The Silence of Scheherazade Read online

  Muezzin Nuri’s velvet voice filled his room at the inn. As he lay on his back on the mattress, Avinash allowed the same scene to play over and over in his mind. Every time those slender white fingers touched his lips, his stomach tingled and his heart beat as if it would burst.

  Avinash Pillai had fallen in love for the first time in his life.

  Gypsy Yasemin’s Web of Secrets

  ‘And from then on, my dears, every afternoon, in that house with a garden at the end of Vasili Street, those two – you know who – would, beneath a blanket of smoke from the hashish in the waterpipe… What acrobatics! What tricks! Don’t ask me about the rest.’

  By the time I heard this story, neither Edith, nor Avinash, nor Vasili Street where the house in which they met and made love every afternoon was located, remained. But Gypsy Yasemin still walked the streets, going door to door, enthralling women with her tales of the rich Europeans.

  Much time had passed since they’d found me, just before dawn, in the garden of the house on Bulbul Street, unconscious. Maybe one year, maybe two; I don’t know. Time had lost its significance. I didn’t venture out into the streets of my ruined city, but in spite of all the suffering I’d endured, in spite of my losses, I was young, and with the fierce strength of the young I kept going. Under a new name, and from within the warm embrace of the Turkish family who had taken me in with no questions asked, I adjusted to my new life.

  I had become silent Scheherazade, with no past, no people, no speech.

  The power of speech, which I lost on the morning they found me, had still not returned. It was never going to return. In a way, this was a good thing because people who spoke my language were being hounded out of the villages in which they had lived for a thousand years and sent to a faraway shore. I didn’t want to ever be separated from cinnamon-scented Sumbul, who had restored me to life, or from other things in that house.

  Gypsy Yasemin would lay out the items she had unpacked from her bundle on the large decorative wrought-iron table left over from the time of the Europeans. As soon as she began telling the love story of Edith and Avinash from twenty years back, all the women would gather in the kitchen to listen to her, their mouths hanging open: Sumbul, her widowed sister-in-law Mujgan, Makbule Hanim, Nanny Dilber from Ethiopia, and myself, alias Scheherazade. The kitchen smelled of bergamot and the onions which Gulfidan, a refugee from Lesbos, was forever slicing. Nanny Dilber, black-skinned and quite as massive as Gypsy Yasemin herself, would pack wood into the huge oven, another relic from the Europeans, and fry red mullet in olive oil. I would prepare a salad with mustard greens and endives that I had gathered from the garden as well as poppies and hackberries Yasemin had brought down from the mountains.

  We had all moved to the house known as the Mansion with the Tower, which was bigger. It had been given to Sumbul’s husband, Colonel Hilmi Rahmi, as a reward for his successes during the war. Only Hilmi Rahmi’s father, the grumpy Mustafa Efendi, remained in the old house on Bulbul Street at the top of the Muslim neighbourhood.

  ‘Our boy Avinash had not had much experience with women before, but he was a good student. In Edith’s arms, he quickly became an expert. How do I know this? Let’s just say I heard it from the cats on Vasili Street, okay?’

  Next to me, Sumbul – still sane at that point – leaned her elbows on the table, settled her blonde head and plump cheeks between her palms like a child, and listened to the story she had already heard countless times from the bundle peddler. Her green eyes grew wide and she even set down her peacock-feather fan, laying it on top of the earthenware wheat jar. She was intrigued by the adventures of the Europeans. They had given Smyrna its colour, its sounds, its distinctive flavour, until they were lost to the city in that one night. She latched onto Yasemin’s tales of the old days as if clutching a lifebelt.

  The contents of the gypsy’s bundle lay on the table: lengths of linen, silk, lace…

  It was said that the gypsy went into the chalets, villas and mansions of Bournabat, Boudja and Paradiso that had been abandoned by the Greeks and Armenians fleeing for their lives and took dresses, jewellery, hats, whatever. It was true that on occasion a very fashionable linen dress would emerge from her bag, its armpits bearing the scent of distant places, its collar, lace and underskirt of the highest quality, obviously cut by expert scissors.

