The Seamstress of Ourfa Read online

  [1]Act I, Scene III, Macbeth, William Shakespeare.

  Work Horse

  Ourfa, Winter 1903

  Ferida

  Morning. An empty room. The little machine sits forlornly in the middle of a table scattered with plaster dust.

  Bang! The door flies open and Ferida comes running in carrying a large piece of cloth. She throws it over the machine, trusses it up into a bundle and carries it outside, elbowing her way past the neighbours and setting it down on the road next to the wagon with an “Ouf!”

  Iskender and Khatoun are already seated up front under a blanket with Baby Alice. She’s just three months old and sucking so noisily at the teat, Ferida feels sick.

  “Thank you, jan,” Khatoun says smiling down at Ferida over the baby’s snuffling head. “I can’t believe I almost forgot it.”

  “Ugheg. It’s alright,” Ferida mutters as she grabs the machine and heaves it up into the cart. “Ugheg, ugheg, ugheg, ugheg, ugheg!” She slaps the helping hands away and clambers up herself, perching awkwardly on a pile of belongings next to her mother. Seyda pats the floor next to her.

  “Sit,” she tells her daughter.

  “I’m comfortable up here,” Ferida snaps back. She tightens her headscarf and tries to drown out the sound of Grundug’s whining.

  Everyone is taking their prized belongings with them but not her. No, she has to leave her beloved dog behind. For a start, she’s been told, there’s no room for him on the cart and secondly, Khatoun’s parents want Grundug on their farm for extra security. So that’s it. She bites her lip and ignores his howls. One of her bootlaces is fraying and she bends down, snaps off the end and reties it, ignoring the friendly faces swarming round the cart with their goodbyes. Eventually, with a “Ho!” from Iskender, they set off, leaving Grundug yelping her name into the dust.

  Ferida sits back and watches the well-wishers recede into the distance. There go the neighbours, now the proud owners of half the carpets that lit up their dust floors for generations. And there’s the shopkeeper from down the road, sad to see his bartering women leave. Ferida had loved her daily fight with him. It was almost as if…but no…they were both too old for that. Next to him, bent over his stick like a river crane, the wrinkled old foreman from their cotton-mill snivels into his handkerchief. He’d been with the family since before Ferida was born and was hoping they’d see him to his grave. Sorry old man. And that’s goodbye to Lativa and Bahie, Khatoun’s sisters who are frantically waving and pointing to one of the parcels in which they’ve hidden gifts. And lastly, there, clutching Grundug, her Grundug, by a greasy length of rope stand Khatoun’s parents, weeping as their little darling heads south on the Aleppo road with her fat-faced baby in arms. A dream finally realized and then cruelly snatched away. It had taken Khatoun so long to conceive that when Alice had finally arrived, everything else in their lives had been eclipsed. It was as if no one had ever had a baby before. One simple gummy smile from the chubby infant and everything else had been wiped from memory.

  The wagon turns a corner throwing up a cloud of dust that showers Ferida and her mother in grit. They flap at each other with cloths and when they look back, the people waving goodbye are gone. Only the houses stand out. A steeple. A minaret. A weathervane. Ridiculous thing.

  Next to Ferida, Seyda sits straight-backed against their pile of belongings, her face placid. Their home has been sold. Their business is dead. Life as she knew it has disintegrated into a fragile bank paper held in her son’s hands. She trusts Iskender will keep it together, and this is what gives her the strength to sit in the back of this cart and start life over. At her age. Asdvadz! She closes her eyes. While it’s still cool, she may as well try and nap. Catch up on lost sleep. She drops her chin to her chest and within minutes her head is bouncing gently to the churn of wooden wheels over potholed earth.

  Ferida watches her. She hates how some people sleep so easily. So comfortable anywhere. The last bundle to end up on the wagon was the little Singer and as they’d turned the corner it had fallen and is now lodged uncomfortably in the small of Ferida’s back. She shoves it with her hip but it won’t budge. She has to swivel round and rearrange everything before she can drag the machine in front of her. She doesn’t want to lose it off the open end of the cart so she keeps it within arm’s reach and settles back, muttering.

