his long johns. But never more than one. He never hid them all in one place, lest the finder’s profit, or his loss, be too great. And he was always changing the places of his coins, knowing Jemafer’s mother and father were after them. Unbeknownst to one another, everyone was on a secret hunt. The furniture in the house and the dirt in the garden were always being scattered about. The furniture revolved around the coins and was dinged and scratched from the never-ending hiding and finding of gold.

His grandpa was always in high spirits on days when he found a clever hiding place for his earnings. He’d sit on the stone in the garden and wail on his zurna. Jemafer would pop up at the mouth of the horn and, intoxicated by its sound, stick his nose in so deep he practically fell in.

On the day Sergeant Stingy fell into bed to complete his life, the entire household ran around like crazy cows. The uncle’s family, the aunt’s family—they all came together so each of them could scour a different corner of the house. They checked on him every now and then; no telling when the miserable geezer would keel over.

While everyone else was after gold, Jemafer was beside himself over the fate of the zurna. After his grandpa it would go to his father, who would be tasked with picking it up from holiday to holiday, this beloved pipe with its polished wood and bead-laced neck. But if Grandpa left his legacy to Jemafer, it would never fall into anyone else’s hands.

As he was no bigger than a flea, Jemafer was able to slip through the mess of people to reach the dying man’s bedside. It unnerved him, seeing his grandpa with his cheeks sunken, face pale, and mouth agape. The old man’s breath was short and heaving. Last summer the boy’s dog had gone and died in his arms the same way. For days it breathed through its stomach until, in the end, it seized up and went stiff. That was how Jemafer knew there was no more breath left in his grandpa’s body. He leaned in and whispered in the old man’s ear.

“Grandpa, you’re dying.”

The old man blinked slowly to show he heard and understood.

“Tell Pa the zurna goes to me.”

Miraculously, the old man sat right up like he’d changed his mind about dying. He tried to get out of bed. Failing in his effort, he had to go through the labor of speaking instead.

“Where’s your pa?” he growled.

“Looking for gold.”

“Your uncle and his?”

“Them, too.”

“Bah! Into the fate’s wine vat with ‘em … It’s just you?”

“Just me.”

The man in the bed gave his hand an airy wave and puckered his face. He went quiet and thought for a bit. The boy was terrified that his grandpa would keel over before granting him his wish. Finally, a growling voice arose from the man in the bed.

“So, it’s the zurna you want, is it?”

“Uh huh.”

A single finger rose into the air and wagged slowly back and forth. Jemafer fixed his eyes on it, as if it was the one talking. His grandpa spoke slowly, catching the rhythm of its sway.

“If you remember what I say and keep it for a lifetime, the zurna’s yours. The time will come when the word will want to come out. You’ll set it free it and let it go on its way.”

The boy nodded and rested his ear close against his grandpa’s mouth. The old man labored as he spoke, spending his last remaining breath. What the old man said was plenty long, and Jemafer wasn’t sure where the sentence began or ended. Then came a hiccup and then another. His grandpa breathed out and went quiet. The boy stood waiting, but the old man didn’t take another breath.

The zurna hung on a nail above the high bed. The boy couldn’t contain himself and set about getting it down. He climbed onto the foot of the bed. What lay there was no longer his grandpa. With his soul departed, he’d turned to a man of wood. Jemafer was too scared to look at him. He closed his eyes and reached for the pipe. He lost his balance and plopped down on the stomach of the still-warm body. He gathered himself quickly, reached out, and swiped the zurna off its nail.

Now, lying on his own deathbed, Jemafer remembered his grandpa. He bawled, he wailed, but he couldn’t shed a single tear. His body had turned to a rag, and he went mad with fear that they would wrap him in his shroud and put him in the ground before he could pass on the words hammered in his brain.

Jemafer’s eyes were frozen, locked on the ceiling. No one understood why he still spoke. If he’d just shut up already, they’d go ahead and put him in his coffin. But he seemed to keep vigil by his corpse along with everyone else. They couldn’t figure out if the odor they smelled was from the horse filth on their shoes or if the long-dead body had begun to reek. They waited sullenly all together, a chill running up their spines as they listened to the only one talking in the room. Just when they had gotten used to the ethereal quality of his voice—like something from the hereafter—things took a sudden, ugly turn. Everything Jemafer had bottled up he began declaring to the world in a blaring voice. There was no misdeed or thievery done by those present that went untold. He began with girls secretly getting rid of their unborn, then moved on to unfaithful wives, donkey molesters, then to whoever went out carousing with small change ripped off from so-and-so. He rattled off all the things he knew all these years but kept to himself. Just when the listeners shot up and were ready to raise hell, the lofty fullness returned to Jemafer’s voice. The hopping-mad visitors sat back down, fearing God would strike them dead.

