To the Spring, by Night 9780773588233

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To the Spring, by Night

To the Spring, by Night Seyhmus Dagtekin

Translated from the French by Donald Winkler

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

English translation of À la source, la nuit University Press 2013

© McGill-Queen’s

French edition © Editions Robert Laffont, Paris 2004

ISBN 978-0-7735-4155-9 Legal deposit first quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been supported by funding from the Scott Griffin Foundation. Funding was also received from the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, as part of the translation grant program. This work has been published with the support of the French Ministry of Culture – Centre National du livre. (Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture – Centre National du livre.) Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de Culturesfrance/Ministère français des Affaires étrangères et européennes. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Dagtekin, Seyhmus, 1964– To the spring, by night / Seyhmus Dagtekin ; translated from the French by Donald Winkler. Translation of: À la source, la nuit. ISBN 978-0-7735-4155-9 I. Winkler, Donald  II. Title.

pq2664.a 437a213 2013   843’.914   c2012-907580-9 Designed & set in 12.5/16 Perpetua by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

To the Spring, by Night

c I was small. And my village was small, I came to know that in time. But when I was small it was big for me, so big that when I had to cross it from one end to the other, I was afraid. It was as if I had to pass through seven countries and three continents, as many seas and as many mountains. As if I were navigating the highest heavens and the earth’s depths. Every hundred metres the landscape was different, and so was I. I was in turn the neighbour, the cousin, the stranger. I was the child of the enemy, the child of outlaws, a child gone astray, lost or almost so, who needed to be set on a homeward path or, as an act of kindness, led back to his parents. The way I walked, spoke, cried out, or wept changed with who I was, with where I was going. Between our house and the village, the merriment, the joyful cries, the games mutated into withdrawal, wary glances, disquiet and anxiety, while on the return the sequence of emotions was reversed. Of course, there was the house of an uncle here, an aunt there, tiny oases that lit up my face with a smile, lent me confidence for a few more steps. But that was soon done, and the route went on through other realms until I arrived at the promised land that was my grandmother’s house, mother of my mother, at the far end of the village. Friend, enemy, stranger, tame and wild, field and forest, valley and mountain spread themselves out before me in a

swath four kilometres long and two wide, which I navigated with growing ease in all weathers and in every direction as the length of my stride increased. When I was small my life unfolded within a vastness that had prevailed for countless millennia on this earth, an earth that harboured in its depths all colours and bestowed them on us according to the season or the clime. An earth whose slopes saw the coming and going of the tortoises, in whose gaze there lingered the memory of the stones that our grandfathers, at our age, must have bounced off their shells. The tortoises stretched out necks as dry, as wrinkled, as ancient as the earth, and followed us with their soft eyes, in a slow and graceful motion, unless we startled them with sudden and hostile gestures. We are all of the earth and we return to the earth, said the grownups, and we bent down close to the tortoises, which, in their low progress, so near the ground, merged with the dust, with the pebbles, and lured us earthward to see them, and to see the earth itself at close range. That tortoises are of the earth, we could accept. But ourselves, with our own flesh, our own blood, how could we be of the earth? We could see that grapes, figs, pears came from the earth, or at least that the vine, the fig tree, the pear tree, the almond tree were planted in the earth and that their fruits began to wither when they fell from their branches, and in rotting became earth again, dust again. The same thing happened when they passed through the belly of the tortoise or the entrails of man. But how could men, or even tortoises, be of the earth, they who walked on the earth, rose above 4  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

the earth, and with each step disengaged themselves, trying to put the greatest possible distance between themselves and the earth? This remained a mystery to us. Or a half-mystery, because after a death in the village, when we went to watch the grownups dig a grave, we saw bones appear that we were told belonged to people who had died long ago. They tried, of course, to dig the grave in a spot that seemed empty, that seemed untouched, but that did not stop them from now and again stumbling on bones, which they set aside to return to the earth once more. But never a skull, and I didn’t know what had happened to the skulls that should have been there with the bones in the grave. I don’t think they hid them from our sight; on the contrary, there were those who would have taken malicious pleasure in brandishing them to frighten us. Besides, always watchful, we missed nothing of what they did, nothing of what they dug up. But the mystery within the mystery remains: I never saw skulls when I witnessed the disinterment of these remnants of elders who had preceded us on this land. And so we saw that man too could become earth again and leave only a few bones to mark his passage through the world. But man and tortoise, how could they come from the earth, flesh and bone, sweat and blood, the tortoise’s gaze and the word of man? That was the true mystery. The mystery of a shoot so tender, so fragile, emerging from the earth but so different from the earth, the mystery of the rose crowning the stem, bringing to a halt its progress toward the light, the mystery of flesh combing every surface as though in search of a few roots, dropping at the end of its course, turning to dust again. To the Spring, by Night  ·  5

We were told that the rose and its scent were of the sweat of man, the sweat of the best of men. Man was of the dust, but he was not fated to remain in the dust. Rising above the earth, he could reach the heavens by transcending what made him dust. That was where his passage was taking him, it was the purpose of his life on earth. We should admire the rose but not be content with that; the rose was only there to give us a glimpse of the final blossoming. The bud on the stem that was man would open under other skies, for other eyes, is what we were told.

6  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

c This step, which frees itself and lifts only to fall again, must be of the earth, said the grownups. They spoke to us of a valley in another time, empty of all lands and skies, a valley composed of countless small valleys inlaid one into the other. They spoke to us of two letters, one embracing half the earth, rising above the level of the horizon and going beyond it, beyond the firmament; the other embracing the earth’s lower half, reaching down past the horizon, passing through it to the bottomless pit of the abyss. They spoke to us of a word made up of those two letters. Of a word bearing the seed of all words, a word containing the seed of all voices. They spoke of this two-letter word as of a lightning bolt sundering the dawn on the horizon. They spoke to us of a rain, of a sun, that followed on this word, and of those countless seeds that, issuing from the word, began to sprout and to grow from the rain’s moisture and the sun’s warmth. They spoke to us of a wind that rose up after the rain and the sun, of a wind that lent vigour and substance to the seeds and swept away unwanted warmth and moisture. But the wind, in its jubilance, forgot to stop in time. No creature is free of faults, the grownups reminded us, not wanting to blame the wind for its absent-mindedness. And the rush of wind, too strong, uprooted those healthy shoots, scattered them over

vast spaces that became skies and lands in the wake of the two-letter word. That is why men and tortoises constantly roam far and wide, hoping to recover their roots and replant them in their primal soil. So we were told. Because that first soil is like a first love; it is the first of loves and we hold it dear, want to find it again and trace the origins of this thing that stirred our hearts, that bound us to our surroundings and freed us from the solitude of our body, of the walls around us. And all nostalgia, all longing, issues from that first love on that first soil, the first countenance of the Friend who before all others awakened us to life. That is why man, more impetuous than the tortoise, devised new avenues and new bearings for his wanderings on this side of the earth and beyond, tracing the upward slope of one letter or the downward curl of the other, impatient to rediscover this first land, the land of first love, the native land of that face on which one’s eyes first opened. But, they told us, every meeting, every encounter, is decreed, and haste will never make it come to pass before the appointed time. Tortoises, being strangers to haste, live for a very long time, the grownups told us. They have kept alive a memory of the first days and the secret that is theirs. And with the patience to which all living things should aspire, they have taken step after step, one after the other, along the line of time drawing us away from any plausible return to that first secret, to the origin of all our steps forward and all that drives us through the world. And so, the grownups went on, tortoises have prolonged their time on earth thanks to their slowness and a steady gaze that looks beyond the signs all beings make 8  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

and sees them in the light of their earliest awakenings to the world. A gaze that has embraced those lives, enfolding them in the memory of that first love, the homeland common to them all. On the day of decision, when the Creator identified those who were to accompany man on his earthly journey and gave each companion a number of options for making that passage, tortoises, so we were told, chose slowness and a long life to be able to savour for as long as possible what they would only see up-close for a very short time. And the Creator bestowed on them this ineffable, inimitable gaze to meet our own on the path through fields or vineyards. This gaze that encompassed in its softness, bathed in its radiance, all that surrounded it; these steps that, in their slowness, numbered and grazed the pebbles; this jaw that, with a steady and insistent sound, chewed delicately on the vine leaves and later the newly ripened grapes. And these feet that opened like four hands despairing of all the heavens, and this wrinkled neck that stretched right and left to the breaking point, striving to touch the earth when the tortoises were turned on their backs and the curve of their shell stopped them from pulling themselves upright to continue their leisurely progress through pastures and fields. But man sometimes found the company of tortoises useless, even bothersome, when they came to feed on bunches of grapes, on his food, on the food destined for man. How could this fruit of paradise, this heavenly fruit that man had brought to ripeness by the sweat of his brow and the heat of the sun as it passed across the sky, be profaned, ground up in the mouth of To the Spring, by Night  ·  9

a lowly animal? Was it conceivable, after so much labour and patience and slow maturation, that this exquisite taste should be lost to the earth in the maw of a beast otherwise content with a mouthful of dirt for a meal? But they were there for the journey, side by side with man. And, accompanying us, they nourished themselves with what they found along the way, just like any other being. For even the earth, which is the source of all life, withdraws its blessings when it is not nourished. A few droughts, a few spells of heat, and its springs and trees dry up, depriving others in their turn. The tortoises were of the earth, but they were not more resistant than the earth. They could be happy with little, modestly and with resignation, but that patience had to be rewarded one day with something exceptional, even if that exceptional thing should be our clusters of grapes. They nourished themselves then, like the earth, and sometimes their steps led them close to our vines and they allowed themselves to share our food, the bunches of grapes which, in their abundance, almost touched the ground, putting themselves within reach. They did not seek elsewhere, the tortoises – did not burrow into the earth to expose what was hiding there, did not climb onto branches to make off with what was forbidden – they were content, in all humility, with what could be found at their own height. And companionship, all the same, is worth a few bunches of grapes, even if the one who is accompanied finds it a burden. Especially when this companionship lasts no longer than one’s passage through this world. The tortoise is limited to life on earth, we were told; it was not going to rise with man toward his final destination. And since the tortoise, unlike man, would not find this fruit in another life, it could well 10  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

chew a few seeds, spoil a few grapes while it might, and we were not going to hold such a small thing against him. It should be said that tortoises were not the only companions to give themselves the luxury of sharing the food man wanted to keep for himself. The fox, the snake, the partridge came to treat themselves to that same nourishment, the best of our grapes. It was painful to discover, one bright morning, the most cherished, the most lovingly cultivated clusters stripped of their fruit, while we ourselves dared not touch them, saving them for a special occasion. Sometimes, finding them still sour and wanting to let them ripen, we let time pass before revisiting them. But there were those who knew the grapes as well as we did, who in their wanderings were more attentive to them than we were. When we returned, all we found were dangling twigs. Those creatures were never caught in the act and were adept at quickly putting themselves out of the reach of humans, while the tortoises, slower to escape, and with no means of attack or much by way of defence, were most at our mercy. And where mercy was concerned, man did not set the best example, especially when the harm inflicted was so visible – there was nothing more clear to the eye than the twigs left bare – and when the guilty party was so glaringly weak. When the tortoises were taken by surprise, they drew in their head and feet under their shell, and braced themselves for the blows that were sure to come. To withstand the blows without their shell giving way, that was their wager – a courageous gamble that we had to admire once the assault was over. If their shells were cracked open, they fell prey to ants and other insects that in short order swarmed over To the Spring, by Night  ·  11

the exposed flesh, regaling themselves beneath the tortoise’s staved-in casing. After a few days we sometimes found the empty shell, and regretted having massacred a poor animal, cutting short the course of a life that had flowed peacefully in parallel with ours, bearing a part of our life along with its own. But we forgot how precious each life was when we set out to stone a tortoise whose path had crossed ours, even if, after the fact, we were troubled. An empty shell was a bit like a grave exposed to view, a life we had overturned, a grave for which we were responsible, and that we didn’t know how to fill. It lay there before us and stared up at us with its empty gaze. Not knowing what to do, we smashed the shell to bits with a few more stones, re-enacting the execution. At other times, when the injury was not too serious, the tortoises were able to take shelter and heal. A little while or some years later, when we encountered a tortoise with a scarred shell, we didn’t know if it was the one we had tortured or another, whose marks had been inflicted by our older brothers or our fathers. Tortoises lived for a very long time, we were told, and they had long memories, memories that were beyond our reach, beyond the reach of our stones and the harm we could cause. They knew how to leave their injuries behind them and continue on with a measured pace, continue on toward their homecoming and the ever-welcoming ground.

12  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

c They lived close to the earth, the tortoises. They lived in the earth, were of the earth; and the earth was charged with the responsibility of passing on to them a small portion of its eternity, which was tiny compared with the eternity of stone, which in turn was minute next to the eternity of the sky or the eternity of water – water which, we were told, was the source of all living beings, their starting point and their ultimate destination, once they had passed through the earth. The earth on which we trod each day, where our feet communed with time and memory, and our heads with the promises of the heavens. The earth that sheltered our village, so small when I picture it from afar, perched in time amid the mountains; our village, which among those mountains was of such little consequence, disappearing behind the merest rock, lost from sight around the mildest curve. And it was from this smallness that living beings and things eked out their entire lives on earth, before returning to the water. But it seems very big – vast even – when I see myself as a child in its streets, a child upon its rocks, when I see my life unfold again, dwarfed by this immensity that has known so many millennia. The village houses were lined up as if on a thread held taut, from east to west, like the beads of a rosary told to the rhythm of our footsteps as we passed along. They were on a slope

facing south, with flat roofs and terraces that were sometimes more spacious than the interiors. At certain points the thread of houses doubled, tripled, and in the summer the roofs on the lower levels became terraces that the residents of the higher houses used for their meals, their rest, or their sleep. The thick walls, built of a double row of stones and a mortar of earth and straw, allowed the outside in and the inside out, within reason. Winter cold and summer heat were more tolerable within those walls, cocoons of wood, stone, and earth. As far as anyone could remember, the village and its houses backed onto Mount Kêmêl to the north, backed onto it with such blind confidence that one could not, in the entire village, find a single window opening toward the mountain that blocked the icy winds of winter and let pass the cool breezes of summer. Not a single window, even to allow for the occasional fearful or admiring glance up toward the mountain. Not a peephole to ensure that it was still there, still holding the village close, keeping it safe with its solidity. Mount Kêmêl anchored the village to its surroundings. It looked down on its environs as a ship’s mast looks down on its small world, as the upright letter of the first days lent support to the village and its inhabitants. The houses had blind walls on their other two sides as well, east and west. At times they lined up, shoulder to shoulder, wall against wall, to the count of ten, making this uninterrupted succession of flat roofs a perfect playground for us in winter as well as in summer. Beyond, there were the mountains. Beyond the walls, the village, and the forest, but before other villages on the plains or 14  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

other mountainsides hidden from our view – so many mysteries, so many territories yet to be discovered – there were the mountains. They surrounded the village and its lands, the houses and their rooftops; they encircled Mount Kêmêl as well, making it a tall ship poised on its heights, awaiting the floods. A ship that we could leave only with difficulty, and then sparingly. Openings onto the outside were rare for this ship on the mountains, openings through which we could reach the plain that spread out below the village, offering us access to other heights. For the plain we had two openings, one to the southeast looking down on the fields some of the villagers tended there, fulfilling most of the village’s requirements for grain, and the other to the southwest, leading toward the town in the distance. A town, said the grownups, that was only the first inkling of other more remote towns to the east, and especially to the west, out of sight and beyond the distance we could travel on foot. Towns they had seen only during their military service, as far as the west was concerned, and during their perilous smuggling operations, in the case of the east and the south, and which they promised we would come to know when it was our turn to go off to the army or engage in contraband. In both instances – in the southeast as in the west – the slope dipped just beyond the opening, making descent dangerous and climbing difficult, especially when the beasts of burden were loaded up with wood, cereals, straw, and dried leaves for the animals. When there was nothing to carry, the men, rather than walk, climbed onto the animals’ backs, sparing themselves for the work ahead in the woods and the fields. To the Spring, by Night  ·  15

The wood that was to be sold in town, and which, along with grapes, tobacco, and goats, constituted one of the principal sources of revenue for the villagers, needed to be carried by animals through the narrow opening on the west. This opening was so narrow that the villagers had honed their skills at loading into a fine art, piling up the beasts in such a way that they could fit through the gap without incident. In any case, everything was sold by load rather than by weight, and they were not going to burden their animals to death with wood they would sell for only a few cents more. It was different for the villagers from the plain who came up from time to time seeking wood. Since they made the trip only rarely, they exaggerated the load in order to take back in one fell swoop as much wood, as many branches and leaves, as possible. And on their return they had enormous difficulty trying to fit their animal through the opening with all they had piled onto its back. One of those villagers from the plain so burdened his donkey with long branches that the poor animal, barely visible, advanced painfully, like a small hillock. As soon as it arrived at the passageway, the donkey’s owner became aware of the trouble ahead. He had imagined that the opening was wider, and only when he found himself before it with an overloaded donkey did he realize how narrow it really was. He wasn’t going to waste time lightening the burden, thus losing part of his precious load, or unloading it only to load it up again on the other side of the passage. Determined to preserve his advantage in terms of both time and load, he drove the donkey into the opening, but the poor animal, wedged in, could not go forward. He backed up and tried to retreat but, under the 16  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

force of his master’s blows, he had to move into the opening once again. He still couldn’t make any progress. His master continued to assail him, and once again the donkey thrust himself forward with all his strength. He pulled at the saddle, at the load, but couldn’t widen the passage, even though he had the strength of a donkey. Frustrated in his endeavours, the master persevered and, more and more impatient, laid on blows wherever and however he could. While at first there had been a few jolts forward as a result of their combined efforts, the master now realized that for some time, despite his exertions, nothing had changed. You had to shove to make a donkey move – that was well known – but now, even goaded, it didn’t budge. The man took a branch from the load to use as a club and give a welldeserved punishment to this lazy donkey that was making him work so hard, but it didn’t move an inch. He bent down, the better to see the donkey. To his astonishment, he was greeted by a gaping hole. No donkey. The load and the saddle were suspended in space. He hoisted himself up to see past the opening, and spotted his animal down below, free, descending toward the plain at a nonchalant pace, giving himself the luxury of a detour to the left or the right, to graze on whatever he found along the way. The man then realized that for some time he had only been beating the saddle, and only pushing the load. The girth had given way, and the donkey had escaped the saddle, the load, and the blows. He hadn’t been strong enough to widen the passage, and he was not about to move the mountain, which had been there long before his arrival. He was happy just to pass through by himself, leaving his master on his own behind the load. Here was one To the Spring, by Night  ·  17

more trick that a donkey, out of desperation, had played on his master, a trick that his good nature, his self-denial, had played on the obstinacy of his masters and his detractors. His trick would become known, and his master would be mocked for his stupidity. But for all that, he would not be spared. The man was his master; he would find him, take him in hand once more and make him pass through the opening, whatever it took. Here comes someone now, climbing toward the passage, hailing the master, taking the donkey by the rope and bringing him back. But they will always be there, the few mouthfuls of grass he was able to graze on his way down, the lightness and swiftness of his steps on the path, unburdened and free. The grownups told us that this life was like a ship, that we boarded it and disembarked only by exercising restraint. No matter if the mountains were thick with wood, branches, and leaves; we could only load what our donkey could carry and fit through the narrow pass that opened onto the high seas of the plain. With a horse, a bit taller and a bit stronger, we could perhaps take a few logs or a few branches more, but even then we were limited by the horse’s strength and by the width of the passage, which was always the same, even though toward the top it broadened slightly to enable the horse to take advantage of his size and his strength, both superior to those of the donkey. Our desires did not determine the size of the opening, and it was in our own interest to moderate them, given the narrowness of the passage and the limitations of our mounts.

18  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

Our village, they told us, was made in the image of a ship, a ship that was the image of life. Like a ship on the heights, our village kept us secure from the waves that swept off the plain and died out at the foot of our mountains. And beyond its confines, it made itself and its holdings accessible only within limits. Not all could enter, not all could leave. And we had to pay more attention to what came in than to what went out, the descent being more easily assured than the climb back up. Even so, the ease of the one and the difficulty of the other could vary, depending on the traveller. The tortoise preferred the climb to the descent, when it was not too steep, while the hedgehog, which could roll itself into a ball and cushion itself, thanks to its resilience and its spines, likely favoured the downward path. And water was never more at ease, never more joyous than in the most violent descents, whereas it stagnated and sulked as soon as it went slack, and lost its way when it came to a flat expanse. Whether climbing up or down, coming in or going out, if we did not exercise moderation the passage was closed to us, the donkey abandoned us and, so the grownups told us, we were left with our burden, marooned there in front of the passage. Our village was a ship and we the oblivious passengers, novices in knowledge and in consciousness, preoccupied with our ever-growing appetites and by our games which, at each step and at every turn, wilfully urged us to overstep all bounds.

To the Spring, by Night  ·  19

c Like our houses, each of the springs in different parts of the village had its own reputation, its own character. One was supposed to be good for tea because its water was not chalky, another was more pleasant to drink from, and a third was said to have water that was thick. That spring, the one with the thick water, which was separated from the cemetery only by a slope and a field that was once a vineyard, was said to be frequently visited by djinns, those good genies and demons that shared the countryside with us. Each spring had its own times, its own moments, with the djinns, we were told, perhaps to temper our fears with ancestral knowledge so that we would not carry them around with us like stones in our bellies; or so that our fears would be dispersed over a multitude of springs, thus lightening our burden. Or perhaps, supposing a malice that was just as ancestral, it was so that we would encounter our fears wherever we went: so we could go nowhere without them and they would always be there, some in our bags, some in our gut, some in our legs, some in our heads. And we would have no way to escape our fears. We also learned that djinns did not like mingling with human beings in large numbers. They preferred to meet them alone

or in small groups. Certainly, people ventured out elsewhere than to springs, but springs were, night and day, their preferred destinations, their most frequent stopping points. And djinns chose the springs to satisfy their longing to keep company with humans, or to fulfil their goal of harming them. Because there were all sorts of djinns, just as there were all sorts of humans. Some didn’t like men, while others wanted to protect them from their malevolent fellows. The Creator had created djinns first, we were told, before he created humans. That gave them a kind of pre-eminence, making them our big brothers, and endowing them with a birthright that was not always defended or honoured in these parts. Among us, it even happened that the youngest, the junior, was favoured in the division of labour, and later, possessions. But that was another story, a story only concerning humans who paid little attention to djinns. The djinns insisted that the Creator recognize their rights. And that was none of our business. But it didn’t mean we were spared the complications arising from this demand. The Creator, in addition to granting them seniority, had created the djinns from fire, we were told. And the djinns lived in the state of adoration for which they had been conceived, until the day when the Creator told them that he was going to send a new species down to earth. A species that would worship him even when exposed to temptation, he told them. “Is our adoration of you so wanting, that you should create a species that’s going to spill blood and sow discord on earth?” the djinns and the angels retorted. The Creator replied: “I know what you do not know.” To the Spring, by Night  ·  21

He created man out of clay and breathed his spirit into him. He then presented him to the angels and the djinns. The angels saw in man yet another sign of the Creator’s goodness. The djinns were divided. Some agreed with the angels, while some were hostile to the Creator’s work, and vowed to thwart it for all eternity. Made from fire, they considered themselves superior to man, who was only made of lowly clay. As of that day, while man was created only to bear witness to divine grandeur and to live worshipfully, the rebel djinns swore their animosity, and promised his destruction by any means, the grownups told us. Man, created to live on intimate terms with the divine, would turn away from the Creator. The djinns wanted to show that in men temptation would trump adoration. Pride blinded them. They disparaged the Creator’s work, and dedicated themselves, at great risk, to disclosing his errors: man would not persevere in the path of worship. From now on that was their gamble, that was their goal. They asked the Creator for the time and the power to compromise his new work, in order to achieve their ends. The Creator granted their wish, and gave them the power and the time to do what they would with man, while assuring them that man would remain worshipful, whatever they did to lead him astray. From then on some djinns were to be avoided, the grownups told us. But we didn’t know quite how to do it. Especially when it was a matter of eluding them at the springs. We had no idea why this particular spring had more djinns than the others, and when we asked the question, the grown-

22  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

ups didn’t seem to know either. We didn’t know if it was the thickness of its water or its nearness to the cemetery that drew them there more than elsewhere. But we did know that it was the spring most visited at the djinns’ preferred hours. And in practice, that was enough for us. It was the spring to which men and women hastened as soon as they awoke at dawn, on their way to the fields. And which they passed when, at dusk or later, they returned, exhausted by a day of hard labour. It was the spring where all roads met, roads that led the flocks to the most distant pastures and the villagers to their vineyards, to their fig trees. It was full of djinns, they told us, this spring facing the cemetery, next to an ancient vineyard in which, even in summer, a few surviving stocks added green patches to the field here and there. As for us, we had our hands and heads full of djinns, abuzz with their stories every time we had to pass the spring after sunset or before sunrise. But that too is another story. A night-time story. In the meantime, we tried to take into account the reputation of a spring when we were asked to fetch water. Our direction was determined by the way the water would be used. And we observed with wonderment that these springs warmed the water in cold weather, and cooled it in midsummer, much like the insides of our houses, which remained cool in the fierce summer heat, and warm when the winter assailed us with its ice and snow. The resemblance between the springs and our houses went beyond the shift in seasonal temperature. There was another similarity, one more intimate, which linked water to man,

To the Spring, by Night  ·  23

given the respective dwelling places they occupied and passed through. Most of the time, the springs had a large open-air basin, a smaller inner basin, covered over, and a dark chamber deep within, from which the water issued. The large basin was for the animals, the small one for humans. As for the dark chamber, it was the spring’s secret place where its mystery dwelt. We were rarely allowed to enter the inner rooms of springs; nor those of houses, at least not those of others. When, for one reason or another, the village men uncovered this hidden part of the spring, we all gathered round to see the spring in its nakedness. We approached it with fear and fascination, and gazed on it as one would examine the entrails of a sacrificed beast. With the spring, the fascination did not last for long, even if the fear endured. We saw that it was just a trickle of water flowing from an opening in the earth or a rock, and that it was covered only to keep the water clean and not to waste it. And we saw that it was the same water, the same earth, both within and without. But seeing this and knowing it were not enough. Our eyes could not replace what we saw in our imagination with the clear picture we had in front of us; our powers of reason could not undo the stories about water and springs that stayed with us, asleep or awake. And as soon as it was covered over again, the spring regained its sense of mystery. The curtain fell, turning this inner room into something impenetrable, and it became the threshold and point of departure for all our stories and everything we imagined.