  She’d sat and stared at this machine for a long time. Sat and tried to turn fabric into clothing. To fashion flat, inanimate fabric into shapely waists and flirtatious hems, her hands thick, her fingers bent in all the wrong directions. When Khatoun had an idea, she turned it into paper and then into cloth and soon a beautiful dress was gracing her ankles. She could sit with Alice sucking at her breast while the machine churned out blankets and frocks all of its own accord. Now look at it. Draped in an old piece of sacking. Ferida felt like kicking the machine. Whipping it like a dog.

  When her father had been alive she knew what gave her purpose. To make him happy. She was mistress of his belly and could turn the most meagre of ingredients into a feast. Her father had adored her and she’d never wanted the love of another man. And then he’d died and it was too late. The years had already gone, taking her youthful complexion with them. Who would love her now? She was little more than a maid to her brother and his family and plain in the face. With each lurch forward she is leaving all that is familiar behind and going to God knows where with who the eshou botch knows who.

  “Whoa!” Iskender yells, pulling hard on the reins. They have reached the river and the horse spooks at the water, executing a sideways jump. The cart seesaws from side to side and skids to a halt, upsetting all the luggage and knocking Ferida off her perch.

  “Hayde Fundug! Masha’Allah. Hayde, hayde! Ho!” Iskender cries. He cracks the whip and the cart lunges forward onto the sagging bridge and everything slides towards the front, the hateful machine now slamming into Ferida’s rickety knees.

  “Kaknem!” she snarls, kicking it away again. She wants to grab it by the neck, throw it into the river like a sick dog and watch it drown. It would be an accident – who’d know? She glances across at Seyda. Miraculously still asleep. Ferida inches herself towards the back of the cart, dragging the machine with her. She hangs her head over the edge, a rag doll in the spray. The river, swollen by recent rains swirls past, caressing large boulders. Ferida pulls the machine closer and balances it on the edge. The river spits in her face.

  “Careful in the back there!” Iskender calls out. Khatoun looks over her shoulder at Ferida, a worried look on her face.

  “Are you all right? Ugheg es?” she mouths. “Do you feel sick? Want to sit up front?”

  “She’s fine!” Seyda calls back, one eye open, staring straight at Ferida. “We’re both fine, aren’t we?” her keen eye remains on her daughter hunched at the back of the wagon, one fist tight around the neck of the sewing machine. And then she snores. Her eye rolls back in its socket, her chin drops to her chest and she is asleep once more.

  Ferida abandons the back of the cart and wipes her face clean with her skirt. She lies back, arms open to the sky. The air is calm. The sky a pearl grey shroud darkening to indigo just above them where the last few stars shine. The sun has arrived in the east, fringing the edges of night with gold. A cool river breeze lifts, Seyda snores and Ferida starts to cry.

  Tears roll down her neck and pool in the hollow at the base of her throat. She’s going to soak the front of her dress and make herself ill. If she had the strength she’d wipe the tears away and gather her shawl around her but her hands lie limp at her sides. She looks at the beautiful sky and wishes she was up there, a bird, not down here on the bare wooden floor of a second-hand cart. Something familiar nudges her hip. She automatically stretches out her fingers to stroke Grundug’s nose only it is hard, metallic. The little Singer has burst free of its sack and is trying to climb into her lap.

  She starts to laugh and reaches down to pet it. Moments earlier she’d tried to drown it. A machine. She’s defin
itely going crazy – maybe the lack of spinach and irregularity of her moon. She picks up the machine and holds it close. Drapes it again in its cloak of linen. It purrs against her chest, the warm, oily fragrance seeping through the bundle, infusing her with home. How many nights had she spent asleep at the sewing table, inhaling this very smell? Her fingers worn with the effort of trying to do something that was beyond her – the tattered remnants of her sewing strewn across the floor. How many times had she woken up with the imprint of cloth pressed into her cheek as she started water for breakfast? It was part of her life.