  ‘A place has ears. When those two, Avinash and Edith, slid beneath the mosquito netting of an afternoon, the house servants weren’t sleeping, were they? When I read their fortunes from the coffee grounds later, they couldn’t stop talking. Speaking of fortunes, fill up a coffee cup and let me read the fortune of this silent Scheherazade. Why is she so sad? What has caused her to be tongue-tied? Let us find a cure for her troubles.’

  From time immemorial, Gypsy Yasemin had been going in and out of the houses of Smyrna with her bundle. No one knew how old she was. Sumbul swore that back when she’d run away from Plovdiv and had come to Smyrna as a bride, Yasemin was still the same age as she was now. The wrinkles on her face had not deepened one bit. Even the ancient women living over at Iki Chesmelik remembered the bundle peddler from their youth. According to one story, she had discovered the secret of immortality while roaming around India before the Christian Era and had remained the same age ever since. So as not to arouse suspicion, she relocated frequently, but when she arrived in Smyrna, she fell so in love with the Pearl of the East that she settled down there, willing to risk the inevitable gossip.

  Another rumour had it that, like all gypsies, Yasemin practised witchcraft and drank the blood of uncircumcised boys. When I was a child, in the Christian neighbourhoods, angry people would accuse the Jews of kidnapping their children and throwing them into spiked barrels. From time to time they would attack the Jewish kortejo on Havralar Street, where the town’s Sephardic Jews lived together in small tenement rooms around a dirty courtyard. The witchcraft stories about Gypsy Yasemin could have been a hangover from those old legends.

  Witch or not, since olden times Yasemin had woven a net – invisible as a spider’s web, very thin, very taut – around the women of the city. She’d become famous not only in the poorer neighbourhoods but also in Bella Vista, in Punta, even in Bournabat and the European mansions of Boudja. Wearing high-heeled clogs on her feet, her belly hanging down over her baggy trousers, which jingled with coins, she wandered from street to street. She would call out in a clear voice, ‘The peddler has come, ladies! Open your doors and view her delights,’ and doors around the edges of that intricate net would open, allowing the huge woman to slip inside.

  Gypsy Yasemin would entertain the poor with the love stories of the rich, like that of Edith Lamarck, and she would provide the rich with the magic potions of Old Aybatan the herbalist or the healing oils of pharmacists like Yakoumi. In the old days, when Avinash used to bring precious gems from Bombay, Yasemin was one of the sorcerers who waited in Smyrna harbour in water up to their waists for the arrival of his servant Ravi. She could also perform lead-pouring rituals to cleanse a space of evil spirits, do epilations with wax, read fortunes from coffee grounds, and procure opium or hashish for those who craved it. It was also said that she carried letters between young lovers. Although she would swear on three holy books that she understood neither the Greek nor the Arabic nor the European alphabet, the women knew that the source of her never-ending supply of gossip were the letters she tucked between her enormous breasts.

  Even if her oaths were genuine and she really didn’t know how to read or write, her tongue was as nimble as an acrobat and she could warble off all the languages of the old city like a nightingale. Her name, like her language, would change as she passed from one neighbourhood to another. From Yasemin to Yasemi, from Yasmin to Jasmine.

  ‘That Edith, you know, was a hashish addict, a dope fiend. How can I be sure? Don’t even ask, dearie. The purple-green weed she inhaled was the most superior, the most magical. She knew the good stuff, I’ll say that much. You’ll have to figure out the rest for yourselves.
Do you imagine that without getting high, she could she have gone to bed with that Indian? But then her flesh would get so carried away… The sounds she came out with would make even the cats on Vasili Street go on heat. Ha, ha, ha! If I’m lying, God strike me dead!’

  The laughter that rang out from Yasemin’s vast chest bounced off the marble walls of the kitchen like a bomb exploding, making all of us who were sitting around the table jump. Sumbul tried to signal to Yasemin with her eyes and eyebrows that Aunt Makbule was among us. Makbule Hanim was the older sister of Sumbul’s father-in-law, Mustafa Efendi. I was afraid of her. I had never seen a smile on her face. She hid herself behind a black veil and spent all day with her prayer beads.

