‘Yes, let’s,’ said Ziya.
As he spoke, he looked soulfully into Binnaz Hanım’s eyes.
This seemed to embarrass her, because now she averted her eyes. Then she lit the cigarette already dangling between her lips, falling back into her chair as the smoke seeped out through those lips and billowed upwards. And at that moment, Ziya could see the little girl in her. Gone were the lines that the decades had drawn on her face. It was as if they, too, had taken fright and abandoned the girl who now gazed at him in terror, wide-eyed and trembling.
‘Then my mother took leave of her senses,’ Binnaz Hanım continued. ‘Yes, for some reason, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She’d managed to bear the sight of my father’s lifeless body, but when she saw his coat in my arms that day, she lost her mind. My mother had always been the second of the two pillars holding up our household, and now this pillar was crumbling, before our very eyes. And we children were at our wits’ end, Ziya Bey. Because of course we had no idea what to do. Our despair seemed to know no bounds, but each time we looked at each other, it seemed deeper, and darker. You might have thought that all the lights in the world had been extinguished, plunging us into a nightscape so black it was almost luminous. Who knows? It might have been the darkness of our future we could see just then, shining through the sands of time. All we could do was to cry helplessly on each other’s shoulders — cry into the night. What was to become of us? From time to time, we heard footsteps approaching. We’d rush to the door, sobbing and red-eyed, to see who was there, but all we could hear were footsteps receding. They ran like the wind, these footsteps, rushing in only to rush away. I like to think it was our father’s spirit, back from the graveyard to see how we were. Ever so gently, pressing his ear against the door. Drinking in the music of home and then vanishing into thin air. Every time this happened, of course, it felt like losing him all over again. And once again, the vale of tears would claim us. The first to cry would be the youngest; he would stand up, saying “Who’s there?” in that milky voice of his, and toddle off to the door, and as he walked he would open his arms, ready for a hug, and the wider he opened them, the more excited he became, but even so, there’d be tears welling in his eyes by the time he reached the door. I have no idea how many days we spent like that, wandering around that house of ours, bleating like lost lambs. But in due course, our grim-faced relatives surfaced. They arrived from all four corners of the city to divide us up. My aged grandmother, for instance. She took me to her draughty ruin of a house, fitting me out with a thick mattress that reeked of naphthalene. Sitting on the edge of said mattress, she stroked my hair and said, “There’s never a tragedy without another in its wake, my child.” She was only trying to offer me comfort, but I was in no state to understand. In actual fact, many months passed before I understood a thing anyone said to me. I stayed inside, wandering like a mute ghost from one room to the next. But my grandmother could not afford to feed me, Ziya Bey, let alone keep me in school. Once that chapter of my life had closed, I went to work in a