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Just like the springs, the houses had a part that was open to the sky and was used by people and animals in common, a covered section serving as a stable on the ground floor, with bedrooms one flight up, and an inner space at the back, a shadowy repository for the secrets and mysteries of the household. But that story must wait for the half-light of day or the dark of the night, the proper moment for stepping over the threshold. As for the dark chambers, it was said that every spring had its own monster, and that on hearing the noise of the crowds, of the picks and shovels, it fled the spring or disappeared more deeply into it, to protect itself from the human gaze. Because the monster was selective about its appearances, it chose the times when it would make itself visible; it did not like being taken unawares. That is why we never saw it while the spring was being uncovered. It was described as a great snake, a dragon that in times of drought drank the water of the spring, letting only a tiny part seep out for the needs of men and other thirsty creatures. But where could he climb out or disappear, since we saw no hole in the spring other than the eye the water flowed through? And unless it foresaw the work to come and fled during the night, it could not reasonably make its escape through the opening in the spring while it was besieged on all sides. We were told that it climbed further back into the eye of the spring and, in climbing, closed the hole behind it. We told them to dig farther, to look for it. They told us that the more we advanced into the spring, the more it would climb up or down, depending on the flow of the water. There was no way

To the Spring, by Night  ·  25

of capturing it, or even glimpsing it, they said, and even if we did capture it, another one would soon take its place. We had to leave it alone, it was at home where it was, and we shouldn’t disturb it. We wouldn’t appreciate it either, if we were disturbed in our home. In short, it suited the grownups perfectly well not to have to go looking for the dragon, not to have to confront it and reveal it to us. Having run out of arguments, we went silent, while they carried on with their work and left us still wondering. And the dragon continued to go back and forth in our heads between the earth and the dark chamber of the spring. But during the hottest and driest periods of the year, the spring thinned out to no more than a dribble that took forever to fill even a pitcher, drop by drop. When we were desperately in need of water our mothers and sisters organized vigils, taking turns with other village women, with the djinns sometimes joining in. That was a story told, along with others, when the evenings became very long. As for the monster at the spring, which was a snake or a dragon, we were told that sometimes, during the hottest part of the day, its favourite time and the hour when it would deliver up its prey, the monster, whose eyesight was poor but whose hearing was acute, would replace the trickle of water with a trickle of its poison whenever it heard a human approaching the spring. And at those times, when you came to the spring, you had to gather the first drops in the palm of your left hand, spill out the contents once your palm was full, gather a second handful in the palm of your right hand, bring it to your mouth, and drink only after you had prayed 26  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

for divine protection from all the evil hidden from everyday human view. Otherwise, you would be paralyzed forever in the eye of the snake, or the claws of the dragon, and the monster would make short work of you. How could our fear deal with an enormous snake, with a dragon in the chamber of the spring, which we had just seen with our own eyes? How could it, corpulent as it was, negotiate its comings and goings in earth that the men found so hard to excavate with their picks and shovels? In the parts of the spring open to view, the only living things we saw were leeches and worms. The worms were found mostly in the big basins where water accumulated and stagnated for a day or two before it went to irrigate the market gardens around each relatively abundant spring. The leeches lived mainly in the basins for animals and people, and they were the most dangerous things you could find around the springs. Once swallowed, they clung to the walls of our throats and filled up with blood until they stopped our breathing. We knew what would happen if we swallowed one. A grownup inspected our throat and pulled it out. But they were particularly dangerous for the animals that gulped them down in great numbers and had frequent coughing fits. Sometimes we understood and removed the leeches; at other times we thought the cough was caused by a straw that had gone down the wrong way, or the amount of dust in their food, and we waited for it to pass. But their bloodied mouths reminded us of the leeches, and now there was no mistaking. And so we pulled out the leeches, which had had time to grow as big as a thumb. It’s true that they were small and thin when they were in the spring, and could swim up and downstream as they wished. But even that To the Spring, by Night  ·  27

didn’t make them monsters, and it was hard for us to imagine them as such. But once the spring was uncovered, the dragon was gone, hidden from our eyes, and we saw no nest of leeches in the spring or in the earth. The monster would only return to take up its position in the spring and in our minds once things calmed down and order was restored. How the devil did the dragon get into the hole? And if it wasn’t any larger than the opening, how could it have room for us in its belly? We had seen snakes swallow sparrows; we had even seen snakes swallow other snakes. But that a snake could swallow a human being and climb back into the spring with that weight in its belly without being noticed … ? Our failure to understand did nothing to assuage our fear. And there was always someone to tell us there was no problem, that everything was possible. If a camel could pass through the eye of a needle, a snake or a dragon – whichever – could work its way up the spring whatever the size of the opening, and it didn’t matter if it was in the rock or in the earth. It’s true that the grownups told us that if god wanted it so, a camel could pass through the eye of a needle without either one changing its size or its nature – that the passage would take place, the eye remaining an eye and the camel remaining a camel, just as they were. And so there was no point arguing about the size of the dragon, the victim, and the spring. And our lack of understanding wasn’t going to make the monster disappear from the spring. If we didn’t pay more attention, and ended up meeting it one day, it would be too late, but it would serve us right, they told us. And in any case, presented like that, there was no more question, no 28  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

more doubt about the monster. It had to be there somewhere, and we had to keep it in mind as we moved about. We would not be able to force it out of its home. We had to live with its presence in the spring and in our minds. The monster was diurnal, they told us, and the djinns nocturnal. The one showed itself in the midday heat; the others made their rounds between twilight and dawn. The monster stalked those who, trying to escape the heat, sought refuge near the freshness of a spring; the djinns attracted humans with fires and revels that made them visible at night. The one set out to lure us with the heat, and waited for us to approach the spring, drawn there by our thirst; the others wandered with their trappings through pockets of night, like nets into which the awaited victim would fall. Their favourite season began in early summer and lasted until mid-autumn, until the end of the grape harvest. Midsummer, when some of the neighbourhood springs were bubbling over, inspired a number of celebrations. In mid-autumn, when the harvest was over, we let the vineyards prepare for their winter sleep, and the men retreated more and more into their homes. In the time between, everything was alive in the fields, on the roads, and around the springs; everything was festive. Springs of life and springs of fear, which we approached with hope and with apprehension. Monster or djinn, both put in their appearance when, with our water depleted, along with the strength we’d had when we left the village, we had no choice but to stop at the spring. Times of thirst, times of return, and of hunger. After a To the Spring, by Night  ·  29

morning spent in the fields with the grownups, chasing after goats in the pastures, we wanted to pause at the spring to quench our thirst and refresh ourselves. All the more so because we only began to make our way home once hunger, thirst, and the punishing heat of the sun were having their way with us at the approach of noon, or as dusk edged toward nightfall after the sun had set. During the day the heat arrived early, after a short period of morning freshness. And the closer it came to noon, the more the atmosphere became stifling and heavy. The higher the sun climbed in the sky, the thirstier we were. All the animals and insects retreated into patches of shadow, under cover, so as to hold on as long as possible to the freshness and moisture that remained from the morning, the freshness and moisture that, in the shade of a leaf or a stone, they could steal away from the sun. The silence, the stillness of noon, set in with its eternity of heat and thirst. Like the eternity of a drop of water making its way across our path toward the spring. Most of the time, hidden from view by what had been built up around it, the spring only showed itself for the last few metres. These were not springs that offered themselves up to us, springs of joy and abundance that came to us of their own free will, as if by magic, to slake our thirst; on the contrary, they were springs that had been sought out, tracked down, brought to the surface by the force of will, by brute force, sweat, and pain. Springs that were dearly won and fiercely protected. Springs that tended to ebb beneath the heat, dwindling as we watched, and in extreme cases, to go 30  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

dry during the mildest of droughts. Springs that we coddled, that we cherished, that we hid away from the most innocuous storm, that we placed under cover so that the first squall to come along, or a stray, malign bolt of lightning, would not snatch them from us. Springs that we guarded like the softest of our nights, that we greeted like the most joyous of our awakenings. For the water did not willingly come to a halt on that slope where our village was to be found. Its instinct was to flow down to the valley, and irrigate the plains. And so, when we saw moisture that lingered through the summer, we understood that this water was trying to make up its mind between staying on the surface and running lower, and that we had to woo it with the height of our mountain, with love, with the devotion we could offer it whatever the season, summer or winter, spring or autumn. We would not let it get muddy, and we would protect it from bushes, weeds, and animals. It would be for our tables first and foremost, for our buckets and our cooking pots. We would not let it trickle away like an ordinary stream: we would cherish it and treasure it. We would shield its source from the eyes of the curious and the shameless; we would shade it with a few cypresses, a few willows; we would cheer it with a few mulberry trees, and even a few fig trees, so that on the pretext of thirst, and sometimes going out of our way, our steps, large or small, would lead us there with greater joy and elation. We would give it a name and a legend, provide it with basins and surrounding land, so that it would refresh our fields and our hearts, so that it would enchant our dreams and our waking. Once it had been wooed, the grownups came with picks and shovels and began to dig, To the Spring, by Night  ·  31

seeking water, seeking this elusive, ever-downward-flowing part of our selves. But the more the hole grew, the more the wetness disappeared, the more the water mixed with the mud, and our sweat with the earth. It was a lost cause; neither song nor prayer could lure it to the surface, so we left it to a few earth worms that would perhaps get something from it before going in search of some other dampness in other holes. And yet sometimes we managed to unearth a trickle, a thin trickle of water. A trickle that would transform what at first was only dampness into a place of life, a place of fear. After the digging of the hole and the capturing of the water, if the trickle was substantial enough, the building of the spring began three days later. At the spring’s birth, we sacrificed an animal with prayers and invocations, with a meal and a celebration, as we spilled into its flowing water the blood that kept us alive near where it stood. We made the sacrifice and let the waiting period pass. We agreed on the three days to be certain that the water had decided to stay with us, and so as not to build a spring we would later abandon. Because an abandoned spring was an unkept promise, a broken covenant, and could become a curse aimed at passersby in times to come. If the water was still there after three days, we began. The dark chamber, the little basin, the large basin. And then, later, the construction of the walls to contain the earth and its landslides. And far enough away to protect the spring from invasive roots, the planting of a few trees, a few fruit trees, especially a few mulberry trees. All that to make this place that was only wetness, then only a hole, welcoming to beasts and men. To transform it into a source of life. 32  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

This gave us springs recessed into the slope, hidden from view, out of range of passersby, springs that only showed themselves when we were present in body, and the body manifest in our gaze. These recesses, which at the beginning and end of day sheltered the springs by offering them shade, became by midday, with their walls heated by the sun, furnaces that amplified the heat and the silence that surrounded them. The smallest sound disturbing the uniform background noise of the crickets’ song – crickets never seen, always heard, their song the furnace’s song, because it was loudest at those times – the smallest sound, or perhaps a lizard darting over a blazing hot stone, startled the passerby, who redoubled his vigilance as he approached the spring. Because it was hot, because we were thirsty, we were probably not alone in our thirst. There were likely others who were thirsty. Others, who tried as we did to overcome their fear of the spring and its daytime resident, and, as impatient as we were, also moved toward the spring, taking infinite precautions. That did not give us any more courage or make our approach any easier. On the contrary, it made our steps all the more leaden, our thirst all the more oppressive, in the midday furnace. At this boiling point of the day, parched, the mysterious denizen of the spring’s dark chamber – the dragon our fear situated in its eye – had already reached the spring’s outer basin to slake its thirst at the water issuing from it, and would have liked at the same time to make a meal of the first comer, man or beast, before retiring into its coolness for the rest of the day – even for several days. Until, its victim once digested, a renewed hunger and thirst drove it out of its dwelling place again to seek new prey. To the Spring, by Night  ·  33

Sometimes we dared not confront this fear. To the devil with the dragon, the spring, and its water! No matter how great our thirst and our desire for what was cool! We had held out this long and would hold out a little longer, and we would not expose ourselves to the jaws of that vile beast. Let it devour the earth where it lived, let it drink the water of its spring! With fear in our belly, we didn’t need its water. And let it see that we could do without! And so we chose to bypass it all – the devil, the dragon, and the fear – to go and quench our thirst at home, with the water our mothers had already spirited away from under the scrutiny of the spring and its denizen. But we knew that the next day we would face the same dilemma and that we could not make the same detour. We knew we would have to accept the spring’s challenge if we wanted to grow in our own eyes and in the eyes of our mothers, who in any case were going to make off with its water.

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c Like the springs that flowed south, the windows of the houses also opened to the south, facing the sun. They opened onto sparrows, swallows, doves, at play or in distress. They closed to wind and rain, to fear and storms. It was at these windows that the storm unleashed its wrath, that the snowflakes came to perform their dance, that the sparrow and the dove sang their melodies. Every flake of snow, every drop of water, and even every hailstone was, in its descent to earth, said to be accompanied by an angel. Otherwise, the drops would join together and fall from the sky not as rain but as sheets of water like entire lakes, and would drown the forests and fields, killing off men, flocks, and everything alive. Instead of beautiful, fragile snowflakes, there would fall mountains of snow that would suffocate houses, terraces, and villages; and instead of hailstones, blocks of ice would fall that would smash everything in their path. No man, no beast, no house on earth, we were told, would survive. And so, to avoid such disasters and to maintain a certain degree of calm for the earth and its inhabitants, who considered themselves burdened enough in their passage through life and never ceased complaining on the slightest pretext to any ear within hailing distance – and so as not to add cares to their cares, or compound their adversity all along this

journey – the angels joined in the descent of these celestial substances to earth. They partnered in the dance of snowflakes before our eyes, they brought drops of rain down on our hair, on our faces, into the eyes of our goats, onto the manes of our horses. They lashed the walls and windows with sleet and drowned the fields with rain to keep our minds alive to the disaster that might ensue if they, the angels, were not there to guard against the anger, the moods, and the excesses of the water. The water which, if it was unhappy in its descent, could inflict a summary punishment on everything below, indifferent to the chaos and complaints it caused. For, in falling, it might want to push deeper, even deeper than the earth on which it fell. But no, the angels were there, and thanks to their watchfulness the water fell like a blessing, a source of life for our journey. Because, they told us, no heaven-dweller left home of its own free will. From wonderment or fright, we remained glued to the windows in the face of nature’s outbursts, the extravagances of the water, priming ourselves to deal with other outbursts, other extravagances that would stir up the waters simmering within us, when the time came. It was also through the windows that the sun shone in, to make the dust dance in its rays. The sudden appearance of dust in the interior sunlight was always a mystery to us. We couldn’t understand where these tiny specks came from, given that the room had been empty before the sun was there. Empty and pristine, especially since our mothers and sisters

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had just cleaned the house from top to bottom. They had shaken out the cushions, the eiderdowns, and the carpets, swept the earthen floor; they had dusted the glassware, the place settings and saucers, the picture frames, furniture and trunks, the decorative objects in the house. The room should have been empty and clean because what might have been dirt had been removed. But we didn’t realize that this cleaning process had stirred up an army of dust particles that remained invisible when there was no sun. And once the dust was set in motion, all it took was a sunbeam to make the room full and lived in, to populate it with dust particles as numerous as the stars in a summer sky. The stars were now within arm’s reach, at eye level. We didn’t even have to raise our eyes to see them. They were there, all around, bearing us up, enveloping us. It just took one ray to bring their soothing presence to light. One ray of sunlight, and we were no longer alone in the room, but in the presence of thousands of little beings, an infinity of tiny specks. Dust dancing with dreamlike slowness. We blew air into the path of the beam and the dance became a whirlwind. A swirl of so many dust motes that it made our heads swim. A dance of dust giddy from our breath and the light. A Milky Way of dust wheeling about us, gathering force, wilder and wilder. We tried to calm them, but in vain. Every gesture we made lent more energy to their dance, brought more specks of dust into the beam. Those already there invited others, and they all swept us up in their movement. They wouldn’t

To the Spring, by Night  ·  37

stop, but kept turning more and more quickly. Tireless, they wanted no rest. Instead of disturbing them with our hands and arms in our efforts to slow them down, hold them back, we had to wait with our arms and bodies still, so that they would resume their slow and graceful dance within the sunbeam. And so we stopped our gesturing and, after a while, the dust calmed down again, and returned to its weightless circling. Ourselves calmed in turn, we went back to watching them and following a few of them in their motions, just as from our beds we focused on a star to keep it company in the sky so that it would keep us company in our sleep. We took the dust motes to be the sun’s guests, to be messengers that only showed themselves in its company, that only revealed themselves in the sun’s presence. They were different from the stars. The stars only appeared when the sun was gone, as if they were what was left of it at night, preceding us into sleep to brighten our dreams. But these specks made us dream in the daytime, darting this way and that in the sun’s light. And since they came with the sun, they must have come at its behest; and they came at its behest because they were the sun’s messengers. And so we tried to decipher the message the sun was sending us, and made wagers as to where a particular speck of dust whose progress we were following with interest and impatience, with hope and devotion, was going to come to rest. What the sun had to say to us through the intercession of these specks of dust, these dancers and messengers, must be important. And these tiny things must be important because a being as powerful and majestic as the sun had made them its intermediaries. The worth of things 38  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

could not be determined by their appearance. That too, the grownups had told us. Our sisters or cousins, more advanced than we were in the ways of the world, and more receptive to the dance of the dust, would place an object such as a comb or a mirror, a present from their boyfriends or fiancés, in a ray of sunlight. Then they would pick out a dust speck and with intense concentration fix their eyes on its trajectory. But they only resorted to this practice when the village was buzzing with rumours that might frustrate their desires, threaten their loves, and trouble their heads and hearts. Perhaps it was reported that someone had met someone else on the way back from the spring, that he had asked for water to drink and that, while the girl offered the cup of water, their hands had touched and they had smiled at each other. Or, more serious, that he had met a girl in another village when he had gone looking for a lost goat, or to buy tobacco for smuggling. On the way out of the village, he had seen the girl in the grapevines and had asked for some grapes. The girl had met his gaze and smiled at him as she gave him a big bunch of red grapes. For everything everywhere, for every word and act, there was always someone – a witness, a passerby, a labourer, a latecomer – to see, to hear, and to report. That was another mystery we couldn’t solve. Behind every tree an eye, under every stone an ear. How could everything be known, be spread around so swiftly, and then hit home, wounding the hearts of some, the pride of others? What wind could spirit words away from mouths and make them known to all so that they To the Spring, by Night  ·  39

reverberated forever from these mouths to those ears? What eye was on the watch for the misstep, however small, of one person or another? A misstep that did its work, bringing ruin to the faces you saw and to what was hidden behind them, even when the misstep was long past and the wind long gone? There is an old saying that even if a goat becomes pregnant in hiding, it will give birth in the light of day. The grownups repeated it to us from time to time to impress on us that you could not hide things forever, that sooner or later the truth about what you did would come out into the open. That led us to exercise greater restraint when it came to behaviour that, were it to be known, would have incurred the wrath of the grownups, and it inclined us to be more circumspect when the threat of a reprimand was not enough to deter us from the act in question. However, that the eventual disclosure was inherent in the act itself – that the goat might not even get pregnant in secret – was to take things a step further, and this was something beyond our understanding. We also heard the story about an uncle by marriage and his daughter who, at odds with her husband, had returned to her parents’ home to calm her anger. The uncle by marriage, a man of great piety and wisdom, wanting to curtail the flight of his daughter, accompanied her back to her husband’s house. Halfway between the two villages, in a deserted spot, with no living soul around, he sat her down in front of him, listened to some of her complaints, and gave her some advice. At the end of their conversation, he lifted up a stone and said, “Daughter, let us leave everything that has been said here

40  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

under this stone, and you can return to your husband with a light heart.” But hardly had they arrived when a few allusions, a few remarks, made it clear that their father-to-daughter conversation had preceded them to the village. “Daughter, I think the stone has made free with our words,” he said. So it was with the misdeeds of a fiancé or a loved one. The news made the rounds of the village, bringing joy to the hearts of a few unhappy contenders for his affections, and reached the young girl before her loved one had even returned. Then our sisters or cousins ran to their tokens to put their loves to the test, to see if there was any truth to the rumours. Their faces became radiant when the dust, responding to their wishes, came to rest on the chosen object. It was as if it had set itself down on the most intimate part of their heart, and had set it aglow with promises of happiness for the future, with promises of endless love. If it did not, they took the object, fixed it with a tender gaze, and set it down in another beam of light. When the dust refused three times in a row to come to rest on the loved one’s gift, their faces grew bitter. They tried to hide their pain from us, we who were making fun of them, of their weaknesses, of their avowals in the presence of grownups, especially in the presence of our mothers and our aunts, who could be of no help to them beyond a few comforting words. Words that only fed the fires that burned within them. They would put aside the object, now synonymous with bad luck or worse, the harbinger of a betrayal or an abandonment yet

To the Spring, by Night  ·  41

to come. They put it aside, hid it in their disappointed hearts, hoping that other signs, kinder, bearing happiness and good news, would follow to ease the pain that weighed on their hearts, and they averted their faces from us. Or, better still, they hoped that the loved one would arrive and deny the rumours with a smile and a new gift that they would put to the test under different circumstances. However, they said, it could have landed on her mirror, that wretched bit of dust that settled everywhere but where it was supposed to; he could have bided his time, that wretched lover, instead of becoming a miserable merchant of unhappiness, a seducer at village gates, a beggar of cups of water and bunches of grapes. Could he not have waited for the next spring outside the village to quench his thirst? Could he not have waited for a venerable old man to offer him a bunch of grapes a little farther on, a bunch of grapes that would have come with some wise words, with some advice? That would have been more worthy of a man than to go and worm a cup of water or a bunch of grapes out of a shameless woman who handed out smiles to passersby. At first we were disappointed too, even if later we resorted to mockery. And we were angry with the loved one who sought distraction elsewhere, with the sisters or cousins who couldn’t choose the right speck of dust or the right loved one, and with the sun, which refused them its signs. Let us talk about the sun, about his treachery and his lack of honesty. He could not decide on one way of behaving and stick to it. He had to change from season to season. He, the

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grand, the luminous, the beautiful, let himself be hidden behind a cloud, be drenched by tiny drops of rain, be frozen by flimsy flakes of snow just passing through. You had to leave the sun to his moods, to his codger-of-the-skies excesses, to his pranks. We became angry with him and stopped playing our game with the dust. Good luck signs for our sisters and cousins could be sought somewhere else. We had to find someone more receptive, less self-absorbed, someone who would not be so double-dealing with his games and with his light. After all, he was not the only one who could send forth signs, even if his were the most abundant and, when it was cold, the easiest and the most agreeable to await in the warmth of the room. But there were other signs in other seasons that would give the lie to his, and bring back the glow to those faces we loved so much, faces that returned that love so well. There might be other seasonal adventurers like stray raindrops in summer or the first snowflakes at the end of autumn, signs that could disrupt the course of the seasons and give the lovers’ gifts their blessing. Or perhaps, at the stable door, they might find a snakeskin that, without crushing it, they would coil around their gift and place close to their heart. Or the first woodland fruits fallen into their hair from a sparrow’s beak as it was bringing them to its little ones, fruits that they would place on the gift and dry in the sun, adorning the object and blessing it with this act. Or it could be a tortoise that left its tracks behind it, a dove that let fall a feather onto the mirror, or onto a still-unused handkerchief that they placed in its path. And they would keep the gift with

To the Spring, by Night  ·  43

the tracks, with the feather, until the next visit from their loved one or fiancé, which would dispel the rumours. Only then would they start using the gift that had made their wish come true. And there might be hundreds of other signs to set these faces aglow, to fill these hearts with joy. They would only have to bid farewell to this dialogue between dust and sun. Anything could be a sign once invested with their expectations, with their hope. All they had to do was to open their eyes to their surroundings, and the signs would be there. Signs that could even lead them to a new loved one, one who was worthy, wise, loyal to what they bore in their heart. Who would sue for smiles, for happiness, only with them. Who, whatever the path, whatever the thirst, could be relied upon not to stray, and would be sure to come back to them. Or, so as not to turn everything upside down, so as to preserve what was traditional and familiar, along with the sun and the loved one, they might try their luck with the dust once again, the following day, if the sun co-operated. For it is not so easy to set aside what one has come to know, and to find a better alternative elsewhere. The past feeds on regrets, we were told, regrets we associate with the past and compare to our present troubles, or what we think of as troubles, but which in the future will be looked back upon with regret. And what stories we heard from our aunts, our neighbours, about their failed, thwarted loves, their misunderstandings, and the regrets in which they draped themselves as if that was all that remained of their happiness! And so it was best to

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be wise and prudent, and give the dust and the sun another chance. If the sun was at the rendezvous. He had never failed to appear before, even though everyone was alert for the day when he might not be there, or when he would perhaps be there but show a different face. We could wake up to find things unlike the way we had left them. No one knew the hour, or the moment, but things would not keep their familiar appearance; they would don new vestments as they passed from one state to another. The grownups told us that every being and every object lived subject to decree, and that if the decree holding sway over them changed, then they would change. Their present state was not eternal. They moved toward a final state, toward fulfilling the purpose of their journey here on earth. The sun was also ruled by a decree, even if it seemed to reign over the other stars and the earth, even if it seemed to reign over life. We were told that at the end of time, for three days, the sun would rise in the west and set in the east. In those three days, time would roll back to its point of origin, and would restore everything to its beginnings. Those three days would play havoc with all that happened on earth. The chickens would attack the cats, the cats the dogs, the horses men, and men one another. The eyes of men would shift to the side, their mouths would move to the back of the head, their noses would turn upside down, their hair would leave their heads to go and hang in tree branches. Blood would spurt out of arteries, flesh would mix with the earth. Water

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would vanish from buckets, buckets from houses. Houses would break free from their roofs and their walls, and walls from their stones. Stones would rush to the mountains, earth to the quarries, water to the springs. Springs and mountains would scatter like dust in the wind. Man would find himself naked, naked in the midst of everything. It would be the end of his reign over himself and all things. It would be the end of all beings and all comings and goings. Man would find himself stripped of his roof, his clothes, his tools. He would find himself stripped of all those forebears and descendants who had shown him his place during his passage on earth. Stripped of his intelligence and the clairvoyance that guided him through the darkness of that passage. Stripped of the finery that lent him confidence. Stripped of his flesh. Denuded, and standing in the midst of nakedness. He would be alone again with the wind in the valley, waiting like a newborn to go back into the womb that would open for him one day. At the end of the third day, Israfil, the angel of the Apocalypse and the Resurrection, would sound his horn. The two letters of the beginning would contract, all beings and things would fragment, the high and the low would crumble to dust to make way for another beginning, another life after death, so we were told. Three days during which man and all things would unlearn what they had learned during their passage on the earth, and would reunite with the dust and the wonderment of their first day. We are of the earth and will return to the earth, the grownups said. And every day that was renewed with the

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return of the sun was only a day of reprieve that we should dedicate to bettering our condition in the course of this passage on earth. Because this passage was a journey and every journey had an end, and – beings and things – we were companions on this journey, we had to bring it to its conclusion by being the best we could be with our fellow companions. Every day was another opportunity granted to man for remembering the bond uniting him with other beings or things with which he shared that day; every day was an opportunity to honour that bond. We were also told that forgetfulness was a property of man, that it was one of his afflictions, and that it erased, or at least weakened, the link that bound us to all those worlds leading the same life as ourselves. That each disappearance, including that of the sun, was a reminder of man’s own disappearance, just as each appearance was proof of his eventual return to the source of his own re-emergence. Since there had been the journey, there would be the return. Since there had been birth, there would be leave-taking. And since there was leavetaking, there would be homecomings. Like the lamb, like the child, every being and every thing had its beginning and would have its end. Man’s leaving his birthplace behind was followed by a trial of distance and forgetfulness. Each instant of amnesia induced by distance led to disorder in the passage through life, set those embarked upon that passage at each other’s throats. But every moment that the birthplace was remembered brought serenity to the heart of man: brought the sharing of that first love with those together on the journey, filled them with calm and compassion. This love that brought

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us forth from nothingness, that brought forth from nothingness all beings and all things. This love that anoints our life with tenderness during the journey, the love that during the journey keeps us alive. But, until we undertook the struggle against forgetfulness, we lived oblivious to the end of the sun and everything on which it shone. We clung to the present tense of the child, the lamb, the sparrow, and the partridge. The moment of a stolen apricot, of a blackberry captured from its branch without making it fall, of a bunch of grapes or a gobbled fig. As long as we saw no end before us, we lived in an eternal present that never failed us. We lived from moment to moment, between laughs and whispers, as if crossing a river, leaping from stone to stone. The grownups told us that forgetfulness was the greatest of ordeals. But we behaved as if our being at the beginning absolved us from forgetting the end. We had this fierce desire to discover everything, to know everything, and that was all we needed to exhaust our days and fill our nights. As for the present, it was the sun that lit up the day, made it possible for us to see, even to see other signs. It was the sun that, with its light and heat, brought the dominion of life and of wakefulness to the surface of the earth. The grownups told us that without this love being there to keep everything alive, nothing would survive and nothing would endure. The sun would not be able to rise, and night would not be able to return. But beneath the sun, we lived. And it was the sun that prepared the night for us, whose absence allowed us to rest; and when its absence became unbearable, it was the sun that,

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shining down on the world again, freed us from the weightlessness of night. Even if we had our own opinions about its excesses or its caprices, it was the sun, the source of our light on this earth, that dissipated our night-time fears. It was the sun that, along with the stars and the moon, remained faithful to our sky. More than the moon, more than the stars, it was the sun that, even when hidden, steeped us in its presence, and never failed us. The day was still the day despite the clouds, despite the snow, despite the rain. On that score we had no doubts about the sun.

