Before long, Nurgül Hanım arrived. Gently, she tucked him in.
‘People undress before they sleep, my boy. Does anyone sleep like this?’ But after she had covered him, she lingered at the foot of his bed, smiling kindly.
Then, as if she thought Ziya was listening, she said, ‘There’s food on the stove. I mustn’t let it burn. I’d better go back and check.’
She tiptoed into the kitchen and turned off the flame under the saucepan. Calmer now, she shuffled out into the courtyard in her nylon slippers. Passing through the shadows of the huge leaves, she went first to look over the wall. There was no sign of her husband; just a few boys some way away. The fun seemed to have gone out of whatever they’d been doing, because they were shouting at each other. One looked like he was ready to eat the others raw. Each time one boy finished shouting, and before another started, he would raise up his hands like two ferocious claws, and let out a string of filth. ‘You’re queers, every last one of you! So don’t forget. I could make your mothers’ cunts as moist as a cat in heat.’ At first Nurgül Hanım did nothing — she just stood there, squinting out at them, smiling kindly. Before she was even aware of smiling, she was stroking the basil plant next to her head and breathing in its lovely scent. By now the boys’ bickering had turned into rage: they were jumping on each other, rolling about in the dust.
Nurgül Hanım called out to them, ‘Stop fighting, boys. Stop fighting!’ Again and again she called out to them, but they paid her no heed.
Then, without willing it, she pulled off a large sprig of basil and threw it in the boys’ direction. This struck her as funny, somehow, so then she took off one of her slippers and threw that as well. But even this was not enough. The slipper landed a few paces away from the boys, and they didn’t even see it: by now they were tearing at each other’s collars, scratching and punching and kicking without even looking where their blows were landing.
Nurgül Hanım had no idea what to do.
Then one of the boys poked his head out from under flailing arms and legs, and spotted something.
‘A twister’s coming!’ he cried. ‘Run! A twister! Run!’
With that, the boys jumped to their feet. Seeing the whirlwind that was heading down the street, they scattered.
By now the whirlwind reached as high as the rooftops. It was a muddy tube, churning noisily through the air. The things it had picked up were turning with it, of course: huge stones that looked like lead, dust, leather broken to splinters, sheets of paper, shards of glass, and leaves, rusted tin, scraps of wood, nails and rubbish, some old tasselled hats and paper bags. Mixed in with all these was a large handkerchief whose stripes and borders sparkled as it swirled. The wind whirled down the street, taking Nurgül Hanım’s slipper with it before leaping up into the sky, whereupon, with an unearthly groan, it vanished.
Nurgül Hanım was still crouched below the wall, hands over her head. Her heart still pounding, she kept her eyes on the earth at her feet.
The town looked like a different town altogether now. It was still as still, dark as dark. Everyone had gone inside, slamming their doors hastily behind them, leaving only the whirlwind to roam the streets. A fearful minaret of wind — that’s what it looked like, whirling down the streets of this town. Then suddenly, this whirlwind stopped, losing all sound and all shape. The things it had carried were now dropping and falling and flying back to earth. The whirlwind had swept through town, a fog of havoc, sucking up everything in its path — sucking down to the soul, even. Now it had dropped it all back on to Nurgül Hanım’s street, as if to say, ‘Here they are. In these symbols are your future, your present and your past.’ But Nurgül Hanım didn’t look too closely at this shower of falling debris. Instead she fought her way through the splinters, the shards and the scraps to retrieve her slipper, and once she had it on her foot again, she darted back into the house lest the whirlwind return. She had reached her doorstep when the town midwife caught up with her, clutching three sets of prayer beads. She no longer looked like a midwife. Her headscarf was unravelling, releasing a shock of white hair. Her clothes were caked with dust, and she was tiny enough to be mistaken for a child born of the wind.
‘I’ve never seen a twister like that,’ she said, trying to straighten herself up. ‘Never! My days, what was that?’
Swallowing hard, Nurgül Hanım agreed. It had been horrifying. Just horrifying.
The midwife held on to the wall to catch her breath, and then, very calmly, she surveyed the things that the whirlwind had deposited on the street.
