‘We could leave,’ Fatma said, ‘you could open a workshop, do a bit of trading, I could weave carpets. You’ve got two horses, we could live somewhere else.’
Yes, he had two horses and a donkey, yes, he had a bit of money, but where were they to go? Leave the town, leave all their relatives and friends, for another small town where they wouldn’t know anybody?
‘A strange place?’ he asked.
‘We could move to a village.’
‘You have no idea what it’s like, life’s completely different there. They don’t even have toilets, they squat down in the bushes.’
‘We could build an outhouse. You could keep the forge and ride into town and back, sell fruit and vegetables at the market on the side. Timur, we could lead our own life.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
And to help him think better, he took a week off and got on a train to Ankara. He wanted to enjoy life in the big city for a few days, look at cars and rich people’s houses, take in the sounds and the scents, the crowds. By day, he sat in teahouses and started conversations with city folk. Some said the war would soon be over, others predicted it would last a long time yet and that the Germans would be at the gates of Istanbul in six months’ time, like the Ottomans besieged Vienna back in the day. For Timur, the war was a long way off nonetheless; he listened but changed the subject at the first opportunity and tried to find out who supported Beşiktaş like he did. He was more interested in football than politics.
What interested him most of all were the evenings in the city. Listening to the scantily dressed singers in a bar for a couple of hours, drinking a glass or two, eating a slice of melon, a few chunks of white cheese, and he’d melt into the music after only the third glass. And later he lay alone and relaxed in a cheap hotel room, his worries lifted, his business far away and his mother too. Nobody knew him there, he’d lost himself in the big city, lost himself by losing his greed, ambitions, reservations – all the chains that bound him. He had lost himself only to find himself again, smiling on a hotel bed, his breathing even and calm.
When he got back, he said: ‘Winter isn’t a good time to move house.’
In the spring, Timur had found a house and taken their possessions there on the backs of the horses and the donkey. He had hired a cart to transport the bed, now returned to them by the cousin, and last of all he had fetched his wife. She’d been on the donkey’s back for two hours by the time they got there. The ride on one of the horses took only half that time.
It had been Fatma’s idea to move to the village, but she only knew villages from stories people told, and she’d only come across villagers as traders at the market.
Lying in bed on her first day in the new house, Fatma asked: ‘Are all the women here related?’
‘No, why?’
‘They all wear the same clothes.’
Timur laughed: ‘That’s the way it is here. We’re in a village now.’
He laughed but he was worried. He wasn’t sure Fatma would get used to it here while he rode into town almost every day to work at the forge. But when he arrived at the village just before sunset a week later, he saw Fatma sitting in the village square, the young women and girls gathered around her, listening.
When Fatma caught sight of him she leapt up, but he gestured to her to stay seated, then he dismounted, led his horse by the reins into the stable and smoked a cigarette on the steps outside the house as he watched the sun go down.
‘Fairytales,’ was the first thing Fatma said when she came over. ‘I was telling them fairytales. They don’t know any. Isn’t that strange? I always thought fairytales came to the town from the villages… You’re back early, I thought you’d be back at the same time as the other days. Dinner’s ready.’
Inside, the blacksmith looked at the carpet on the loom, saw that she’d been working, and smiled quietly to himself.
Timur bought green beans from the villagers, bulgur, and in summer and autumn tomatoes, broad beans, melons, grapes, apples and apricots. He loaded up his donkey to sell the produce at the market, and he made a good cut. He bought two cows, a few chickens, and at Fatma’s insistence, a small vineyard as well; his workshop was doing well, he was earning more than before.
Towards the end of autumn, he sold the carpets Fatma had woven, and now that the successful summer had put so much money in his pocket, he went to the big city again. Not to Ankara, though – this time he went all the way to Istanbul, because that was where Beşiktaş had their stadium, and the women there were even more beautiful and sang even more sweetly, and the wine flowed down his throat like liquid sunlight.
A week later he was back, having left half of the money in Istanbul.
Fatma got on well with the villagers. They all thought highly of her and valued her, and not because she was the wife of the blacksmith, the wife of the man whose strength was extolled by all, and who was also a good head taller than most of them; the wife of a man with piercing blue eyes, who sat proud and straight-backed on his horse. No, the women of the village liked Fatma because she was still so young, because she could tell stories, because she was always friendly to everyone and didn’t think herself better than them simply because she came from the town, or because she had money. They liked her because she was sweet-tempered and always tried to play the peacemaker when arguments arose; they liked that she was soft, but firm.
When Fatma got pregnant in the winter, without having had her period even once, the women of the village shared in her happiness.
The blacksmith had expanded his business, he had made sure word got around the surrounding villages that here was a man who paid farmers a fair price for their wares. One day in spring, when Fatma’s belly had grown big and round, Timur took her along with him to a village almost a day’s ride away, to give her a change of scene. He still brought her gifts, still fussed over her. Not as much as he had in the early days, but that was the way of everyday life; it did not mean that his feelings had lost any of their intensity. In the village, they had slept at a fat man’s house, on a mattress, just as they had recently been doing at home. One of Timur’s friends had got married and was borrowing the bedstead. The next morning, Timur spent a good while haggling with a farmer who was determined to squeeze a few more kuruş out of him. It was already lunchtime once the business was finally concluded, and their host did not want to send them on their way unfed. So it wasn’t until after midday that the two of them saddled up.
They were still some distance from the village as the sun started to set, but it was dangerous to ride on in the dark; it was so hard to see and they had to be on their guard for highway robbers.
‘We’ll have to sleep here and ride on in the morning,’ Timur said.
‘Where are you expecting us to sleep? There’s nowhere safe, I won’t sleep a wink!’
‘I know a place. It’s not far.’
At dusk, they reached a graveyard.
‘No one else is brave enough to come here after dark,’ Timur said. ‘Don’t be scared, trust me, this is the safest place to spend the night.’
That night, Fatma’s sleep was light but peaceful, and from then on, the blacksmith took her with him more often when he had business in villages far away, and she grew accustomed to nights like these. She liked to lie close to her husband in the quiet and the dark, and the ground beneath them seemed to her as soft as down when she lay her head on his shoulder and he stroked her hair and said: ‘My girl, my piece of the moon.’
She felt that she had been lucky with this man. It didn’t matter to her that he frittered away half the money he earned from the carpets she made, even though they had cost her a whole summer of sitting at the loom. There were things that bothered her, of course.