  ‘With her head full of the smoke from such pure weed, the flesh beneath her fingertips would turn to feathers, and syrup rather than blood would flow through her veins, my dears. The Indian had skin like velvet; on my oath, like milk-chocolate. Edith wouldn’t agree to marriage, but she couldn’t do without that Indian in her bed, the tart. How do you think she preserved that baby-doll beauty? When a man becomes a husband, he sucks out a woman’s soul. Children too. Miss Edith knew this very well.’

  As Yasemin rubbed at her blotchy face, recalling former passions of her own, Sumbul bent her head over the embroidery she was working on. Her sister-in-law, Mujgan, was more relaxed, having sent her adolescent daughters out to the garden to keep an eye on Sumbul’s sons. Disregarding the blush that had by now reached Sumbul’s ears – ‘For goodness’ sake, sister, Aunt Makbule can’t hear a thing anyway’ – Mujgan insisted that the bundle peddler go into the details of their lovemaking.

  For example, how did Edith manage not to get pregnant? Was she sterile? Was it true that Avinash did exercises like a Hindu fakir in his room at the inn every morning? Maybe one of the functions of those exercises was to hold back his semen. Was it true that he had an emerald earring on his penis? How could he operate with that earring there?

  Didn’t they understand that it was my embarrassment, not Aunt Makbule’s, that Sumbul was wary of?

  ‘I swear to you, dearies, I don’t know if it was the earring or the hashish, but Edith never once asked me for the herb that draws babies from the womb. Whereas in those days that was mostly what the other European sluts like her requested. How many times was I called to their houses as if it was an emergency! They had no shame. They’d pull their skirts up to their groins and moan and groan in their high-pitched voices. “Help me, Mother Yasemin, for the love of God. Bring me some of that magic potion. Two full moons have passed, and no visitor has come.” I’m not talking about Edith but the other sluts. Edith’s voice, praise God, was as deep as a drum at Ramadan. I have not had the fortune to hear another voice like it.’

  From above her crow-like nose, her green, feline eyes were fixed on me. With her chin she gestured to the sapphire ring on my finger.

  ‘Why are you staring at me as if you’ve been attacked by an evil spirit? What has happened to those Europeans you all loved so much? Edith ran off to Paris with nothing but a single suitcase in her hand. That no-good brother-in-law got his hands on the girl’s entire fortune. The businesses, the bonds all burned up. The mother too – she ran to her own death. Her son couldn’t even find her ashes. Such were the wages of her sins. Good God Almighty! I’m telling you, all those disasters that destroyed the Lamarck woman’s soul were set in motion way back when she pretended the baby in her womb was her husband’s. She brought it all on herself. Those who know, know. You understand what I’m saying?’

  No, I did not understand anything. Listening to the stories about those rich people was like listening to fairy tales. I could not imagine what they could have to do with me. My mind went to other things, to my own secrets. When Yasemin said, ‘Let me read your fortune; let us find a cure for your troubles, you understand, eh?’, and her eyes stared at the ring my dear mama had placed on my finger at our last embrace, fear spread through me. Did this gypsy recognize me from the time before I became Scheherazade? Did she know what had happened to my mother? My father? Did they know that I was alive – were they looking for me?

  I would not know the answers to these questions until years later when Yasemin brought to me an elderly person whose hair and beard were all tangled together. Avinash Pillai. The Indian spy retained not the slightest remnant of his former charm. He had been wandering the streets of the new city called Izmir, where people spoke only one language, a place whose past, like the names of its streets, had been erased. These streets smelled now of rotten eggs rather than jasmine.

  Yasemin had run into him in an obscure passageway in Tilkilik. This was a half-century after the events I am relating. The crazy old man had still not given up on Edith, even at that age. It was only then, the last time that I saw Avinash, that I would be able to put together the pieces of the Levantine story that the gypsy had told and understand how the end of the story related to me. The story that Sumbul’s annoying ghost told over and over like a stuck record was not, as the doctor maintained, a paranoid delusion but the truth itself.

  However, by the time I understood this, it was too late.