Topuz was at it again, bawling his eyes out.

“I’ll never pick up the drum again without you,” he wailed—as if the man in the bed wasn’t on everyone’s nerves as it was.

Semine begged each new visitor to take Topuz with them, but the drummer stomped his feet, swearing not to leave his abi’s side until he’d properly departed from the Earth.

After his grandpa, Jemafer thought of the zurna.

“Without me it’ll just sit there, sad and out of place. It can’t ask to play and be one with the melodies. How can it? Take it, throw it on the fire if you want. Think it would complain? Or use it to spur your donkey. Now it’s nothing but a stick, nothing but a pipe with holes. But don’t you just want to breathe into it and make it sing? Then, you see, what’s just a pipe with holes becomes love, becomes passion, becomes life. Whatever there is, it’s in me, in my heart.”

If he could lift his hand, he would have rapped the wood of his chest, tak tak.

“Aha, here resides something unknown.”

With that, Topuz let out another series of high-pitched wails.

The flow of visitors finally ceased. People thought twice before walking past the house. Jemafer neither went quiet nor died. And his appearance was unsettling. How could someone’s bones turn to dust before they were even in the grave?

“Just this teeeeeeeny bit. That’s all that’s left,” women said to one another, squeezing their fingertips together.

The thing in the bed was no longer Jemafer. One morning his wife would shake him away along with the wool dust of the mattress.

The whole neighborhood began cursing him.

“This one’ll keep talkin’, even in the grave,” they said. “Shut up already, old man. Who put the world’s weight on your shoulders anyway? Just die and get it over with.”

Finally, Zarif got word and rushed to Jemafer’s bedside

If you ask him, Zarif was the last of his line. Ask anyone else, and they’d say he was off his rocker.

The truth was, he was carried by winds of feeling that even he didn’t quite understand. Wherever they blew, he was dragged along. There were times he didn’t go home for months on end, as no one was there waiting for him.

But he was the same when his mother was still alive. After all, going crazy doesn’t cost a thing, so anyone could break the ties binding them to their mind one day or another. Zarif was somewhere between breaking away and hanging on. He seemed to be in his right mind, yet sometimes he had a strange way of talking.

“Why can’t you stay in one place?” the neighborhood would ask. “Just live in your house, get a job. You’re a young man.”

“What rushing river just flows into a hole?” Zarif would reply. Not just empty words; if he didn’t hear the flow of a river in his veins every God-given day, he would probably give up and live in his house just like them.

During Jemafer’s endless jabbering, another peculiar thing happened: Zarif wasn’t alone when he arrived. He had a young girl with him, her eyes clear as glass. It was as if wherever they landed, that place became a part of her. She looked around with a curiosity so wild, people thought she would suck everything up inside her.

The girl was like some kind of rare, wild bird. She walked with a hop that sent her milky white, ruffled skirts billowing, like she would sprout wings and fly off. This caused a shadow to lurk just behind the never-before-seen glow on Zarif’s face.

The girl and Zarif passed under the neighbors’ curious gaze and entered Jemafer’s house. Semine stood muttering at the door, unable to endure the wrath of the chin any longer.

“All the scarves I tied and all the cotton I stuffed in his mouth, none of it’s any use!” she cried in anguish. “I’ve got a soul, too! Let me die in his place and be done with it!”

The house was filled with a heavy stink. They were practically blinded by it and had to use their hands to feel their way to the room where Jemafer lay.

Death had tainted everything. The carpet on the wall had disintegrated into nothing but frayed thread. The curtains and bedding were in tatters. The plastic flowers in the corners had puckered on their stalks. The glass cabinet, the television, the tablecloth, the carpet—a malice in the air had descended on everything. Zarif and the girl struggled to breathe. The intolerable stench clung to their sinuses. For days, weeks even, this smell wouldn’t leave the house—or the neighborhood, for that matter.

Jemafer sensed those entering his room with his unseeing eyes. One was Zarif, but he didn’t recognize the other.

“Who are you?”

The girl didn’t realize the question was for her.

Topuz jumped in:

“Zarif, who’s that with you?”

“I’m Hasret,” said the girl in a quivering voice.

Jemafer’s chin opened and closed, repeating this name. All of a sudden the voice went far back in time. The moment had come to tell the story passed down from the days of old.