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c The grownups told us one day that every living thing, everything that existed, had its weaknesses, that all of creation was deliberately designed so that no individual could lose his way in the blindness of pride and self-sufficiency. Just as forgetfulness was to be avoided along this journey, the mutual support of those making the journey was crucial if it were to be accomplished with as few mishaps as possible. It had to be done with humility, free of arrogance, with everyone aware, beings and things of whatever rank, that they were dependent on one another, that they were essential to each other. Nothing around us and that accompanied us on this journey was an exception to this rule, they said. And beyond the vagaries of the seasons, the alternation of day and night that had the sun giving up some of its power, accepting oblivion and absence like ordinary mortals, it also had another weakness that manifested itself less frequently, but which was more substantial and more worrying. So it was that they told us one day, as if it were a revelation whose consequences one had to weigh before bringing it to light – not wanting to disturb the fragile equilibrium already in place – they told us that despite its apparent eminence, there were times when the sun could not stop night from falling right in the middle of the day. We had not seen

this exceptional occurrence, this enormity, and it was very hard for us to imagine such a thing. But the phenomenon had been brought to our attention, and even if it was hard for us to imagine, we could not ignore it. This revelation, and that’s what it was, aged us by a few years. We feared that such a night might catch us unawares when we were far from home tending the sacrificial goat where it grazed, or were absorbed in a game. And what would we do if that happened, how would we deal with this night, sudden as the death that sometimes caught up with its victim, we were told, while he was walking along or working away, with no hint of its imminent arrival? That made us even angrier with the sun; this business of night in the middle of the day was one more caprice, more dust in our eye. We children discussed the matter, but we couldn’t decide on the kind of behaviour that would be appropriate to such a catastrophe. What could we do if faced with an unsuspected night, a night that would arrive with no other warning than its falling in the middle of the day? The revelation shook our faith in the sun. It meant that it could not fulfil its primary task. Up to then, at least on that point, we had no reason to find fault with it. Day was day and night was night. No beating about the bush, it was decisive. At dawn, there was no more night; at dusk, there was no more day. The day was white thread; the night was black thread. There was no question of one interfering in the other’s life, one taking on the other’s colour, or one throwing a veil over the other. But now we had learned something new. And we couldn’t understand it. How could night fall in the middle of the day? How could it become dark when the sun was in the

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sky? And how could the sun permit such an act of treachery to take place in its own domain? We had seen black clouds accumulating layer upon layer and spreading themselves out before the sun. We had seen black storms unfurl in the mountains on all four sides, cover the sky and the sun, and let loose on the roofs, the terraces, the woods, and the fields. That took away much of the sun’s light, made the day a little darker, sowed uncertainty among us at twilight; but from this to changing the face of the heavens, so that they went dark, so that there would be night in the middle of the day … But we had to face facts. What we were told must have happened, and would happen again. It was not one of those jokes for which the grownups, some grownups in particular, had the secret, jokes they tossed our way with malicious delight to fill us with uneasiness and fear. They were informing us of a truth, telling us about something we were going to witness in our lifetimes, one day. And if we had any doubt, all we had to do was ask the grownups in confidence. Knowing about such an event was better than being taken by surprise, they told us. We had to expect, we had to accept that we could be overtaken by night in the middle of the day. And we had to live with an uncertainty that made the sun a being that could stumble and disappear at any moment. It was like the sudden death they had told us about, and there was nothing we could try, nothing we could do about either of them. One more thing to mourn, one less certainty. The grownups told us that once, in bright daylight, when there were no clouds in sight – no storms, no blemish in the sky, no

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mist – a black shadow had come out of nowhere and begun to creep across the sun. It covered the sun like a blanket, as if the sun felt cold and sick – covered the sun so slowly that one would have thought it to be at the end of its strength like someone stricken, ill, someone departing this life. Burning with fever and shivering at the same time, moaning, complaining about the cold. Like someone dying, waiting for the angel, asking to be covered with all the eiderdowns, blankets, and carpets in the house. And who, no matter what one did, shivered and burned more and more, leaving us powerless, fearful witnesses. And could there be any greater fear than the fear of the end of the sun, any greater death than its death? They were there, witnessing the death of the sun, which would be their own death. Or, some said, it was as if the sun felt sleepy, as if it were preparing itself for a moment of pleasure. For in this slowness there was also the pleasure of letting itself lapse into forgetfulness, the rapture of letting itself be invaded by sleep or by a supreme contentment. Death throes or rapture, we could not know which, with everything taking place so far off, somewhere so inaccessible. But the word had been spoken, and the face of things had changed. Changed were the lives of those who, between heaven and earth, watched things happen. There was nothing to stop night from falling in the middle of the day and plunging everything into darkness. One of the grownups who had participated in distant gatherings during his adventures in smuggling had brought back accounts so bizarre that they came close to blasphemy, were

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accused of being blasphemous. Where these gatherings took place, he had told them, people assigned a sexual identity to every denizen of the heavens and earth. For them the angels, the stars, the mountains, the seas, the night, the day, all had a sexual nature, were male or female. And for them the sun was a woman, reported this master of contraband, thereby becoming a master of blasphemy. But he pursued his account to the end, pointing out that we too, in our village, saw the sun, the moon, and the stars as feminine, and wind, fire, and the mountain, as masculine. All of which met with approval. And so the sun was female for those people under distant skies, just like a cow was said to be female. It shared that female disposition, which was to attract through its radiance the seed of man, the small male seed, making of it, thanks to its inherent nature, living beings, men and women, cows and bulls, billy goats and nanny goats. That little seed, which left no trace if it fell elsewhere, became offspring, thanks to the strength and the inner nature of the woman, and ensured that man and his species would endure on earth. The sun also, through its light, would in this way share that disposition, drawing from the earth the substance that was life. The earth, which was nothing but mud and darkness, became, thanks to the radiance of the sun, a place of colour and life. Through its grace, the sun transformed the darkness of the earth into a place where life proliferated in all its diversity. The earth, which was as dark as the blackness that obscured our heavenly cow, abounded with living things after the sun passed over it. The sun, through its light, transformed the space between itself and the earth into a womb, and what was embryonic in

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the earth’s darkness grew toward the sun, toward this womb, just as the solicitations of man mounted toward woman, toward the womb of woman, who in her turn perpetuated the species through her nature and her grace. The sun, feminine in nature, stretched out upon the bed of the sky, afire with longing, burning with desire, toward which there turned, there rose, all expectancy and all desire. It would be the white heat of this desire that would endow all those who dwelt in the heavens and on earth with sustenance, longing, a lust for life, and the means to go on multiplying. For these distant people, there were two marriages for the woman-sun, said the master of contraband. Those that were ordinary, that were consummated every day, with the earth, and from which our earthly life was born. And those that were exceptional, entered into with that black thing in the sky to engender other dwellers in the heavens. As the skydwellers lived longer lives than the earth-dwellers, the rarity of these unions was a consequence of the longevity of the celestial beings. One only had to see the sun, radiant with desire, ablaze with longing, like a white cow in wait for a bull that would come to it but once in its lifetime. That night in full daylight would be the union, renewed each time, of the woman-sun with the black bull of the heavens, come to stir the fire, to keep ablaze, to keep alive this white heavenly flame that endowed us with life, that bestowed life on what filled the sky. Did not the couplings of cow and bull unfold like those of the sun with the black thing in the sky? That was the way the cow in heat attracted the bull, the way the bull approached and

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covered the cow with its massiveness, the way he lingered for a while and then moved off her like the black thing with the sun. The sun-woman waited, languishing, exercised her attraction, and the black thing came to her. Because it was out of the question that oblivion, a dearth of pleasure, a kind of death, should have its way with the sun. It would mean the death of everything that lived thanks to its being there, thanks to its light. It was out of the question that a prolonged waiting period should dim its fire, compromise its whiteness. A waiting period to quicken desire, yes, but not to kill it. And so these reunions would each time fan the fire and the sun’s desire, and would perpetuate the light it shed on those around it, those who lived from its light, those whom its light drew toward life. The union of the sun and the black bull of the skies brought forth stars and heavenly bodies to replace those that had disappeared since their last coupling. As on earth, there was degeneration and regeneration among the dwellers in the heavens. They too were subject to birth and death. Stars died, that we knew. On clear nights we saw stars falling, emptying themselves of their light just as those who lived on earth emptied themselves of their blood after a wound or a sacrifice; they vanished, leaving a luminous trail behind them. It’s true that we’d already been told that every person living on earth had his star in the sky, and that when one of them died, his star died with him. And so the stars that fell each night and disappeared from the sky in numbers we could count were those whose corresponding beings had just vanished from the earth. When there was a death in the village 56  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

or in a village nearby, we kept our eyes on the sky to see if we could spot the star that would be falling. And we’d been told that the longer and brighter the trail the star left behind it, the better lit and smoother would be the deceased’s journey to the sky, and the more beautiful and luminous his place in the heavens. The achievements of each individual on earth, the good he had done, would lend their intensity or their faintness to the trail his star would leave behind it as it disappeared. The value of a life, of what had been accomplished in the course of a life, could not be judged by man, but the trail his star left behind could give some sense of the worth of the person who had just passed beyond the stars. According to whether the deceased was close to us or distant, whether he was dear to us or despised, we attributed to him one or another of the stars that had just fallen, without divulging our choices to others scanning the sky. We ought only to speak well of the dead, said the grownups, who, even when there had been ill feelings, asked the heavens to bless the deceased. And so we were reluctant to choose a star with a short trail as the star of one of our disappeared, trying to think of circumstances that would incline us to a star that was more brilliant at the time of its fall. We also tried to see which star among this multitude might be ours, and resolved to work for what was good. Because we wanted to have a brilliant star with a luminous tail when we disappeared, one that would make our return journey an easy one. And so we were taught that these couplings in the middle of the day would be a renewal, a return to life for the sun and what surrounded it. To stoke the flames of the sun and replenish the stars, for, even if we could not perceive it, the To the Spring, by Night  ·  57

sky had thinned out with the disappearance of stars since the last union. In the brightness that followed these couplings, a certain number of stars and heavenly bodies would be born, in anticipation of the beings who would appear on earth between then and the next reunion. So it was that our stars would precede us in the sky, and would leave it only after our death, to shed their light on our return path. Their ashes would drop into the river that encircled the earth and watered it with freshness and rain when it threatened to dry up from the heat of the sun and the strength of its desire. All of that made for a strange chaos over our heads and beneath our feet. We had trouble knowing where we were. We realized that these couplings, along with the stars, made the sun and the stars and the heavenly bull as mortal as ourselves. There must have been star graveyards in the sky and sun carcasses strewn along the celestial roads, just as we would find them along the roadsides near the village. We didn’t know which way to look. Besides its dust, its whims, and its daylight nights, the sun gave birth and died. It was something we had to accept. Our small death was sleep, and the sun’s was night. For those who experienced a small death, there was still the big one on the horizon. Everyone knew that when there was a storm, large clouds followed on the small. He who multiplies also dies, we were told. In sowing a seed of birth, we also sow a seed of death. But if the sun had children, why did we not see other suns in the sky? Were its children going to grow up and become suns? Were they going to replace the sun we had in our sky, as children on earth replaced their parents? Or would the sun-cow, after coupling with the black bull in the sky, only give birth to stars 58  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

and other sterile and childless heavenly bodies, as when mules were born of the coupling between a mare and a donkey? No one knew. No one could know. Blasphemous thoughts, some said. They added that we had to spare the sun from speculations that bordered on indecency. But now that they had begun, we wanted them to finish the story of the sun, even if they didn’t agree on the cow. Cow or bull, angel or demon, the sun was accessible to no one. If those who wanted to stare at the sun, even to worship it, burned their eyes, so those who wanted to embrace it in an excess of enthusiasm would burn their hands and arms, and those who wanted to soil it with spittle and words would burn their mouths and be reduced to ash. That is how they warned us. But the sun remained in its place, and the grownups picked up the thread of their story. They then told us that while the sun was covered over in its entirety, it did not, to their relief, remain that way for long. In freeing itself, it freed them from this vise that they thought would be there forever, both for them and for the sun. Now it was warming them again and shining as brightly as before, and that gave them a new lease on life. Once things had settled down, they had prayed together on the village square and prostrated themselves to thank the Creator for the reprieve he had given to the sun, to the earth, to all that lived between sky and earth, and by the same token, to man. However, no one could say they had been taken unawares. When they were small the grownups in their time had already told them – as those who preceded them had already warned them, and as they now repeated to us – that the sun To the Spring, by Night  ·  59

would find itself covered over from time to time. Not often, but once in a lifetime, it was said. No one understood why or how it would be covered, but they knew it could happen one day, and that it would happen, because from time immemorial it had been observed. They were warned about this strange phenomenon so that when it occurred they would not be disoriented like butterflies when a lamp was darkened. Because only ignorance could let a goat fall from a cliff, make a donkey stumble in the mud; only ignorance could throw a man into disarray when he was being put to the test. As for this story of the sun as a cow in perpetual heat, this occasional union with the bull in the sky, these couplings with the earth – and as for this pregnancy, this bringing forth of stars and heavenly bodies, the sun fornicating in the middle of the sky with a bull, they had to ask for help and protection from these aberrations. Not only should they not speak of all this; they could not even go near it in their thoughts. It was contrary to everything the grownups of their time had passed on to them regarding modesty, propriety, good behaviour. Only demons fornicated openly and publicly, in the middle of the day, the grownups of their time had told them. And could the sun be a demon? This star that banished what was dark from the face of the earth, granting it heat and light, could it transgress like a demon? Those were thoughts that could only be whispered in ignorance within the skull of man. They had to be put aside in order not to trouble the spirits, in order not to sully a being as pure as the sun, who deserved to be fairly judged by all beings and all things. We had to know that it was compassion and divine generosity that gave rise to the heavens and the earth and those that dwelt there, and 60  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

not the rut or the heat of one individual or another. This was the conclusion they came to without heeding any further the master of contraband, who would have liked to talk of the role of love in creation, of breathing the spirit into the body, and of the spirit’s going forth as an act of love, of intimations of the beyond clothed in the delectable garb of the flesh ... They didn’t listen, reproaching him for the fact that in his story love was confused with indecency, and indecency was the sworn enemy of both love and beauty. Those who had news of gatherings in other lands where some sage had also reflected on these strange occurrences brought other interpretations before the village. It was the djinns who had darkened the sun so that it would stray from its path and do harm to humans, they had heard the sages say. And they had decreed how people should behave, should a disaster occur during their own lifetime. Those present had taken this advice to heart and shared it with others on their return. The grownups we knew were aware of what had been said. But as time passed the words lost their sheen, became less vibrant, and settled quietly and inconspicuously into a corner of their memory trove. And when the hour came, it took some time to search them out and bring them back to life. And so when they saw the sun being covered over, they were at first dumbfounded at the gravity of what was happening over their heads. But they pulled themselves together and, remembering the advice the grownups had given them when they were children, they lit fires in an attempt to bring warmth back to the sun. Seeing it being covered more and more, they lit more and bigger fires. They ran this way and To the Spring, by Night  ·  61

that, urging everyone to fetch more logs to feed more fires. In all the village squares enormous blazes burned, but they didn’t stop the sun from being obscured. While some lit fires, others brought out cooking pots and big metal objects they’d been able to find, and they banged on them with all their might. There arose a din, a clamour, along with the cries and tears of children and women, the panicked animals, the smoke and the flames. In their haste some burned their hands, others the hems of their skirts or jackets. People were running everywhere, screaming, hammering away, hoping to frighten the djinns that blocked the sun, hoping to scare them away. But it was all in vain. They didn’t even know whether it was the djinns that were covering the sun, and if so, whether they heard the noise, or whether, from the sun, their fires were visible to those trying to obscure it. When a fire broke out in a distant neighbourhood, burning fields and crops, it appeared from our village as a redness, like a campfire that no longer gave off light or heat to those a few metres away. Similarly, the loudest commotion from a wedding or celebration in a neighbouring village reached us like a buzzing that didn’t even disturb our goats. The sun must be just as far away, if not farther, than these fields and villages. And djinn or bull, spirit or creature, veil or mountain – nothing fled, nothing moved. Inexorably, the sun was being obscured. The light failed and darkness overwhelmed it. Seeing that the fires, the cries, the tears, the din and the clamour were all futile, everyone sat around the fires and watched the sun clothe itself in cold and drift off to sleep. That day they thought the sun would never emerge from the cold or wake from its sleep. They waited for the end, fed the 62  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

fire with everything they had to hand, hammered sporadically on the cooking pots, but without conviction. The sun was covered over and nothing could be done about it. As the darkness grew and the light weakened, they began to feel cold and to tremble in front of their fires. They became increasingly convinced that the end was near. And once the sun was completely obscured, the darkness was total, they said. And they thought they were going to remain there with their guttering fires, their shivering bodies, and the receding commotion. The last time, the sun had come back, the grownups had told them. They had basked in its light for years, but it was inevitable that one day it would stay away. It was inevitable that there be a last day, the true sleep. You could recover from illness, danger, or famine, and as long as you recovered you remained alive, but one day there was no coming back. One day you had to stay behind, never to return. That’s the way it was with the grownups who had preceded them, and they waited for it to be the same for them when their turn came. Everyone’s turn came one day. Sooner or later. Today it could be the sun’s turn. Its turn could come before theirs, with its end precipitating their own. For an insect that lived only for a few hours or a few days, the life of a man might seem an eternity, just as for man the life of the sun might seem an eternity compared to his own, they told us. But what could the life of the sun, that of man, or that of the insect mean to the Eternal, who had created all of life and all of eternity? The sun’s turn would come, and it might have come on the very day they were around their fires, trembling with fear both for the sun and for themselves. With an end that they To the Spring, by Night  ·  63

could only behold, could only endure. They could do nothing for those who were dear to them, for those they worked for, for those they lived for. And there was no help – not from belongings, not from flocks, not from riches. It was a moment that brought before their eyes the grandfathers who had perished eons ago, and the grandchildren who would be born in the near future. Everything was going to disappear in this instant when the sun’s face was obscured, and they could only await their own end. But after a time that seemed long to them, very long, they also saw the sun returning. Neither damaged nor troubled. It didn’t fall from the sky, it didn’t fly off. Nothing of the sun fell away, no flame rose up. It continued on its way as if nothing had happened. They were the only ones troubled. The sun remained in place, resumed its work. They saw it shining in all its brilliance, with heat and light. The sun’s end was not now, and they could in turn alert their children yet to be born to this night when, person or thing, nothing emerged unscathed even though life went on.

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c The sun continued to rendezvous with the moon, the fine days chased away the snow, signs added to signs that were read in other signs. And every spring, with no heavy downpours expected until the following winter, we whitewashed both the outsides and the insides of the houses to signal a new beginning to these rites, and to these signs. We covered the floors of the houses with a coat of greyishyellow earth that we found in an open quarry on the slopes of the mountains south-west of the village, and which we mixed with straw to make a kind of cement. We applied this coat, as we did every year, over what remained of the previous year’s coat. In this way the houses renewed their skin, freshening their interiors following the example of nature with its almond trees, sparrows, snakes, and the insects, large and small, to be found there. It was our way of waking to spring, to life. We lived at the very eastern end of the village, and it was like living a vast distance from everything known, from every familiar face. It was like having our own continent to ourselves, a place of exile and refuge. Our house was separated from the village by a stream. A dry stream, a barely perceptible depression except during the

rainy season and the season of melting snows. We didn’t know exactly where it had its source, but one fine day, after a rainfall, or on a day when the sun shone down on a thick layer of snow, we saw that it had already sprung to life and had begun to wind through the village, skirting some of the houses and, below our own house, spilling into a stream larger than itself. It soaked our shoes and sometimes our feet when it caught us in our awkward crossings. Even in flood it had never carried anything off, except perhaps a few unwary sparrows that happened to be bathing there, courting under the spring sun. But the sparrows were nimble, and in any case this was not a time for them to be swept away by the stream. It was the season of love, of nests, of the hatching of eggs, the season of fruitfulness and abundance. The season when everything was starting over, when men would be busy and let them live their sparrow lives without laying traps for them, lighting fires to grill their poor flesh, and gnawing at them for meagre nourishment. It was the spring, and not a time to be abducted by running water. They were agile and strong again, and it was easy for them to fly off to a tree branch and continue their courtship, escaping the water and letting the stream flow on to other adventures. Because a stream didn’t lack for adventure, even if that seemed incongruous to us, even if ours seemed quiet and humble in its course below our house. After all, what did it take itself for, our stream, that it should have adventures we didn’t know about? A thread of water that swelled from time to time thanks to a thaw or a rain, only to evaporate at the first dry spell, could it have a life beyond the life we saw, as it

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made its way through the narrow channel that separated our house from the village, flowing between our wet feet and the sparrows’ wings? Obviously, a stream, our stream, must not have lacked for adventure. If, on the least pretext, it began to flow, it was because that is what made its life worthwhile. And whereas the sparrows – and more than the sparrows, the swallows – spread their wings to mount on currents of air and let themselves be borne off on a journey without end toward the far horizons of heaven and earth, where they could watch our stream’s progress and its adventures, the stream, for its part, ran headlong into a hollow in the earth, propelled on an endless journey where even the swallows had trouble tracking it and left it alone to run its long race: from incline to incline, crossing gorges and valleys, visiting lands and villages, not stopping until it died out in a lake or a sea, where it would hold itself ready for other births. There was no lack of witnesses to tell us about the flight of the birds and the course of the streams. When people from the villages below us came up to ours – our neighbours of the plains, those who saw the northern flight of the swallows before we did, and in whose direction our stream descended with what it carried along after its crossing of our village – they said that the stream did not lose its way, that it continued to flow beyond their village. These were the people who saw fruits appear on the branches before we did, and watched grapes ripen earlier, because the sun warmed them more than it did us, even though on the heights, on our mountains, we

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were nearer to the sun. We didn’t complain, but we wondered why the sun gave more warmth to what was farther off, while a fire, on the other hand, warmed first what was closer by. In any case, they told us that the stream did not get lost, that it continued to run, that it continued to flow beyond their village. And that the people from the villages even lower than theirs had given them the same information, saying that they had seen the stream flowing even farther downhill. It seemed that for every village there was another below it, and that our stream did not stop in a village or a ravine, or even lose itself in meadowland. That it was headstrong and ran on, joining other streams that also flowed in the same direction. And, they told us, very far down in the plain, our stream was no longer what it was in front of our house, small and weak, but it became, with this convocation of streams it had joined in its descent, a great river that could engulf our houses from top to bottom, like those flights of swallows that, appearing suddenly, blackened the sky over our heads, even though you could hold a single swallow in the palm of your hand. A river that you could only cross by swimming or in a boat. And so our stream ran on and threw itself into the great river that must have been the one the smugglers crossed with their loaded animals to pursue their journey on the other side, across the plain, toward the frontier. The same river that they could only cross thanks to those with boats fitted out for contraband. The same river that the horses sometimes swam across, they said, because there was no room for them in the

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boat. That fascinated us, but it was hard to imagine horses swimming. We were assured that they did swim and that, tied by their bridles to the boat, they crossed the river from one bank to the other. And so our stream was privy to the adventures of our smugglers. And if we had spoken its language, we could have asked it to tell us about things it had witnessed. Because the grownups told us that the earth, the water, and even the wind, preserved the traces, the memory, of what occurred in their presence. What surrounded us was like an open book the Creator made accessible to everyone, but to decipher it, to read it, you had to open your eyes and look. So, if you knew how to read the stream, if you knew how to listen, perhaps it might recount some of its memories, exposing to the light of day the truth of some of our smugglers’ words, and the conceit of others. Because, where adventures were concerned, there were often versions that differed in every respect. And we, torn between one version and another, didn’t know which to believe. Our modest stream, which at times almost disappeared, had its own adventures. And it was the water that made it run, we were told – this thing, this element with no colour or shape, which could not stay still. Otherwise a stream would remain where it was or would stop moving once it had found its place. It was the water that made it romp over slope and plain, through hollows and terraces. Because, the grownups said, water never wanted to stay in one spot; it had to be in movement, flowing down or up, running to its ruin or

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climbing to be reborn. Everything obeyed its own nature, the rules that governed it, they told us, and water’s nature was to rise and fall. They said it was the most unstable thing on earth. The most docile and the most obstinate at the same time. The gentlest when it became the dew on the leaves in spring, and the cruellest when, at the end of winter, in torrents, it uprooted trees and rocks, flinging them downhill. Always deepening its bed or fleeing through the tiniest gap. Binding together the sky and earth when it fell and when it rose, as if it had kept the imprint of those two letters that in the beginning linked the deeps of the sky to the deeps of the earth. As if those two letters had made it responsible for the bond between earth and sky. We, ourselves, had never seen it rise. It was always falling on us as rain, as snow, as sleet, drenching us to our last hair, our last piece of clothing. If it did not fall right away, it would likely fall later and take us by surprise. If it did not rise openly, in plain view, it was likely taking advantage of some noontime or night-time secret. It was just as devious when it was clinging to the roofs as an icicle and, well sharpened, falling on our heads while we played around the houses, taking pleasure in the sun. We learned not to trust it. Or else we raised it up ourselves, either to drink it or, filling large containers and setting them on the backs of horses and donkeys that we led to our houses, to store it for a while in skins and pails and use it for its intended purposes. Then we let it resume its wanderings, freeing it from the shapes and colours we had imposed on it in our homes so it could now

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take on those it desired, those that offered themselves to it once it was freed from our clutches. But before beginning its sojourn among us, it was said, water fell from the sky’s deeps in quantities that would bring life to the dry earth and to those who dwelt there. It was a blessing longed for by humankind to ease the passage leading it to its first patch of ground, and to make the journey more tolerable. But like every companion, water had moments of distraction, of aberrant behaviour. Because, we were told, man had been created from muddy earth, from earth mixed with water, and without a continuous supply of water the mud would dry rapidly in the heat of the sun, in the breath of the wind, leaving only a pile of dust where there had been a man. When it wanted to be beneficent, water came down to us as rain and snow. Hail was like anger, a scourge that, fortunately for the earth and its occupants, was a guise rarely assumed by water in its descent. Once on the ground, it offered drink to the earth and all the living things that grew out of it. When the earth and its living things had drunk their fill, and the mountains had stored up enough for the dry seasons, the streams took the remaining water and directed it toward the meeting place of all streams, the confluence of all the drops of water fallen to earth, and there formed vast expanses, wider and more infinite than our lands and our mountains here where we dwell. Expanses that you could not cross by swimming, and that it took months, if not years, to cross, we were told, on the backs of ships, the mounts for these expanses. It was the ships as well that carried the burdens impossible

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to load onto the backs of donkeys, horses, and even camels. Ships that could transport hundreds of camels with their load. The strength of these vessels matched the vastness of those domains. Domains for a new purpose, and for the repose of water on earth, from which it would depart again for the skies, to continue its cycle. In that respect, the journey of water, the journey of the drop of water across the earth, was not unlike that of man, of humankind, they said. Like water, man fell alone, in drops upon the earth. A single drop without the support of other drops would dry up quickly, would disappear into arid ground or onto a thirsty rock. In small numbers, the drops could only become swamps where they would first decay, then disappear. But if there was a constant supply of drops and the first ones were not lost, they became springs, streams, rivers, and continued their journey to the meeting place for all water. So it was for the drop that was a man. Alone, he would have been disoriented and would have dried up where he stood, falling victim to the weaknesses of his nature. It is only thanks to his coming together with his fellow creatures that his life could continue in houses, villages, and cities, and that he could complete his journey. And there were great cities far across the plain, we heard, greater than the river down below, which could swallow up our houses. Cities broader than the lakes, more infinite than the expanses of water. Houses, villages, cities, like so many waterways, streams, rivers, which would enable man to live his life on earth in the company of other men, each with his own experience, his own helping hand to offer the other. And when his hour had come, man would take his place in the 72  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

cemeteries that were his lakes, seas, and oceans, from which, like water, he would find his way back to the primordial ground. But, unlike water, man would never come back down to earth, they said. He would make the passage one time only, know only once the departure and the return. It was a test made easier for him by the companionship of other men, in order that he not lose himself in forgetfulness. That was his lot in this trial, to descend once, and then to go back. As for water, it would continue to serve as an example and a companion, as long as there was life on earth, as long as there were men. At the end of its journey, each stream and river, at the designated place, emptied itself of the water it carried, putting an end to its life of adventure amid the slopes and hollows of the earth. From there the water returned to the sky to devise new adventures and astound other eyes with its rising and falling, its gentleness and its wrath. And so the sparrows let the stream flow on toward its destined goal, let it run on, to fulfil the destiny of water.

