Two details preyed on his mind, her insisting on saying my stepsister and not my sister and the slightly mocking tone of voice as she said ‘our author’.
Throughout the journey the stepsister and her husband had talked incessantly about the beauty of Soğukpinar: ‘A little corner of paradise, a natural wonder; oh, if only this war would end and peace and quiet return! Our homeland is paradise, Ömer Bey. If we could show you every part of it, believe me, you would write a novel about this place. If only tourism were allowed to develop people would be able to breathe a little easier. We have no factories and no real pastures or fields left. War has put paid to livestock farming. Smuggling, the maia and terrorism are rife. Don’t expect honesty from starving people. A starving person has neither hope nor honesty. What will a starving person do? He’ll either go up the mountain, become a village guard or start smuggling.’
Jiyan was silent, thoughtful. She was sad. It was as though she regretted suggesting this trip. She looked exhausted, as if she had been without sleep for days. Later she was to say resentfully, her eyes full of tears, ‘I realized that even if you didn’t show it or admit it to yourself, you would look down on us; you would feel sorry for us because we cannot share our paradise, and that would estrange us even more.’
In fact, it was a lovely day. The sky was as blue as could be, the little white clouds did not obscure the sun. The brother-in-law’s black jeep — Ömer had not found out how the brother-in-law earned his money — left the main road and turned on to a stony, dusty country road. From his first day Ömer had been amazed at the abundance of luxury jeeps, some armoured, some with dark-tinted windows, perhaps bullet-proof, amid the poverty, the neglect and ruins of the town. When she saw that Ömer was surprised, Jiyan explained that the vehicles represented security and prestige and were symbols of power.
‘Even in the big cities it would be difficult to find as many of the latest jeeps with massive amounts of horsepower or the luxury cars you come across here in the street. You wouldn’t believe that you were in one of Turkey’s poorest and most underdeveloped regions,’ the Commander had said during a conversation on the subject.
Now, as they travel in such a jeep along a road covered with bushes and scrub, the brother-in-law says, ‘Ten years ago this was all woods and forest.’
Ömer asks in an unguarded moment, ‘Then what happened?’
There is silence. Damn it, why don’t I keep my mouth shut! ‘Oh, I understand. I keep forgetting. I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t forget,’ says Jiyan who has been sitting silently in the back during the whole journey. ‘You don’t have to apologize either. No, you don’t forget. To forget you have to know. You never even registered it so that you could forget. There are things that a person cannot feel deeply unless they’ve experienced them. At the end of the day, the images on television screens are just pictures, unreal. Even if they are our whole life, for you they are bad things that happen in distant places.’
Later, when they were alone, she would say, ‘Please forgive me. I can’t stand this thing between us, this line that divides us. I can’t accept it. I get angry.’
Jiyan’s words subdues the mood in the car. There ensues a silence that seems longer than it is.
‘A girl has been born,’ says the step-sister.
‘We say, the Devil passed,’ says Ömer. The jeep turns off the earth road and progresses slowly along a dry river bed. When armed men — whether soldiers or civilians, Ömer cannot make out — block their path, no one except Ömer gets excited. Here everyone is used to everything. The extraordinary has become ordinary. What need is there for a state of emergency? Every state is always an emergency anyway.
‘Don’t worry. It’s a routine check,’ says the brother-in-law. Their work is difficult, too. Everyone’s priority is their lives. They know us, but should they see a car that they don’t recognize, believe me, their hearts will be thumping, too. All men are the same. Everyone has just one life. Everyone is afraid. We are all afraid.’
‘They treat us well,’ says Jiyan. ‘We will sort things out with a reciprocal greeting. We are considered the region’s gentry. We even have dealings in common with the state and with the military. Conversely if some poor person were to pass by on a donkey then there would be no deference or respect.’
The jeep stops and the heavily armed men approach.
‘We are taking our guest to Soğukpinar,’ says the brother-in-law. ‘He’s one of our writers, and he’s come to get to know our region. He’s a friend of the commander.’ Then he says something in Kurdish.
The men glance briefly at their identity cards. ‘All right. Pass. You don’t have anyone with you with a foreign passport, do you?’
‘Which of us would be a foreigner? This gentleman is one of our best-known authors. Perhaps you’ve heard of him: Ömer Eren. He has come to acquaint himself with the region, to write. We are looking after him.’
The man does not seem impressed. ‘We don’t know what these writers write. It’s all right for the Commander. If something goes cock-eyed, or anything happens to him, we’ll be held responsible, not the Commander. There is a lot of action again in the area these days, so you must get back before nightfall.’
The arrogant and abrupt manner of the man, who appears to be the head of the patrol squad, his all-powerful demeanour, offends Ömer. The brother-in-law’s almost grovelling humouring of him and Jiyan’s silence upsets him further. Here even going to a spring on a hot day comes at a price …
Soğukpinar: a few poplars, a few willows and a little further on clear water gushing from the rocks. And a hut with thick plastic over the holes that pass for its window and door. In front of it, by the water, are three tables covered with wax cloths with dilapidated wooden chairs arranged around them.
The dark, wizened man who emerges from the hut at the sound of the engine comes running with a dirty cloth in his hand in the hope that his unexpected guests may be good customers. Welcoming them in Kurdish, he makes a show of wiping the chairs and the table surfaces with the cloth.
‘Well, this is Soğukpinar,’ says Jiyan. ‘The surroundings used to be much more beautiful — or at least it seemed like that to us. In spring when the snow melts it’s really lovely, when the snowdrops begin to show their heads.’
She has the timid melancholy of a child who is worried that the beautiful picture she has drawn will not be admired or of a poor little girl who suddenly realizes that the frilly dress she has donned to impress the others around her is in fact old, cheap and pathetic. She knows that Ömer will compare it with country restaurants near water he has known and belittle it, thinking: Was this the picnic place you praised to the skies? She knows that even if he does not say so he will think it and lie, saying, ‘It’s beautiful.’ Indignant and depressed, she knows that Soğukpinar is a sorry place of three poplars and a willow and that the standards of the best and the most beautiful of this land have changed, that in the eyes of the country’s giants it has shrunk to the size of the land of the dwarfs. Later on she would tell Ömer this, in an attempt to explain herself.
She leans down to the clear water that flows in front of the table where they are sitting. From the edge of the water, she picks a daffodil with glossy yellow petals, the constant adornment of the riverbank. As she tries to pin it to her hair, her slide springs open and her hair tumbles down towards the water like a thick black mane. At that moment such desire swells within Ömer that he can hardly prevent himself from embracing her, reaching out for her lips and holding her tightly to his breast. As Jiyan straightens up and comes to the table with the gracefulness of a black cat or a lynx, he understands from the moistness in her eyes and the flush spreading around her prominent cheekbones that she shares this desire. He thinks that her hair is the conductor. When her hair is freed from its restraints, we fall into its net. Their eyes meet, their eyes make love, commit adultery.