  By the time Avinash told this story to me, a half-century had passed since the morning we found Sumbul’s naked, white, cinnamon-scented body hanging from the ceiling. Apartment buildings had replaced the villas and their gardens, and the wind wafting in through the windows carried the smell not of jasmine but of coal. Even the nights when I used to sneak out of my room and creep beneath the mosquito netting of another room at the end of the corridor, those dark nights in a gilded bed, were now but memories from a distant past.

  By the time Avinash brought me this story, the mute concubine Scheherazade had long been abandoned to one hundred years of solitude in the Mansion with the Tower.

  I will tell all,

  Everything,

  That death may find me

  In the tower of this wreck of a mansion.

  Part II

  FROG RAIN

  Psomalani 1919

  ‘They’re coming! They’re coming! The British Consulate is spreading the news! The shops on the quay have started closing – ask the folks down there, if you don’t believe us. Fishermen coming from over by Lesbos saw their ships. People have even begun setting up camp on sacks and bales. They’ll be in the harbour by daybreak tomorrow. This time it’s for real.’

  When Stavros and the other neighbourhood boys reached Psomalani, Bread-Baker’s Square, Panagiota was playing skipping ropes with the girls in front of the low wall on the police station side. It was obvious that the boys had run all the way up from the docks. Their tongues were hanging out, their faces were red and their eyes were lit up like maniacs. Turning the rope with one hand, she glanced at Stavros out of the corner of her eye. His cheeks were flushed and sweat was coursing down them.

  In his newly broken voice he shouted, ‘Did you hear, gentlemen? They’re coming!’

  Like parrots, the boys behind him repeated his words. ‘They’re coming! They’re coming! Did you hear, gentlemen? They’re coming, as sure as honey.’

  They said ‘as sure as honey’ in Turkish, and then began reciting like a nursery rhyme the names of the Greek battleships they had known by heart since childhood. ‘Patris, Themistoklis, Atromitos, Syria… They’re already at Lesbos!’

  Stavros and his gang walked towards the middle of the square. The sun had set and only the meadows alongside the railway tracks were still lit up. The men throwing dice in the coffeehouse took no notice of the boys shouting across the square in their croaky voices. The mothers chatting out of their windows didn’t stop their conversations. Only the toothless old women picking over the lentils as they sat in chairs they’d brought out in front of their houses smacked their lips and shook their heads. Everywhere was dusty, but the lemon trees were in bloom and the neighbourhood was suffused with a fresh green smell. Niko’s mother set down the guts of the fish she’d just cleaned in front of her door and suddenly the roofs got lively. Cats that had
been stretched out on the tiles since noon, preening themselves, now converged en masse on Menekse Street.

  Even from a distance, Panagiota could smell the sharp tang of salt and sweat on Stavros’s skin. It was as if a kitten was turning a somersault in her stomach. It was only May, but the skin of his arms extending from his light blue, short-sleeved shirt were already dark. The roots of his hair were white, probably from sea salt, which meant that he must have been at the beach today, swimming like a fish. Panagiota longed to be able to do the same, but, being female, she’d probably never get the chance. How much fun it would be to just jump on a tram and go anywhere you wanted, to leap into the sea from some random beach, to swim towards the horizon without getting tired. Girls could only go into the water when they were picnicking at the Diana Baths, and that wasn’t the sort of place where you could stretch out your arms and take long strokes in full view of everybody. They could only stand in the shallows and throw water at each other.

  These picnics, one of Panagiota’s favourite summer entertainments, had become more fun since Kyra Eftalia had bought a portable Primus stove from Frank Street. Now the women could bring coffee, sugar, a coffee pot, spoons and cups in their baskets, as well as their umbrellas and tablecloths when they went on a picnic. The coffee-making was most beneficial to the girls. While their mothers were seated around the little stove, stirring their coffeepot, the girls would quickly shove each other and sink down into the water with their dresses on. The mothers, at first anxious for the girls not to get their clothes or heads wet, stopped caring once they were wet anyway, and then they were able to splash about as they pleased. That said, at the end of last summer, Panagiota’s mother had admonished, ‘There’ll be no more jumping in and out of the water after this year. From next spring, you’ll sit with us like a lady.’ Panagiota had rolled her eyes. Just a little further on, at the cape, the boys were diving off the rocks into the sea.