Cibin-1914
Satin-
I always wanted to have a son named "Andre", God made my wish come true, I experience this feeling for the first time, it is neither like the feeling I felt for Alpinaryan nor the love of a parent, the love of a child, when I held him for the first time, he looked at me with such innocent and defenseless eyes. !
My days are spent thinking, for the first time I feel that I am very close to happiness and at the same time very far away. We have a month to prepare before we set off, the Eastern Anatolian convoys have already set out, the state will also provide armed soldiers with us, and two or three poor privates will ensure our safety throughout the journey. ,I am not afraid of walking all the way to Lebanon, but I am afraid of losing my son, Alpinarian talks about leaving him to Abdullah and Meryem, their daughter would grow up with Meryem and get married when the time came! I often heard from my mother how insensitive creatures men were, but until this moment, it was like a refrain throughout my youth. Now I understand better the meaning of this word I heard. I don't want to leave Andre to another woman, but I want him to live. If we choose Islam, we will be able to stay in the village. I had a nightmare last night. Because I am an Islam, while the Lord Jesus was hitting my head with the big cross in his hand, he said, "The place of the unbelievers is hell!" God said. Forgive me, even thinking about this makes my soul bored. Even though Islam, like the purified ones, believe that the Almighty Jesus is not a spiritual being, Muhammad, who married little girls, with his sword in his hand and his long beard, causes me to experience nights full of fear. This journey, this separation, maybe. It will end in five or ten years, if this tension between peoples ends and the war ends, I can go back and take my son. Mary is his foster mother, even if they raise him in Islam, at least I will believe that he is safe. I lived the first days of my marriage in this house, the best days of my life, it was a changeable house, ours was sometimes as safe as a church, sometimes it felt like it would shake and crack in two. A sloping stone roof held the house up. The windows of the house were closed with white shutters. The one surrounding it was leather, a wall that a soldier could tear apart with only his hands. A small armchair covered with worn pink brocade fabric with buttons was always waiting in the corner for Alpinaryan to sit down. Two porcelain bowls and plump dragons around the writing desk. A mirror with a broken ornate frame was faded and thin in places. long carpet.
This morning, Alpinaryan began to stack the items in the house one by one in front of the door. Baiona had come to visit him, and he was wondering how long he should wait before asking Saten what to do. He promised himself that he would be cautious and prudent.
The writing desk stood in the middle of the corridor at the back of the house, facing the wall. Alpinaryan would sit here and write to his cave friends from the old siege days. His feather pen, blue paint and leather-covered blotting paper were always in the same place. He would sit on a satin round-backed chair and knit.
He paced the corridor up and down. He liked the sound of footsteps measuring the long silence of the corridor. He liked that it had two doors at each end, symbolizing pause and progress. The corridor itself was not a room, but it connected the rooms.
When you turn the curve of the oval staircase, you come out to a living room with doors half hidden by the gray coating. When you open the farthest door, you go out to the bedroom. Saten would not forget this house in her new life in Lebanon, she would remember which door would open where. Years later, when she returned to this house, she was a surprised stranger. Saten would return to this house as a birthright and as a place he had lived in throughout his childhood. While wandering around the house with these thoughts, he found himself in the middle of the kitchen. A shelf with knives hung on the wall next to the stove. The symmetry of thick black handles with razor-thin blades. Saten remembered the day when Alpinaria explained that the word "bad" meant "sharp". It was that moment when they hugged by the fire in the pale light of the cave and were together for the first time.
There was an empty place between the knives. Saten looked at her hands in surprise. She realized that he was pricking the tip of the dull vegetable knife into her thumb. He lifted her up and sliced the air in half with the knife. Suicide?
Could dying be a better solution than leaving Andre? He felt dizzy. It was as if he and B aiona had become children again, as if they were playing the game of spinning around themselves at a point with their arms open to see who could come back the longest without falling.
Baiona came with the brown dress she had been wearing for ten years, she did not want to stand out and be recognized. When her dress sat down, her knees were visible from the skirt that slid up. This was a feeling of being half-covered, mixed with the feeling of being seen too much. At the other end of the road was the church of the village, behind it the cemetery and the mill. How many times had they heard the church bells ringing softly?