Hasret and Zarif went over to the divan and sat, ready to listen.

The dry chin began to recount by heart what Jemafer’s grandpa had told him. He uttered words that for him were a little more than a few decades old, but had clearly lived for centuries. Without rushing, he took his time in the telling. In the story was a snake. This snake swallowed its tail time and time again, formed a circle with its body, bringing its turning in time with that of the Earth. For a billion years it turned without end upon the blistering soil. It got smeared in dust, dirt, rancor, and bitterness.

What he said was something everyone knew, actually, but at the same time something known by no one. The ear heard, forgot, remembered and then changed what it heard. When it came to the tongue, on one end it piled a thousand and one new things on, all the while whittling down the other. Exaggerations and omissions. This was how the things that happened on Earth lived on—neither forgotten nor completely remembered.

Who knew when it was? No one knows. According to some, people at that time stood over five meters tall, according to others, they were the size of gnomes. See what happens when a lie gets into the mix? But everyone knows just like they know their own name, at that time a tyrant walked the Earth. This man headed them off, tore their asses to shreds and strew them in all different directions. As if that weren’t enough, he took the most loved among them and drowned him in the belly of a boiling water. They all saw and none could forget. The earth and sky saw but they forgot. Those who remembered kept what they saw hidden in their minds and scattered to other lands throughout the Earth. Though there were other rivers and other streams in the new lands, they hoped the beloved spirit they’d lost would return. Every year, always at the same time. They entered those waters until they were waist-deep. They were cleansed with innocence, the belief that the spirit would emerge from the water to keep at bay the hand of the tyrant, the wicked gaze of evil.

Zarif knew these things, and Hasret had picked up this much here and there. As Jemafer recounted, Zarif nodded his head to say he knew. The chin twitched one last time as if to say, there’s something you don’t know. He rattled off the words his grandpa told him, that he had inadvertently kept hidden:

“Whatever faces, whatever people come and go, only tyranny remains on this Earth. Tyranny is a carousel, a snake that’s swallowed its tail … It turns and turns and repeats, it turns and turns and repeats, turns …”

It stopped. The chin went silent. At first, they couldn’t understand this sudden halt to the weeks of jabbering. Hasret and Zarif waited for the rest of what it had to say. Their eyes locked on the chin, thinking it would start clacking again any moment.

The silence passed from the room into the garden and from there to the street and rolled on to the center of the neighborhood. Everyone standing, running, joking around in the neighborhood’s dusty, muddy road and everyone sitting and chatting within the crooked walls of their houses—all of them froze with the silence that came crashing down. They stopped and listened. They understood; the wrath of the chin was spent. They let out a sigh, but still couldn’t feel at ease. Having said what he had to say, it was like Jemafer had left them all in an ominous wait. Realizing this, they whetted their resentment.

Semine ran in from the garden. At first she didn’t believe it. She waited. Then she let loose a grief-filled wail, the one she’d been preparing for her husband for what might have been years. It rang out like an explosion after being bottled up for so long.

“Oh, my Jemafer! Can you believe you’ve died?!”

At that moment, Jemafer expired.

Hasret and Zarif forgot that they were huddled against the corner of the divan they’d been sitting on for hours. Hasret noted the word in her mind. Zarif realized the chin had gone still for good. He got up, unable to feel his legs. He picked up the zurna, still resting against the iron headboard, next to the dead body. He put his fingers over the holes and blew a long strain for the deceased.

Topuz couldn’t make sense of the silence and came running all the way from the corner store. Hearing the sound of the zurna halfway there, he thought his Jemafer abi must have quit talking and started playing. He entered the house and halted at the door of the room. The zurna was in Zarif’s hands. His Jemafer abi lay in the bed, his bone chin agape. He realized his abi was dead. Dead, but how was it this living person played his abi’s tune? He couldn’t fathom it. You mean, the breath of the deceased passed into this kook? Topuz was sorry he’d left his abi’s bedside. If he’d stayed, the zurna would have been his. He had every right to it. Jemafer had no children, and Topuz had spent half a lifetime alongside him with his drum, dreaming of this day. Zarif played the zurna hungrily, puffing his cheeks, dipping low to the ground and coming up again. Topuz stared in amazement, unable to object.

In the coming days, Semine would head to the countryside and return with a sack full of herbs. She would cleanse the death-tainted house with dock and wormwood.

Jemafer’s zurna, its neck laced with a string of beads, became Zarif’s and his story Hasret’s. The pair left the town of Kel and made their way toward the plain.