  She can hear Digin Aghavni their old sewing teacher moaning at her. Another lecture on how to place one’s legs and yes, she did mind the stitching, an apron was still an apron! And Seyda heaping praise on each misshapen potholder she presented. And Khatoun swallowing hard at the crooked-hemmed dress Ferida made for Baby Alice that straightened out all on its own a week later. Their voices were held together in the hum and murmur of the machine now clutched to her heart. Ferida reaches into her pocket for a length of rope – a Grundug piece of rope – and ties it gently around the machine, securing the other end around her wrist. She holds the Singer close and rests her forehead against its spine, her tears dried by the soft linen sacking. Sleep drags at her bones and she succumbs, listening to the voices, holding a precious piece of home next to her heart. And they go forward, all of them, together. Forward into their new life.

  Aleppo

  A poem, 1st draft, Summer 1904

  Iskender Agha Boghos

  Halab. Alep. Aleppo. City of Song.

  Above a citadel

  High in light

  A mote flies

  On zephyrous…song.

  Iskender puts the pen down and reaches for his coffee. Cold. And perfumed with cardamom as they do here. He prefers it without but still forgets to tell anyone. Next time. He reaches for another cigarette, lights it and starts again:

  Above a citadel, high in light,

  A mote flies in on zephyrous song.

  The warm sun floats it, and lilted song.

  The flame of cooking, the languid wave…

  no…

  a languid wave…of hand…

  Hand? Hand? Agh! So…pedestrian. Hands and feet have no place in poetry, Iskender thinks. He takes another drag and surveys his work. And there’s ‘song’ twice in two lines. He’s bad at this. A rotten poet. A rotten poet with a shaky hand. Perhaps it’s too much coffee. Maybe not enough. He drinks the swill down to the grounds, grimaces and scrawls:

  A mote flies in on zephyrous…throng.

  Not bad. It could work. There were lots of them and they were singing. It made sense. He blew out a smoke ring and stabbed the hole in the middle with his pen.

  Outside, someone had hung a bell from one of the shutter dogs and it chimed softly as the wind blew. It was pleasant being upstairs for a change. There was a window to fling open. There was a breeze. And the view! Rooftops dancing shoulder to shoulder with a million church spires. Minarets pointing to God in a pink streaked sky. Doves flying and settling under the eaves. Swallows diving, searching out insects to feed. And that majestic citadel crowning a hill. No wonder they called Aleppo the ‘City of Song’. Music played from every balcony. And the local tobacco was excellent. Lung-searing and rich like chocolate. Iskender liked the fact that he could write at his desk by his window in his study. Never mind the room was little bigger than a closet. It had previously been a storeroom and the women had raided it when they’d moved in; reassigning the lumpy furniture to the various small rooms crammed together into an apartment over the restaurant below. Yes, a restaurant! A new and unexpected business that had landed in their laps.

  And it was such fun, entertaining all those nightly wags. The writers, the French expatriates, the travelling merchants, the relic seekers, the English and American antiquarians, the Jews, Assyrians, Yazidi, Sunni, Shi’a, Kurds. Aleppo held them all, the silk-road spilling books and wares and people all over the city; each of them needing shelter and food and a place to vent the intricate lunacy of their artistically gifted minds. And Iskender had just the place for them. A soirée house. Zankagadoun. The Belfry. Food, wine, poetry and song. His muse was with him at last. Now was the time to write and this would be the first of many poems he would compose for her. His lover. His wife. He picks up his pen once more, and with a flourish, dashes off another line:

  The warm sun floats it, and lilted song,

  The flame of cooking, a petalled kiss on hand…

  “Iskender!”

  “What?” Iskender jumps, midway to pressing his lips into his palm.

  “What are you doing cooped up in here alone?” Seyda says from the doorway, one hand on her hip, the other clutching a sheaf of pale blue paper.