Baiona said he was calm, that he was on the right path, that he was ready for the journey to Lebanon, that his feet knew every cranny and bump on the road.He was crying to Saten. She inhaled the smell of grass, wet soil and manure. They said goodbye to the tall poplar trees that swayed like feathers as the wind shook. A coolness rose from the wet grass on which Saten stood, towards her legs. The cold suddenly made her nostrils, neck and wrists shiver, and she put her hands into the sleeves of her cardigan. Trembling, Baiona looked around. She vaguely inhaled the smell of the country. There were more and more sacks loaded with wheat, oats and barley loaded onto the carts. The pale and brightly colored straw stalks were arranged in this way, thanks to Alpinarya's skillful hands.
He suddenly thought of Satin, smooth skin, beautiful legs, why were these so important?
She had always been important to men, the right clothes, the right way of speaking, the way of attracting people, of looking nice to them. She didn't have these, you know, that thing deep inside a person, that is, I don't have it, I don't know what it is. Was it femininity? A real woman like the others. not being able to be?
Saten felt her brother's eyes moving over her, the ticking of the clock was the loudest heartbeat in the house, it was slow, like the falling of metal hands, it was as if it showed the time of Saten's childhood, they were feeling their last heartbeat, these were the last hours they spent as guests. The bed stood in the far corner opposite the door, the mattress It was placed in a curved mahogany frame with raised head and foot ends.
There was a gas stove made of white rose glass on the bedside table next to him. He let himself sink into the satin-feather depths. The mattress was as soft as a quilt covered with red silk, and the pillow was large and square. Satin was standing at the kitchen with his face facing his room, he wanted to eat, breakfast before the journey? To draw a wall to the uncertain future. It could be soothing for him. He wanted fresh bread, salty under its crusty crust, with a little butter and white almond apricot jam spread on it. He wanted a cup of Turkish coffee, and most of all he wanted the best cigarette of the day: his first cigarette.
He was a coward who wanted to escape, the words he was afraid to say were locked in this room, he thought he would lose them, the dead in the cemetery came back, at the same time, mouths opened and he shouted the words that Saten tried not to hear and tried to believe that no one could ever say. The words of death were spoken loudly in the village. It had to be a text against the undead and unburied things that came out of the grave of the war that was going on and came to capture them all and lay claim to them.
The murdered Armenians spent their last night with the villagers in the old coffee house, they prayed, they said their own names and the names of the Islamists who betrayed them. Saten recorded everything in this room by writing, she believed that one day she would come back and own this house.
Sometimes she thought she was being punished by God. The day she caught her husband in that state in the barn with an Islamic man, she was cursed. Alp and Abdullah begged her not to tell Meryem what they had experienced. Now she could put forward a condition: If Abdullah fathered Andre, this secret would go to the grave with her. .She now understood why her husband did not do his manly duties sufficiently, this "game" they had been playing since childhood was forgotten for a while when they both got married, but Aalpinaryan's endless desire for "femininity" won, they started to be together again as in the old days, Saten is now She understood why her husband did not touch her for months, why there was blood on her husband's underwear while he was doing his laundry, and why Alpinaryan made suggestions for a second man to join the moment they were together. She hid this relationship and accepted the "threesome" relationship because she had longed for a man's touch for a long time. Abdullah had taken possession of both her husband and herself, but the happiness was short-lived, Meryem felt that she had been deceived, women have strong intuition, Saten could not think that she would take revenge by using Andre, but there was a rule of life that she should not forget, every sin has a price.