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c The houses and the village were surrounded by the known, the less known, and the unknown. They were overflown by sparrows, by swallows, traversed by the running stream, all invested in their turn with our dreams and fears. We passed from one to the other, from the known to the unknown, in the blink of an eye, in a single stride, going from one room to another, from one house to another, or from a terrace to the forest. We would have preferred always to remain in the known world of the houses, the village, the sparrows. It is all very well for our bodies to be inhabited by water, the grownups said, but unlike the stream, we would not go off to explore unknown lands. It was not for lack of desire, but the unknown was difficult to define, difficult to contend with. It was like finding our way in the darkness, without knowing what we might bump into with our feet or knock over with our hands. But we were of the earth, so we groped our way forward as one unit, step by step and with caution, like the mud as it slid down. We only continued on once the new step had been duly taken and the next was within range. Also, we clung to our little patch of familiar land. It was hard for us to allow our curiosity to take us any farther. We would have preferred to keep one foot in the realm of the known before we dared, hanging on to swallows’ wings, to venture far from

home, beyond our houses, beyond the village, preferably with children our age, with our brothers and sisters or our parents, in the full light of day. We did not want to come face to face with the unknown. We didn’t want our beds to be on the east side of the terrace, which looked out onto the woods whose every tree, whose every blade of grass we knew by heart, but which became strange to us as soon as dusk began to encroach on the trees and terraces. The east and its woods, over which day dawned and from which night swept over us. God in his infinite wisdom, we were told, wanted the east to be both the source of light and the source of the dark, just as the sun in its majesty was beset by weaknesses, so that no being might think itself intrinsically eternal. So that no arrogance might show itself in beings or in things. And so night swept over us from the east, from which came the light. In the half-light of dusk, the wind in the leaves, which cooled us during the day, became the trembling and whispering of countless invisible beasts, filling us with fear. The trees in the woods were transformed into giant beings, phantoms from another world that, barely glimpsed, set the innermost recesses of our small selves to trembling. We took our courage in both hands to go and make sure that these were still the same trees as moments ago, that between our two glances no horn of the archangel Israfil, he who would herald the Apocalypse and the Resurrection, had sounded the end of any world, that no tortoise had crushed the eggs of any ant, that no serpent had swallowed any sparrow along with its babies in its nest, that no spider had caught any ladybug in its web, and that the world was still the world to which we had last awakened. We concluded: nothing had To the Spring, by Night  ·  75

changed; the trees we were touching were the same as those of a moment ago, the grasses were in their place, and the earth did not betray our feet as we walked. But the trees a bit farther off were still threatening, and the house, too, began to seem unsettling, the more we distanced ourselves from it. We rushed back to the house before being stricken by fear or being questioned by our parents, wondering where we had been, if they noticed our absence. And it took only a few steps before we found the house as it was when we left it, and before the trees, once we had turned our backs on them, took on their ghostly appearance again, donning the apparel our fear had clothed them in for the night. And so we avoided the end of the terrace that drew our feet, and in large part our minds, into the unknown, preferring to huddle up against the known, turning toward the neighbouring houses and the village whose familiar noises might ward off the silence and the menace of night in the east. We were not the only ones to dread the night. The birds in the trees were no happier than we were when it arrived. They who, at the dawn of day, filled our mornings with their many songs, withdrew at the first sign of dusk into a painful silence that only increased our fear. To see them curl themselves into a ball as if they wanted to shrink their skin, to see them bury their heads in their bodies, their bodies in their feet, their feet in the heads of their little ones – to see them crouch down in their nests or in their shelters – you would have thought they were bracing themselves for the worst of disasters. The slightest movement, the smallest noise, made them jump, drove them even deeper into their bodies. As though they wanted to disappear from the night, to remove themselves from life. 76  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

As though the gates of the night were gates of despair, gates of nothingness that they tried to avoid by clinging to their branch and their nest. You would have thought they were living every night as if it were their last, as if they were about to close their eyes to life, as if it were the last night of time. But at the first hint of dawn, they began to wake us with songs as joyous as the day before, as if nothing had happened, as if there had been no fear, as if they wanted to pull down a shade of forgetfulness over our night and their own. But in the meantime we felt their fear, their fear stayed with us through the night. To have one foot in the unknown in the east, itself plunged into the nocturnal unknown, was too much for our childish minds half-overcome by the night, busy reliving the day’s failures in the uncertainty of dreams to come. As our short summer evenings came to an end and we were preparing for sleep, we preferred to set up our beds right in the middle of the terrace, surrounded by other beds, in the known world far from the birds’ fears and the rumblings in the woods, and under the watchful eyes of our big brothers and big sisters. Mother and father guarded both sides, east and west, like markers setting our terrace apart from the unknown. And so it was nest-like, this gathering of beds in the night. When my father was absent and my mother off milking the goats in the summer pen the shepherds had built for the herd outside the village, and when at night, alone, I had to watch the house until they returned, I sat on the west side of the terrace facing the village, so that I could share the company, even if it was distant, of the other inhabitants, listening intently for To the Spring, by Night  ·  77

what might be going on behind my back to the east. To distract and calm myself as I waited, I kept my eyes on the comings and goings of the neighbours. These were times when we felt the unknown was breathing down our necks, while the known took shelter in the pupils of our eyes, with only the brightness of the moon and the multitude of stars giving us any comfort. How could a far-off presence be any sort of match for this rush of fear? What could I do, who could I call for help, and what use could our distant neighbours be, all of them busy with their plans for this night and the following day, if without warning I found my neck between the jaws of one of the monsters I imagined hidden behind the trees, in the wood to the east? And what could the birds do, huddled together in their nests under the roofs of our houses, in the branches of the mulberry or the almond tree, except to fly off into the dark, far from the frail protection of a nest in the night. It was a vain hope to turn toward the village or align ourselves with the birds, who themselves were seeking a hollow where they might shelter their heads and bodies from this fear. But it was a hope to which I clung, a hope that sustained me until my mother returned. Terraces and village, woods and mountain, all blended together, and no distinction was evident when, come winter, the village, the fields, the forest, and the mountains were covered in snow and formed one whiteness, dark and cold when it was cloudy, and blindingly bright when the sun shone. During the day, everything opened up to us. We found ourselves on a white expanse that went on forever. Everything 78  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

was an extension of the terraces, and presented infinite possibilities for games and races across this whiteness that burned our eyes, that took away our breath. But it was then that the fear, creeping out of the woods and the trees to the east of the house, came right to our doors, and was no longer a function of the trees in the night, but was now audible in the whistling of the wind, visible in the tracks we found in the morning on the terraces, the roofs, and around the houses, and which we took – not without reason – to be those of the wolf. Night fell quickly, even if the whiteness of the snow delayed its arrival. Even if there were times when the night could not hold sway. Because the brightness of the sky, the dominance of the moon, the whiteness of the snow upon the earth, held the edge of night at a distance, and kept it from sweeping over the earth, over our land. Evening came quickly, night fell even more quickly, when the sky was clouded and the moon was concealed behind a grey sky suspended just over our chimneys. We hardly dared leave our houses or expose our bodies to the uncertainties of night, even just to relieve ourselves, to ease the weight that nature had imposed while night and snow were crowding our walls. Our mothers took us by the hand and gave us the courage to attend to our needs while confronting the fear that lay in wait for us outside. We emerged into a silence punctuated by a few barks and the occasional howl that lent a deep uneasiness to the night’s peace and its uniform whiteness. There was something in the distance that we sensed but could not fathom, something we strained our ears for, as if listening for doors opening, rifts in the night. To the Spring, by Night  ·  79

We saw that breaches could be opened in the night, that it was not an opaque orb of trembling and fear, that a kind of serenity could make its way in and find a place for itself there. We could share in this serenity and taste of it, even in response to the needs of nature, and the night could become a realm to explore, which would reveal to us, differently, all the beings and objects around us. But just as the bird and the goat were not fooled by this calm, and sought refuge as soon as night fell, we were not taken in by the silence, by this peace, which might at any time turn to menace. Before we could come to know all there was of the night, fear caught up with us with a whistling of wind or a crackling of snow, and threw us back on our initial uneasiness. These nocturnal outings were an ordeal for our mothers, who tried not to make us aware of their own fears. Our mothers who, because they were said to attract wolves at night, tried to hide their natural scents under enormous shawls. They tried to conceal them to protect themselves and to protect us from the curse of what was spoken of – things that could befall us in the blink of an eye, and which heightened the fear in every step our mothers made. Steps that heightened the fear in our hearts. Fear they navigated in the night and in the snow, by the flickering light of an oil lamp. Fear they tried to ward off with prayers and invocations or by camouflaging it in our own fear, holding tightly to our hands clutched in theirs. As long as they were standing there, we always had the corner of a shawl to hide us behind our mothers’ fear, the fear that bound our flesh to theirs, that bore through our bloodstream every branch sighing in the wind, moving through the 80  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

tiniest veinlets to the most secret recesses nourished by our blood. But as long as our mothers held us by the hand, as long as we could feel the rustling of their dresses at our side, the night could bestow on us a little of the peace we must have known within the womb. The peace that every seed must have known in its valley before being flung by the wind into the tumult of the heavens and the earth. As long as they held our hands, the night was an extension of their womb, and passed on to us a small part of this serenity. As long as they held our hands, as long as they could keep our hands in theirs. Hoping they wouldn’t find their hands empty of the hands they had been holding. Because it happened that a mother returned home, her hands emptied of the hand of the child she had just led outside. That a simple visit to the outdoors prompted a return she could not have thought possible in the worst of her nightmares. A return filled with cries and lamentations, madness and despair, pleas for help, imploring heaven and earth, life and death, rousing the household, which roused the village, the birds, and the trees, disturbing everyone who slept and everyone awake. It was all very well for us to be accompanied by our mother, to hear her breathing above our heads, but still the fear never left us when such an event had taken place before we went forth. It was during one of those cold nights, snowy and calm. One of those nights that have you trembling from fear or cold, you don’t know which, and keep everyone inside his shelter, in his nest, in his skin. A night that makes you regret the glass of water you drank or the extra morsel of bread you swallowed. But one does not choose one’s nights, one lives them. To the Spring, by Night  ·  81

It was on such a night that a mother in a nearby village had accompanied her little daughter into the snow, away from the house, so we learned one evening when we were told everything or overheard what was said. She had left her daughter just beside the house, behind the wall, so that she might return to bed with her body relieved, just as she often did, but a little later than on other nights. Or else the girl, awakened in the night, had asked her mother to accompany her outside. Having covered herself, she covered her daughter and led her out under a clear but moonless sky. Just as the girl was seated and the sleepy mother was adjusting the sheet over her shoulders to protect her from the cold, a beast leapt out of the night, pounced on the little girl, and seized her by the arm. Taken by surprise, the mother rushed forward and grabbed the other arm, pulling with all her strength to free the girl from the jaws of the beast. For a time, each pulled on the arms of the girl, who, crying and struggling, tried to throw herself toward her mother. But the beast, more powerful, tore its prey from the mother’s arms and fled, while the voice of the child calling her mother for help continued to cry out. Shouting to awaken the household and the villagers, the mother began to chase the beast, pursuing the screams and the tears of her daughter as they became more and more distant, weaker and weaker. Seeing that she was not going to catch them, she returned home to seek help, to send stronger, more agile legs and arms in search of the beast that held her little girl in its jaws. Awakened, the men of the house, soon joined by other villagers, looked for tracks, listened for cries, moans, growling, in the direction the mother indicated and on the surrounding 82  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

land. They turned over branches and bushes, searched in hollows and around rocks, scoured embankments and shelters, but found nothing in the half-light of that icy night. They returned frozen and spent. It was only the next day, at first light, that they discovered a scrap of bloodied cloth here, a tuft of hair on the snow there. And a few traces of blood. That was all the mother could bring back of her daughter to the house the next day. That was all she could hold in her hands, against her breast. Her daughter, who had gone out in the night, holding her by the hand. Her daughter, who had left her hands empty, and her ears full of screams. That was all that remained of her: a bit of cloth, a tuft of hair, and her cries for help as the beast bore her away. We too went out on cold and snowy nights, with the screams of this little girl in our ears. When the evening was slow to come, and the night had difficulty spreading its black shawl over the sleeping houses and the souls it sheltered, given the triple conjunction of snow, sky, and moon, then it became something else – a full and mysterious brightness peopled by those wanderers in the absolute, the hunters, and the traces of the absolute, their prey, night watchers in their own right: partridges, hares, antelopes, foxes, jackals, and … the wolf. Deprived of the generous and abundant covering of night, all the wanderers lay in wait for a breath of deliverance or a fatal encounter, seeking a shred of flesh or a mouthful of food. All were watchful, some fearing others, some shying away from others, all feeling the breath of the hunter down the back of their necks, the breath To the Spring, by Night  ·  83

of the void within their bodies, turning like the still point of the whirlwind. And in the glacial cold of that snowy expanse, loosed onto this white sheet by an inadequacy of the night, they went their rounds, circling our fear, circling the village. Rounds so far-reaching that they sometimes prolonged them beyond the night, beyond the snow, and risked leaving their bodies behind them in the freezing cold. One of the great-granduncles, having left his body, contacted his wife in a dream, and the next day was found frozen on his rounds during a night of hunting. Frozen in place, his finger on the trigger, poised like a hunter awaiting his prey. It was not unusual to find prey frozen in the night, as if not to leave their hunter alone when he departed for other rounds under other skies. Because the grownups told us that under other skies each would awake to his passion, with companions who shared that passion and the thoughts that went with him on his way.

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c Opposite our house, in winter as in summer, was the tomb of Hâji Mouss, the patron saint of the village and its surroundings, the guardian of the living and the dead, the purveyor of hopes and fears – he through whom losses found consolation and joys a home, he who watched over the coming and going of every pious thought, of every impulse to goodness, who stood in the path of every malicious intent. His tomb rose over the cemetery and the land around it. Land that inspired respect and fear, and that the most devout trod barefoot and bareheaded, approaching with prayers and invocations. It was visible from almost everywhere in the village, and you could call on it as a witness and appeal to its arbitration just by pointing to the tomb, inviting others to swear by the saint, even for the smallest disagreement: conflicts over the boundaries of fields and woods, differences as to the sharing of the harvest, and even disputes among the women when they could not agree on their place in the waiting line at the spring. Everyone could turn toward that land and its occupant, and find it within view. Our house was the closest to the saint’s tomb, the one that looked out on it, straight ahead, the one that could not turn away from it without being seen. And so, if we always had an eye on Hâji Mouss, he always had an eye on us. When we were afraid, that was a comfort. At other times it became burdensome and unsettling to have

the saint’s eye on us, and the eyes of the dead who surrounded him in the cemetery, each with stories and fears that compounded our dread when the names of the deceased returned in tales told by the grownups on long winter nights. Once we were bedded down for the night, the stories echoed in our minds, peopled by those presences in repose in front of our house, with the saint at their head. We had to wonder whether we were in our beds, or if the house had been taken over by the cemetery and those there at rest. The grownups reassured us. The dead did not return. We could dream about them, but they stayed in their graves until they were called on to take leave of them. And for that you had to wait a long time; you had to wait for the end of the world. The dead were very occupied in their graves, and did not live at the same pace as the living. For a dead person the time of a life on earth lasted no longer than it took to sew on a button. As soon as they realized they were dead and would remain in their graves, they began another life, and had no more time to think about coming among us. Because in the beginning, a dead person did not know he was dead, they told us. When he saw that we were mourning someone who was dead, he too began to weep without knowing for whom. He too got busy preparing for the burial, for greeting the guests, and accepting their condolences. He too prayed and washed the body, and went with it to the cemetery, but wondering who it was. Once the body was lowered into the grave, he too helped to cover it with a row of stones starting at the head, and then to blanket it with earth. When all was finished and the assembly had left the cemetery, he too wanted to leave,

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but his head knocked against the first stone set down over him. He understood then that he himself was the deceased, and that he had just collaborated in his own burial. And so the dead did stay put in their graves. Still, their stories continued to trouble our thoughts, disturbing our sleep and our winter nights. For winter was the season of death even if it was not the dead but their stories that frightened us. The season of death and hunger. During its tenure, the rain, the snow, the wind left us no greenery, except for the leafy branches of the evergreen oak that met the needs of our goats in winter, keeping the glossiness of its leaves and finding no taker other than the goats who, in their persistence, paid no attention to its thorns and gobbled them up by the mouthful. Everything else that might serve for food was, at the height of winter, blanketed with a uniform coating of snow hardened by wind and ice. And everything was hungry, the herbivores, the carnivores and, from time to time, even man, this unscrupulous omnivore whose boundless appetite made everything tremble. Yes, even man sometimes went hungry, he who from beast to plant, from leaf to bark, filled his belly and made a meal of just about anything. But when there was no beast, or plant, or leaf, or bark, everyone was left with a hollow in his belly, a hollow that could bring in its wake the worst abuses, the worst debasements, sweeping away limits and barriers, shame or pride, love or goodness. “Lord, do not afflict us with hunger and dishonour” was one of the prayers we heard most often from the mouths of the grownups who had lived through the

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years of privation. A prayer that one sometimes heard uttered in a trembling, tearful voice, as though it led us to repeat this privation, as though it could bring it back. Everything was hungry, and everything sought some morsel of sweetness, a scanty subsistence, the barest crumb for the teeth to bite into and the intestines to pass along, anything that could first fill the cavity of the mouth and then that of the stomach. If only for a little respite, to allay the fear this emptiness spread through the rest of the body, so that they might to go off in search of new mouthfuls, and continue their journey on earth. Hunger reigned, and when winter followed on a year of poor harvests, then there was famine and man had more than his share of it, relying on harvests as he did. Famine was pre-ordained; it arrived like a fast, to the exact month, day, and hour, we were told. But we did not know its hour. One day, when one of our number was visiting a neighbouring village, he was privy to a conversation with the sage of that region, respected also in the surrounding villages. He announced at a small meeting that the famine would begin on a certain day at dusk. The man came back to the village, uneasy, but, as the sage had advised, he said nothing to anyone, wanting to promote a very moderate consumption of food. Consumption was already extremely frugal, the harvests having been meagre, but even with this small amount of consumption, given the remaining time, the man had to push even more for moderation. As dusk fell, a guest arrived, with his hunger. The family had already eaten and only the

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guest remained to be served. The villager took his wife aside and told her to mix one measure of flour with equal parts of ground-up goat hairs. The woman protested, because she wanted to receive the guest as generously as she could, and they still had some reserves. But as her husband insisted, she prepared the mixture he had asked for. And when she arrived with the baked bread and set it in front of the guest with a glass of water, to her great astonishment there was no reaction of surprise or disgust, but evident pleasure on the part of the guest, who in short order devoured the bread, and seemed to want more. Finally, the husband revealed what he had kept hidden until then, explaining that they had just entered a period of famine, and that was why the guest had not been aware of the presence of goat hairs in the bread. For, in times of famine, everything changed its taste, became agreeable to the palate, as long as the mouth had something to chew on, as long as it did not remain empty. The palate, the body, we were told, knew what was coming before the man himself was aware of it. The village was poor in general, but among the poor there were always those who were poorer still. Our lands did not escape this rule. During famines, the poorest were affected more than the poor who had a bit in reserve, a few pots with yesterday’s leftovers or what remained from the previous winter. Things were more complicated for those who had no reserves at all. The story of the family that had traded a field for a meal was well known. The descendants of the relatively rich family in the village who had taken advantage of the situation were still looked on askance because of this exchange

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predicated on hunger. But such disapproval had not returned the field to its former owners. And so the poorest were the most affected. They had no land to swap for food every time they were hungry. And if they did, they would not have been fed for long. The poorest did not have many fields, either. One of those families, which had only one vineyard on land not conducive to agriculture, poorly positioned in relation to the sun and not well endowed with grapes, was constantly struggling with poverty, even in normal times. Father, mother, three boys, and two girls, they tried to make do by labouring in the fields of others. They were destitute but joyful, and working for others was not joyful. They avoided it when they could. But a task refused, a job disdained, had to be replaced by another that would bring in a little sustenance. And in this respect there was not much choice on our heights. One worked the vine, the field, and the forest, or took care of the goats and the animals of those who were busy with those three. They could not work the fields, because they had none, apart from the vineyard rich in leaves but poor in grapes. The share of wood each could cut in the forest was limited. With unremitting overuse, the forest would soon be depleted, what with the need for firewood and wood to sell in town. And so the poor soon resorted to theft. But theft was difficult, because logs are heavy to transport, even in order to sell. Most important, such a theft was badly viewed. Trees, warming us, nourishing the animals, bringing in money when sold, were what kept the village going. You didn’t cut a tree without good 90  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

reason, and you didn’t cut just any tree. You had to be sure young trees would replace the old before disturbing any part of the forest. And you didn’t touch the vines, didn’t damage the vines of others. Trees and vine stocks took precedence over goats. The branches of one, the fruit of the other, allowed a certain latitude, but their bodies had to remain intact. And so one had to avail oneself with moderation, with a smile, of what belonged to others, choosing what was within reach and edible on the spot. A light-hearted theft. Not always so for its victim. It only became a subject for gaiety later, when all that remained of the theft was the exploit, the good-natured side of it that could make people laugh when it was recounted with art and tact. Once the theft had aged a bit, the thieves were the first to turn it into a story and make people laugh at their misdeeds. They told us about their thefts of grapes, of a chicken, of a kid, even of a goat, as if they were legends. About the goat a father had stolen in a nearby village, for instance, which he had led to slaughter in our village, only to return and hide the goat’s head under a pile of branches in the first village, the site of the theft. Getting up in the morning he was aghast to find the goat’s head under a pile of branches in front of his own house. Unable to hide his astonishment, he gave himself away, saying, “But just last night I left it under branches in your village! How could you come back and leave it here?” The goat’s head had made the return trip thanks to the spite of a villager who had seen the ruse and taken the trouble to follow the thief from one village to the other and expose him in the light of day, in full view of all the inhabitants. But even at the time the story had caused more hilarity than resentment. The To the Spring, by Night  ·  91

villagers made reference to this goat’s head whenever they wanted to express their surprise at being faced with a situation that was hard to believe. Thefts might well repeat themselves from father to son, but when there was no spring, they said, you couldn’t turn the mill with the water you fetched. Thefts had their limits; they perhaps helped one to survive in normal times, but they had nothing to offer during a famine, when all kept careful watch over their bits of bread, their fistfuls of salt. You had to try another way. But what could you invent when privation, famine, were everywhere? There was also a saying, “Better to have a full belly, even if it’s the bark of a tree, than to have it empty.” Perhaps that is what one did when there was no other recourse? We didn’t know how the poor held on during difficult times, but they did. They managed to get through the winter and make it to spring along with the others. In any case, miracles didn’t have to draw attention to themselves. They could take place in the obscurity of a hovel and still be miracles. Each fresh shoot glimpsed, each new leaf that appeared, was an invitation to celebrate. With the return of spring, the father sent his boys and girls out to “graze” in a nature that was just beginning to show itself. It threw off its covering, and laid itself open to all. The family’s winter table could now be moved out into the fields. The famine was over, and one sought nourishment in nature. Even in normal times, was the family not known to have green stools during the first days of spring? And so there was a hunt for greenery through the fields, in the woods and the forest. “Herbs or leaves, everything you find 92  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

that’s green, name it and eat it,” advised the father. Another expression that went down in the annals of the village. What was important was to know what one ate, to name what one ate. Everything changed its nature, became known and edible as if by magic, once it was named. Had not the Creator done as much with the first man when he presented him to the angels and the djinns? Had he not taught him the names of things, while the other creatures were deprived of this knowledge? And was it not man’s knowledge of these things, they reminded us, that had confounded some of the djinns? The father may not have been able to teach us the names of things, but he urged the children to name the herbs and in that way to save themselves from famine. And the herbs once named, the famine was swept away until the following winter, if the fields and the forest had enough greenery. But in waiting for spring to return, whether preceded by famine or not – and aside from whatever miracles might manifest themselves in one tiny dwelling or another – man, along with other living things that looked forward to nature’s awakening, knew his share of winter and of hunger. And he who was hungry inspired fear. He inspired fear through his hunger, because hunger was a harbinger of death. It was death made visible. As if air had become scarce and the fire had gone out, to leave us waiting for death to arrive. That was a crack, a flaw in the wheel that made worlds and life turn. The starving man inspired fear through his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth, all of which added hollows to the hollow in the belly, opening wells of fear in the gaze of those who had To the Spring, by Night  ·  93

so far escaped hunger. The starving man inspired fear through his capacity to wait for one knew not what. For a pail of water to be transformed into a pail of honey, for a pile of earth to be transformed into a pile of wheat, a pile of flour. He inspired fear through his patience, where perhaps there germinated the seeds of thefts to come. He inspired fear through his teeth, which at any moment might sink themselves into our morsel of food, if not our flesh. Those who were starving inspired fear in those who still had something to eat for the time being. With their eyes fixed on this emptiness, their empty table yawned open like an abyss before those who had eaten their fill, or barely, at their tables well laid, or barely. An abyss that could at any moment swallow up their meagre sustenance and leave them with only this waiting, this emptiness. And those who were starving inspired fear in each other, just as they inspired fear in those who wanted to keep their provisions out of reach of their hunger. Just so did the cat and the dog, the dog and the wolf, the wolf and the snake, the snake and the chicken inspire fear in each other with their hunger, and feared the hunger of the other. And so the faintest odour of food unleashed flight, anxiety, and fear in the night. And that is how the cemetery in front of our house, the end point of death and hunger, became the place that inspired the greatest nocturnal fear, especially after a burial. Fear of the fresh meat that could appease the craving of an army of the hungry, that could calm them for a time in their flight. For there was no lack of stories about strange beasts that came nightly to unearth freshly buried corpses. Corpses that the earth, as famished as the rest, wanted to keep for 94  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

itself. But its appetite was an appetite for all seasons. It was patient, it could wait because everything returned to it, and so it let go of what had been lowered into it. And there was no dearth of stories about this beast that, according to descriptions, was part wolf, part bear, and part man, stories that added to hunger a fear of the uncertain, of the unknown. For we could not have imagined how afraid we would have been of this thing with the blurred face, this faceless thing, if we had come face to face with it. No one had seen the beast in question. We knew about it from hearsay: a few words from a single source, embroidered with details supplied by the imaginations of those who passed them on. No one had seen it other than a curious villager who, we were told, had hoped to surprise and unmask the beast everyone talked about without having laid eyes on it. But even that went back a long way. Accounts and descriptions were just memories blurred by time. Since it was said that this strange beast visited cemeteries on the night of a fresh burial, and since one could learn nothing from a corpse, whether it stayed in its grave or was unearthed, the villager wanted to confirm the rumours on his own, and decided to play at being dead. Then things would be clear. One day he went and dug a grave and lay down in it at dusk to await the beast. When it was totally dark, he heard footsteps approaching. The beast had found him, had smelled his flesh in the cemetery. It had its limitations and could not distinguish live flesh from dead meat. Either that, or it didn’t care. Flesh was flesh after all, and it wasn’t going to be fussy. And it certainly was not alone in paying little heed To the Spring, by Night  ·  95

to this distinction. Its den or hiding place could not have been far off for it to put in an appearance after every burial, but it must have been well hidden for no one to have yet seen it in the light of day. Hidden near the cemetery, which, however, did not offer many options to someone wanting to stay out of sight. We, who knew the cemetery’s perimeter, had no hiding place where we might take refuge in case of need. But the creature was there, true to its reputation, ferreting about with its nose, circling the grave to be sure it was the only guest at the feast. Pausing from time to time, still ferreting, coming closer and closer. The false corpse stopped breathing when it sensed the beast at the edge of the grave. The beast dropped down, snuffling to be sure of its prey, and began, with its paws and its mouth, to haul the man out of the grave. During all this time the corpse had aroused no suspicions, letting himself be manipulated like a true cadaver. The beast pulled him out of the grave, hoisted him onto a stone to raise him to its height, threw the presumed corpse over its shoulder, and set off, perhaps towards its den. There was something human, the man said, in the way the beast had pulled him out of the grave, had lifted him onto the stone, and had loaded him onto its back. After they’d gone a certain distance, fear got the best of the villager. He didn’t want to take any more chances. As the beast plodded on, he started kicking at it, treating it like a mount. Taken by surprise, the beast gave a start, heaved him a good distance, ran a few metres, and keeled over. And was already dead when the man, back on his feet, went to look at it.

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We were also told about a young woman who had seen it from behind and had at first taken it for human. She had been delayed in a neighbouring village and was returning to her own, not far from ours. Having left at dusk, she spotted a silhouette walking ahead of her. Not wanting to walk alone, she called out to it so it would slow down and she would be able to join it. The silhouette carried on without answering her call, as if it were deaf or hadn’t heard her. Annoyed, she decided to catch up to it and surprise it. She increased her speed without making much noise. As she approached, she saw that the silhouette was carrying a white sack on its back. When she got level with it, she pulled on its burden and asked, “Where are you going? What you’re carrying must be heavy!” To the woman’s astonishment, the beast threw down its load and fled into the darkness. Now she was filled with fear, and frozen in place. Once the fear and shock had passed, she bent over the load and saw that it was a corpse that had just been dug up. She returned to the village to report what she had seen, so the villagers could reclaim their dead. And they buried it a second time. A silhouette with a corpse on its back and a flight into the darkening night. That is what she had seen of this strange beast. She didn’t know whether the beast was erect or on all fours; nor could she say how it held its load on its back. When carrying the corpse it seemed upright, but when scurrying into the darkness, it looked to be on all fours. The descriptions we had of it came from a trick played on the beast while it was trying to lay hands on what would keep it alive for a while in its hiding place, and from an untimely

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encounter with a fellow traveller who disturbed it in its work. And ever since, even though no one had seen any beasts of that sort, and even if there had been no more talk of corpses being dug up, the beast and its legend still haunted our winter nights. Nights when, being idle, we were more vulnerable than during the day which, thanks to our games and occupations, kept such thoughts and fears at bay. Nights when, even out in the open, mysterious as ever, the beast was hidden from our eyes, while we, even within our walls, were assailed by the terror it never ceased to inspire in us. Winter passed with or without starvation and famine. It was only a parenthesis. We were warm during the day, cozy inside our houses, playing on the carpets and cushions, and when we were hungry we ate warm bread or a slow-cooked meal, or, as night fell, some dried fruit and a few cakes around the stove while listening to stories and tales told by a visiting uncle or aunt. On those occasions we didn’t complain about winter. Sheltered from outside disturbances, we could savour this period of rest, this period of calm. It was, however, a parenthesis that froze our feet when they got wet in our plastic shoes. A parenthesis that numbed our hands, especially the tips of our fingers, which we warmed with our breath so we could feel them and keep playing in the snow all afternoon; or that burned our ears, made the ends of our noses red, then violet, after we’d been playing or tending a small herd of goats for hours in the snow outside the village, or after we’d gone with our father or big brother to gather dried oak branches for the animals still in the stable. Branches

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of oak that were cut during the summer and stored in a tree, high up, to be there for winter. Or the fresh branches of that tree, the evergreen oak that surrounded our houses with its little spiny leaves, green and bright, in every season. But it was a parenthesis and winter passed. It folded its tent and beat a retreat, with all the remaining snow and cold. It retired to the mountains behind our mountains, they said, mountains as endless in expanse as in height, there to prepare for the following winter. It took away its snow and left behind the solid ground as we remembered it. It was then that the known and the unknown changed places. With the snow and winter gone, everything became identifiable, the woods once more the woods, the terrace once more the terrace. Having grown up by one more winter, we had gained some ground on the unknown, and in the absence of snow there were no more wolf tracks on the terraces. That didn’t mean that no goat came back with its leg torn to shreds or ripped off, or failed to return with the herd. It was just that, unlike in winter, the wolf came no closer than our mountains, where it lurked around our goats. When one of them disappeared, we went to see Sofi Oussiv.