  “Nothing, Mayrig. I was just working on…”

  “I know, I know,” she says, shaking her head, “one of your poems. Put it away now, son. Some letters have arrived from Ourfa. We need you to read them. Downstairs in the kitchen.” She turns to leave and pauses in the hall. She looks back at her son, “And who are the poems for?”

  Iskender blushes. “My wife, of course! Who else would I write for?”

  “Then you are even more of an idiot than I thought you were. Dungulugh! Love poems to a woman who can’t read? Who’s going to read them to her? Hm? You? So then, what’s the point of writing them? Put them in your head and keep them there, son, where no one can mess with them. Hayde. We’re waiting for you in the kitchen. I have arak. And wash your fingers before you come down. They’re covered in ink.” She waves the sheaf of paper in the air and leaves, the door shutting behind her with a click.

  Iskender studies the page on his desk one last time. He picks up his pen, sticks it in the inkwell and continues where he left off:

  Above a citadel, high in light,

  A mote flies in on zephyrous throng.

  The warm sun floats it, and lilted song,

  The flame of cooking, a petalled kiss on hand!

  And the mote

  just wants

  to float

  down

  to

  earth

  and

  smudge the fat pink cheek of a mother.

  He puts the pen down onto the page, a bloom of ink immediately spreading across the ivory vellum. He stands watching it for a minute, wipes his fingers on his trouser leg and steps out of the room.

  October Skies

  On the road from Aleppo to Ourfa, October 1904

  Khatoun

  The road curves up around the hill at a shallow incline until it reaches a ridge near the top. Here it levels off and the walk is easy. On one side it hugs the warm rock-face scattered with sagebrush and leafless trees. On the other, feathery clumps of purple grass soften the view over the arid plain below. The road dips in and out of the shade as it rounds each bend – the cool inlets cloaked in mauve while the gentle curves that protrude over the valley remain lit with gold.

  They’re on the move again, Seyda, Ferida and Khatoun. Heading north this time through the limestone massif to the dry, flat lands that stretch east to the Euphrates and on.

  “How far can a dog walk into a wood?”

  “Half way,” Khatoun groans, “because then he’s on his way out again. We’ve heard that one a hundred times before.”

  “Runs around all day. Sleeps with his mouth open?”

  “A shoe.”

  “No. Your husband. I win!” Ferida slaps Fundug across the haunch and the horse skitters across the dirt track, the wagon lurching dangerously behind her.

  “The edge!” Seyda screams and Ferida leaps for Fundug’s reins, pulling the horse to a stop just before the drop.

  “That would have been nasty,” she grins, looking over the edge in mock horror.

  They’re going back to Ourfa, the women, and have been trekking all day – climbing steadily to this ridge. Stretched across the plateau beneath them sits Aleppo, the ramparts of the old city wall grinning a gap-toothed sm
ile where they can be seen, the city’s hundred million spires and minarets miniscule from this distance. Any minute now the first muezzin will float the azan and his voice will reach them, insect thin on the wind.

  It had been Ferida’s idea to have a competition. Having finally finished her repertoire of disgusting songs, she’d demanded to know who knew the most riddles. Since none of them could remember the same one in quite the same way, there was no clear winner and an argument had ensued about who was fit to judge anyway. Fundug, they’d decided. Masha’Allah, Fundug, their almond-eyed mare.

  Ferida eases the horse away from the edge and back onto the path. “No need to kill us now, Fundug. Two more days and we’ll be with Khatoun’s parents. Then they can kill us with their village cooking.”

  “If we ever get there.”

  “Insha’Allah.”

  “Park Asdoudzo.”

  The letters from Ourfa had been coming regularly since they’d moved to Aleppo. At least once a week, a fat missive in Thooma’s myopic scrawl arrived.

  ‘Our Baby Alice jan, granddaughter from heaven, is probably walkingeatingdancing by now and we’re missing it.’

  He never suggested that Khatoun go home for a visit, insisting instead that he was proud of her for following her husband ‘so far away!’ But it was an obvious plea that swam from every page.