THE SHADOW

Emerging from behind the rocks at the foot of the vast mountain, faint shadows, scarf-wrapped shadows, armed shadows, hard, merciless shadows crept stealthily closer in the moonlight. The shadows flowed past the narrow window of the house. They clustered in front of the wooden door, smashed in with a hard blow. One shadow among them slipped inside before the household woke and seized by the collar the boy lying beside twelve-year-old Fırat, his brother, two years his senior, before the boy could even grasp what was happening. Then, all together, they turned the child into a shadow like themselves. After that they withdrew silently through the door by which they had come. Flowing past the window one by one, they made their way towards the rocks they had come from and melted into the vast darkness of the mountains.

All this was over in a very short space of time, and straight afterwards his father lit the paraffin lamp. His mother rushed outside barefoot and screamed ‘My sonnnn!’ into the darkness, as if she were cursing it, or perhaps pleading with it. His mother’s cry was full of pain and helplessness. The moment the scream was heard, paraffin lamps were lit across the village. The villagers’ shadows flickered along the village path. Flickering, the shadows lined up silently in front of their houses. The whole place smelled of fear. Fear is like a thorn that pierces the heart and is dangerous to pull out; pull it out and it bleeds, leave it in and it burns.

Thorn-like fear, mingled with pain, uncertainty, agitation and doubt, was raining down on the shadows lined up at their doors. Only one shadow, kneeling in front of the others, was tearing at its long, dishevelled hair with both hands and screaming and screaming at the top of its voice. His father took his wife by the arm as she tore at her hair before the shadows, and lifted her to her feet. Then a single gunshot echoed down from the mountains. The moment the sound was heard, the shadows in front of the house threw themselves to the ground and put out the paraffin lamps in their hands. Afterwards the shadows rippled in the moonlight and merged into one another. They scattered just as they had gathered. As the shadows scattered, his mother sat on the stone by the door, moaning in her pain, ‘Bastards, kill me! Either kill me or give me back my Çeto!’

That night the household did not sleep until daybreak. No one spoke to anyone. They shared their pain in silence. Pain shared in silence is like a deep knife wound. The family had eight children: Fırat’s three older sisters, his older brother Çeto, Fırat himself, his two younger sisters and his youngest brother.

At daybreak, along with the smell of petrol, a pick-up full of soldiers came to their door. The moment he climbed out of the cab, the commander at the head of the soldiers seized Fırat’s father by the collar and began to slap him, yelling, ‘Damn you, you scum! Was it you, damn you, who gave your son to the organisation to be one of its men?’

The commander, harsh…

The commander, strong…

The commander, a zealous man who believed he was in the right…

The other soldiers, fingers on their triggers, surrounded them. When his father’s mouth and nose were covered in blood, his mother rushed over and clung to the commander’s huge hands. Then, in a wronged and innocent voice, she began to plead:

‘Don’t, Commander, don’t do this, Commander! Why would we give our son away? They came in the night and took him. You are the state, you are the strong ones. And you are the ones who will bring my son back to me,’ she said.

At this the commander jerked his hands roughly out of hers and glared at her in anger. As if what stood before him were not a human being but a germ, a worthless animal or a cigarette end he had just ground under his heel, he spat his words out in front of them all:

‘When it suits you, it’s “You are the state, you are the strong ones”; when it doesn’t, it’s “You are killers, you are evil.” You feed the organisation, you harbour them; and when you get hurt, you come running to us for shelter. Are you people a curse on the state, damn you?’

He had spoken his last sentence with his hand lifted in the air and his voice rising. The ones before it, in a thin, mocking voice… The whole of his speech was threatening and aggressive.

Fırat’s father, his eyes on the ground, spoke in a trembling voice:

‘Tell us, Commander, what are we to do? Are we all to shoot ourselves?’

The commander softened his voice a little and put on a show of false tenderness:

‘Ado Efendi, I gathered you all in the village square time and again and said, “Clear out of this village, it isn’t safe here,” didn’t I? Only three days ago I took the headman with me and went from door to door saying, “Clear out of this village at once, this is the order of the state,” didn’t I?’

