I did not reply to Hasan. Even if he was actually going to the judge today, I didn’t believe that the men he and his father were assembling would raid our house immediately. If he were indeed ready to take such action he’d have done so without writing a letter or awaiting my reply. He’s surely awaiting my response, and, when it doesn’t arrive, it’ll drive him mad. Only then will he begin assembling people and prepare to abduct me. Don’t think I’m not afraid of him at all. But, I’m counting on Black to protect me. Anyway, let me tell you what’s going on in my heart just now: I believe I’m not so afraid of Hasan because I love him as well.
If you object and think to yourselves, “Now what is this love about?” I’d find you justified. It’s not that I failed to notice during the years we waited under the same roof for my husband’s return, how pitiful, weak and selfish this man was. But now that Esther tells me he earns a lot of money-and I can always tell when she’s being truthful from her raised eyebrows-since he has money, and with it self-confidence, the overbearing Hasan has surely disappeared, exposing the dark, jinnlike peculiarity that attracts me to him. I discovered this side of him through the letters he stubbornly sent to me.
Both Black and Hasan have suffered for their love of me. Black disappeared, traveling for twelve years. The other, Hasan, sent me letters every day, in the corners of which he’d illustrated birds and gazelles. At first I was frightened of him, but later, I loved to read his letters again and again.
As I well knew that Hasan was thoroughly curious about everything having to do with me, I wasn’t surprised that he knew I’d seen my husband’s corpse in a dream. What I suspected was that Esther was letting Hasan read the letters I’d sent to Black. That’s why I sent no response to Black by way of Esther. You know better than I whether my suspicions are justified.
“Where were you?” I said to the children when they returned.
They quickly understood that I wasn’t really angry. Discreetly, I pulled Shevket aside, to the edge of the darkened closet. I lifted him onto my lap. I kissed his head and the nape of his neck.
“You’re cold, my dear,” I said. “Give me those pretty hands of yours so Mother can warm them up…”
His hands had a foul smell, but I didn’t comment. Pressing his head to my bosom, I gave him a long hug. In a short time he warmed up, relaxing like a kitten, sweetly mewling with pleasure.
“So then, you love your mother quite a lot, don’t you?”
“Ummmhmmm.”
“Is that a ”yes“?”
“Yes.”
“More than anybody else?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m going to tell you something,” I said as if divulging a secret. “But you won’t tell anyone, all right?” I whispered in his ear: “I love you more than anyone, you know that?”
“More than Orhan, even?”
“More than Orhan, even. Orhan’s young, like a small bird, he doesn’t understand anything. You’re smarter, you’re able to understand.” I kissed and smelled his hair. “So, I’m going to ask you a favor. Remember how you secretly brought Black a blank piece of paper yesterday? You’ll do the same today, all right?”
“He’s the one who killed Father.”
“What?”
“He killed my father. He himself said so yesterday in the house of the Hanged Jew.”
“What did he say?”
“”I killed your father,“ he said. ”I’ve killed plenty of men,“ he said.”
Suddenly something happened. Shevket slid down my lap and began to cry. Why was this child crying now? All right then, I confess, I must’ve been unable to control myself just then, and I slapped him. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was hard-hearted. But how could he say such nonsense about a man I’d been making arrangements to marry-and that, with the well-being of these boys in mind.
My poor little fatherless boy was still crying, and all at once, this upset me greatly. I, too, was on the verge of tears. We hugged each other. He hiccuped occasionally. Did this slap merit so much crying? I stroked his hair.
This is how it all began: The previous day, as you know, I’d told my father in passing that I’d dreamed my husband had died. Actually, as happened quite frequently over these four years during which my husband never returned from battling the Persians, I dreamed of him fleetingly, and there was also a corpse, but was he the corpse? This was a mystery to me.
Dreams are always used as a means to other ends. In Portugal, from where Esther’s grandmother had emigrated, it seems dreams were used as an excuse to prove heretics met with the Devil and made love. For example, even if Esther’s forebears denied their Jewishness by declaring, “We’ve become Catholics like you,” the Jesuit torturers of the Portuguese Church, unconvinced, would torture them, forcing them to describe the jinns and demons of their dreams, as well as burdening them with dreams they never had. Then they’d force the Jews to confess these dreams so in the end they could burn them at the stake. In this way, dreams could be manipulated over there, to show that people were having sex with the Devil and to accuse and condemn Jews.
Dreams are good for three things:
ALIF: You want something but you just can’t ask for it. So you’ll say that you’ve dreamed about it. In this manner, you can ask for what you want without actually asking for it.
BA: You want to harm someone. For example, you want to slander a woman. So, you’ll say that such-and-such woman is committing adultery or that such-and-such pasha is pilfering wine by the jug. I dreamed it, you’ll say. In this fashion, even if they don’t believe you, the mere mention of the sinful deed is almost never forgotten.
DJIM: You want something, but you don’t even know what it is. So, you’ll describe a confusing dream. Your friends or family will immediately interpret the dream and tell you what you need or what they can do for you. For example, they’ll say: You need a husband, a child, a house…
The dreams we recount are never the ones we actually see in our sleep. When people say they’ve “seen it,” they simply describe the dream that is “dreamed” during the day, and there’s always an underlying purpose. Only an idiot would describe his actual nighttime dreams exactly as he’s had them. If you do, everyone will make fun of you or, as always, interpret the dream as a bad omen. No one takes real dreams seriously, including those who dream them. Or, pray tell, do you?
Through a dream that I half-heartedly recounted, I hinted that my husband might truly be dead. Though my father at first wouldn’t accept this as an indication of the truth, after returning from the funeral, he was suddenly persuaded by the evidence of the dream, and concluded that my husband was indeed dead. Thus, everyone not only believed that my husband, who was virtually immortal these past four years, had died in a dream, they couldn’t have been more certain of his death had it been officially announced. It was only then that the boys truly realized that they’d been left fatherless. It was then that they truly began to grieve.
“Do you ever have dreams?” I asked Shevket.
“Yes,” he said smiling. “My father doesn’t return home, and I end up marrying you.”
His narrow nose, dark eyes and broad shoulders resemble me more than his father. Occasionally, I feel guilty that I wasn’t able to pass on to my children their father’s high, broad forehead.
“Go on then, play ”swordsman“ with your brother.”
“Can we use father’s old sword?”
“Yes.”
For some time, I gazed at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the boys’ swords striking each other, as I struggled to quell the fear and anxiety that was brewing within me. I went down to the kitchen and said to Hayriye: “My father’s been asking for fish soup for quite some time now. Maybe I ought to send you to Galleon Harbor. Why don’t you take a few strips of that dried fruit pulp that Shevket likes out of its hiding place and let the kids have some.”