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c Sofi Oussiv was the most pious man in the village; he was the one who knew the most suras by heart, even if he couldn’t read or write; who never interrupted the telling of his beads and his incantations; who never left out a single prayer, and who always reserved a part of the water he brought with him from the mountain for his ablutions, whereas others only collected it to drink; who was said to be privy to things invisible and inexpressible; who at all times of the day and all times of the year, walked and talked without anxiety or haste; who never insulted his goat, or even his donkey; who when he walked abroad shared his meal with the birds and the ants; who stopped on his way when they were in trouble, returning a lost sparrow to its nest; who removed stones from the path for fear that a passerby or beast of burden might stumble; who bandaged a dove’s wounded foot with a bit of cloth cut from his shirt; who planted mulberry trees near the springs and tended them for the birds, for the joy of children, and the comfort of travellers; who arranged the springs so that everything alive could drink there in peace and enjoy the cool and the shade that surrounded them. He was the only one in the village no one had ever heard raise his voice or shout. The only one who, whatever the situation, never cursed; who extended charity and compassion to the person before him, even in the face of hostility.

And the verses, in order for them to have their beneficent effect, had to be recited in a voice free of the baser impulses in this world below, the grownups said, a voice that commanded the respect even of one’s enemies. And so we went to the most pious man in the village, respected as such by the four corners of the village, to have him recite the verses that would, by night, lock up the jaws of the wolf. He whose animal was lost went to him with a pocket knife and gave it to him. Sofi Oussiv began to recite: In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful I swear by the sun and its brightness, And the moon when it follows the sun, And the day when it reveals it, And the night when it draws a veil over it, And the heaven and Him Who made it, And the earth and Him Who extended it, And the soul and Him Who made it perfect, … That as for him who gives alms and fears God, And believes in the best, We will grant him an easy end. But as for him who is niggardly, and longs for wealth, And calls the good a lie, We will turn his easy life into a difficult one … Allah in his greatness is truthful. To the Spring, by Night  ·  101

The recital finished, Sofi Oussiv breathed three times on the blade and closed the knife: “O Great One, as I close the blade of this knife, so in Your Goodness, keep shut the jaws of the wolf to protect the lost beast of Your poor servant.” He gave the knife back to the supplicant, for him to keep it closed all night. The supplicant went back to his house with the knife in his pocket, and hope in his heart. Sometimes the animal was recovered safe and sound, in which case the knife had been kept well closed. Sometimes only its remains were found, and so the knife must have been opened by accident. In that case what ought to have been eaten was eaten, what ought to have disappeared had disappeared, what ought to have died had died. We knew that the verses could not do away with the wolf. That the verses were there for the wolves as well as for man. But that we could try to protect ourselves from the wolf’s hunger, if only through the verses, not forgetting that the wolf also had his verses in his language. And that the wolf’s incantation could sometimes prevail over the recitation of man. The grownups told us that animals were most often closer to the spirit of the verses than man. They said that animals, by nature, could only obey him who rules, while man, with the possibilities that were open to him, could turn away and distance himself from this spirit. Which made man more worthy than the animals when he remained true to the spirit and turned his back on the transgressions available to him. Knowing that animals recited verses, each in its own language, brought us closer to them. Perhaps not to the wolf, always an object of terror, envied, admired, and feared all at

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once, but to the other animals, and especially the birds when they began to sing. Birds whose chirping brought us closer to our brothers and sisters in the cradle, who gave us big smiles when we imitated birdsongs for them. We replied to birds with bits of verses we knew by heart, trying to answer their calls. We were happy when an exchange took place. Their peeping made the sound of the verses more pleasant. But we could not make out what the dogs were reciting when they ran through the streets of the village, nor the wolves when they made us afraid with their tracks in the snow and the marks of their teeth on the legs of the goats. Every verse is full of compassion, they said, but there was also the wrath of the verses against everything infamous. But then, why was the wrath of the dog and the wolf directed at us and at the goat when we and the goat were deserving of compassion? There were things we would know later, when we were bigger, we were told. And so we learned patience, even in fear. Patience nurtured both compassion and wrath. There was wrath that was only compassion, and compassion that was only infamy in disguise. The way things appeared did not always reflect the truth. We had to gravitate toward the true nature of things, toward their truth, they advised us. “Lord, show us the truth of each thing,” prayed the grownups. But how to expect the true nature of a bite to be revealed to us, when the goat was bitten and we were afraid of the dog? I had kept the knife tightly shut in my pocket when my father sent me to Sofi Oussev, to ask him to recite verses for our lost goat. I loved the goats because of their gentleness, because

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of the softness of their gaze. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them. Even if I sometimes made them unhappy by hitting them with a stick, because a goat when it wants something is very stubborn, that is known, and a child can and must be more stubborn than the goats if he wants to tend them. It is perhaps for that reason that the grownups entrust them to us, not themselves being patient and stubborn enough to deal with them. But I didn’t have anything against the goats as long as they weren’t making me crazy, as long as I wasn’t going to be reprimanded by an uncle, or by my father on my return, because they had done damage to someone’s fruit tree or someone else’s wheat field. Our house was at the east end of the village, and depending how they arrived, our goats were either the first to return when the herd came from the east, or the last when the herd came from the west. That day they came from the west, with the last glow of the sun behind them. They took their time getting through the village to the house, especially the curious ones who, before being closed in for the night, wanted to see what there was in every stable along the way, reluctant to leave any of them behind. Realizing that we were missing one of those curious goats, we went to see if it was perhaps dawdling somewhere as usual, mingling with the goats in a stable that was well stocked. We went all around the village without finding the goat. It was getting dark, and clearly the goat had not been delayed by curiosity; it must have wandered off far from the village, since the shepherd hadn’t noticed it on the way back. As soon as we were sure it was missing, my father called me and handed me his knife. I took the knife

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and ran to request the prayer for the wolf, while a big brother went looking for the goat with a shepherd, retracing the path of the herd. Sofi Oussev was coming to the end of his evening prayer when I arrived. He performed his last genuflections, recited his prayers in a sitting position, acknowledged the angels and humans on either side. He ended with invocations and recitations, and then asked the reason for my visit and enquired after my father. The dinner plate was set down near the stove. He faced the stove, in the position he assumed to eat: his left leg bent, supporting the body, the right knee raised, held against the stomach. It was different from most men in the village, who sat cross-legged to eat. This position, which Sofi Oussiv had learned from the wise men he had met, pressed on the stomach so that you could not fill it too much. The wise men had warned against excess in three things, we were later to learn. Too much food, because it weighed a man down and bent him under the burden of his body; too much speech, because it numbed the mind and turned one away from meditation; and too much sleep, because it made a man lazy and wasted his most precious possession, time – because sleep, too much sleep, shortened the time that might be spent on prayer and learning. Time was the greatest treasure given to man as he passed across this earth. This journey here below was for the trial of the soul, and it was the body that bore the soul upon that journey. Everything counted, both sleep and waking, and no waste was allowed.

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God was a hidden treasure, they said. He wanted to be known, and created the soul, which had the capacity to know him. Once it was created, he brought the soul before him to contemplate the treasure he was, as one would set before a friend, as a gift, what was most dear to oneself, and most secret. All souls lived in this infinite love, lived in contemplation. One day, god addressed the assembly of souls and asked them: “Do you see me as a Friend?” The assembly replied: “Of course we see you as a Friend.” God said to them: “Then I am going to send you away to see if you are sincere, to see if you will be able not to forget.” That, we were told, is how the souls were scattered, how they were exiled far from the presence of the Friend, and were subjected in this life, in this world, to the trial of love beset by absence. In preparation for this trial, flesh was bestowed on the soul as an envelope and as a carrier. The soul was implanted within the envelope. And god ordered it down to earth to put its vow of love to the test. That is why we were told that god’s house on earth was within man. Neither the skies nor the earth could welcome god into their abode; he could only find refuge in the heart of man. His infinite being could only be at home in the vastness of this heart he had forged for it as a dwelling place. The soul’s domicile during this journey was also god’s dwelling place in the midst of his creation, they told us. And we had to keep such a place pristine; we had to keep it accessible. Those who wanted to harbour this Friend in their house had to maintain it in the best state possible. Those who wanted to welcome the Friend into their home had to be vigilant and not become forgetful. This heart must not be tainted by evil, even in thought; it must not be made 106  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

unsuitable as a dwelling place for the Friend by the slightest bit of forgetting. There is one goal on this journey, we were told: to hold fast to the memory of the Friend and of love. This journey through the world, this trial of absence, must be completed without many mishaps or much forgetting, if one is to fulfil one’s destiny by returning to the point of departure. If one is to set eyes once more on the Friend’s face, to gaze upon it, to be in his presence, in his love’s secret heart. There were many chances to forget along the way. Every piece of finery, every beautiful thing here below could be a sign, a reminder of that first beauty granted the human eye, but it could also become a veil if man’s heart stopped short at the surface of beauty and took it for the goal. A reminder could become a source of distraction. Only through watchfulness could the heart penetrate these veils, these occasions for forgetfulness, and turn them into lanterns that would light its passage. But the carrier, the bearer, the soul’s mount, needed sustenance, needed strength to serve the soul in the course of its journey, in its trial of absence, in order that the body, they told us, not be a prison for the heart nor the heart a veil for the soul. Because in forgetting, what ought to induce watchfulness could become a well of sleep. To negotiate the route successfully you had to exercise moderation in caring for the mount. There was no room for indulgence or for privation. One was as harmful as the other, they told us. Caring for one’s needs ought not to be the principal preoccupation of the soul, ought not to veil its light and make it stray from the path of the trial. Privation ought not To the Spring, by Night  ·  107

to slow one’s progress. And one ought to be moderate in all things so that the mount will remain nimble, and so that its heaviness will not hobble the lightness of the soul, not weigh the journey down. So we were told. And so Sofi Oussiv sat in his preferred position, a serene smile on his face. I held the knife out to him, saying I had come because of our lost goat. He opened the knife, read the verses, breathed on the blade, asked mercy for the creatures, closed the knife up, and gave it back to me: “Everything comes from god, nothing is done that is not his will. Keep this knife closed until tomorrow at noon. After that, open it so the wolf will no longer suffer. Because if the verses are recited well, and the incantation accepted, he can eat nothing as long as the knife is closed. If the goat had lagged behind, the shepherd would already have brought it back. If it was destined for the wolves, it will be eaten sooner or later.” He invited me to share his meal. But one must not accept an invitation when one’s parents are not present; one must not occupy the house of one’s host longer than necessary. I took the knife, put it in my pocket, and ran home holding it tightly in my hand in order to keep the wolf’s jaws shut. Sometimes it was not the right knife, or it was not the right person who brought the knife, and the wolf devoured the goat. At other times one had become aware too late of the goat’s disappearance, and the wolf had eaten it before the recitation. Or the wolf itself had pronounced such an invocation that the On High declared the recitation and the verses void, and freed up the wolf’s jaws so that the goat might fulfil 108  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

its destiny. So that the round of creation might continue, that the earth be covered with grass, that the grass nourish the goat, that the goat absorb our fear and deposit it in the entrails of the wolf. So that the wolf, in turn, leave it in its tracks in the snow, and live in dread of man, in dread of the hunter following the tracks. We never escaped unscathed from a fear inflicted on another, they told us; we always bore within us, somewhere, traces of the claws that had been planted in the flesh of the other. A kind of sadness and fright crept into us when the wolf ate a goat, when it devoured it along with its fear. When a goat came back bitten, torn to pieces, we went to examine the bite, to inspect the marks the wolf left on the goat, marks much more visible and unsettling than its tracks on our terraces in winter. We went to see the fear of the goat, which was to some degree our fear. If it had been consumed, we went to hear the accounts of those who had seen the goat’s remains, to learn how it had been eaten, and where exactly its skin had been separated from its body, thus situating its fear and its death within the geography, for the most part imaginary, that we had of the village’s surroundings, a geography that we had to domesticate bit by bit, from day to day, but which we still considered to be the domain of the wolf. The day after the prayer at Sofi Oussiv’s, our goat came back with its hind leg torn open. Those in the village with the necessary skills all came together. They warmed oil and dressed the wound. They grilled salt and smeared it over the wound. They found animal bones, burned them in the fire, ground them up and covered the wound with them. They brought goat To the Spring, by Night  ·  109

hair to spread over the wound. They wrapped everything in a cloth. After ten days our goat’s leg was crawling with worms. My father cut its throat and carried it far from the village to throw it to the wolves, from which we had perhaps wrested it, thanks to the prayer, when they were already gnawing at it – to the wolves and to their brothers, the dogs. Our goat was shared out among dogs and wolves. Three days later, when we passed by that place again, all that was left were a few bones and pieces of hardened skin with hair attached. Those were times when the wolf devoured the goat and its fear, and the fear left the wolf’s entrails to lodge in ours. The grownups said that the goat lived with this fear in its gut, that it never forgot it except under the shears when we clipped its hair, and under the knife when we slashed its throat. Two moments when the fear of iron was more immediate than the fear of teeth. Two moments when the presence of man was more threatening than the ferocity of the wolf. Man, who protected it from the wolf, the better to slip it under the shears, and later the knife. All the rest of the time it was haunted by this fear. And it had to pass a little of it on to us when it looked up at us with its liquid eyes. I never understood where it came from, the goat’s terror of the shears and the knife. You would have thought it had already had its throat cut, had been resuscitated after being cut in pieces, roasted on the fire, eaten, gnawed; and had preserved from that first experience the memory of the knife on its jugular vein, the memory of teeth in its charred flesh, and now saw in the sharp blades of the shears and the knife the source of its first fears, saw in the face of the man holding it 110  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

in his grip the first of its executioners and the first to devour it. Yes, you would have said that this fear harked back to another age. To everyone his language, to everyone his fear, his gaps in memory. As for us, we understood that forgetfulness could be fatal, especially when there was a knife that had to stay closed as protection from the jaws of the wolf. No one was immune to forgetfulness, or safe from another’s hunger. Even if its tracks no longer appeared in front of our doors, the wolf was always there. It had just moved a little way off. Our fear in the night was kept at bay and our terraces were ours until the following winter. But forgetfulness and repose were fleeting. It would be back along with the fear that would banish such forgetting. In the meantime, the wolf didn’t leave us alone with ourselves. It signed to us through the fear of the goat, its shredded leg, and what we were told of the goat’s scattered remains in the domain of the wolf.

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c It should be said that there was more to the wolf than fear. We knew it was in its nature to reflect something else than the fear that dwelt within us. If man projected onto the wolf something other than fear, then the wolf could show different sides to its character. The grownups told us that creatures conformed to the gaze we directed at them. If it was one of compassion, the wolf could graze with the goats, the sparrow feed with the eagle, the dove welcome the serpent into its nest. We knew that wild animals, revealing another side to their nature, could become companions to man, lightening his load and watching over his herd, as long as man was attentive to their appetites. We learned that from the grownups, who had learned it from those who preceded them, and it all went back to the greatest man in the village, Hâji Mouss, whose grave on its bit of land in the cemetery faced our house. Hâji Mouss, it was said, had been a shepherd to antelopes. But before he adopted that name, he was just Mouss. Hâji was a title bestowed upon those who had made the pilgrimage. Mouss had an older brother rich enough and pious enough that, when the time came, he decided to set off for the Friend’s sacred dwelling place and complete the pilgrimage. Such a journey meant preparing oneself for a great enterprise, a foretaste of that final leave-taking for which each person must hold himself ready. It meant leaving possessions and

dear ones behind to join with other pilgrims, also relieved of all ties, in a coming together that revived a man’s primal sense of belonging. Crossing mountains and deserts, towns and villages, the brother set off for Mecca. It was after the overnight vigil on Mount Arafat, the most solemn moment of the pilgrimage when pilgrims gathered on a bare plateau, and – as if they had been deposited onto sand and revived by a rain that, it was said, would raise the dead like flower buds on the day decreed – opened their hearts to the memory of the Friend. After that night, Mouss’s brother lingered a little to savour that instant, which was like a homecoming, a foretaste for the pilgrim of the crowning moment to come at the end of every life. The sun was already high, and the heat of the desert was beginning to make itself felt. He recited one last prayer on the mountain, then remained seated and, in his contemplation, thought about his brother, about the antelopes in the mountains around the village, the grasses they fed on, the trees toward which they climbed. In his mind’s eye he saw their repose in shadow, and within his ears, heard the sounds of their chewing. In his nostrils was the scent of tender shoots, fresh flowers; in his mouth the taste of wild berries. And more than anything, he had a sudden craving for the bowl of milk Mouss offered him whenever he paid him a visit. Emotion clouded his eyes with a veil of moisture. He was suddenly transported to the coolness of the mountains near the village, with Mouss and his antelopes. He was in a state of ecstasy, with that lightness brought on by crossing those forests and those mountains in the heart of spring. He did not know how long his meditation lasted, nor the amount of time his vision of these distant places had stolen from him To the Spring, by Night  ·  113

in this place of prayer. When he came back to himself to rise and depart, a bit confused by these yearnings, by this absence on the mountain, he saw before him his brother’s bowl brimming with warm milk. He accepted it as a sign of grace sent to him through his brother, and he drank the bowl of milk. When he returned to the village, the local inhabitants came to visit the brother to honour the completion of his pilgrimage, and to partake in their turn of the blessings such a journey bestows. In approaching someone who had visited those places, they wanted to feel themselves in the presence of that distant prayer that resembled no other, and which they would perhaps never have the opportunity to perform. As soon as he understood that the people from nearby had come to pay him this visit, he came out to greet them and asked them to turn back and go to his brother Mouss, the shepherd of antelopes, saying, “I may have completed the journey, but he is the pilgrim.” And it is Mouss who was called the pilgrim, following the revelations of his brother. Now Hâji Mouss, he remained the shepherd of antelopes, watching over both the antelopes and his land. Wild animals, the grownups told us, could distinguish a gaze of compassion from a look of fear or a glare of hatred, and they told us the story of the antelope shepherd and the wolf. One day, as he was leading his antelopes to pasture, Hâji Mouss received an invitation to attend a meeting of the wise men and scholars of his time. Unable to delay his departure, or to refuse the invitation, and not wanting to leave his herd without protection, he entrusted it to a wolf. He designated 114  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

an antelope for its meal, telling it not to touch the bones, and afterward to put them aside. Hâji Mouss left for the meeting, and the wolf guarded the herd and ate the designated antelope, laying aside the bones. On his return Hâji Mouss found everything in order. He approached the pile of bones, touched it with his staff, and said, “Rise, O living one!” and the antelope stood erect. But it was limping. The shepherd had said nothing about the cartilage, and the wolf had gnawed at it too energetically. The grownups told us that story, and we saw that even between beast and man something could always be forgotten. The lapse could be more or less serious, but still, what was essential was not lost. Even limping, even without its cartilage, the antelope stood on its feet. The wolf had set the bones aside and had guarded its companion’s herd, and the antelopes had gone along with the bargain, fleeing neither man nor wolf, even if it meant becoming lame, and perhaps hoping that one day each of them would be more careful not to forget. But sometimes, between man and wolf, there was neither fear nor distance, each having found in the company of the other sufficient joy to encourage them to come together over the years, over a lifetime. What is important is to find the key to the other, to discover the path that can lead us to its dwelling place. Because, we were told, beings are like fortresses, with steep heights that discourage any impulse to approach one another. And without a word to bridge the gap, without a key to open a door, they can, in the same neighbourhood, remain strangers, hostile. Each can close himself off in fear of the nearby fortress, in fear of the cliff before him, in the fright To the Spring, by Night  ·  115

each inspired in the other for lack of this key, for lack of a path that would lead one to the other. Once the key is found, the path discovered, knowledge supplants apprehension, joy takes the place of fear. For man can come close to what surrounds him through the knowledge the Creator bestowed on the first of men, knowledge that was in man when he introduced man to the angels and to the djinns, the grownups said. Man can recover this bond. And other meetings between man and wolf were cited, in addition to those, forced or fortuitous, of the people in the vicinity. To the legend of wolves they added a figure that you might encounter without fear on any path, they added the legend of the so-called wolf man. The wolf man’s house was in the north, a bit outside the village, near a few cliffs, and on the edge of the forest. Having found a language common to them both, he spoke with the wolves, and lived with them, it was said, for a good part of his life, participating in their councils, their hunting, and their feasts. He shared with them cold and hunger, abundance and fine weather, their raids and their hunts. With the wolves he howled in joy and distress, tasted the euphoria and the anguish of night, experienced their fear of men and dogs, and the fear they inspired in men, dogs, and other animals. How often the villagers had seen him vanish at the call of the wolves, and return days later to give an account to the people, curious to know how he could spend so much time in the company of these beasts they tried to avoid, of his travels side by side with these wolves who were his friends. As all joy has its sorrow, so the pleasure he experienced in going off with them was marred by the occasional misadventure. But he loved the company of wolves, as they did his. 116  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

When he went with the wolves he first drew them away from the village, avoiding other communities, and led them into the deep woods so that their hunting would do no harm to humans and what was precious to them. The villagers, seeing him as an intermediary between themselves and the wolves, came to complain to him if damage had been done, even if he had not been with the wolves on that day. He had from time to time eaten human flesh when he came upon the wolves at the end of their hunt and was invited to share the prey with the rest of the pack, the prey being, on rare occasions, a human being. In his opinion, the best part of a man was the flesh of the heel. Sometimes, on his return, the people in the village found him robust, at other times thin and gaunt. And so they asked him why he stayed with the wolves when it became difficult. To leave their company was not easy. You could not, at the first hardship, abandon those whose abundance you had shared. Part of the comradeship was to share with the wolves both plenty and dearth, the sweet and the bitter. There were times, during a storm, when there was nothing to eat for several days, and they had to take refuge in their dens with a few roots they were able to dig up here and there and gnaw upon while they waited for another means of survival, like an infant cheating hunger with his thumb while waiting for his mother’s milk. It was said that, like every creature, the wolves too, on days when there was no hunting, in months when every living thing was hunkered down where it dwelt, when everything moist was covered over with ice and snow, when hunger alone had something it could gnaw on, when in the depths To the Spring, by Night  ·  117

of hunger they had no resort but to appeal to the heavens … the wolves, they said, only in such extreme circumstances, received sustenance from on high. It was their howling, they said, between fear and invocation, between sob and prayer, which reached the farthest limits of the sky and brought down sustenance. And it was even said that my maternal grandfather had tasted that food. Caught one day in a snowstorm, he had taken refuge in the hollow of a rock. The wolves were assembled not far off. Turning themselves around, turning around each other, they had formed a circle on this carpet of snow, as when men come together for a summoning, and they began to emit howls that were like prayers or supplications sent past the grey clouds to the heavens. One after the other, howling back and forth, giving repeated vent to their cries, pausing, starting in again, and hurling their calls beyond the storm, as if pleading to heaven. And from the sky there dropped down food in the form of balls, larger than a fist, whiter than the flakes that continued to swirl. One ball for each wolf. One ball for the open mouth of each wolf, consumed with great calm and satisfaction. With an appearance of gratitude, and reverence. Once the balls were eaten, and their hunger appeased by this celestial manna, the wolves left the scene and scattered. Dazzled, and at the same time astounded by what he had witnessed, and wanting to sample this food that might sate his hunger, my grandfather ventured out of his shelter and, scraping up a few crumbs of the nourishment mixed with snow, tasted them. It was said that he never forgot the taste of those crumbs. That when it was snowy and cold, he went searching 118  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

for another opportunity to share in the prayers of starving wolves. But the chance never came. And it was during one of those cold spells that he was found strangled, with that glimmer of hope deep in his eyes, that softness of mien that had become familiar ever since his encounter with the wolf balls. He lay not far from the spot where he spoke of having partaken of that celestial nourishment. We never knew what revelation he had had just before dying, or which face of death had appeared to him. We were also told about men praying in times of extreme destitution and hunger. They said it happened during the reign of Caliph Omar, when the new faith of the southern lands was spreading to the north. And when the people of the south travelled up in company with this faith to establish it on the northern plateaus. First arrived those with swords to propagate it, then men of peace to perpetuate it in the newly converted lands. The tribe of Hâji Mouss’s ancestors, from the region near Mecca, would have been among those who migrated north at the beginning of this upheaval, so we were told. The migration would have been led by Ayzer Ghéffari, one of the first followers of this new faith; Ayzer Ghéffari, whom I always envisioned in the company of his brother, staff in hand, coming down the far-off hill where his tomb was to be seen, below our village, to pay one of his visits to the messenger from Mecca. Visits that had made him one of the most beloved of followers, so it was said. The caravan for the north left with Ayzer. It arrived without incident at Mosul, one of the first stops on the northern route. The travellers spent the winter there and, with the To the Spring, by Night  ·  119

return of the good weather, continued on toward the northwest. They were caught in an ambush in the mountain passes between Mosul and Cizîr, and half of them perished. They stopped at Cizîr long enough to recover from their losses and wounds, and then took the road toward Harran. The crossing of this semi-arid plateau was difficult. Toward the middle of the crossing, they were raided and stripped of the provisions and mounts that were left to them. Extreme destitution. A hundred people remained, counting the women and children, with no food, no shelter, and no animals, in the summer heat of these arid lands and the cold of their nights. They walked for several days, wandering in this no man’s land, at the end of their strength. There were losses from thirst, heat, hunger, cold. Not that they were trying to avoid death, but they wanted god to allow them to reach the destination they had set for themselves, in order to accomplish the good they had promised. They wanted to know these new lands, to honour them, allow their little ones time to grow up there, take root, become one with them. Death was the end of the journey, they were accepting of that. There would be an end, here or there. And in any case, they would be happy to come home to the divine presence. Ayzer turned to the On High to ask him for help and guidance. The grownups told us that one might wonder why such an ordeal should occur when one was trying to accomplish an act worthy of divine mercy. An ordeal might befall us in order to put our goodness to the test, to see how dedicated we were to the accomplishment of this good, and to ensure that the good not be done lightly, that we pay the price for it. That once it was accomplished, it had to its credit its share of 120  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

hardship and devotion. A journey that was to alter the nature of its destination forever had to be burdened with hardship. To change the other was not to change it through the imposition of one’s power, one’s pretensions, one’s desire for wealth and glory. It was to go in all humility to endow it with a clarity that would redeem it from its forgetfulness, if there were forgetfulness, that would open it to the beyond within itself, would return to it a redolence of this first love. Man should be a reminder for man, not his scourge, his punishment. And the journey to the other, in the course of its completion, had to bring about the humility, the lucidity, that Ayzer and his companions must have come to know in the course of their journey. Their destitution having reached these extremes, the On High took pity on them, and, with the infinite generosity of his mercy, he brought them into the presence of a herd of antelopes and their shepherd. Every three days the herd and the shepherd appeared to them, quenched their thirst and satisfied their hunger before disappearing. At the end of their journey the shepherd returned with his herd of antelopes, entrusted the herd to their care, and then disappeared, said the grownups. So it was that Ayzer Ghéffari and his tribe arrived safely at their destination, and settled there, near our village. And the herd of antelopes that Hâji Mouss tended was descended from the herd inherited from that journey.

