Gül had very quickly started talking. But it took her longer than other children to learn to walk. She was almost two and her mother had started to worry, while the blacksmith simply laughed. Gül crawled, but not like the other children; she crawled backwards and was always looking over her shoulder to see what was behind her.
‘My crazy rose,’ Timur said.
Gül was walking by the time Fatma was pregnant again. One night, Fatma lay once again in Timur’s arms at a graveyard and got that same feeling, quite clearly. It was the new moon, and Fatma felt that the spirits of the dead were looking on her kindly, looking on her kindly from surprisingly nearby.
‘Timur,’ she said, ‘would you rather have a son or another daughter?’
‘All that matters to me is that its hands and feet are in the right place,’ replied the blacksmith, ‘that it’s healthy and grows up with a mother and a father. That’s the most important thing.’
‘You’re going to have another daughter. Do you know what you’d like to call her?’
‘Melike.’
Melike cried through the night, she bawled until her face was purple; sometimes she would nurse greedily, sometimes she wouldn’t want anything at all, and sometimes it seemed she would only sleep if all was well. If Fatma was overtired and exhausted and weak, she could be certain Melike would cry all night long. But Fatma never complained.
‘What kind of child is this?’ Timur asked his wife.
‘It’s a different child, she’s restless and headstrong. You named her Melike, queen, and now she behaves like one.’
Timur laughed, took the baby in his arms, gave her a nip on the cheek and said: ‘We’ll force that out of you yet.’
Fatma smiled. When Timur had fixed the roof, and a raindrop fell from the ceiling into his tea the very next day, he’d hurled his glass at the wall. There was nothing she could do to change it. When Beşiktaş lost, he would be short-tempered for days. When something went wrong at the forge, Timur would hammer away in a frenzy, and afterwards there’d be black bruises underneath his fingernails.
This man would not be forcing anything out of Melike; yes, he loved his daughter, he made time for her, he was besotted with the girl, but he would be as powerless to change his children as Fatma was to change him.
Year after year, they spent the summer at the summer house on the edge of the town and the winter in the village. They made good money and even when they weren’t perfectly happy, even when there was lots of work to do, when the winters were hard, when the blacksmith went days at home without speaking a word and Fatma didn’t know what was bothering him, when they asked each other in bed at night how they would find the strength to face another day, these were good years. Gül learned to walk, she played in the street with the other children in the village. Melike learned to walk before she could talk, she almost never did what she was told, she protested loudly if she didn’t like her food, she yelled if she had the scissors taken away from her. Since developing a big bruise on the back of her head from flinging herself on the floor, whenever she didn’t get her way she’d plop down and carefully let herself fall backwards, and only then would she cry and rage and thrash at being told a three-year-old wasn’t old enough to milk a cow.
‘My little ones are jumpy creatures,’ said Timur, ‘they might kick out.’
And Melike screamed and shrieked, squeezing the air out of her lungs. She thrashed about and stamped the ground, and Timur was already in a bad mood that evening: two customers who owed him had disappeared without a trace, and Beşiktaş had lost three-nil to Galatasaray, a feeble bunch who hadn’t even been on good form. He had fixed the same spot on the stable roof for the third time; the ladder was still propped up against the wall. He grabbed Melike and climbed up to the flat roof with his daughter under his arm. Fatma and Gül stood below, staring up in disbelief.
Arm outstretched, the blacksmith held the still-crying child over the edge of the roof and cried: ‘I’m tired of your bawling, I’m tired of it, you hear? Let the devil take you, you can cry in the depths of hell. Now hush, give me some peace or I’ll drop you, you hear me?’
Melike fell silent for a moment, but once her father’s words had died away she started up again, and in the midst of her cries Gül heard a strange, cutting voice: ‘Timur, stop it.’
Gül looked up at her mother and realised that it was she who must have spoken in this quite unfamiliar voice. Fatma’s face looked strange too. Melike had stopped crying. For a few seconds, the four of them stood there, unmoving.
‘Be thankful for your mother,’ Timur said, and climbed back down the ladder with Melike. ‘One of these days, I’m going to forget myself’, he added.
As soon as he let go of Melike, she carefully lay back on the ground. Fatma seized her by the arm and pulled her into the house. Gül was still standing next to her father, who shook his head, booted the ladder, and went into the stable.
Timur was admired by many in the village; he came from the town, was prosperous, always friendly and generous, and his broad shoulders alone were enough to command respect. But others in the village did not like him – this man who made a profit by selling their harvests at the market, this man who spent the hotter months in his summer house like he was better than them, and who raked in more than enough money come the autumn, when he sold his apple harvest.
One day, the blacksmith received a tip-off from one of the villagers that one of the men who envied him had reported him to the gendarmerie, and they would soon be on their way to search his house. The blacksmith had nothing to hide – he had not grown rich from stealing and flogging stolen goods, he had nothing in his house that he hadn’t earned by the sweat of his brow. He had nothing to fear.
As long as he hid his guns. He was a man, the head of a family, of course he had to have a gun. He shot birds with it, rabbits, foxes, making money from their skins, and sometimes in summer he’d shoot moles. If he discovered a molehill in his garden, he would snatch up a spade and shovel away the earth until the underground passage came into view. Then he’d lie down on his stomach some distance away, gun at the ready, and wait. Sooner or later, the mole would emerge to tidy up the hole.
He was a man, and he had two guns which always hung on the wall, loaded. But he didn’t have a licence. Timur came home and took the guns down.
‘Gül,’ he said to his daughter, ‘go out and play for a while.’
Gül went out, but once the curtains were drawn, she grew curious. If she stood on tiptoes and tilted her head, she could see exactly what was going on inside. The previous winter, there had been a draught coming from one of the windows and when he repaired it, Timur had noticed a hollow underneath the window ledge. He was a man, yes, he wouldn’t entrust his guns to just anyone. He wrenched the board off the window ledge, hid the guns in the space beneath it and hammered the wood back into place.
As the blacksmith was smiling contentedly, Fatima shook her head and pointed to the hooks on the wall. Timur pulled them out with a pair of pliers and they mounted a wall-hanging over the spot, to hide the holes. Three days passed before the gendarmes came. They heard the clatter of hooves just as they were sitting down to eat one evening. Timur opened the door.
‘Good evening, gentlemen. I hope it’s good news that brings you our way.’
‘Good evening,’ the gendarmes replied, in chorus, and one continued: ‘Can we come in?’
‘But of course, do come in.’
Gül was frightened when she saw the strange men, all in uniform, two of them carrying guns. The unarmed one bent down to speak to her.
‘Hello, little girl. What’s your name, sweetheart? … Don’t you have one?’
‘Gül.’
‘And your little sister, asleep over there, does she have a name?’
‘Yes.