Beirut-LEBANON, 1915
-Alpinaryan Kırkıryan-
He was in a community where women in chadors were gossiping in a corner on a street with narrow streets and adobe houses. He had no money. He was begging. It was in front of the mosque. This was a big mosque. Minarets, domes, arches and barred windows were all complete. Especially its courtyard: the most important place for beggars. He was standing off to one side. He was unsuccessful at begging, either because he showed no skill, or because he had no painful quirks, or because he could not think enough to separate himself from the environment and feel sorry for his failure. Because he could not sell corn in small containers, he could not sing songs with children and birds and do good deeds on behalf of others, and since he could not speak, it was very difficult for him to achieve success in this regard. He was not doing anything interesting other than leaning against the wall of the mosque. He hadn't even attempted to open his palm yet. However, pigeons and corn pots and religious monuments lined up on a sloping wall protrusion of the mosque.While the concentration of books and those who warned the public against some social evils and who did good deeds in return for receipts was concentrated, a woman wearing a headscarf and chador, thinking that she was disabled, turned the palm of this reluctant beggar and put some money into it. She did not look at the money, perhaps because she was blinking because the sun was so high at the moment; Maybe she forgot to close her palm because her eyes were focused on the children playing in the inner courtyard of the mosque. All this had happened after the first benefactor of the day had walked some distance away. While she was looking at his face, knowingly or unknowingly, she never moved her eyes. That's why his first customer thought he was blind. He seemed to come to his senses when he heard the sound of another coin falling into his palm. When he looked up, he saw a man with torn clothes and a long beard, just like him. Then, the young girl who was looking for her coin purse, rummaging through her bag made of an old carpet with nervous movements, appeared before her; A large coin made his hand heavy and covered all other coins. A dark woman squatted next to him with her baby in her arms. They stood against the wall for a while, like two stains. Then, the light blob walked into the middle of the courtyard. A cane reached his legs from the black-robed old man's hut; He almost fell. "Take me to the fountain," said the old man in a gruff voice. When his hut was pushed in the direction of the wheels, he stamped, "Not there," and went out; They turned the wheels in the direction they wanted.
The old man greedily covered the open side of his hut; He opened a small window in another wall. He looked at the courtyard angrily from there. He left the old man in the shadow; He went and leaned against the wall and watched his money. "You are a strong man; aren't you ashamed to beg?" A fat man was standing next to him: "If you were given a job, you wouldn't work." He looked at the fat man's suitcase lying on the ground and tried to lift it by holding it with both hands; He didn't make it. Then he saw a porter in the distance, skilled. He did the same: crouching down, leaning his back against the suitcase, grasping the handle; It didn't happen. Finally, with the help of the fat man, it was loaded. On the way, "I won't pay more than two and a half liras," said the fat man in his thin voice. They walked side by side. As he approached the dock, he collapsed with the load on his back. The owner of the suitcase stopped and hesitated for a while; Then he handed over the money. I guess he felt a little sorry for him. He could also enter the ferry for a separate fee; But the wall of the porters' organization did not break. Then he begged for a while on the wall of the ferry dock. When the possibility of carrying a load again appeared, he was pushed aside. It was a little battered and was shaking slightly in place. There were those who accused him of being drunk at this time of the day; Still, it did a pretty good job. Then again suitcases, trunks etc. (all the way to the dock). He went back and forth between those who thought he was healthy and those who thought he was disabled. Maybe he would work more. However, just as a well-dressed gentleman put his hand into his pocket to give him money, the child in the arms of a woman passing by started crying while looking at this shabby man, and he walked away without waiting for the money; He immediately crossed to the opposite sidewalk.
When he came to the mosque courtyard, he went under an arch and counted his money against the dim and cool wall; Then he had it completed by the bagel seller on the opposite wall, and some coins were left over. He walked and went to a crowded street; He mingled with the people again. He watched himself in a large, carved, gilded mirror standing between two tired and sweaty porters: He had no jacket, his shirt was in tatters. Looking at the mirror, he placed the pieces of his shirt, which had been torn while he was unintentionally involved in a fight between two vagabonds and mediated for them, on top of each other. He untied the rope holding his trousers and tied a tighter knot. Then they took the mirror away; He couldn't watch his torn trousers and the elastics he had on his sockless feet. He walked slowly; He passed from narrow and crowded streets to narrow and crowded streets. The voices of street vendors joined the noise of people walking. Then the vendors began to take specific and fixed places on the sidewalks: First, stalls with short legs appeared; stalls rose and were armed with poles and awnings. The sun disappeared; The heat has subsided and there is no room left to walk on the streets. He got stuck between clothes and fabrics that were hung from unknown places; had to stop. A white coat, swayed by the wind or passers-by, was spread over his face. A long and bright coat. A ghost with a flared skirt and huge buttons; wide collar, cool. A light wind arose; He was big, dark, and his appearance made the country salesman's clothes flutter imperceptibly. Only the white coat did not move; It must have been made of heavy fabric. The seller, who was watching him, finally broke the silence: "What is it? Are you going to buy it?" He didn't respond. The seller smiled and spat on the ground; He had a half-sly, half-indifferent expression on his face.