‘You said it, you did say it, but is saying it enough, Commander? My grandfather was born here, my father lived in this house, in this village. I grew up in this house, and my children were born in this house. We may be needy and hard up, but we have our way of living, we have our habits. As everyone knows, we are poor folk. If we leave here, where are we to live, how are we to go, and with what money are we to settle, and where? How can the state that tells us “Go” not think of that? All right, we are ignorant, we don’t understand; but does the state not understand either? When the great men of our state say this, do they not know it cannot be done? Doesn’t every matter have its proper ways and customs, Commander?’

‘The state isn’t going to learn its ways and customs from ignorant people like you! I don’t understand the ins and outs of it, Ado Efendi. We follow orders too; whatever the state says goes. Look, you wouldn’t listen, and what came of it? Now you come whining, “My son’s been taken.” How do I know you didn’t give your son to the organisation yourself? How do I know he won’t be trained and come back and shoot these fine lads right here?’

As he said this, he pointed at the soldiers ringing them round.

‘God forbid, Commander! Find my son and bring him to me.’

‘Oh yes, yes! So I’m to put my soldiers’ lives at risk for your snot-nosed son, am I? Go and take your son back the same way you gave him!’

‘If you don’t stand by us, this business will never be finished, Commander. If the state doesn’t take us under its wing, the organisation will finish us off. The more we are finished off, the more bitter our children grow against the state. Man is the echo of man; the louder you shout, the louder it comes back to you.’

The commander, who had no answer to give, shot him a hard, sour look. Then he and his soldiers piled into the pick-up and sped away. A long, thin cloud of dust thrown up by the pick-up rained down on those left behind. The dust rained down on them until their hair, their moustaches and their clothes had all turned a dun colour. Either they had been that way since the beginning of time, or in that moment they had come to look like a natural part of the dun countryside around them.

It had all happened twelve years before, yet as he was swiftly throwing mortar at the wall with his plastering trowel, twenty-four-year-old Fırat remembered it as if he were living it again. Remembering, he grew sad. He put the trowel down beside him. He rubbed his cement-burnt hands together, shook off the bits of mortar stuck to them and slumped down on the wooden scaffolding he had been plastering from.

He slipped his right hand under the jumper his mother had knitted, took one of the cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit it. He drew the smoke in and blew it out into the empty air. It was as if his troubles, his worries, his sorrow, his love, his pain and his longing had mingled with the smoke he blew out. There was a strange, acrid taste in his mouth. These were not things that could be blown away in a single breath…

As always, he thought about what had become of his older brother Çeto. Was he dead, or was he alive? If he was alive, how could he find some trace of him? Thinking of his mother, who had spent twelve years sighing until her hair turned white, he too heaved a deep sigh. He took a long drag on the cigarette, smoked almost down to the filter, then held it between his thumb and forefinger and flung it away hard. As he began throwing mortar at the wall again with his plastering trowel, he lived through that day once more in his mind.

After the commander had gone off with his soldiers in a whirl of dust and smoke, his father had come in and said, ‘We’re going, there’s no way round it.’ His mother, her eyes swollen from weeping, had looked at his father through her tears:

‘I’d sooner die than go off and leave my Çeto in the mountains in the organisation’s hands! And where would we go, and how?’ she moaned in anguish.

‘No good will come of this. We have seven other children. If we stay here, anything could happen to us at any moment. Going can’t be more bitter than dying, or than losing another child, surely! Nobody dies of hunger; we’re hardly going to die! And isn’t it God who provides?’

His father had said this, had said that; in the end he had managed to talk his mother round.

First the animals were sold. With the little money they got, they went down on foot, step by weary step, from the hamlet to the town and from there to the city. In the city they boarded the Istanbul bus. When they reached Istanbul, they went to the district where people from back home lived and rented a ramshackle, cobbled-together house.

The next day, when his father came back from the neighbourhood coffee house, he said to Fırat, ‘Fıro, in the morning a man from back home is coming to fetch you; he’ll take you to a building site as a plasterer’s apprentice.’ And from that day to this he had worked in plastering. He had started as an apprentice and then become a master of the trade.

