When he was abandoned by his lover in college, he thought he would die. He could attend neither his classes nor his exams. His roommate would find him staring at the wall both when leaving for school and upon returning. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he would stare at a stain on the shanty-blue painted wall, the cause of which could never be remembered. Once, just as his friend was leaving the house to rush to class, he said, “This stain… it is as if all the walls exist for this stain…” A few weeks later, his housemate returned home to find him unconscious.
After undergoing psychiatric treatment for a long time, the joy and hope within him had died, leaving their place to a serene peace like the void of space. He made his way to a medieval monastery in a sparsely populated town, a place no one ever frequented. There was nothing worldly left in the world for him. As the devout population in the country steadily decreased, they couldn’t appoint priests to all the churches, and consequently, the number of churches in the country was also steadily falling. Six years later, they gave him his current church in this godforsaken coastal town. The town was a small settlement where people of different faiths and nationalities lived, where no one felt the need to go to church, and the church itself was a neglected, detached building with a small garden. The priest spent his years looking at the statues of the Holy Prophet and the Mother of the Prophet above the altar.
One day, a young, pregnant woman walked through the door; thinking that the priest sitting in the front row was praying, she sat in the pew just behind him so as not to disturb him. In her native religion, she had been taught that being close to the clergy meant being close to God. There were only the two of them in the church. The young woman was reciting surahs belonging to another religion of another country whose official language was different, reading them in yet another language, unknowingly doing so aloud enough for the priest to hear. The priest turned around and smiled understandingly at the young woman. The woman was praying for her first baby, who was soon to be born. They chatted for a while; the woman was new to the priest’s language, which he could tell from her accent and the clumsiness of her sentences, and at some of her mistakes, he couldn’t help but burst into laughter.
The young woman, who had never even imagined that her first friend in the country she had newly moved to would be a priest, was a mother of two within a few years.
She sat right across from her husband, who was sitting thoughtfully and despondently at the kitchen table under the light of the range hood. Economy meant dictator in all the languages of the world. She could see this in her husband’s face, in her neighbor’s coat, in the priest’s shoes. She had always thought life would be easier than in the motherland.
As the old-model mobile phone vibrated with its screen lit up, the older woman—seeing the name of her daughter, who lived in a faraway country and with whom she hadn’t communicated for at least two seasons—felt her heart both break and take flight like a bird in its cage. Her daughter, like her other children, knew very little of her mother tongue, despite having learned the official language fluently; fortunately, although the woman could not speak the official language, she could understand it. Taking as a command the official-language complaint of her husband, who had worked for the government for many years—“Oh come on, set the table so we can eat already, look, we’re starving”—she had set to work in the kitchen. As she peeled the dry skin from the body of the onion, the flashing light of the phone flustered her. She answered the phone, and with a flurry of panic, fear, and unease rising from seven layers deep, never quite sure if she was saying it right, she said, “Hello.” Her pupils and lips trembled with a meticulous apprehension, like an object borrowed from someone else. The daughter in the official language, the mother in her own language, thousands of kilometers between them…
“Mom, how are you? How is my dad?”
With her daughter’s voice, the frozen longing inside her thawed and spilled from the corners of her eyes; the old woman, having no trouble translating the official language into her own, peppered her with questions: “We are fine, how are you, how is your husband, how is the child, what are you doing over there?”
The daughter on the other end of the phone translated her mother’s questions in her head while simultaneously calculating how to broach the main subject.
“Mom,” she said, and after taking a short breath, added, “You need to come here. I am going to start working, and we are going to have another child. I will send you the ticket and cover the expenses for the necessary procedures. Can you come for a few months? Just until I get things on track.”
The mother, too, paused briefly to translate every sentence of her daughter into her own language in her head, answering her daughter that way. This time, she had to understand not just what was said, but the situation itself. While she was filled with sorrow on the one hand, her entire body flushed with the excitement of seeing both her daughter after many years and her grandchildren for the very first time on the other.
“I will come,” the woman said, handing the phone to her husband with the words, “Talk to your father too.”
The children knew neither the official language nor their grandmother’s language, but a grandmother would fiercely protect what was entrusted to her; she wouldn’t neglect them, she would care about what they ate and what they wore. Besides, what else could a child want!
With her thick, single-braided brush-yellow hair falling to her waist, and her timid, hesitant gaze that had now become an inseparable part of her, she cast furtive glances now and then at her grandchildren playing on the beach, and listened carefully to the town priest, a chatterbox in a language of which she didn’t know a single word. She was searching for her own way to express her gratitude to this man who had not left her daughter alone when she had no one else but her husband. At the sudden sound of water spouting from the sea, the priest broke off whatever topic he was discussing and turned toward the crescent-shaped bay nestled among mountains with sharp, glaciated peaks. Amid the dark blue churn, two sperm whales were there in that sliver of time, subject to an unknowable chain of cause and effect—to hunt, to flee, to mate, to rest, to hide, or entirely due to what we might call a twist of fate. The priest must have changed the subject. He was looking at the bay and waving his arms excitedly, while the woman, drawing support from the tall blue glass of ginger ale placed before her as a result of an entirely random order—a glass she was almost hugging—looked at the whales with that same fear and unfamiliarity. At that moment, her grandchildren, who had been crouching and digging in the dirt, stood up to instinctively witness the uniqueness of this moment; the older one cast a casual glance at the bay and crouched back down to dig the dirt again, while the younger one pointed at the sea with a tiny finger and said something to his grandmother in a language she didn’t understand.
He could have been saying, “Grandma look! A huge fish.” He could have been saying, “Grandma look, a whale.” He could have been asking, “Grandma, will these eat us too?” He could have been asking, “Grandma, can you swim all the way out there and get on top of the fish?”
Remembering that for a myriad of reasons she hadn’t been able to learn the official language of the country she lived in, that her children did not know her language, and that her grandchildren spoke an entirely different language in their father’s country, she felt an ache inside her.
As the scent of red pine, birch, linden, and spruce from the forest at the foothills filled the lined-faced woman’s nose, the bell of the town’s clock tower startled her. When the sperm whales lingered on the surface a little longer and then disappeared from sight, the priest, with his calm and peaceful tone, either started a new subject or continued speaking about the topic before the whales. The woman—observing his clean-shaven face, his blue eyes gazing serenely from behind small round silver-rimmed glasses, paying attention to the rosary with a cross dangling from his left wrist, and watching his aged hands as he smoothed down whatever the wind unsettled—looked neither bored nor happy by this conversation of which she did not understand a single word. Her constantly raised eyebrows, her darting pupils, her forcing her thin lips into a smile according to the man’s facial expressions, and her furrowing her lined brows only made her look like an active listener.
The third baby was born in good health. When the baby reached its fortieth day, a piece of cloth was tied to the linden tree in the church courtyard as always; the baby received its fortieth-day blessing in the church, and the young woman sang melodious lullabies in her mother tongue to those inside.
Yazan: Chaotica
Çeviri: Umberto
ANARCHISTALES 