There was a flowing sun. Even though he slowed down his steps, drops of sweat slid from his forehead and wet his beard. He leaned on the railings on a large bridge and took shelter in the shadow of a comb seller. He favored the salesman with his coat, his beard, and his gaze that passed over passers-by; Some of his unemployed people stopped to watch him; those who carry heavy loadsThey found it appropriate to rest there. A few combs were sold by the way. At first, they could not approach him because he stood motionless, expressionless. There were people who tried the few words they knew from the most spoken foreign language on it. "This man is not a tourist," someone said. "He's trying to impress himself." Another person tried him with a swear word in a foreign language. No response was received. A bingo player, with American cigarettes visible in his pocket, said, "No, this guy is British, maybe he's a spy." Then they touched him and pulled him; It turned out that he was alive. He walked and walked away. The bridge was long; He stood next to other vendors for a while. One of them, a young man in a cap selling filtered cigarettes, even left him in his place while he went to pee. In that short time, five packs of cigarettes and three matches were sold. When the seller returned, they each lit a filtered cigarette from their own stalls; They leaned on the bars and watched the people fishing. Without speaking, he unbuttoned his top two buttons, but still couldn't cool off. He wiped the debris from his forehead. He turned his eyes to the end of the bridge; There were dark streets there; he made a vague gesture with his hand towards the seller and left.
He stopped in front of a shop window in a narrow street. He watched himself. It was on a street where fabrics, dresses and vendors were overflowing from shops. Customers were being cut off. After a while, he sensed that he was being watched from behind the showcase. The fat shop owner was looking at him with his thoughtful little eyes. Then a wide smile covered his round face; eyes narrowed and disappeared. "Look here," he called, holding the door with his fat body. "Where did you find that?" He looked; He didn't respond. Another person approached him and grabbed his arm. "Hey mister!" said. He told me something in a language he didn't understand. It didn't happen. He supported his words with his hands; He also tried to explain what he wanted with his arms. It didn't happen. He opened his suitcase on the floor, took out shirts wrapped in transparent paper and handed them to him. "You tourist," he said, putting his finger on one of the large buttons on the coat.
He left her there in front of the shop window and went to the corner of the street. The fat man was waiting for the result at the door of his shop. After a while, a young man with his chest hair sprouting like a black bush from among the flowers of his shirt stood in front of him; He looked at the shirts: "How much?" said. Just look at the young man's face. The main salesman on the corner of the street stamped his foot in anger. "The guy's a junkie," he growled. "He is deaf," said the young man in red trousers, approaching the hairy young customer so as not to miss him. The main salesman looked angrily at the face of the man in the coat; He stood indecisive for a while, then put my ear to his mouth.
"I understand your language."
"Come in for a moment." He stopped and thought: "That's right, he won't understand." He tried the way of the Suitcase Seller: "You come, the shop is here," he said and without waiting any longer, he grabbed his arm and pulled him inside. He and the shop assistant walked around it for a while, thinking about what they could do with it. "The guy looks like a model. I can't give him a roll of fabric and make him sell it!" It was circled around for a while longer. "Mannequin," said the fat shopkeeper again, for lack of other words. They were muttering with the shop assistant for a while, "Mannequin, mannequin," and after a while they thought of using her as a mannequin. For a while he said, "Live mannequin!" they shouted with joy. Then they pushed him towards the window to stay there (he couldn't be persuaded otherwise). Just as he was about to step towards the ledge of the shop window, the shop assistant warned his boss, saying, "His feet are very dirty, and so are his trousers." They stopped him. Some white cloth was wrapped over his shoes and around the bottom of his trousers. With the parts he couldn't cover, he looked like a mummy in a museum. They took him by the arms and brought him to the showcase. "Don't look like an idol like that," said the shop assistant. "Let's give him a nice pose." They thought again. "Let's open your arms," said the boss. "Let it fill the showcase." "He gets tired and keeps moving his arms." They finally decided to hang the arms from the ceiling with nylon ropes. They extended one arm, tied it, and attached the rope to a nail above the display case. They placed the other arm on a shelf they emptied on the wall. A few people started watching them work. Then, the number of people gathered in front of the showcase increased. There were people who said, "This is a lifeless puppet." The shop assistant was shouting in front of the door: "Come to the live mannequin store! See our range of cooling fabrics. Here, the Mannequin that we brought with great sacrifices can only endure this heat by wearing our light fabrics. Well, even the big coat does not make him sweat. He flies in the air like a bird with our fabrics and offers you the most lively mannequin." and makes the most real advertisement. 'Saran Fabrics' is only in our store.