It was in those days that he had first seen Zehra, who was their neighbour and came from back home too. As Zehra went hopping past him like a sparrow, it was as if she had swept him along behind her. That day his heart had gone flowing after a sparrow. After that, for a long time, their eyes would meet, and then they began to talk. Years later, Fırat went off to do his military service. While he was serving, he listened, all ears, to the stories soldiers from other units told of fighting the organisation, in the hope of finding some trace of his brother, but sadly he came across no trace at all.

It had been six months now since he came back from the army. Any day now his family would be going to ask for Zehra’s hand. In the midst of so much pain, Zehra was perhaps the only thing that did him good. For her, every hardship was worth bearing. Life, in spite of everything, seemed beautiful to him. Because in life there was Zehra; there was holding her, breathing in the smell of her, taking her hands and looking into her eyes.

He was forever picturing the day he would buy a tiny plot of land somewhere far away, lay the bricks of a house like a little box on it and do the plastering with his own hands. There was hope inside him, but something whose cause he did not know was casting a shadow over that hope. Every good thing that might come his way had always made him uneasy. And it was this unease, whose source he did not know, that had made it harder every time for him to reach the good things. Now he felt the same unease about being united with Zehra. Would this feeling welling up inside him, whose source he could not know, keep him from being united with Zehra?

He slapped the mortar from his trowel against the wall in fury. It was as if he had struck the wall with it so that his dark thoughts would freeze in the concrete. He looked at his watch. It was nearly knocking-off time. He gathered his trowel, his shovel and the wheelbarrow together to wash them. It was winter. The weather was harsh and rainy. That was why he had lit a fire in a tin drum where he was working. After washing his hands he held them out to the fire and rubbed them warm. The cement burns on his hands had left deep cracks. From one of those cracks a thin trickle of blood seeped out. He took no notice. He was used to such things.

Coming towards him, Recep, one of the plumbers on the site, called out from a distance:

‘Knocking off already, Fırat the Kurd? Your fire’s blazing away, I see; let me warm my hands a bit.’

‘Warm them, Recep. I’m off. Once you’re warm, don’t forget to put the fire out.’

‘We could have had a bit of a chat. What’s up, why are you rushing off?’

‘My family and I have got preparations to make. Tomorrow evening we’re going to ask for a girl’s hand for me, you see…’

‘Oho, may it all go well for you, and good luck!’

‘Thanks, Recep, thanks,’ he said, and walked away.

When he came home that evening, he found his mother sitting at the window, lost in thought.

‘Is this rain falling where my Çeto is too, do you think, Fıro?’ asked his mother. Not a single day went by, in fact, without his mother speaking of Çeto.

‘I don’t know, Ma. Enough now; we don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. We don’t even know where he is.’

‘If you were a mother, you wouldn’t say that, my Fırat. If you were a mother, you wouldn’t say that. He’s alive! If he had died, I would have felt it. Mothers feel these things.’

‘God willing, Ma. God willing he’s alive and one day he’ll come and find us.’

‘He’ll come, oh yes, he’ll come. I know it.’

‘Ma, have you sent word to Zehra’s family? Are we going tomorrow evening?’

‘We have, son, we have. Your father sent word; they’re expecting us tomorrow evening. We’ve married off your big sisters and your little sisters. All we have left is you and your little brother. Now you’ll be going too; that’s what I’m afraid of.’

‘Where would I go, my dear Ma? I’m going to rent a place nearby. Don’t you worry; we’ll come to you every evening. You’ll be the one getting tired of us.’

‘Can anyone tire of a son, can anyone ever tire of him? How can you talk like that?’

For years his father had worked as a gatekeeper at a factory. A little later he came home too. They talked over the business of asking for the girl’s hand, watched television and had supper. His mother brought up Çeto again. Because they were going to ask for Zehra’s hand the next evening, a new colour had come into their lives. They were a family who scrimped and scraped to get by. Though they had never quite settled into city life, they were trying to hold on somewhere between the village and the city.