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c But winter had an end, and the wolves other domains. In moving off, they freed us from fear and left us with what we knew: the stream, the field, the woods; the fronts of the houses converted into stables for the goats in the first months of spring, the terraces where we slept with our eyes in the stars, thousands upon thousands of stars, which pierced the night’s canvas with their light, lavished their coolness upon us on the hot summer nights, directed our gaze beyond fear. On those terraces the night was consummated in the wide-open eyes of our dreams. My mother had shown me the stars of Laylâ and Majnûn, the lovers, one night with a full moon under a clear sky teeming with stars, when we were on our way home from a visit. Majnûn loved Laylâ, his cousin. They had grown up together, tending their herds of goats near their tents. They had played together, with their goats or on the backs of their camels. They had drunk at the same oases, gazed on the same dunes. From stopping place to stopping place, they had crossed expanses of desert and mountains. Laylâ was beautiful, more beautiful than the gazelles that Majnûn spotted from time to time near his goats. And Majnûn was more beautiful than a bird in the sky. Their love was comparable to their beauty. The more they grew, the greater was their love. But Laylâ and

Majnûn’s beauty and love had their enemies. And just as their love was about to flower in all its strength and beauty, the enemies became afraid, hatched a plot, and separated Laylâ and Majnûn. He was locked up with his goat and his camel, and she was led away with her family and her tribe. It became impossible for them to live their love on earth. As they were about to succumb to their enemies, god, in his compassion, brought them up to the sky, alive, one with the other. He took them from their enemies, so they could be reunited in the sky. And, at the end of time, under the peaceful reign of the Mahdi, god would bring them back down to earth so that their love would be consummated. The two stars were separated, far from one another, each one brilliant in its own part of the sky. My mother told me they were waiting for the living to fall asleep before coming together, as they did every night. And if, as you fought off sleep, you were to surprise them in their union, they could make your wishes come true as long as you kept their secret. I told myself that if I ever managed to surprise them I would wish to live for a thousand years with my sweet cousin, the star of my heart, who would have become my wife. I was already tending the goats, but my cousin, smaller than me, didn’t do so yet. We were not the same age, as Laylâ and Majnûn were. But in a few years we would be able to tend the goats together just like them, near the village. Knowing the territory and a few secrets about goats and other things, I would teach them to her in my turn. I had only seen gazelles from very far away, but that was enough to persuade me of their beauty. My cousin was beautiful also, with a beauty that To the Spring, by Night  ·  123

would not take long to flower. And we would perhaps come upon some gazelles and gaze at them together. This love deep in my heart had no enemies. And so I was going to ask to live a thousand years of happiness with my cousin, who would be my wife. But the evenings were short, the nights were short, and sleep was heavy and long. Laylâ and Majnûn each stayed on their own side of the starry sky of my childhood nights. And my cousin remained under these stars, deprived of the antelopes that inhabited my childhood gaze. Yes, the known world was the terraces, the fence below the terraces that encircled the resting place of the goats and the horse, mingling their ruminations and mastications with our sleep, and interweaving their waking lives with our dreams. Then there was the slope below the fences, up to the borders of the cemetery, an empty space. The empty space that I overflew in my airiest dreams, and filled with multicoloured marbles in those dreams brimming with incident. The empty space inhabited by the dead, in the centre of which rose the tomb of Hâji Mouss, the guardian of this space opposite our house, and guardian of all it contained. Hâji Mouss was the patron saint of orphans and of old people lost in the fog or the gloom of night, for whom he lit a candle to guide them to a safe haven. He was also the patron saint of the vines, and of the goats, and protected them from thieves and wolves. He protected the wolf from the forest, the forest from fire, the fire from rain. He protected the tortoise, which we would hang by the neck to bring on the rain. He protected the ant that, wanting to cross the spring, risked falling into 124  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

the water and drowning. He protected whoever held a branch over the spring like a bridge, to ease the crossing of the ants. He gave grass to the goats, milk to the shepherd. He was Hâji Mouss, reigning over the dead and the living in our land. A land blessed by the saint, the wolf, and the goat. And so we felt that our herds, our forests, and our vines were protected from any ill will those around our village might bear them. For the possessions of some people might appear excessive, making others want to take them away. Some, rather than asking that everyone prosper together, might bring on the ruin of others along with their own, as we heard in the story of the poor man who, having no mount, asked god to give him a donkey. God told him that, if he asked for a mule for his neighbour, who already had a donkey, then he would be able to have a donkey. And the supplicant, horrified that the neighbour might then have a mule, replied that he would rather have no mount at all than give a mule to his neighbour. We didn’t have much in our hills, but the little we had could provoke jealousy, could lead to a hatred that we found difficult to understand, and that sometimes gave rise to extreme acts. Acts that had to contend with the vigilance of Hâji Mouss. Those who wanted to damage a vineyard were pursued by the stakes that supported the vine stocks, as if a dozen invisible hands were wielding them to chase the culprits from the vineyard. Others, seeking vengeance for a dispute between our two villages, wanted to cut down a part of our forest during the night. With every blow inflicted on the tree, their tools were damaged rather than the tree. Still others stole a goat from the herd and led it away to cut its throat in the caves on a To the Spring, by Night  ·  125

neighbouring village’s land. They lit a fire and put the meat on a large platter. During the night they fried up the meat and, once it was cooked, they doused the fire, planning to rest so that they could better enjoy the feast that awaited them. When they awoke, the meat had been transformed into filth. Confounded, on the following days they came with profuse apologies to confess their misdeeds and misadventures. They brought offerings and food to Hâji Mouss’s tomb and asked his forgiveness. By the end of the visit the disputes were settled, hatred and animosity had disappeared, and there were no more such initiatives for a very long time. And Hâji Mouss continued to watch over the land and those who came to him for protection. But sometimes the villagers themselves turned on each other and did spiteful things. In such cases, the saint did not intervene, but let those who considered themselves his children resolve their differences on their own. Differences that could lead to insults, shouting, stones aimed at the head of an adversary. At other times things could become more serious, going so far as the destruction of plantings and crops and even vineyards, all during the night, of course. To speak of night is to speak of a veil cast over an act committed, to speak of uncertainty and ignorance. And ignorance was unbearable, especially when it was a matter of knowing who had set fire to a field of grain at harvest time, who might have gone so far as to raze a vineyard. Night was mute, the authors of the act kept their lips sealed, of course, and Hâji Mouss did nothing either. The wrongdoers must have belonged to the village.

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But how to know, how not to wound one’s neighbour or one’s neighbour’s neighbour with wrongful accusations? One day, it happened to our vineyard. While we were doing our daily inspection, we found a good half of our vines cut down to the ground. What anguish, what misery for the hands, the feet, the eyes that had for so long worked to raise them up, to bring them to maturity, so that they would at last be filled with pride for the grapes they were going to bear! The fruits of five years of labour lay there, despondent. They had lost their self-respect, their freshness, they were green no more. And we had no one to suspect. No recent differences or animosities. We reviewed the entire village, all the possible offenders, but could decide on no one. Nor could we bear this uncertainty. It was as if placing a head on the arms and shoulders that had struck down our vines, a face on the head and a name on the face, would ease the pain we felt. That same night, other vineyards had been razed. Above all, that of a great-cousin who had no more reason than we did to fear such an act. He was as much in the dark as we were and wanted to find out who could have done something so disgraceful. He had heard about a man in a village far off on the plain, a man who with his science could unmask those evildoers, those rats in the night. He discussed it with my father, and they agreed to go and see him. My older brother left for this village with the cousin. After a day’s walk, with everything it entailed, they arrived at the village, found the man in question, and explained the situation. The man told them they should have come with a child who was no more than seven

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or eight years old, and knew the villagers and the area. My brother was too old for the exercise to succeed. But seeing that he knew how to read and write, they agreed that he should note down the necessary formulas and prayers. The cousin and my brother came back from their trip, not with the criminal unmasked, but with invocations and prayers for my brother to recite at home that would achieve the same end. He immediately set things in motion. The child who was going to participate in the experiment had to have reached the age of reason, had to be able to distinguish good from evil, but could not be spiteful in any way. His thoughts could not be tainted or led astray by wickedness, and he had to be close to innocence, open to wisdom. You could not go looking far and wide for such a child. There was a confidentiality to the operation that had to be respected. We could not arouse suspicions in our search for the guilty party. And so my big brother resorted to his two younger brothers. I must have been six or seven years old, and my other brother, eight or nine. One was close to the minimum age, the other to the maximum. My brother went first. He was able to identify the places, to make out a few silhouettes to which he put names that seemed plausible to the grownups, my father and cousin. Then it was up to me to see if my brother’s visions needed to be modified in any way. My older brother had made notes on how things should unfold, and he followed the procedure to the letter. It’s true that at the age of sixteen or seventeen he had been taught by a schoolmaster who had spent a few years in our village. He had then served a serious apprenticeship with a carpenter uncle who had some notions of reading, and some learning to pass 128  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

on to him. And so he invested his role with the diligence and conscientiousness required. He began with some recitations in a low voice, and then smeared black ink onto our right thumbnails. He began to chant his invocations and his prayers, during which time we had to stare at our thumbs, which were now windows open onto the night. It was as if our ink-smeared nails had become dark transparencies through which we could revisit the night when those acts took place, as if the veil that had covered those abominations had been drawn aside. I listened to the voice of my brother as I stared at my black polished nail. I saw the terrace, its full length covered in branches that were undulating in the wind. I saw trees, perhaps pistachios. I saw silhouettes moving near a wall that formed an angle with another. I saw the silhouettes approaching a thorny tree that looked as if it was about to fall on their heads. I saw footprints through the undulating branches. I saw scythes releasing into the wind branches that flew off with their grapes like so many heads coming out of my thumbnail. I kept staring at my nail, but didn’t know what to say. I had never travelled far from the village, and what I saw was unrecognizable and strange. I could not situate the cliffs; nor the terrace, nor the branches, nor the silhouettes. I babbled a few words that in no way enlightened the grownups, who tried to understand, to puzzle out what I was saying to them, while my brother continued his invocations and brought the séance to a close. A few years later, when I was becoming more familiar with what lay beyond the village, when my fear of these once imaginary geographies was being supplanted in my mind and before my eyes by real rocks, cliffs, and trees, then these To the Spring, by Night  ·  129

once-wavering visions began to steady themselves and become more concrete. And it was during one of these outings, while I was leading our horse to pasture, that I found myself face to face with the vision of my thumbnail. Everything became clear, like a picture unveiled. Everything was in its place. The terrace, the cliffs, the vines with their undulating branches, and lower down, the young pistachio shoots, indeed razed to the ground some years earlier, when I had my vision. But the known world was still hidden by a veil that would not part for years, until the time when I would comb through the cemetery, with its graves, and the saint’s domain. Beyond the domain of the saint and the cemetery, the known world ran on, rose to the height of the citadel, and from there plunged downward, this time falling into an invisible void on the citadel’s far side, looking off to the villages on the plain. An endless plain, so they said. A plain upon which you could walk for entire days without finding rocks or woods or forest, and certainly not mountains, a plain that was cultivated over its entire expanse. There was wheat and barley everywhere. We understood then why our donkeys went down to the villages on the plain when they wandered off. Later we would learn, we would discover that this was not the only reason; there were also she-asses in abundance that attracted our donkeys, unlike in our village, where there were none. But for the moment the wheat and barley seemed to us to be reason enough. The citadel, acting as a boundary, shielded us from this expanse. From afar, it loomed on the horizon like the end of the world, the one that was known to us and that we could 130  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

take in at a glance, the world of our village. For a long time I thought my head would touch the sky, especially the clouds, if I scaled the citadel. The grey clouds, engorged with rain, bore down on our dwellings from the heights of the citadel, or else hung there, unable to advance. Clouds that with their rumbling and their flashes of lightning over the citadel called up echoes of other lives that must have run their course on those heights in distant times, we would be told later. The known world had its limits. On fine days, when the clouds were high and completely white, the limits that were not fixed for all time receded. And on those days we saw airplanes pass over like enormous, noisy, high-flying birds. We were afraid of them. Because we knew that birds smaller than those called planes made off with snakes, chickens, and even lambs. Sometimes parents feared for their children because of these birds. And sometimes the planes flew so low, with such a roar, that we abandoned our games to scatter and seek refuge under a tree, a rock, or in the arms of the grownups. At other times they glided very high up, slowly, and their muffled sound barely reached our ears. It became a pleasure to observe them, like the flight of a bird in a windless sky. On those days they disappeared into the white clouds, and reappeared farther on. I believed that these planes, flying high and slow, loaded themselves up with cotton as they crossed the fluffy sky, and brought it down to earth. The white of the clouds against the blue immensity of sky was like the cotton on the bright red of our sheets. One calmed our gaze and inspired our infinite imaginings, the other ushered us into the night and sweetened our sleep. One To the Spring, by Night  ·  131

was the horizon that prolonged our waking dreams, the other the cradle that embraced our dreams at night. This whiteness of cotton could not, I thought, be of the earth. It must have descended from the whiteness of the clouds above our heads. And this thought united our mattresses and our eiderdowns with the clouds in the sky, in the wake of the planes that flew over our village. The backs of the houses, the back of the village, faced north, and vacillated between the known and the unknown. The village was nestled on a rocky slope, the opacity of the rock shoring up bodies and houses the way the opacity of the night supports sleep. The darkness of the rooms at the back aroused uneasiness, just as the night brought uneasiness to our hearts. These rooms backing onto the rock were windowless, with an opening in the roof that served as both skylight and chimney. They were the repository for the houses’ yearly provisions and, in their coolness, for hidden memories. They were easy to block, these openings. And when, as a prank, we wanted to smoke out a neighbour or an aunt who was baking bread or cooking inside on winter days – in summer cooking and bread-making were done on the terrace – we sat on the opening or blocked it with a board to keep the smoke from escaping. After two minutes the air became unbearable, suffocating. Depending on the mood of the moment, this provoked either hilarity or reprimands preceded by shouts and threats. Once the room was smoked in, we were happy; the reaction didn’t matter. We took flight before we could be identified. We could always own up later if we hadn’t already been identified by our noise and laughter. But 132  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

times were not always good for the occupants of the rooms at the back. There was certainly heat in winter and coolness in summer, but these rooms could, at any time of the year, be places for the settling of scores, fits, convulsions, cries stifled by blows. They could be the site of blood, coagulated and hidden away, of cold bodies, of lives snuffed out. It was in one of these rooms at the back that my young aunt by marriage hanged herself, or was hanged, we never knew exactly. It was said that she could not bear the betrayal of my uncle, who had become infatuated with a married woman. The married woman was very beautiful, certainly. Her husband was a good-for-nothing, a weakling, they said, and too young for marriage. I only knew the husband after his military service. He had forgotten the language spoken in our part of the world, as happened to other men from the village while they were absent, without their even mastering the one spoken in the army. For the men of our village this was a military disservice. For their two years of service, later one and a half, they were thrown, without any notion of the official language, into the harsh and unfamiliar army world. They were proud of having performed their duty, which made men of them, whereas up to then they had been looked on as greenhorns, as virgins. “First do the army!” some fathers admonished their sons, who were eager to taste of the good things in life, the most coveted being a woman next to them on a pillow. The precocious ones who had already enjoyed this privilege were impatient to get their service out of the way in order to enjoy it more fully. And so everyone was keen. Bring on the call-up! To the Spring, by Night  ·  133

Let’s get the service over with! In order to finish earlier, some even went without leave, because if it was not used, the time was deducted at the end. And in a sense it was quickly over. Yet, at the age of sixty, or eighty, they still hadn’t stopped talking about the hardships and mistreatments they endured in the two unhappy years they spent in the army, even if two years doesn’t amount to much at the end of a life. Not much, perhaps, but it left them with stories to tell for the rest of their days. And it was rare that these stories reflected anything they could be proud of. Bit by bit this man relearned the language of the village. Meanwhile, after his unfortunate marriage and before his military service, he had begun smuggling, a practice he resumed after his service. To add to his unhappiness, he was the object of mockery and ridicule on the part of the men in the village. He could barely open his mouth without being treated with derision. With my father, whom he greatly respected, and whom he called uncle, he could exchange views and manage a conversation on his own terms. And so he often came to our house, even if his family, who lived very close to ours – his mother was a distant cousin of my father, and a neighbour – resented us because of the story of my maternal uncle and the man’s wife. My mother was held responsible for what had happened, even though she had repeatedly warned the young woman against this relationship. But things had changed, and his wife and my mother were no more of this world. That may have created, between the two men, a kind of bond in unhappiness, in a felt absence. In addition to which, in the intervening time, the man had remarried, with my mother’s niece. It was during these conversations with my father that 134  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

he was able to describe some of the nightmare that his military service had been, and his adventures as a smuggler. Not understanding Turkish, and not being able to follow an order or carry out a task, he was constantly being punished, he remembered. The most unbearable were the times when they put him, head shaven, head bare, under a pail of water from which drops fell at regular intervals. He was held motionless under the pail so that he could move neither his body nor his head, and was kept there until the pail was empty. Most of the time he could not endure this torture, and by the time the pail was empty he had passed out. He was convinced that those water-dropping sessions had taken away his sense of language. He remembered that his head felt empty, brainwashed, after those sessions, and it took some time for him to regain his sense of things, to find a normal posture for his body in the barracks, where his comrades were by no means kind to him. As for smuggling, what was most striking and most amusing was his adventure with the horseman who had suddenly appeared at his side when he was riding on the plain. Anyone else but him – because smugglers, but not just them, more often told stories of bravery, stories that allowed them to strut about in front of others: “He who respects himself never exposes his wet shirttail,” it was said in families, especially to little ones who had a habit of talking freely about private matters – anyone else, for fear of ridicule, would most likely have kept this story to himself or have altered it to his advantage. But he told it innocently and in all its truth. It was on his way back from a smuggling trip, he began. A venture that he undertook alone, because the other smugglers To the Spring, by Night  ·  135

didn’t care for him, or didn’t find his company useful. In this world, more than in any other, your first consideration was a companion’s usefulness on a ride that took place in darkness and fear. You were not there to take care of anyone, but to be accompanied by someone who would make things easier for you, either with his knowledge of the territory or his bravery. For the novice it was best to have a family connection with someone who was experienced. He would take you under his wing or entrust you to someone he had confidence in, until you learned the ropes. No one in his immediate family was a smuggler, and the others didn’t consider him experienced enough to have him along on a trip. And so he would ride off on his own, even though, once en route, he might meet up with others and go part of the way with them. But on this occasion he was alone, having successfully made his delivery and loaded his horse with merchandise for the return. A good smuggling trip had to pay both ways. He had accomplished that and was riding ahead on the plain under a starry sky, when suddenly he became aware of a presence by his side. It should be said that a smuggler, however heroic he may appear, lives in fear. And it takes very little – only for the hero to be away from home on his horse – for the slightest tremor, the smallest noise, to have him fearing the unexpected, the worst, and for heroism to give way to fear. Fear of the police, in other words death or prison; fear of the bandit, in other words loss and shame; fear of other smugglers, fear of being seen during the day, fear of being lost at night, fear of the village to come, fear of the village he’d just left, fear of the plain, fear of the river. For the smuggler, everything is fear,

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from his departure to his return. And bravado is soon overcome by the desire to go to ground or take flight and escape smuggling’s bottomless pit. And so fear followed the smuggler everywhere. An unknown presence was always to be avoided, especially if it came out of nowhere and began riding by your side. Which was the case for the unfortunate husband. Panicked, he whipped his horse, and sent it off at full gallop in order to shake off his pursuer. His horse ran well, and once goaded on, did not stop so easily. He rode for some time without turning around. Sure of having put some lengths between himself and the presence he thought he had seen, he risked a glance. He was stunned to see the same figure riding by his side. He redoubled the pace of his horse, and when he dared to look around, the same rider was there. He couldn’t believe it: how could another horse keep up with his own for so long, when every time he had placed a bet on it, it had outrun its pursuers after just a few strides? His mount began to show signs of fatigue. Reducing his speed, he realized that the rider was doing the same. That was some comfort. After all, this was perhaps not a dangerous stalker, a bandit who was going to strip him bare. He continued riding alongside the stranger, sensing no hostility in the glimpses he took. And so he looked about him, as if seeking help and advice, consolation or refuge. He heard the rustling of the wind in the dry grass. He looked at the moon, and saw it shining above him in the sky. He took the time to turn in the direction of the rider. And all of a sudden the realization hit him: the presence in question, this unknown rider whom he had

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taken for a bandit, and worse, for a mounted policeman on patrol disguised as a smuggler, was none other than his own shadow. He cursed himself, called himself worthless, a good-fornothing, a weakling, apologized to his horse for having made it pay for his spinelessness and his fear. Tears streamed down his face. But, reassured, he continued on his way. There was no nasty stratagem on his tail, no danger. It was only his shadow. He vacillated between shame and confusion, and at the same time he was proud to say that he had ridden alone in the night, even if he had been afraid. This was a form of pride that would make it difficult to impress a woman, a beautiful woman. And the allure of this husband must have meant little for a wife like his own. But she was his cousin, and he had married her, against her wishes. In this part of the world, a man had a right to marry his paternal cousin. Without his prior renunciation, and above all without that of the father in the name of the son, either no one would have asked for the young woman’s hand, or blood would have flowed until everything was clear. And since the father absolutely wanted to marry his young son to his beautiful and desirable niece, that is how it came to pass, along with the risk that fires not doused might flare up at the first opportunity. Which is what happened. Because there had been fire before the blaze, they said, between the uncle and the beauty. My uncle was handsome, intelligent, four or five years older than the husband. One was already a man, the other was still struggling with adolescence, even if it was of brief duration

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in these parts. There was a shortcut between childhood and adulthood that left little room for adolescent dallying. As soon as you could grip a handle, you worked. As soon as there was a hint of nature’s having its way with you, you were married and had paternity or maternity foisted on you without your having had time to scramble out of childhood. And you grew up along with your children. Which in no way prevented the grownups from being grownups. The passage was short, but there was a passage. And the youngest ones were soon aware of the cruelty of this passage, which was to their detriment. My uncle was already a man, the husband still in the shortcut. One in the plenitude enhanced by his natural advantages, the other in the thankless passage made worse by the resentment of his own wife. It was not surprising that the husband provoked laughter and mockery, and that my uncle inspired fear and admiration. Whereas the husband went out of the village with a pick or a shovel on his shoulder, my uncle went off for the hunt sporting a gun. One was a humble labourer, bound to the earth and his fears, while the other seemed to exist only for a life of courage, beauty, and love. One was scorned, the other admired by the young women and the young girls of the village. One tried to hang onto the treasure he had in his hands, while the other, flamboyant, giddy with promises, always had his eye out for the conquest to come rather than the one he had already made. One was the eldest of his family, with all the responsibility that entailed in our part of the world even if one was not an adolescent, while the other was the youngest, pampered and carefree. One was a stay-at-home who, even when he went out, kept his eyes on

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the toes of his shoes, and tried to arrive as early as he could at work or at the house where his father was waiting to send him off on another job; the other was a hunter alert to his surroundings, always vigilant, on parade, a woman chaser even when sitting idle at home. And so how could the poor labourer keep his wife from this splendid predatory bird on the prowl, how could he defend her against him? How could he look the hunter straight in the eye, or exist in his wife’s eyes or in the eyes of anyone else? How could he raise his head and his gaze from his feet on the ground? Because shame does not leave you, it is always with you, they said; wash it seven times with blood and seven times with water, it will not disappear; it stays, indelible. Who would want to own the smallest parcel of shame, under the circumstances? Everyone tried to avoid what might look like shame. The grownups said my uncle was a skirt chaser, not happy in his marriage. He found my aunt dull, not playful enough, not jolly enough, lacking sparkle, lacking colour. Beautiful but bland, with an icy beauty. Beautiful but discreet, one of those beauties afraid to disturb or to offend. Beautiful but modest, they said. One of those who set little store by their nature. Someone more vibrant, more exuberant, would have better suited the temperament of my uncle. Being a hunter, he was out during the day among the rocks, in the shadows; he was out at night on the land, in the forests. He chased everything that moved. The village was small, and its two unhappy natures eventually found each other, with the complicity of the young woman’s family, which did not find her husband up to the mark. And they plotted to flee, to murder, to live their love to the end. 140  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

My aunt’s death in the rooms at the back would have figured in those plans; some said she had been hanged. According to others, she had received a mortal blow and been hanged afterward. Or, disappointed, she may have simply hanged herself. Had she entered the room at the back alive? She had been brought out dead, she had been buried, that much is certain. The rooms at the back kept their secrets. They kept them so well that, instead of broadcasting them in the light of day, thirty years after the first hanging, my real aunt went and hanged herself from a tree, in the forest, not far from the White Rock of my childhood. She had been one of those who had brought out the first dead body. Once again no one could explain this leave-taking, the leap into space, the suspension from a branch. Why did her old head on her old legs drape itself in a rope to go and hang itself in the forest? Would we ever know if it was to free her old head from its secrets? Years passed, occupants moved on to be replaced by other occupants, but the rooms at the back endured, true to themselves, keeping their secrets and the secrets of those who had passed through them. From the two sides, east and west, the village and our house opened onto the unknown world of the trees and the earth. The world of the people and the village, the stream once crossed, was for the children. And then there was the obscure world of the hangings and their swaying one way, and then another.

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c I often crossed the stream and moved toward the west, if only with my eyes, to stroke the necks of the two snakes that rose up pressed against each other and intertwined like an emblem of passion and love. It was a day at the end of spring or the beginning of summer. The sun was high in the sky, halfway to its zenith, and the neighbours were on their terraces. Perhaps we were waiting for the herds to return? Some were talking about the day’s events – the sun that was already beating down, the water to be gathered at the spring – while others listened, replied, or scanned the horizon in search of who knows what vision, because, we were told man, awake or asleep, alert or unconscious, was always waiting in fear or in hope; when suddenly two snakes loomed up like an enchantment into this late morning. Like the incarnation of fear and hope. Fear inspired by the sight of a snake gliding along like life itself, lashing out like envy and holding a mirror up to baseness, the lot of all of us; and hope aroused by an opening of the heart, an ingathering on the part of every human or beast, including the snake, who at such times brought up to the light the love that governed life, embracing even snakes, it was said. Silence fell, and all eyes turned in the direction everyone was pointing, some with an arm, some with a sign of the head, some with the end of a rolling pin. People and time froze at the sight of

those two snakes that had chosen for their lovemaking the shade cast by two oaks next to the houses, the oaks that are always green. It lasted a few instants, a few minutes. An eternity of happiness, moments suspended in time. I didn’t know what the world was, or what all the love in the world was, but in my child’s eyes, filled with wonder before this spectacle, celestial and animal, all the love in the world was in the yearning of those two serpents for each other. Later, I knew other snakes. The enormous blind snake whose hissing was for a long time the very incarnation of fear for me, a sound that would unnerve even the bones we saw come out of the graves. The bones from which on the day decreed we would be awakened to another life, we were told. Because just like the fig tree whose countless branches were contained in a small seed, man must also harbour such a seed in those bones, out of which he would be returned to life. Even the bones would have feared this snake, and I thought of it later when we children, in swarms, were tormenting the village blind man, a great-great-uncle, and he in his confusion was trying to chase us off with his stick and his curses, his only weapons, like the snake with its hissing and its head that it swivelled around in every direction to scare us, to drive us away. It was on a flat stone, exposed to all the pebbles and blows we could rain down on it, but despite that it didn’t move, only turned and thrust its head at us to threaten us. Wanting to frighten us with its own fear. But fear did not stand in the way of death, giving it or receiving it, just as it didn’t stop us from tormenting the blind man. We killed the To the Spring, by Night  ·  143

snake, with my brother’s help, hitting it with a stick and with stones, while we were guarding the baby goats. And then there was the grey-black snake, its back gleaming in the sun, which wound itself around a tree, swallowed another snake, and stopped us from going near the vines hanging over the hedges around a vineyard. It deprived us of the grapes that were within arm’s reach, when we were counting on being able to steal them as we passed by. We were petrified by the scene before us, as was my brother. This living mouth swallowing another life that for a long time continued to struggle inside its stomach. Its belly was swollen with the half-swallowed snake that battled with all its remaining strength in hopes of freeing itself from this vise, this wide-open mouth that had swallowed it alive. It swallowed and fixed its gaze on us, motionless. A gaze that was defiant, as though it were ready to swallow both the tree and anything that came near it. We knew it could no longer budge, even if there was defiance and menace in it eyes, but we could not make a move and soon retreated, leading away our herd of baby goats, turning our backs on any hunger for the grapes on the hedges, as if afraid of a spell, afraid of being frozen forever in the eyes of that snake. There were other snakes too. There was the snake that, no one knew how, entered the belly of a woman. She was on her way home from the village of her birth to her husband’s village. My mother said that the young woman had paused in the shade of a tree on a very warm day. Feeling hot and weary, she had fallen asleep under the tree. And while she slept, a black snake had slid from her mouth into her belly. 144  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