‘So what’s all this now?’ she said. ‘There’s worse in this mortal world, my beauty. Oh yes, far worse. When I was a girl, a twister destroyed a whole village. On the other side of those mountains over there, and then some. Turned it into hell on earth. When the news spread, some people wanted to go and have a look, so they jumped on their horses and off they went. Those of us left behind waited at the town gate. For two days we stood there with bated breath, waiting for their return. And while we waited, our elders and betters got busy imagining the worst, and for two days they whispered their worst fears into each other’s ears. Our hearts were with that village on the other side of the mountains. Even the ones who’d stayed home would scramble on to their earthen rooftops every half hour or so, to see if they were there yet. We didn’t have tiles back then — they just got themselves ladders, went up to the roof, shaded their eyes with their hands and looked towards the mountains. Then they’d hurry inside again, like anxious little shadows. As for those who couldn’t leave what they were doing, or were cripples, or too exhausted to get up on the roof — well, they would send their children to the town gate to ask if there was any news. And these children — well, they could not help noticing that this was something they could do, something that made the grown-ups sit up and listen, so they’d race over to us and ask us for the latest in the most solemn tones, and then spin on their toes to race home faster than they had come. Even on that first day, some of them had worked out ways of making the job easier, of course. Rather than huff and puff all the way out to us every hour, and all the way back to the edge of the mud huts, they began to ask for news with a system of hand signals. And we’d answer in kind. Bowing our hopeless heads. Flapping our hopeless arms. The more we did this, the stranger things became, until we were not just signalling to the children at the edge of the mud-brick houses, but to the shadowy figures in the distance. Who never asked questions. Who just stood there. What I mean to say is, we did a good deal of bowing and flapping. Come to think of it, I doubt we would have been so upset about all this if those men hadn’t jumped on their horses to gallop off to that village struck by disaster. We wouldn’t have felt this degree of pain, our streets wouldn’t have been awash with worry and sorrow, and we wouldn’t have had half the town gasping at the town gate, and the other half going up to their rooftops every other minute to look for news. If you ask me, it was pointless, galloping off to that village, because there was nothing they could do when they got there. It was at least a day’s journey — a day and a half even — as the crow flies, and those jackdaws had taken no food with them. No nothing. If you ask me, they just went there to gape at the ruination. If you know anything about the mysteries of humankind, you know that there is this side to us. There’s another side of us that likes to talk about the ruination we have seen and spin tall tales. But never mind. There we were, waiting at the town gate, where the grass is now, for two long days. Then, on the second day, just as the light was failing, the horses came back; heads lowered, eyes crazed, and defeated, they came down the road that winds through the gardens. It must have been their silence that made their hooves hit the earth so hard. And perhaps it touched our hearts, too. That is why, at first, we just stood there frozen. Why we all sprang to our feet at exactly the same moment and rushed towards the horses. The men were grey in the twilight. They got off those big horses and heaved great sighs. Looked all around them, as if in search of something. Bowed their heads in shame and silence. And so they remained for some time. They just stood there, saying nothing, struggling with the agonising memories they’d brought back with them, as it were. They loosened their trembling tongues after that, of course, and in voices as dry and yellow as the desert they began to tell us how the whirlwind had changed that village into hell on earth. Let me say this: what they told us was more than we listeners could bear. We were afraid even to imagine what they described. According to what they told us, the whirlwind did not hold dominion over that village for long. It was no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. But within that space of time there was not a place in that village that this blind apparition did not ravage; wailing most horribly, it careened from nook to cranny, turning dust to smoke, sucking up whatever it found in barnyards, and courtyards, and dunghills, and the streets. With shocking speed it span this silo of debris around and around, only to rise as high as the clouds and disappear. Only then did the villagers come to see how violent it had been, and how merciless. Because at that very moment, five children came tumbling down from the sky, and with these children came three lambs mired in filth and excrement, and with the lambs came chickens, pots and beehives, and pruning hooks, and glinting hatchets, and after all this, a few things that looked like sacks and pitchforks and rags, and various items of laundry. The villagers who had taken shelter here and there were dumbfounded by this terrifying scene of ruination. They ran screaming through the wreckage, to their children, their poor children, who had been ravaged beyond recognition. That same day, just after the midday prayers, they wept over these children as they gave them to the earth. But the catastrophe didn’t end there, my beauty, for while they were lowering those little lambs into their little row of little graves, they heard that two other children had gone missing. So while those men were still shovelling earth into those graves, other men joined the women in their hunt for the two missing children. Running to the grain stores, they looked behind the sacks and heaps of winnowed wheat, and in the pitchers, jars and buckets that lined the entryways, the barns and the henhouses, the vegetable patches and the dung heaps, and after examining underneath the horse carts and the oxcarts, they split up into groups that combed the streets of the village, over and over, but there wasn’t one trace of those two little children. To make a long story short, they at last found one of them at the very top of a giant mulberry tree, and the other stuck inside a narrow oven chimney, struggling to breathe in the thick smoke. In the end, they had to dig two more little graves next to the other five. What I mean to say is this: there are worse things in this cruel world, my beauty. Far worse.’