They were not unhappy, nor were they happy. Like millions of others, they were people whose days were all alike. But even those whose days were all alike had, now and then, times that were different and exciting. Thanks to the preparations for asking for the girl’s hand, they too were living through one of those days.

Pitch-black clouds filling the sky had all but stopped the light from reaching the earth, turning day into the half-light of dusk. Istanbul, the grey city, had grown greyer still. The rain looked set to fall any minute, any second.

Fırat was walking barefoot through the avenues and the streets. Then he came to a dead end. At the end of the street the faint silhouette of a person appeared. Afraid, Fırat walked towards the silhouette. As he drew nearer, the silhouette grew clearer. It was his older brother Çetin, fourteen years old. He had not grown at all; he stood before him just as he had been when the shadow men took him.

‘Çeto,’ moaned Fırat, but no sound came out.

Çeto was staring at him, staring hard. He was like a frozen statue. He looked first at the ground, then at the sky, and then at Fırat. His ice-cold eyes recalled the empty stare of a dead man. Then he held his hands out level with the ground. From his hands, blood began to flow like water pouring from a fountain under pressure.

Fırat ran, took hold of Çeto’s hands and tried to stop the blood. The blood was all but spurting from Çeto’s fingertips. Fırat was covered in blood. The blood began to fill the street, to seep into the houses and to rise little by little. Çeto and Fırat were standing in blood up to their throats. Then the blood rose, and rose; it began to seep into both their mouths. On the verge of drowning, Fırat screamed with one last effort.

He opened his eyes as his mother shook him hard.

Sweat was pouring from his forehead, his neck and beneath his eyes.

‘Did you have a nightmare, son? Your screaming woke us,’ said his mother.

Fırat was caught somewhere between dream and reality. The dream had been so real that it was all but keeping him from returning to reality. Pulling himself together and at last returning to reality, Fırat chose not to tell his mother about his dream. To brush her question aside:

‘I don’t know, Ma, I don’t remember,’ he said.

Just then the sound of the call to prayer came from far off. Hearing the call to prayer, Fırat realised it was morning.

‘I’m not going to work today, Ma. Zehra and I are going to buy promise rings. You sleep, and I’ll sleep a bit longer and then get up.’

As his mother drew the covers over him:

‘You sleep, son. When I’ve said my prayers I’ll put the tea on, and then I’ll wake you,’ she said.

So his mother said, but as luck would have it, sleep would not come to Fırat again. He fixed his eyes on the ceiling and began to think. How strange life was, beyond understanding even. Perhaps life could be understood and it was he who did not understand it. Though he had said nothing to his mother, a voice inside him agreed with her. Yes, Çetin might be alive. After abducting children like him, the organisation would shape their minds, raise them as militants, enemies of the state, and drive them off to war.

Çetin too might have been raised that way and driven into the thick of the war. He himself had gone into the army, served eighteen months as a Turkish soldier and come home. Yet the brother who had come from the same womb, who had dipped his spoon into the same pot and who had been taken from beside him as they slept in the same bed might have been raised as a sworn enemy of the Turkish soldier.

He could not understand who it was that made brother an enemy to brother, or what and whom it served. After all, what problem could brother have with brother? Never mind brothers, even a Kurd and a Turk had no real problem with one another. In Istanbul no one had ever said to him, ‘You’re a Kurd; you can’t come in here, you can’t have this.’ Nor had he ever nursed any enmity towards a Turk. His father and he himself had both done their military service, and their grandfathers had fought for this land. So what was it that could not protect them in their village and all but drove them to this city? Why was the quarrel between Kurd and Turk growing in high places, while among the people everyday life flowed on in its own way?

It was impossible to understand. Perhaps it was possible and it was he who did not understand. But whatever the truth of it, the state had hurt him to the heart.