After her nap, she felt a heaviness, but she continued on her way, paying it little attention, thinking it was a heaviness that had come in the wake of sleep. She was thirsty. A thirst such as she had never known. She was able to reach the spring and drink, drink as she never had, as if three oxen were drinking in her place. A few minutes later she was thirsty again, and she felt her flesh cracking everywhere, the way the earth cracked under the burning sun in July. She looked around desperately for drops of water she could gulp down so that those fissures would fill for a few moments. There was no other spring along the way, and she had to keep on until she got home. In her extreme thirst and fatigue, she could barely drag herself to the village. Once home, she suffered the same thirst. Every ten minutes she had to drink. She drank jugfuls and pailfuls but her thirst was not quenched. She didn’t know what to do with this thirst, a curse of the end of time, she had heard. No one understood what had happened to her, how she could drink so much and where she could put all that water. No one could solve the mystery. And they waited for the sky to fall to earth and for the earth to split, forming an abyss. Everyone began to watch for the first signs of this thirst in themselves and others. Was it the thirst spoken of by the ancients, which was going to shrink people and things and hurl them toward their end? But no one else showed any symptoms other than the young woman, who continued to gulp down any water she could get. Men and beasts experienced their usual thirst, which came and went with the succession of shade and heat. No one could comprehend, until the day when an old woman of the village, she who hid the secrets and distress of others under her thick and ample clothes, and To the Spring, by Night  ·  145

who had let the requisite amount of time go by, had her recount in detail the story of her thirst. The old woman had her repeat the story, and when the sun was near its peak, she suspended the young woman by her feet from the beams of her house, over a basin of water, and she waited. Once the sun had reached its zenith, the snake dropped out of the woman’s mouth into the basin. A black snake, gleaming, all the darker after its passage through the entrails of the woman. Once it was in the basin, it was covered with a thick black cloth so it would think it was still inside, then buried in a pit, and covered with a thick layer of earth. So that it would remain there until the hour when all knots are untied, and so that it would never be tempted to return to the young woman’s belly. For a snake that has tasted of the entrails of a woman only leaves her once her days are done, once she is dead. And sometimes it follows its victim even beyond death, so it was said. By all accounts, in a not so distant past, but one perhaps forgotten, there was another black snake and a young woman it inhabited for a time. When the time came to deliver the serpent, not enough care was taken and it escaped. The young woman died as a result of this invasion. During the ritual visits to the dead person in the days following the burial, a hole was observed in the grave, which the visitors filled in. On the next visit the hole had reappeared. A watch was then kept at the grave, to find out what was happening. It became clear that they were not the only visitors, that the black snake they had allowed to escape during its deliverance from the young woman had also been paying her visits. It was then that they finished what they had begun; they killed the snake so 146  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

that everyone would now be at peace, both the snake and the young woman in her grave. In order that there be no surprise this time, the old woman had taken precautions. As soon as it fell into the basin, the snake was thrust into darkness so it would not have time to notice the passage from one darkness to another, and would think it had received yet another jug of water emptied by the woman. It then had to be placed it in a pit as soon as possible, and left in total darkness for a long time. The old woman had thought of everything, and so it was done. The serpent was poured from one blackness to another, and the woman was saved from the snake and from her thirst. Snakes were still on the prowl, and that could happen to anyone, any time, we were warned. When it was very hot and we were tired and felt like lying down in the shade of a tree, we thought about the serpent. And we chose to stay awake rather than sleep in the shade. There were still other snakes. It was a spring day, perhaps a day in May. Not autumn, no. It was a day of fresh greenery, not russet humidity. And of waking to joy rather than readying for sleep. Of dew on bright leaves, not drops falling onto autumn’s muddy soil. Suddenly, on this spring morning, there was a commotion, a disturbance, a flare-up of fear. I had just awakened. Uncle Moussa was either coming back from the fields or setting out for them. My father was on the terrace, his head and feet bare. Or perhaps he was on a neighbouring terrace cutting tobacco for smuggling. That was often the case, my father being the only one in the village with the proper tools and To the Spring, by Night  ·  147

the know-how for cutting tobacco. Was my mother not there? I can’t remember seeing her. Did she have a pot in her hand that she had just washed? Had she just left the fire and the bread to respond immediately to the cries of alarm? I cannot place her physically. Around the house, everything was in shadow. In shadow the little stream to the west of the house, my father on the terrace, my uncle on the road; in shadow the terraces and the neighbouring houses. You could still sense the departure of the herd, which could not have been far off. I didn’t know what had happened, or how, or what it all meant. But I was assailed by a fear for which knowledge can do nothing, that it cannot diminish. I was afraid of what was being relayed from one terrace to another. Cries that, passing over me, entered my ears, and wrenched me from my morning drowsiness into fear: my brother had been bitten by a snake. A snake had bitten my brother. Uncle Moussa had sounded the alarm from the road below our house. I didn’t know if he was coming to the village or leaving it, but he was the one who spread the news. He said that my brother had walked into a bush and that the snake had bitten him. He had perhaps bitten him through his shoe. And some details: most of the poison would have stayed in the shoe. But the bite had reached him all the same. His leg was bound tightly with a cloth so the poison would not rise in his body. His foot was washed with the morning dew. The bite was bled. He was lifted onto the back of a donkey. A cousin was nearby. He went with him. He had to be carried, he was being carried into town. They had to skirt the village on the north side to head for the town. I have no memory of my brother from that morning, 148  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

or of his return in the afternoon or the evening of that day. I only remember my fear on waking up that morning. There was also the snake that had chased me outside with barely a towel to cover myself when I was getting ready to wash in the corner of the room at the back where we bathed and performed our ablutions. It was afternoon. There was my father and the smuggler cousin who shared our house and whom I already saw as a kind of father-in-law. As he was not getting along well with his parents after his marriage, we had invited him to stay with us, where he remained with his young bride for almost a year in one of the rooms that we continued to call by his name after he left. He had used that time to build his own house, where his wife gave birth to a daughter, whom I considered to be my betrothed. And he visited us on a regular basis. In case of need, he was the one my father called on. It was during one of these visits. My father and my cousin were talking on the terrace. My mother had heated the water, prepared my things, and called me to come and wash. I entered the room at the back, where it took some time for my eyes to become accustomed to the semi-darkness. I had begun to take off my clothes, when I heard a noise from the ceiling. I didn’t pay any attention; any creature could make such noises. Only the snake and the scorpion could be dangerous; the rest, like the mouse, the rat, the lizard, were harmless, and we had a cat to deal with them. I was just starting to wash myself when I heard the noise again. My eyes had by now adjusted, and I looked more closely to identify the spot. First, I thought I saw a bit of rope where the wall met the ceiling. Looking again, I saw a snake’s head To the Spring, by Night  ·  149

sticking out from the beam. Covering myself with a towel, I ran outside and gave the alert. I was told that I must have made a mistake; there was no snake in the room at the back. When I insisted, my mother and cousin came to see, with a lamp and the gun. The snake really was there, hissing menacingly, clearly visible under the light. It was exposed for the gunshot that soon came. You must never keep a snake waiting too long in your sights if you want to kill it. The shot hit home, and the snake fell full length onto the ground. It was buried, my mother wiped up the blood, and I could finally wash. But was I not ashamed of acting out of fear? Out of paternal indulgence, my father would have glossed over my fear, but my cousin, the father of my betrothed, who might one day be my father-in-law? Did I want to pass for a weakling, for someone fearful, in the eyes of my future father-in-law? There was also, like a world apart, the valley of serpents, or the hollow of serpents, that faced a rock on one side, and a greyish slope on the other, which, in the hot hours of noon, became reflectors and, where there was no hint of shade, heated the hollow like a cauldron. Snakes liked the heat, and this hollow became their garden in those hot hours. Grey earth covered the pebbles you had to cross to reach the vineyards after keeping watch until the first warmth of noon. A narrow path, little used, crossed the hollow. It was cleared of stones and covered with sandy earth and if you stepped off it, you risked coming upon a snake under each overturned stone, or in every hole. Our hearts stopped and any thought of heroism vanished when we saw them, small and large, moving

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around in waves: emerging from holes, from under stones, threading their way through dry grass, or disappearing farther along under other stones. It was important not to oppose them, much less attack them, but to cross the hollow quickly and without incident to reach the sweetness of that bunch of grapes we had been eyeing since the first light of day. Silent and cautious, we would start along this path, hoping not to wake or disturb anything, then rush to safety in the vineyard or on the opposite slope, which led to the spring below the citadel. The grownups told us about another valley of serpents, or rather a gorge, a chasm with cliffs for walls, whose height and breadth were difficult to judge. Walls with rows of caves or niches, and in each of these holes a snake with a white head, black teeth, and a tongue longer than its body, which disappeared deep in the caves. But they never told us more, claiming that they didn’t want to upset us with the horror of such a vision. Besides, they only knew the beginning of this story. But why begin a story if you don’t know how it turns out? Do you ever know how things are going to turn out for you? they said – and yet there you are, a story, a story whose ending you will never know. There were as many snakes as there were fears. Those snakes that had raised themselves up in love before my child’s eyes were to be found in the west, on the other side of the stream. We were waiting for the herds to come home, and the two snakes showed us the breadth of love. After that moment, I kept on looking to the west in the hope that the unknown

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worlds I encountered would one day bring me back to the known world of the stream with its intertwined snakes, and to the east that slips first into the darkness and that will always be there on the other side of our house, with its mystery, its trees, and its earth.

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c We had a field at the western edge of the village, near the White Rock, a legendary rock that was inaccessible for the greater part of my childhood. It was a rock whose name was associated with gunfire, blood, raids on the village, escapes, kidnappings. With missed targets, misfirings, knives to the heart, scythe blows to the skull. It was near the White Rock that my aunt, already old, went to hang herself thirty years after the first hanging, at the end of her old age and of her patience, as if to engrave the rock in my memory by shrouding it in one more film of fog. From time to time I caught a glimpse of it from afar when we were in the fields. I saw nothing to distinguish its colour from that of the other rocks, nothing to make it worthy of the name White Rock. But it kept its distance in its indefinable whiteness. To my eyes it was the unknown incarnate, a farthermost marker signalling the vastness of its territory, its limitless possibilities. I wondered if it was not the Rock of the White Ladies, the hiding place of those who abducted the women they loved from a family and tribe opposed to their union. Wondered if it might not be this rock that hid them in its cloak, as snow covered the ground with whiteness, and concealed them from enemy eyes that viewed their love with hatred. If it was not this rock that, in its whiteness, inspired pity and charity in

the hearts of the pursuers, leading them to abandon their hunt and leave the lovers in peace with their passion. Or if it was not perhaps the Rock of Whiteness. If a hidden whiteness did not appear by magic, by enchantment, when you passed near. If the blackness covering the body, the head, or the face did not miraculously disappear. Why, when the rainbow could, at one stroke, turn boys into girls and girls into boys, could the White Rock not turn blackness into whiteness and unburden those passing before it? The grownups told us not to move if ever a rainbow appeared, for fear of changing our sex and being forced to wait for another rainbow to reassume our original form. We wondered why men without sons who remarried in order to have one did not simply pass their daughter under a rainbow. They would be spared the complaints and disputes that followed on a second marriage and, in addition to a boy, they would have peace. But it was hard to pass under a rainbow, they said. At each end it was held by an angel, whose role it was to stop anyone from going through. Every time you got closer, the angels shifted the rainbow; the more you walked, the farther away it moved. Only an evil spirit, by obscuring the angel’s view, could make it happen. But anyone who sought the help of this spirit would be damned forever. Still, you had to take care when a rainbow appeared; you were never immune from malice, from the ill-intentioned. But our fear of the rainbow was allayed, and we could again admire its colours, watched over by two angels. What was only an accident, the workings of an evil spirit in the case of the rainbow, could it not be transformed into goodness where the White Rock was concerned? 154  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

When I saw the workers pass by whose fields lay beyond the rock, I watched for their return to see if the rock’s powers, as I perceived them, were well founded, if the rock’s hidden whiteness brightened the face of anyone who returned, if a man’s hardness, which had verged on meanness when he caught us near his plantings, became kindness when we next met, or if I had to revise my theory. Our field was not very large. It had been inherited from the grandfather who had divided it in two, one half for each brother. We grew wheat and tobacco, each in turn. Later, to plant tobacco, we had to go and fetch water up by the Rock, where there was a well. On the heights near the Rock I saw before me an expanse that opened onto other rocks whose names I did not even know, whose existence I did not even suspect. The White Rock was not a culmination, a summit rising from the mists. It was greyish rather than the white I had imagined. It represented one step that, depending on the direction, took one up or down, one stage that led to others, farther into the mountain. It was a threshold. We found ourselves at the portal of childhood, at the door to the memories that had come before us. The Rock had set a boundary at a time when I did not yet dare scale it, when my fears did not allow my nascent memory to join with those of others. Now the rock gave way before other rocks that set new limits, as far as the horizon, and of its legend it left me only its name, and its memory, at the doors of the village. We grew wheat and tobacco in this field. For us children, the wheat seemed a very remote crop, until it was harvested. Once it had been sown, it demanded nothing from us. When To the Spring, by Night  ·  155

lunches were taken to the site and we went along, it was only from a distance that we saw the plantings, which our father did on his own or with the help of a relative or a neighbour whom he would help in his turn. Once the sowing was complete, the cold took over, with the slow ripening of the seeds within the earth and no one present. After the snow and the cold were gone and spring returned, if we ventured farther from the village and its surroundings, we made out fields covered in seedlings that were breaking through the ground. We dared not approach the still-muddy field, or the shoots, which we might damage. Only certain grownups who were used to hunting dared step a short way into the field to gather tender shoots for the partridges that were their hunting partners. They knew the places near the village where the earth was softer and warmer at the height of winter, and still moist in the spring. They went with small sacks to gather earth for their favourite birds to bathe in. Once ensconced in the softness and warmth of this earth, and attended to by the hunter, the partridges treated themselves to a meal of tender wheat sprouts. When the soil was perfectly dry and the wheat near maturity, we could go into the field looking for field peas, one of our favourite delicacies at the beginning of summer. We were still not very welcome. We had to approach with caution, as in hunting for wild peas we could trample the wheat, which would not come back up and would be lost to the harvest. We made ourselves useful shouting and chasing away the birds that found an easy and abundant source of food in the young wheat. But we quickly got tired of the commotion and all that running after birds, who also needed something to 156  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

peck at. We traded in that noisy task for more light-hearted, amusing games or went off in search of other foodstuffs, lured by the abundance of spring, which we had to enjoy to the full, for it lasted such a short time and wouldn’t soon return. The grownups told us that at harvest time only a third of the crop was our due, a small third that we could store within our walls. Everyone on earth had to support those who lived under the same skies. People depended on each other, and we all depended on the one who made it possible for us all to be here. Not to share would in no way increase our portion of the harvest, it would only lessen what came to us from the harvest of others. Those who could not have their share could not give us ours. Everyone had to gather his own third. We had to make sure that our third was brought within our walls for our provisions, so we would survive the days allotted to us. Our watchfulness and our surveillance of the fields, of what had been sown, was part of this effort, the grownups said. During these outings, we were uncertain, not knowing at what point we should let others take their share, and at what point we should begin to protect our own. Because, we were told, you had to be fair in the sharing. The day would come when we would be judged according to how honest we were among ourselves as well as toward others. We heard about the plagues that made off with all three portions and disappeared, leaving behind them ruined fields, a sad land, and a despairing population faced with no subsistence for the days to come. These plagues came down like lightning, rose up like a storm, blanketing nature with a black veil and a deafening clamour. To the Spring, by Night  ·  157

One of these plagues was the grasshoppers, we learned. It seemed strange to us that grasshoppers could constitute a danger. We saw them in the fields, thin and frail, alert for the slightest movement that would send them leaping away to a safer place. How could they devastate fields and forests? We wondered what they could possibly eat, given how weak they seemed. To glean a few scraps on the edge of a leaf? They could not possibly raze the greenery of nature and of our crops. But they could, said the grownups. These grasshoppers were behind plagues and disasters – and not just ordinary ones. Massive, destructive disasters that could never be forgotten. Whenever they appeared as a plague it was during the hottest days of summer, they said. When everyone was preparing to harvest their crops. When the fruits of so much labour were about to be gathered, reaped for the nourishment of man and beast during the next seasonal cycle that would begin after the harvest. And this time of year, this moment of preparation for the harvest, was the moment when the predator called the grasshopper – small or large, they all became predators, it was only a question of circumstance and number – could descend upon territories broader than one could possibly imagine, given the insignificance of the insect usually seen in the fields. But like the ant that a certain king had learned – at his great cost – not to scorn, you could not underestimate the grasshopper, they told us. There was once a king, proud of his power and of his army, whose authority extended over the animals and the winds, and who, thinking himself invulnerable given his might and 158  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

his possessions, used to mistreat those he encountered along his way during his expeditions. It was as if an expedition justified any abuse, as if his strength absolved him from paying any heed to those he thought inferior. Beast or man, grass or tree, each suffered in turn. Some fled, others submitted, the rest let themselves be crushed. And the king advanced. Seeing this tidal wave approaching, the ants wanted to protect their territory, and set out to make the king aware of their presence. The procession came to a halt. The ants knew about the arrogance of those called humans. They had already seen evidence of it. But the future ought not to be sacrificed to past disappointments. It was essential that they inform the king of the whereabouts of their domain and alert him to the danger they faced. And so they threaded their way into the campground and slipped into the king’s quarters. Upon seeing this invasion of ants in his sanctum, the king became enraged and wanted to chase them out immediately. The ants replied that they were not there to disturb him, and would withdraw as soon as he heard their request. They had come to let him know that their territory was in the path of his army, that they could not displace themselves in so short a time, and they asked him to respect their dwelling place. The king listened, still in a fury and exasperated by the audacity of these ants, who were concerned only with their own territory, whereas he was leading an expedition against an enemy that would put these lands out of reach – an enemy that, were it not for him, would bring ruin to the ants and their domain, to the trees and their forest, to men and their homes and offspring. He didn’t want his rest to be disturbed any longer. All the ants had to To the Spring, by Night  ·  159

do, if they didn’t want to be seen as base creatures trying to impede his mission, was to leave their domain and build it up again after his army had passed. The ants tried in vain to make him see reason. The king wouldn’t listen. He couldn’t bear it that the ants, a negligible entity that occupied one of the lowest ranks among his subjects, kept harping on about their domain, daring to propose that his army’s advance be delayed. And he cut off all discussion. Rebuffed, the ants left the king to his repose. They couldn’t trust him. Before leaving, they told him, by way of warning, that they would take steps to defend their territory. The king paid no attention. Free of them, he went back to a night that they had shortened. The ants departed, not understanding why their simple request had been so poorly received. The king’s glory ought not to pose a threat to their lives. The arrogance of some would have to find a response in the determination of others. The dawning day would have to make the king see reason, even if the night had found him complacent and blind to it. He who cannot steer clear of an error he is about to make only courts disaster. The ants alerted the anthills all around, and worked the night through without stopping. By dawn, their trap was ready. At daybreak the army set out for its destination, the king as oblivious to the ants’ territory as to their warning. No whim, no shedding of tears was going to slow him or deflect him. He would cross their territory in no time without even being aware of it. But the road, up to then neither bumpy nor pitted, began to give way here and there; horses and riders, wagons and armaments, servants and their loads all sank in. The farther they advanced, the greater the calamity. Some 160  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

trudged ahead, pushing others off the road into chasms that opened up in front of them. They were all dumbfounded. What enemy had set them such a trap? How did he control the earth that covered the road? The king could not understand. He held power and yet his army was in a state of collapse. All night long the ants had dug tunnels under the road, the whole length of their territory and all around it. They had made common cause with the ants of all the anthills against this arrogant and reckless king who refused to listen to reason. This king whose rush to glory had precipitated the fall of others. And so they had decided to stop him from abusing his authority. And it was done. The debacle continued. Horses slid onto soldiers, soldiers onto other soldiers, wagons onto horses. The more they forced their way forward, the more they tumbled into the holes, which kept on multiplying. What curse had befallen this expedition? The king ordered a halt to the advance. The army hauled its debris, its wounded, its mounts, its supplies out of the craters, and beat a retreat. Returning the way he had come, the king mulled things over in his mind, from his departure to the retreat he was now forced to make, and concluded that the ants had made good on their threat and had cut his army off. How had they been able to engineer this disaster in so little time with their tiny bodies? How had they been able to shift earth and stone to set a trap that had nearly swallowed up his entire army? While the king pondered, the ants entered his sanctuary. Since, confident in his might, he had refused to listen to reason, they had been forced to act, they told him. The king, his wisdom returned, acknowledged his folly, admitted that the ants were right, and rerouted his expedition. To the Spring, by Night  ·  161

Large or small, each can become the scourge of the other, the grownups said. Appearances do not always give an accurate assessment of danger. So it was with the grasshoppers. They could appear out of nowhere and, in the blink of an eye, raze fields and harvests, greenery and forests, and return to the nothingness out of which they had come. It was only at harvest time that all arms became useful and we could freely tread those fields, which had now become hard, hostile even, with their thorns, their spikes, their straw, leaving a good number of marks and scratches on our arms, legs, and feet for months to come. During the harvest, we had all the time in the world to watch the grownups show their skill at performing their tasks and, while they reaped, to try making the same motions ourselves. Motions that had turned the soil again and again ever since the foot of man had first touched this earth, motions passed on from hand to hand, from earth to flesh, motions that we had to learn and would be given us to pass on to others when we, in our turn, would be growers of food. Our field was not vast, but, we were told, in a time that went back further than the time of Hâji Mouss, and even further than the time of Ayzer and his tribe; in distant times that left traces only in words and in the wind that took the words from one place to another; in those times when every group of valleys that we share today with several villages was inhabited by only one man and his family; in those times when men were few, the land abundant, and one could walk for days and meet only the animals that shared the earth and 162  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

the forest with these first men; in those times before men, in greater and greater numbers, began to weigh down the earth with their iniquity; before the sky, in its wrath, began to overwhelm those on earth who had lost all moderation, so that there could emerge new inhabitants who saw before them the example of the first men, a warning that would incite them not to overstep bounds; in those times, before the floods transformed these heights into mountains and gorges stripped of earth, where each tree struggles to cover its roots with soil to keep it upright; in those times, they told us, the grower could without lifting his plough join the two summits of the great valley to the east of the village in a single furrow without the blade meeting any obstacles other than the peaks of the summits on either side. The mountains had risen up out of the fields that, with each flood, drew back to take refuge in the corners where they now sought shelter, waiting for the final deluge that would erase them forever. And we, living on this land, would disappear with everything else, the grownups said. The earth was a table laid open where the living flourished and flourished again, where the generations accomplished their journey. At the end of every journey the table was folded up, and life with it. The earth would in its turn taste of its own extinction, the end of all being, they said, in a scattering of everything to the winds, that the winds might return all to the valley where beings and things had been born a first time. These memories did not make our fields any larger, did not cover our rocks and our mountains where the trees had to stretch their roots out to cling to their heights. Our fields, To the Spring, by Night  ·  163

just as cramped, the remaining pockets, the surviving pockets on our mountains, which were themselves growing more and more bare as the earth drew away from their summits. Our fields where wheat was first sown. Wheat, the first seeds known to the earth, they told us. This seed that we deposited in the earth, that we harvested like a blessing, with the greatest of respect. The wheat that we gathered to the last grain any of us accidentally let fall, placing it out of reach of any foot that might trample it. The wheat we carried to those pockets of ground with prayers and invocations, that it might return to us from the earth increased and renewed. Pockets of earth that we tried to protect, like our dwellings, from the winds and sudden rains, with walls and conduits, so they would shrink no more, so they would be able to accommodate what we folded into them. Pockets that we tried to enrich, to increase with what passed through the entrails of our beasts and our herds, so that they would maintain their willingness to accept what we entrusted to them, and to have it thrive. Tobacco, a recent interloper, was now widespread in our fields and, by contrast, required constant care. We paid it a visit practically every day, for a ritual that began at dawn and ended with the first fierce rays of the sun. With tobacco, everything had to be done in the morning coolness, as if to shield from heat a plant destined for the fire. The earth we piled at its base to shore it up so that it would grow more vigorously, had to be cool, cool and soft. The leaves, once they had reached a certain maturity, had to be gathered before being exposed to the sun’s rays, which would cast a pale light on them all, making it hard to distinguish those that were 164  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

good. The flowered tips at the base had to be cut so that the leaves would absorb all the plant’s strength, so that its energy would not be wasted on greedy flowers that served no purpose in the growing of tobacco, except for those intended for reproduction, which added some spots of colour to the fields. This operation had to be performed when it was cool so that the base of the plant could heal before the sun attacked it. Every gesture had to be precise in order not to damage the plant or the rest of the leaves. As children, we were invited to this ceremony because, large or small, hands could open for the same prayer, work at the same tasks, and, with a little attention, achieve the same precision. Once our movements had met the test, we were no longer so keen to mix our hands in with those of the grownups. Now they had to insist. As for us, soon exhausted by this fastidious work, we sought, with all sorts of pretexts, to avoid it, and to excuse ourselves from the carpet on which the tobacco leaves were piled. It was work that bent the back, tired the eyes, made our legs tremble, gave us pains in our joints. And there was the nausea, the disgust caused by the tobacco when your hands were covered with its thick excrescence, which disappeared only after you’d washed them, first in the earth and then several times with soap. Still, despite the fact that it was bitter and disgusting on contact, tobacco prolonged the life of springtime greenery, an argument very much in its favour in this land of burning hot summers. Wheat followed the same rhythm as nature. The nature of grasses. It greened with the rest of the grasses, ripened, yellowed along with them. Modestly and with simplicity. As children, we hardly noticed. From the almond To the Spring, by Night  ·  165

trees below the terraces to the wild plants we shared with the kids and the lambs, we were too busy, too beguiled by nature in its awakening. In this awakening, the fields of wheat were well-defined green spaces that we avoided for fear of being scolded. This delicate, green haze must never be trod on if it was to grow and stand and ripen. After an initial curiosity, we only went back once the green had disappeared, when the spontaneous spring hues began to fade and the wheat was tall and strong enough to hide us and withstand our clumsiness. Until then, we let the wheat grow under the watchful eyes of the grownups, and we were content with the abundance we found elsewhere, happy to grow with what was burgeoning and flowering in the spring. But when the greenery of the grasses and the earth gave way to summer, when the green of the branches and leaves darkened to resist the sun’s heat, and when the wheat fields became a yellowish expanse that compounded the heat, then the verdant green of the tobacco fields came to represent the last breath of springtime in summer, the final refuge of green. With the cucumbers and tomatoes we planted between the rows, it prolonged the abundance of spring and our bond with the field while we waited for the ripening of the grapes far to the east.

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c While waiting for the grapes, we had to cross the village to reach the field at the extreme west. Our first crossings were of course made on our mothers’ backs, usually on top of another load, quite comfortable even though the crossings were punctuated by our mothers’ grumbling about their burdens and about us. In my case, these were made even worse by the fact that my mother had come from the western edge of the village to join my father in his paternal home in the centre, and once they had a family, they had settled far to the east. Later, I had to follow my mother’s footsteps, and on the return trip, forgetting myself, had to share in her fear of this crossing where killings were not unknown. Still later, I had to go with my father or ride on the back of a horse or a donkey, in the company of a parent or a brother. You had to grow up some day and take the risk of crossing the village from one end to the other on your own. Man the forgetful thinks himself immortal at each stopping place where he finds welcome, the grownups said, even though he is but a sojourner. He only moves on when he is obliged to and has no choice. There was the memory of the first exile, certainly, and man lived in perpetual fear of having to relive it. His habit of thinking himself immortal at each stopping place served to attenuate this fear, even though the exile occurred only

once and was temporary, and at the end there would be the return. But he who has burned himself with milk will blow to cool his water, the grownups reminded us. Before he will agree to move on and prepare himself for the destination to come, man holds stubbornly to the present. He cuts himself off from the past without yet knowing the future, and lives between veils that obscure his view backward or forward. When man is in his mother’s belly, they told us, he lives from her scraps and leavings, surrounded by her inner fragrances and emanations, and there he feels at home. Then he is expelled, with tears and cries, calling on the universe to witness the disaster that has befallen him. Even though he is entering a better world, it is a world he has seen only through the filter of the mother’s body, and has experienced as the beyond: it was the world that nourished the maternal paradise. Now this beyond will become his own, he will himself be immersed in its colours and tastes, will experience the day and the night through his own body. Rather than by the internal liquids of his mother, he will be nourished by two sources of abundance, his mother’s breasts, which will fill his mouth with the scent of the plains, the taste of fruit, the awareness of food and bread. This bread, whose aromas, as it is being baked, permeate the house and its surroundings. It is amid catastrophe and commotion that he makes his entrance and takes his place. And he does not want to leave his mother’s breasts, even though they are there only to meet a need, to make up for a deficiency. Now that he has teeth, now that his intestines are ready, he can taste on his own what his mother was transmitting to him through her breasts. But no, the drama is not over. He does not want to walk, he does not want to chew on 168  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

his own, he does not want to be separated from his mother. Even though his mother wants a rest from him, and in any case her sources of nourishment are drying up. With tears and sadness, he timidly says farewell to his mother’s breasts, only to find that what is before him now is infinitely richer and more varied than what he has just left behind him. And he starts to love his new port of call, and to gorge himself on what is there for the taking. When he begins to hold steady on his feet, he is reluctant to leave the arms of his mother. But he soon learns that with his own legs he can run wherever he wants, that with his hand he can take hold of whatever he desires. The world is no longer his mother’s alone, no longer a world known only through her. It can also be his world. But it is still hard, he is still afraid of leaving what is known for what is new, for the unknown. Once he has found a place in the world on his own, with his jaws for chewing, with his hands and his legs, he imagines himself to be immortal. Even though this new stage is no more eternal than those that came before. It offers a slightly longer gestation that gives rise to a world one could not have imagined. But as no one has ever climbed into a mother’s womb to reassure the infant about to be born as to what to expect on the other side, so no one will return from the beyond to put our minds at rest about what lies in wait for us. Everyone must look back at what he has forgotten, must lift his own veils, so as not to be overwhelmed by the anguish of waiting and the fears aroused by the prospect of a new departure, a new birth into the unknown, so the grownups said. We think we can live forever in our childhood, where everything is familiar. We think we are not growing up, but To the Spring, by Night  ·  169

one day, even while we are still trying to protect our little world, we realize that this world has slipped away from us and that we are face to face with a new one. We are no longer what we were. You are big now, they tell us, closing doors that were until then open to us. And we accept, stamping our feet from time to time, kicking or beating our heads against doors now shut, that stay shut until we turn to confront the world of grownups. I try to think back to my first crossings of the village. To those I accomplished alone, and that became so many acts of bravery, of conquest. Those that led me to meet other inhabitants and made the village a territory I explored by trial and error to annex it to my known world, the world I had made my own, to transform it into a place for games and acquaintances. Where to begin, with what path, with what fears? Every annexation began with an apprehension that had to be overcome, with a fear that had to be absorbed and digested. And the fear reached everywhere, all the way to the mountains that encircled us. Every stone, every rock, at different times of the day, depending on the angle and the distance, became a silhouette, a human or animal form, a form from another world that took over our field of vision and filled us with terror. Each tree in the forest, each beast on the mountain, large or small, had its legends that we had heard and that we recalled with horror every time we approached its territory. Apart from our present fears, there were those that went back to another time, which placed us in the presence of those