Good work was done until the lunch break that day. "He should give him something too," said the boss, as they sat down to eat at the counter and opened their lunchboxes. "Then it collapses." He went to the display case, untied it, released it. They pulled a stool under it in front of the counter. They put some hummus on the lid of the lunchbox; He ate his meal using two small pieces of bread as a fork. Reach out to the faucet at the sink at the back of the store.arak drank some water. He sat on the floor, leaning his back against the counter; They gave him a cigarette. It must have aroused some respect because the boss lit his cigarette. Then he patted him on the shoulder and turned to the clerk, "It worked for us, didn't it?" he laughed. "Are you tired?" said the shop assistant, looking at the boss. It was difficult to talk to him because he didn't respond. He finished his cigarette and sat for a while longer. Then he slowly stood up and headed towards the door. "Where are you going?" shouted the boss. "Isn't that bad? You're making money." He didn't stop. They ran after him and put some money in his pocket. He walked away, dragging his white cloth-wrapped shoes with the needles his boss had forgotten on his coat and the ropes hanging from his arms. The small piece of fabric left on his shoulder fell to the ground as he turned the corner of the street.
He stopped when he came to the top of a steep hill. He sat on the edge of the sidewalk. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He looked around: he got up, took a step or two, then stopped again. The cloths the shop assistant had wrapped around his feet were starting to unravel. He took off the rope from his waist and put it on the ground. He broke the rope in two by crushing it in the middle with a stone lying on the edge of the pavement, tied it to the bandages, and kept pulling his trousers while walking. A yoghurt seller passed by; He bumped into her as he entered the door of an old house behind the bus stop. The man staggered and looked at the door; The yoghurt maker got lost in a dark courtyard. Then a brunette head, with dark glasses and flowing black hair sticking together with oil, began to emerge from the pavement. He looked: He saw a gap underground with a few steps down. The head with glasses grew bigger and higher; He became a man. A decrepit man carrying many belts on his arm. The beggar reached out to a dark colored belt and unbuttoned it; But he couldn't find a place to put the belt on the waist of his trousers. He wanted to pull his trousers up a little; The windings and ropes at the bottom did not allow. He looked at the belt maker with despair; Then they looked at the belt together. The belt maker headed towards the hole he came out of and disappeared for a while. He emerged holding a chain made of huge safety pins. It was attached to the inside waist of his trousers with these pins. "You can put the belt on yourself now," he said, laughing, and handed over one of the bills he took out of his pocket. Kemerci looked at the money, then took it and went into the grocery store next door. He came out with the change and a bottle of cheap wine. After drinking a few sips, he handed the bottle to the man. When he saw that she didn't take it, he disappeared underground again. He returned with an empty can, the edges of which were smoothed so that he wouldn't cut his mouth while drinking. The tin was filled with wine for the man. They sat on the wall of the stairs leading down to the hole, hung their feet down, drank together, and felt a little relieved. She looked at the smiling man with sweet eyes. He finally realized that he was smiling without being looked at.
It was Alpinaryan's first day in Beirut. The wounds on his feet were the price of traveling the Halfeti-Beirut road. He started walking out of the city with tired steps, his fellow citizens were in the church.
Along the way, he thought about Abdullah, the one who caused the greatest pain in his life.
-END-
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