For not finding his abducted brother and bringing him back, for driving them out of their village, for insulting them back then and for depriving him of his right to an education, the state had hurt him to the heart. The more he remembered of his childhood, the better he understood now. The organisation would come and say, ‘If you don’t give us flour, sugar and oil; if you don’t fetch the things we want from the town, we’ll kill you.’ Then the state would come and say, ‘If you help the organisation, we’ll beat you, kill you, hang you, cut you up, drive you out.’

Now he understood far better what a curse it was to be caught between these two fires up in the mountains. The more he understood, the angrier and more hurt he grew, with the organisation and the state both. And the angrier and more hurt he grew, the sorrier he felt for his mother, his father, his brothers and sisters, the people from back home and his own life.

As he lay tossing and turning uneasily in bed among these thoughts, his mother’s voice made him start:

‘Fıro, breakfast is ready. Your father and I are waiting for you.’

Hearing her voice, he got up and opened the curtain. The moment he opened it, the light flowed in like water and filled the room. The day was overcast. The pitch-black clouds he had seen in his dream the night before had begun to gather in the sky. Out in the street, cats were rooting through the rubbish.

This was one of those neighbourhoods known as squatter settlements, where people who had come from the East and the South-East lived. The houses were one, two, three storeys high; here and there four or five. Some were plastered, some were not; some had roofs, some had none. All of them had been built without any planning permission. In these neighbourhoods everyone knew everyone else and knew who was who. Though fights broke out often, over the years the place had become a real home to them.

His older and younger sisters had also married within the neighbourhood and settled here. Over the years the people of the neighbourhood had wrested water, roads, electricity and transport from the council, prising them loose bit by bit; they had built their houses, their streets and their lives with their own hands.

When he held his cracked hands under the water, he felt again, as he did every morning, the thin ache he was used to. He took no notice. He washed his hands and face and sat down at the breakfast table.

‘Did you have a nightmare in the night, son? You were screaming so much,’ called his mother, drawing Fırat’s mind back to the breakfast table.

‘I told you, Ma, I don’t remember,’ he replied.

‘All right, then, eat your breakfast. So Zehra’s getting ready; you’re going to fetch her after you’ve eaten, you said. The two of you are off to look at rings.’

‘All being well, Ma,’ said Fırat.

His father finished Fırat’s sentence for him, saying, ‘All being well, yes, all being well.’

After breakfast he left the house and knocked at the door of Zehra’s house, one street over. Zehra opened it at once and came out, as if she had been waiting ready behind it. Their eyes met. Fırat took Zehra’s hand and they set off together down the street.

‘It’s going to rain,’ said Fırat.

‘Yes,’ answered Zehra.

‘Have you wrapped up warm?’ asked Fırat.

‘I have, I have,’ said Zehra.

‘All being well, we’re finally coming to ask for your hand, and I’ve got such a strange excitement inside me,’ he said, and Zehra broke in at once:

‘Don’t even ask, my heart feels as if it’s going to jump out of my chest.’

For a while they walked in silence as far as the bus stop. Their hands, locked together, gave them both strength. It was as if they had become one body against the wind of life, walking on together.

Lightning began to flash. A light north-easterly was blowing, rustling the trees and dragging scraps of paper and bits of plastic along the ground. They went down to the main road, seven streets below the neighbourhood. They went into the only jeweller’s on the road and bought a promise ring each, the cheapest they could find.

When they came out, Fırat said:

‘I’m not going to work today. Shall I take you down into town for a while and show you around? We’ll be back in the afternoon.’

As if she had been waiting for just such an offer, Zehra broke in at once:

‘That would be lovely, go on, show me around a bit.’

Zehra’s long hair, curl upon curl, made her large green eyes stand out all the more. Her small freckled nose looked lovely between her high cheekbones. Her lips were full and moist. When she smiled, her smile spread right across her face, and her teeth showed pearl-white in her wide mouth. She was a beautiful girl.

Fırat, for his part, was tall and olive-skinned; his hair was straight and short. The dark eyes beneath his thick eyebrows looked out at the world with a smoky, sorrowful expression. Back in the village everyone used to say that what was most alike in Fırat and Çeto was their eyes.