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who had lived in a distant past and were unlike the people we knew. Thus the citadel, with its ghosts, went back through layers of history we could not count. When we passed nearby, we were afraid something would roll down upon us from the summit. We imagined that on the unseen slope of the citadel a life went on of which we were totally unaware, hidden from us so that it could better surprise us when we were blithely at our games. A child lives in the present, free of the weight of memory, does not burden himself with memory as he lives his life. Engrossed in the moment, his memory of what he has seen or known catches him only on the fly. We knew it was dangerous to pass near the citadel after twilight. But our having known, having experienced this fear on many occasions did not stop us from repeating the same mistake. Even though all we had to do was to leave a little before sunset to get past it without incident, after which we could slow down, we ended up spending time with our kids and goats, giving them a few extra mouthfuls of tender leaves, or we prolonged a game we had begun and missed our opportunity. Inevitably, we were victims of our own game, our own trap. Fear caught up with us at the base of the citadel. We didn’t know of what, but we were afraid. It was pure fear, which we didn’t have to name, which we couldn’t name. It was a dread brought on by this mass of rocks with its stones from another era, on the hidden side of the hill. A fear with no face, and formless. A fear that drew its power from the stones entrenched on the citadel, and from the citadel before us, so deeply rooted in our minds and present to our gaze. And it was not only for ourselves. We were afraid for what was around us, for what was there

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with us at the end of the day, as fragile, as helpless as we were when fear invaded us. When we lingered near the vineyard and only passed near the citadel at twilight, the moon was already high, but at one spot along the way, where it was hidden from us by the mass of the citadel, we feared that the inhabitants we imagined living there would hold it prisoner. Especially since we had just learned that the people from a village down in the mountains claimed that, behind one of those mountains, old moons were cut into pieces to make stars out of them. We were afraid that the citadel-dwellers would do the same, and leave us moonless as we walked. Without the moon we relied upon to light our way. We were relieved when, advancing hesitantly, we saw it peeking out from the edge of that mass that was looking down on us. In good weather and in the middle of the day, when we dared to venture onto those heights, we saw piles of stones, walls, and the ruined structures the grownups had told us about. Every stone had a story, every ruin concealed another that we would continue telling as we walked and would finish on another day, even if we had no idea what History was. But we knew that behind every story there was a hidden jar that some tried to take away from others, a coveted, fullto-the-top jar that gave rise to all sorts of chases, pursuits, and stratagems on the part of those who guarded it and those who wanted to wrest it from their hands. Even if some said: “Look, it’s just a jar of nothing at all!” others replied: “Let’s take a closer look anyway,” and the chases and the stratagems began all over again, each marking his stone, each noting the stone of the other. 172  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

We knew that the citadel had been there long before us and that godless people, infidels, had preceded us on its heights. We knew from a remark the grownups made, partly vexed and partly admiring, that the citadel and its buildings had nothing in common with our rudimentary dwellings. During these conversations, every grownup offered his own views on the citadel, and the lives that might have been led there. The most intriguing part of the citadel’s story was the subject of water. What had its inhabitants lived on, where had they found water on this arid rock? Being perennially short of water ourselves, we would have liked to know what water they had used. And so there was talk of a hidden spring. Was it water that sprang from the rock itself, or water that the infidels would have brought from afar to supply their needs on the citadel? To try to find the source of this water, we scoured the rock and the nearby mountain springs in search of clues. Because we had come after them on this land, even if we did not occupy the citadel. When they left, the godless ones must have buried the spring that gave them life, so that no one would find it, so that it would not survive them on the rock, so that it would not meet the needs of other lives on the citadel. Organized as they were, they must have planned the disappearance of the spring from the start, so that they not be taken unawares in the event of a departure that, if it were not voluntary, could only be a hasty one. And the grownups told us the story of the goat that discovered one of these springs. One of those goats who would ferret out the most hidden of secrets even if you concealed it behind seven veils, even if you buried it under seven layers of To the Spring, by Night  ·  173

earth, a goat that you would find coming out of a room chewing on the most delectable of dishes, or the newest piece of fabric, or a brand new dress. We knew that sort of goat in the village! A goat that is always separate from the herd, leading you a merry chase on its trail, and that somehow persuades you to turn your eyes away so it can vanish and then turn up whenever the spirit moves it. A shepherd had noticed that one of his goats disappeared into the trees and rocks when the afternoon was at its hottest. When it came back, he noticed that its beard was wet. He couldn’t understand where it could have found water, when it was far from the spring where he led the herd to drink during the noon rest time. This happened more than once, and he wanted to know the goat’s secret. When it disappeared again, he managed to follow it. Winding its way through the woods and rocks, it arrived at a crevice where it plunged its head. When it rose, the shepherd, to his astonishment, saw drops of water falling from its beard. It dipped its head in again to drink some more. The shepherd didn’t know what to think. It hadn’t rained for a long time, so it couldn’t be rainwater that had accumulated in a hollow. He waited for the goat to leave, and went to verify. There was a rift in the rock, barely wider than the goat’s muzzle, and clear at the bottom. He thrust in his hand and felt the running water. It was not stagnant water as he had thought, but a spring with a rate of flow such as he had never seen, even in the most abundant. Where was this water going from this remote spot? To find out, he returned the next day with a large handful of straw in his bag, followed the goat, and threw the bag’s contents into the crevice. Two days later word arrived from three 174  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

villages on the plain that the day before, straw had flowed out of their large spring. Everyone tried to interpret that sign. Because it was certainly a sign. It was not the dry grass of the mountains but the same straw they fed to their animals in their stables. And on the same day! In three springs! The shepherd remained silent, told no one the secret of his goat, and let it go and drink in peace without following it. The sign did not return, the ardour of the seers and the uneasiness of the people died down, and life went on. The fine weather ended, the cold returned, and the herd followed its winter routine, spending most of the season in the stables. When the good weather returned, that goat was no longer there. It had been eaten by its masters, who had thought it best to shorten its life in order to prolong their own. The shepherd believed he would be able to find the spot without any difficulty. How could he forget such a discovery? But when the sun beat down, and the shepherd found himself again in the same place, he could not locate the rock and its crevice. He returned several times to the woods close to where he had surprised the goat, kept a close eye on the beards of the others, left them thirsty and had them wander in the area where the spring might be, hoping that their thirst might lead them in the right direction, but with no luck. He found no trace of the spring on any of the goats and had to spend the rest of his life regretting this loss, which was rekindled in him at the least provocation, and sent him wandering around that mountain. The goat had disappeared with its secret. Even in his dreams it came face to face with him with its dripping beard, and looked straight into his eyes, but it never again guided him to the spring. To the Spring, by Night  ·  175

The story of the spring was just one of many. Among the tales of the godless and the citadel there were signs we could look for, pointing to where they had left their remains. Clues that would guide us to the jars. Jars we could imagine filled with what we most lacked on the heights, gold and wealth. If we found those jars, we would not have known what to do with them. Our wants and our belongings were very limited where we lived, but everyone desired riches and gold. If man found a valley full of gold, he would want a second. Only earth can fill the orbits of the eyes, the grownups said, alluding to the handful of dirt poured over the eyes of the dead at the time of burial. According to legend, there was treasure buried by the infidels in the citadel and around the village. Certain villagers suspected every unidentified pile of pebbles and stones of harbouring treasure. A treasure easier to find, perhaps, than the lost water of the godless. And that hope drew us closer to them, to their wealth at least, and bound us to them down through the ages more closely than our having frequented the same rock. The jars they might have scattered here and there piqued our curiosity and interest, and created a furor among the villagers that became difficult to control, when a rumour circulated one day that on the heights the most inquisitive person in the neighbourhood had found a jar filled with we knew not what. There was a gold rush! Whoever had a pick and shovel close to hand headed for the citadel. In no time at all, the village was emptied of its men, and the area around the citadel was teeming with hectic silhouettes, pecking at the ground like huge frenzied crows. Others, on their return from the 176  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

fields or the woods, or from the town or the villages, barely took the time to unload their beasts before climbing up to the heights, darkening the slope. Soon it was the children’s turn. Even some women were curious enough to go to the foot of the citadel to take a closer look at what was happening, and remain nearby in case a husband or child needed help. When we arrived, the ground that had previously served as a cemetery had already been turned over. Some, thinking they were on top of a grave, kept digging deeper, while others went a bit farther on and tried to gouge out their own square of ground. Others were turning over and excavating what had been the foundations of ruined buildings. Some found metal objects they had trouble identifying, or fragments of pottery, jars, and even a handle. Still others poked fun at all this scrap, these fragments, prodding the diggers to go into town and get an estimate from the goldsmith, but to avoid all contact with the authorities and the police if they didn’t want to spend the night at the station or end up in prison. If all went well, they could trade in their finds for money and wealth and come back with a few gifts and delicacies to take this day’s sour taste from our mouths, in exchange for some pleasant times among us. No more ploughing or harvesting, no more axes, no more logs. Many hands would be there to serve them, as long as they were paid from this new-found wealth. Teasing each other in this way, they carried on with their excavations. But behind the casual banter, their eyes avidly scoured the smallest patch of land laid bare. It was late autumn and we, the children, had begun to feel the cold and to shiver a little. Here and there a few fires were lit, around which we tried to warm ourselves. Some of the To the Spring, by Night  ·  177

grownups, who had got tired of digging, joined us, cursing the godless and their gold, which they had certainly carried off with them. Being shrewd, they would not have left it behind even if they had to flee. It was stupid to tire oneself out for a treasure all these centuries later. The most eager continued to rummage in the soil, but soon showed signs of fatigue and they too abandoned the field. This mirage, which had seemed to be showing signs of substantiality, had distracted the villagers from their occupations. Everyone began to sense the onset of autumn, of the cold, the burden of all the unfinished tasks and the work to be done. They left the earth overturned, with a few bones balanced on mounds of dirt. Some threw away their pot handle, their bits of mosaic, while others kept their metal objects. If there had been a treasure, they had arrived too late. If it was a folly, it had lasted long enough. They called a halt to the operation and returned home. But for a long time the rumour about a jar full of gold, disinterred and brought home by night, continued to circulate. On that day, we were not afraid of the citadel. It had been conquered, laid bare. We had revealed it in all its fragility and its nakedness. Its inhabitants had not had time to frighten us, so taken aback were they by this sudden invasion. And we had not had time to think of them. On that day all our fears were in abeyance. They had given way to this game, to this festival and its fires. To a hunt for the treasure we thought awaited us deep in the earth. To the gold rush at the citadel. Down below the citadel was Deaf Rock, which guarded its secret visions and conveyed fears of its own to us. It watched over one of the two passages that linked us to the plain. Why 178  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

was it called Deaf Rock? We didn’t know. Its upper part, which gave it a sort of cap on its head, must have been set apart from its body with blows from a club, we thought. Why would one have carved a cap on its skull? Because it would have taken time and energy to do that. Perhaps it was due to these blows and the cap carved on its head that it had been called Deaf Rock, or perhaps it was its name that had suggested this explanation. We imagined for it a life of pain and turmoil, with cries and clamour to which it was constantly closing its ears. It made us think of the grownups in the village who were hard of hearing, deaf to the words of others but an unstoppable source of words of their own. Their life became an ordeal, and they in turn became an ordeal for others, for those close to them. It stood like a sentinel, half-way between Hâji Mouss and the point that tilted toward the plain. It was a link between the end of the saint’s domain and the meeting place for the slopes, one descending in gentle stages toward the vines, the other climbing steeply toward the citadel. A sentinel deaf to all corruption, keeping its eyes alert to all that moved between the village and the plain. It was our bulwark against the terror of the citadel, even if its black mass, ready to leap on who knew what prey, filled us with fear. When we passed in front of the rock with our horses, they started in fright, and made us shudder on their backs. We never knew why the horse was afraid. He always had his reasons, we were told, which would perhaps remain hidden from us. That the horse’s reasons might escape us disturbed us even more. What could be hidden in Deaf Rock that might scare our horses? It was deaf, they said, deaf perhaps to any To the Spring, by Night  ·  179

pain, thus able to keep any secret like a tomb. There must have been a hollow under its cap that served as a hiding place for all the bandits that had spent time on these heights. We strongly suspected that it knew the secret of the jars and the citadel dwellers’ lost spring. It was there as their relic, their guard. We were afraid of being its chosen prey, and as the rock changed form in our minds, in our consciousness, we picked up the pace, we picked up the pace of our mounts so as to pass it quickly and put ourselves far from those shadows that, we thought, were going to open up the top of the skull and close us inside along with them. The Rock of the Godless awaited us at the bottom of the slope descending toward the vines. A block of two rocks, like two knives planted in the ground. It stood on slightly higher ground than the channel carved out by the water, the rain, the melting snow, and its bed, which was just damp ground in the summertime. It intruded into this landscape that hid it from view, and you had to reach just the right angle to spot it. It faced the hollow rock of the citadel, bound to it by a historical connection we could not know. But it was too far off for its name to make us think about the citadel-dwellers until the day when the village blind man, a distant uncle, talked about the godless ones who had been lynched there and thrown into the hollow. For a long time, he said, people could not pass near the rock, which was saturated with the smell of rotting corpses. It was during the general call to arms, they told us. The godless ones who had been chased out of the countries to the north moved southward, toward other countries and other 180  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

frontiers, crossing our lands. They moved down with women and children, a few possessions on their backs, and, for the better off, a few children and old people on the backs of the beasts of burden they had been able to keep with them. The rest, dressed in a few rags, dragged behind them what was left of their offspring. They skirted the villages so as not to incite the anger of the inhabitants, most representing the faith of the majority, sending two or three men in cases of extreme necessity to a nearby village to take or to request some provisions. They had already travelled a considerable distance with significant losses before reaching our land. In the village, where the numbers of men were in any case small, many had been mobilized, and there was one deserter. Some of the villagers, who had not yet recovered from the mobilization and hated the godless with a passion, holding them responsible for their personal losses, wanted to take revenge on the unhappy people who, trying to save their own lives, were travelling through hostile territory. Some of the elders, some of the pious in the village, tried to temper their aversion and loathing, hoping to prevent them from taking irreparable action. But there were men who ignored their advice and set off in pursuit of the caravan. They caught up with the group near the rock, and committed the unforgivable. A dozen of those seen as godless succumbed to their blows. They piled the bodies inside the rock, which has since kept their name alive. The others escaped to the plain. But the plain offered no safety; it meant losing the protection offered by the mountain, being exposed to view, defenceless, with no refuge. Their losses multiplied, said the blind uncle. The caravan of the godless moved onto To the Spring, by Night  ·  181

the plain, but the news that came back to the village about those trying to cross it to reach the south told of more and more rapes, plundering, and killings. Caravans were decimated, men, children, and old people were tossed into rivers that swept them to the south they were desperately trying to reach – not to the south they wanted, from which they could continue on toward more welcoming horizons, but rather to an ultimate south, with no elsewhere and no return. They tossed into the rivers those they had no use for and kept the women and young girls, with whom they would forge a new lineage, said the blind uncle, who saw this procession anew behind his closed eyelids. He who kept track of all events, large and small, in the territory and its surroundings was, along with his own uncle, one of the two men in the village who had never served in the army. His uncle was the sole deserter. In horror and cruelty, man can outdo animal; he can become worse, said the grownups, who as children had lived through these horrors or had heard the stories. Man has a sense of his destiny, but often errs in the means to its accomplishment. Man cannot raise himself up and achieve greatness at the expense of those who are making the same journey and facing the same hardships, the grownups told us. But men had forgotten this episode, it was erased from their memory. The Rock of the Godless, alone, still held the secret of their death throes through the testimony of the blind uncle. Those Christians of the East who should have been our fellows had paid with their lives for their passage to the south at a dark moment in history. Those who approached the rock no 182  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

longer knew what it exhaled, whether it was our childhood fears merged with its shapes, or the odour of the dead permeating the rock’s flesh. The Cavern of the South faced the Rock of the Godless. It must have borne witness to those death throes and decay, whose exhalations, reeking of decomposition, still clung to its cool and humid depths. From close by or from afar, it terrified us with its opening shaped like a wolf. It was a fear that endured, even when we found the courage to slip into its den, half-believing that a wild beast was going to appear and pounce on us. Outside, we were fearful that a wolf would emerge from its gaping maw. It faced our vineyard, which explains our visits, frequent but fleeting, given the terror it inspired. At the same time, it was a kind of revenge we took on our fear. We emerged more proud of ourselves than when we had ventured in. The Cavern of the North looked down on this small world. It was carved into a high, forbidding cliff that led to a terrace on Mount Kêmêl, this mountain that reigned, benevolent, over its surroundings. The cavern opened majestically into the smooth wall. Those who walked along the cliff face and ventured a look inside saw the blackness that made it appear as though it went on forever. Within, it was brighter and more welcoming. But we were frightened to death by the idea of drinking from, or even coming close to its spring, which seemed to us like a dragon lurking in depths that remained dark despite the ambient light, and whose vague contours only intensified their mystery. They were frequented by local To the Spring, by Night  ·  183

pigeons and doves that attracted serpents and dragons, we were told. They also attracted amateur hunters who, little inclined to go in search of real game, were happy with these relatively abundant fowl, and were roundly mocked by the real hunters, who would never, even as a consolation prize, have fired on these doves and pigeons, considered close to man, and thus to be respected and protected. The cavern and its surroundings served as an autumnal resting place for our herds of goats, which left their summer quarters toward the end of the harvest, and began a new year with new shepherds or with those prepared to take on another seasonal round. The herd’s new year began in the areas around this cavern, which offered shelter from the harsh weather, and where enclosures were set up, to be shared by the two parts of the village. Like the springs that were spread around the village in three directions, encircling it and becoming the lairs of djinns, dragons, and monsters thanks to the grownups’ tales, these rocks and caverns surrounded our village and became, depending on the circumstances, hideaways where our hopes could prosper, or fountainheads for our fears. Fears are a bit like fog, as are memories. On the one hand, one dreads to go forward and plunge into a future without end, and on the other, one is afraid to retreat into the past and lose oneself in a plethora of events and tales. I often visited the centre of the village where my paternal uncles and aunts lived, where there were more children of my age, and more games. Living outside the village did not make relationships or games 184  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

any easier. The Red Rock, where the children – and even the grownups – gathered, was at the village centre. A half-crossing was easier than a complete crossing, or an escape into the unknown world of trees and fields. And even if one felt a bit foreign, the adventure was simpler in the centre of the village. And so from time to time we made the effort and took ourselves into the village for some relief from our marginal solitude and from those confrontations with the unknown that were a constant concern near where we lived. These forays were for a long time restricted to the vicinity of the Red Rock and the school. I didn’t dare go any farther into the village. When I think back on these places, my only distinct memory is of a half-crossing that went from the middle of the village toward the extreme west. It had been given me as an assignment. I was to deliver a message from a paternal cousin to a maternal cousin, older than me by twelve and fifteen years, both of whom had reputations as smugglers. The paternal cousin, who had lived with us for almost a year with his young wife, had just finished building their house, and had just had a new daughter. As a good cousin, I was preparing for the future by hovering about him, when he noticed me and gave me the message. He too already saw me as a son-in-law. And his confidence in me in this situation was that of a father-in-law in his son-in-law, that of an almost-father to his almost-son. He had to introduce me to the intricacies of this vocation, starting by giving me little assignments. Of course, it was the daughter, my promised one from the cradle, who interested me, and that did not necessarily make me a good messenger. To the Spring, by Night  ·  185

In the first place, I had not understood the message, which involved arrivals, departures, the names of gentlemen which conjured the galloping of horses through dark nights, the names of distant villages that I couldn’t remember. In addition to that, what with my confusion and fear in making the crossing, I garbled the message on my arrival, and was not able to deliver it. The reproach was not long in coming – a reproach without consequence, but one that nevertheless left me with the bitter taste of something at which I had failed. One of these expeditions involved the schoolmaster who had just set up shop in the centre of the village. It was his second year.

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c Before that there had been no school, no schoolmaster in the village. And no relationship with the written word whatsoever. The women might have had no experience with printed matter during their lifetimes, other than a few inscriptions on packaging. The men sometimes came into contact with it during their military service or when they went into town, without being able to understand how these marks on paper like those of ants or insects could be read and could pass on what one wanted to say. How, from these black flecks, could one derive sounds and words? But everyone knew about the existence of books, where, the grownups said, you could find the essence of all that existed on earth. And for this reason, everyone had deep respect for what was written, especially if it was in the Arabic alphabet. We saw women, in particular, kiss the wrappings of cigarette papers that smugglers brought back, whose inscriptions were in Arabic, and lift them to their foreheads as a sign of respect, hiding them out of reach, preserved and clean. When they were reminded that this was only packaging, and that what was written did not even concern food but cigarettes, they replied that if they waited to learn what was written before showing respect, it might then be too late. And it is true that nowhere in the region could anyone be found who was able to decipher such inscriptions. Because to read Arabic did not mean you understood it. Some

had learned to read a text, a book, but not texts and books, and even less to comprehend them. In most cases they had learned the alphabet without learning the language, without learning to write. And those who succeeded in reading the text of a sacred book were rarer than the fingers on one hand. But this absence of dealings with letters did not mean there was no interest in what had been set down in these writings. Everyone tried to learn some fragments of the sacred book by heart. Fragments that, when those who knew a little taught them to those who did not know them, were altered from mouth to mouth and took on the colourings of our different regions. Everyone used these verses for prayers and invocations. They drew on their verses in times of trouble, when they were fearful or joyful, in poverty or wealth, in famine or abundance. The verses on their tongues took the place of angry insults, cries of desperation, or the murmurings of hope and happiness. When the harvests were good, the villagers sometimes found money for a man literate enough to lead the prayers during Ramadan, the month of fasting, and to make them more acquainted with what was in the Book. One of these itinerant masters was asked to settle in the village and he spent three years there with his wife and children. While the children in the village were being introduced to the letters of an alphabet, the grownups grappled as best they could with the verses they had learned by heart. The master showed the Book to the children, who for the most part had never seen it. A book preserved in a case, itself protected by a cloth. He told them that the Book was divided

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into suras, the suras into verses, the verses into words. And the words were made up of letters that formed the alphabet. He brought out a booklet and showed them the first page. They saw the different shapes that covered it. It was the alphabet and it was different from the page of a book. And so they set about learning the alphabet, whose first letter resembled a reed, the second a waxing moon, the fifth a rounded belly with a flattened head on top, the eighth a jaw, the tenth a goat’s horn, the twelfth a trident, the fourteenth a lamb’s ear, the sixteenth a broom with a handle, the eighteenth an open mouth, the twentieth a curve with an eye, the twenty-second a cliff upright on its base with a head hanging in the air, the twenty-third a hook, the twenty-fourth a hammer, the twenty-fifth a shepherd’s bowl, the twenty-eighth the space between the index and the middle finger. And the twenty-ninth was something wavy. Letters that resembled each other were differentiated by dots above and below. The boys and some of the girls in the village spent time with this alphabet during the three years the master was present, and began to read the sacred book. They even travelled with the master to the surrounding villages, reciting, at each stop, fragments and prayers they had learned by heart, sharing them with those nearby, encouraging the children in the villages to do the same, and even more. Because you had to nurture a desire for the good, the grownups told us. After three years the master had to leave our village for another in the plain where he had vague family connections, and except for two, the children bit by bit forgot what they had learned, even the alphabet. The parenthesis was closed,

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and the village was once again without a master and without letters. Seven years later things took a more serious turn. The State, which until then had been more associated with memories of war, military service, and police presence, wanted to present itself differently, and sent a teacher to the village. He came with his wife and two children before a school was built, and installed his family along with the school in an abandoned house below the Red Rock. He taught children from five to twelve years of age in the same class. He divided the class in two: one group in the morning, another in the afternoon. The parents went into town to order school clothes for their children: a black shirt and pants for the boys, a black dress for the girls, a white collar in both cases, plain for the boys, embroidered for the girls. A new species emerged in the village, an object of curiosity for the villagers, for the little ones not yet enrolled, and for the grownups because they weren’t the right age. Curiosity leads to spectators. The school and its master gave the villagers a new pretext to visit the village centre – to peer through the windows at the pupils seated at their desks, reciting and writing under the watchful eye of the teacher. Two of my brothers were enrolled. The eldest had already left the village. He knew how to read and write both the Arabic and Latin alphabets. I saw him rarely. He had become a legend to me. My father, one of the two literate people in the village who spoke Turkish, had learned the alphabet from a villager who himself had learned to read and write in Turkish during 190  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

his military service, and had been accidentally killed by a bullet during a wedding celebration on the roof terrace of my grandfather’s house. My uncles were accused of murder. Fortunately there were witnesses, and the adolescent who had shot the gun by mistake was caught. My father was literate, my two brothers went to school, and the older one knew how to read and write. That put me in a good position for learning things at school. And, something rare in a Kurdish village, at the age of about four I knew how to count up to fifty in Turkish. The teacher, who didn’t speak a word of Kurdish but was on very good terms with the village, could not have been indifferent to that. It was my father who sent me. He told me to ask the teacher if he could let my brother leave early. He made me repeat several times the words I should say. I found the teacher sitting on a chair in front of the house that served as the school. It was recess, and the pupils were outside. I went up to him and recited my sentence in Turkish. He took me in his arms, stroked my hair, and asked me if I wanted to attend the school the following year. I answered: yes. Meanwhile, my father had left his work and followed me, in case I wasn’t able to repeat his request. He smiled when he saw me talking with the teacher. The teacher told him I spoke Turkish well, and that I should start school when it reconvened. My father agreed. We left with my brother, who had to take the blade my father used for cutting tobacco to the blacksmith in a rather distant village. The next year I began school. The village was still bubbling with the activity of the grape harvest. All around, fires were being stoked to transform grape juice into food for winter. To the Spring, by Night  ·  191

As was the case every year, five to seven families had grouped together and were making the rounds of the vineyards with large baskets for the grape picking. The beasts of burden went back and forth between the village and the vineyards with the baskets and children on their backs, taking advantage of the moments when they were not being watched to treat themselves to mouthfuls of the grapes they rarely had within their reach. The grape harvest was the year’s last time of abundance, and everyone, both people and animals, wanted to live it to the full. Because afterward came the cold; and life became leaner. It was also the time when the children, largely freed from their tasks in the fields and with the animals, were able to start school. And so began the time of my workaday crossings along with my brothers, my scholarly crossings, which linked the two ends of the village with no pause in between, from our house in the east to the school, which was no longer in the centre of the village but now in its own building in the west. As soon as the teacher arrived, the construction of the school building had begun. A construction that arrived from elsewhere. With materials whose transport was preceded by clouds of dust, deafening noises such as we had never heard, and enormous machines that shifted earth and rocks with an ease that would have been beyond the capacity of the fiercest monsters of our tales and nightmares. In fact, to bring in the building materials and open the village to the world, a road had first to be built. The teacher had done as the villagers did, passing through the narrow passage on the west to enter the village. But the school could not take the same route. It could 192  ·  Seyhmus Dagtekin

not be built with what was available in the village. It came from outside and its intrusion would not be without consequence. While the teacher was working in a house in the village, he was part of the village, and shared in its strengths and weaknesses. The school could not continue to be surrounded by all this activity for fear of being overwhelmed; it had to be moved from the centre to a location outside the village, its structure brought in from elsewhere. And for the move, a road was needed, not a passage. After the explosive charges and the bulldozers, the passage had to be widened for vehicles to pass – so much more impressive than our donkeys, with or without loads. Strange machines, operated by men who seemed just as strange, led the way into the village. They were closely followed by trucks that transported what was needed for building the schoolhouse: piles of bags of cement, stone, wood, and also tools foreign to the village. The din from the machines filled the air all around. For a time the village children’s favourite game was to scurry to the tops of the mountains on the southwest as soon as a vehicle, especially a light one, arrived in the village, and to wait for it to leave so that they could watch it roll away, raising plumes of dust, and disappearing on the roads through the plain leading to the distant city. The school was built, and the teacher began his third year, the first for me, in the new school, on a property just outside the village, to the west. We had begun the year in surroundings that had no furnishings. The exteriors were barely finished, the interiors barely dry, heavy and humid in a way our houses never were. But the To the Spring, by Night  ·  193

schoolmaster, while waiting for his materials, kept us inside only to take attendance. We then went out under a shady tree to continue the school day. Up until mid-November rain showers were rare, the good weather, although in gradual decline, held fast, and we were able without any problem to have our classes outside. There, in the shade, the new pupils were taken in hand by the older ones, who helped them work on the assigned exercises. During the first days two students assisted me in my apprenticeship: a cousin on my mother’s side, and a brother of the smuggler who had tried to escape from his shadow. A brother who, himself, was taken for a simpleton, and who to our great delight, without breaking stride, shouted at his father, “I’m not crazy and I don’t want to look after the goats,” all the time racing between houses while his father, stick in hand, chased after him to punish him for his recalcitrance. In time, my two instructors proved to have little aptitude for studying, and left school without a certificate, never having advanced beyond the alphabet. Much later, when I reminded them that it was with their help that I had first begun to learn my letters, they refused to believe it and accused me of mocking them now that I knew how to read and write, claiming they could never have taught me anything, given that they had learned nothing themselves. But they had learned the alphabet, and had shown me the letters. And, in the shadow of one of these trees, I began, guided by my two angelic tutors, to fill in with little pebbles the first letters the schoolmaster had drawn in the dirt. Letters which, as they were traced, created a bond between myself

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and the earth, the tree, the tree’s shade, the machines and their growling, and all that had come before. Letters I have gone back to ever since, from the shade of those trees to the currents that run through my life today, mouth full of pebbles, fingers mingling with the dust. Tracings I fill up with letters in the company of the wolf, the moon, the goat, under shifting skies, passing from one language to another, one alphabet to another, as one might change mounts along the road, riding through the night, to the spring.

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