‘No, I don’t,’ said Kenan, shaking his head.
‘How can you not remember?’ said Ziya in a plaintive voice. ‘Can’t you remember pointing it out to me, when we were drawing water from the well to do our laundry?’
‘I may well have done that, but I can’t remember,’ said Kenan.
Ziya fell silent. Biting his lower lip, as if to soften his disappointment, he gazed for a long time into the distance.
‘Never mind,’ he said in a tense voice. ‘I forgot to tell you this, but in my dream the other night, I saw that same pigeon.’
Uncertain what to say, Kenan stared blankly over Ziya’s shoulder, searching the sky as if he could see his whole past there, fading into nothingness.
‘I remember now,’ he said then. ‘I do! I honestly do!’
Ziya searched his friend’s face, as if to ask, ‘Do you really? Or are you just saying that to please me?’
But when he spoke, it was to say, ‘Right, so that was the pigeon that visited me the other night in my dream, and it didn’t just visit, it smashed through my landlady’s window and made a big commotion.’
‘That’s how dreams are,’ said Kenan.
‘Don’t say that,’ Ziya said. He was suddenly serious. ‘What’s happening is that this bird is following me.’
‘Why?’
Slowly, very slowly, Ziya sat down on the mound next to the road. He looked tired and frightened, all of a sudden: the lines on his face seemed deeper. The light had gone out of his eyes.
Kenan went and crouched down next to him.
‘Do you want to know why that bird is following me?’ Ziya said, lowering his voice. ‘It’s because forty-two years ago, I killed a little bird, and well, you’re the first person I’ve ever told. I was never good at aiming, and so I still can’t understand how I killed it. Maybe it was just a terrible once-in-a-thousand-years coincidence. I just don’t know. This bird I’m telling you about — I’d been running through the woods that day, and it suddenly appeared, right in front of me. You should have seen it. So tiny, so sweet, and so silent. And you could feel it echoing inside. Like it was your heart, your liver, your spleen, or your kidneys, like — I don’t know. It just echoed, everywhere inside you. It just gathered itself inside you, this bird, calm as calm. And there, in the speckled shade, was that little face, as radiant as a calm and distant lake. You would almost think it was watching us from another world, this bird, watching us and judging. From the moment I set eyes on it, this bird stole my heart. Was it love? I’m not sure. It was something more like reverence. Or some kind of trance. Yes, as young as I was, and for all the tumult going on around me, I saw something I had never seen before and it shone a light on me that pierced the depths of my soul. And that’s why I couldn’t move. I just stood there, without saying a word. And by then I was very frightened. I was frightened because of all those other boys running through the woods with their slings who would kill this little bird without a single thought. I feared for this little bird. I don’t know. Maybe I killed the bird so that no one else could. Because, yes, in the end I killed it. I wasn’t able to stop myself, and I killed it. . And as soon as I did, I saw what a big mistake I had made. And after that, I couldn’t stay there any longer. I turned back at once. I ran back into town, panting and sweating all the way.’
Ziya fell silent for a time, and his breathing was as heavy as if he was still running back into town.
‘Do you know what?’ he said then. ‘Maybe what I killed that day was more than just that bird.’
‘Then what was it?’ Kenan asked.
‘How can I be sure?’ Ziya asked. ‘It was like an electric current, this enormous current sending one image after another, coursing through me, and maybe that was what I killed, thinking it was a bird. I recognised it in passing, and I killed it. And then its little body fell into the grass, but its soul has followed me for ever after. Wherever I look, it’s always there, hovering just beyond my lashes. Year in, year out. Sometimes it’s a shadow, sometimes a silhouette. Or a leaf, or a sock, or anything else that might happen to be the length of a hand. And then, when it’s chased me for a while, it begins to expand: if it’s started out like a baby sparrow, it will grow to the size of a pigeon, given time. It might not stop there. I just can’t know. All I know is that wherever I go, it follows me.’
‘If you ask me, you’re exaggerating again,’ said Kenan. ‘What’s done is done. Like all children, you did something thoughtless once upon a time. Where’s the sense in judging that child after forty-two years? And anyway, why should that bird’s soul want to follow you?’
‘I’m not judging that child after forty-two years. I started forty-two years ago, and I’ve been judging him ever since.’
After glancing quickly at the watch on his left wrist, Kenan said, ‘I understand. But the pigeon on the roof of that guardhouse wasn’t looking at you, as I recall. It was looking at all that activity around the well, or the graves just beyond it. Or Syria.’
‘You’re mistaken,’ said Ziya sadly. ‘Even when that pigeon was looking at Syria, it was really looking at me. And when it was looking at those graves, it was looking at me, too. I swear to you. Wherever it looked, it was also looking at me. When I was standing guard at the observation tower, it would keep flying in and out. It would land on that rusty balcony and fix its eyes on me, and stare. It would stay there all day, baking in that angry sun.’
Kenan said nothing. He just stared at Ziya, in the way someone might stare at a little child who is lost to his daydreams.
‘You shouldn’t fret about things like this,’ he said, as he rose to his feet. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I need to go now, to see to that business.’
Ziya stood up, too, and after they had said their goodbyes, he headed across the plain down the dirt road that would take him back to the barn.
That evening, he sat for many hours on the bench outside the barn. He drank tea after tea, and smoked cigarette after cigarette, and watched the mountains sink slowly into the dusk, until at last they were lost to a night as black and thick as ink. But now and then, a star pierced through it, and each little pinprick seemed smaller than the last. From the village came the dim glow of its two streetlamps, and the lights of the houses on its edge. And that was all that could be seen: the stars, the streetlamps, and a few dim lights. From one end to the other, the sky was dark and still. But floating through this black silence was a moist current that ran green. And the silence itself went in waves, down corridors, and through doors, and there were times when Ziya could almost feel it entering inside him, to take him over. And then he thought about that first silence, the silence that was never to return, and — almost as if there were someone sitting with him — whispered, ‘But really. What was that silence really, I wonder?’ And then, for a time, he wondered if all the silences that had come afterwards were no more than fragments of that first silence, fallen from the sky. He thought about how big these silences could be, and how small, and then he thought how each one was different. Anxious as a child, he made a list: there were wet silences, and deep silences, light silences, and heavy silences, distant silences, pregnant silences, and warm silences. Then, all of a sudden, he thought of Besim’s silence, and for a few minutes he held his breath, as he conjured him up again, there in the shade of the mulberry tree. Then he stood up and, with his tea glass in one hand, and his ashtray in the other, he looked into the black night for a moment, before heading inside. After leaving his things on the kitchen counter, he went straight to bed. The moment his head hit the pillow, he shut his eyes, turned his back on all the thoughts shimmering in his mind, and tried to go to sleep. He wanted to get up early the next morning and take a long solitary walk into the mountains. Or rather, what he wanted more than the long walk was to surround himself with nature, and its beauties. He wanted to cleanse himself in its gaze, and in its soul. He wanted to breathe the same air as the trees and the grass and the rocks, and walk with the insects, and if he could find it — if he could find a space of time great enough, resting in the shadows of those rustling leaves — he wanted to lose himself inside it.