They took the municipal bus to Eminönü. They strolled along the quay. From behind the railings of the Galata Bridge they watched the sea. They ate fish sandwiches and drank turnip juice with them.

They walked towards Mahmutpaşa through the crowd, their hands locked together. From the stalls Fırat bought Zehra some beads and baubles, and a printed headscarf too. He was burning, aching, to buy Zehra everything he saw and liked, if only he had the money. With his slender means, he never held back from giving whatever he could.

They were people who knew how to be happy with little. They did not know the endless unhappiness of those who chase after great desires, but gave thanks for what they had and made do with it.

After wandering round Sultanahmet Square, they walked hand in hand again as far as Beyazıt Square. It had got quite late.

‘Let’s go now,’ said Zehra.

‘Yes, let’s go,’ said Fırat.

Just then the clouds that had been gathering since morning and the flashing lightning at last brought the rain. All at once the downpour began. Their hair soaked, they ran for shelter in the covered bus stop. At the stop, many people were either keeping out of the rain or waiting for a bus. The crowd had pressed people up against one another. Many of them were half soaked, half dry.

The rain grew heavier, pelting down for all it was worth. Water running off the edges of the shelter’s roof collected on the ground and began to flow like a stream along the foot of the kerb. A bus came. Most of the people got on it. The bus Fırat and Zehra were waiting for had not come yet. A handful of people stayed on with them, watching the rain and waiting at the stop.

At that same moment, in an empty office in a business block overlooking the stop, a few men were waiting. One of them was watching the stop and its surroundings through binoculars. It was Çeto, who had been taken to the mountains twelve years before. The abducted fourteen-year-old boy had been brought up in the organisation’s camps; under different code names he had been drawn into one act after another, and over the years he had become one of the men who carried out its acts in the big cities.

Five days earlier he had entered Turkey from Europe and met up with the organisation’s men in Istanbul. They had put the bomb they had made together into a child’s hands and had had the bag left at the stop half an hour before. Now they were waiting for the bomb to go off.

When Çeto looked at the stop through the binoculars, he first saw in Fırat’s face a faint trace of the child Fırat had once been. Then he made out the dark eyes beneath his thick eyebrows. Those eyes that everyone in the village had likened to his own… He recognised the little brother who had lain beside him, years later, by his eyes.

He flung the binoculars in his hands to the floor. The bomb was on a timer, and it was seconds from going off. He ran down the stairs.

Just then, in the distance, a young man appeared, running towards the stop and yelling. He was saying something that could not be understood, but the noise of the city and the sound of the rain kept his words from being heard.

The man was running frantically, and as he drew closer he was shouting the same word over and over again:

‘Run! Run!’

Fırat could not tell who this man running towards them was. The man, for his part, was running with all his strength to reach the brother with whom he had shared the same bed years before.

Just as the yelling man reached the stop, there was a terrible explosion.

In an instant the place around them became a scene from the end of the world, with the roar of the explosion, people’s screams and the sound of shattering glass. The rain was pouring down for all it was worth. At the last moment Çeto threw himself on top of Fırat. The force of the blast tore off one of Fırat’s legs, and Zehra’s right arm. And a large shard of glass lodged in Çeto’s forehead.

In an instant the whole place was swept into chaos. The blood on the ground was mixing with the rainwater. After the explosion came a terrible flash of lightning. The glare of the lightning lit up for a moment the blood on the ground, the severed limbs and the motionless bodies.

Fırat saw a shadow close over him. Then he could make out Zehra, too, falling beside him like a shadow, and the blood all around. The last thing he saw was blood mingling with rainwater, and the last thing he heard was the thunder that came after a terrible roar.

Many people had been wounded, many people had died.

With one last effort Zehra touched Fırat’s hair with the hand that was still whole. Then her eyes froze on a single point.

With the act he had prepared, Çeto had killed his brother, the woman his brother loved, a great many innocent people and, in the end, himself. Killing was neither man’s first act nor his last; history had been stained with blood shed, and made to be shed, not only to survive but to gather power.

That day, at that stop, the rain took the blood and the thunder the hope; the shadow, though, remained over this country.

THE END