‘You cowards. Can’t even fight like men. If I get hold of any of you, I’ll use you to plug the hole you crawled out of.’
He yelled the air out of his lungs, and a single trickle of blood ran between his eyebrows and then down the left side of his nose, disappearing into his thick, blond moustache.
‘We’re going,’ he said.
Tufan had run away, the matter was closed. Gül ran home excitedly and told her mother what she’d seen. Fatma simply nodded; she didn’t seem worried.
‘Gül, don’t mention it to him when he comes home, don’t ask him why it happened. Don’t ask him. Will you do that, little one?’
It was dark by the time the blacksmith came back. Melike hadn’t wanted to go to sleep and was still romping about the room, doing somersaults and trying to climb up onto the window ledge. Once her father had eaten, she plonked herself down in his lap. Gül sat on the floor pretending to do her homework.
‘What’s that?’ asked Melike, poking a finger into the little wound on her father’s brow.
‘It’s where a little girl poked me in the head,’ said Timur. ‘I was at work and in came a little girl, the same age as you, and she poked her finger into my head and asked if she could be my daughter. And I said I already have two daughters. And maybe soon I’ll have a third. And I said my daughters are very kind. But the next time you’re naughty, I’ll make the little girl my daughter and give you away instead.’
He laughed and kissed Melike, and Gül was sitting close enough to smell his laugh. It smelt hot and sour, it smelt like something forbidden.
At night, Gül heard her parents whispering, but she couldn’t understand a word. She would’ve liked to get up and lie next to Melike, but Melike would wet the bed and her from top to bottom. That’s what had happened last time. When her mother had found her pyjama bottoms in the stable, she’d confronted Gül.
‘Why did you hide your pyjama bottoms?’
Gül had shrugged.
‘Did you think you’d wet the bed? It wasn’t you, it was Melike again. And even if you do wet the bed, it’s not that bad. It can happen to anyone. Just like the business with the teacher when he smacked you. It happens. But it shouldn’t happen too often, understand? I want you to be a big girl, one who can take care of her little sister. Now, do you want to help me wash these bottoms of yours, my love?’
Fatma had heated the water and poured it into the big portable copper basin, and while she sat on a low wooden stool washing the pyjamas and the sheets, she let Gül scrub along a little.
Gül lay awake long after her parents’ whispering had died away. Her heart still seemed to be beating as fast as it had that afternoon on the roof. It pressed against her chest and wouldn’t let her sleep.
One day, Fatma left Gül and Melike with her mother-in-law so she could take care of something in town. While Melike slept, Gül kept jumping off the divan, over and over. She climbed up on one side, walked the entire length of the divan and jumped down at the other end.
‘If something gets broken, you’re in big trouble,’ Zeliha called more than once from the kitchen, where she was rolling stuffed vine leaves with Hülya.
On what must have been her 50th jump from the divan, Gül got cocky, took too much of a run-up and landed in a bowl of minced meat she hadn’t noticed was there. She was scared of her grandmother, and didn’t want to be in big trouble, so she picked herself up, slipped her shoes on and ran out of the house. There were about as many houses on one street here as in the whole village. Or at least it seemed that way to her. It wasn’t five minutes before she lost her way. It was winter, she was freezing cold, and after a quarter of an hour she stopped on a street corner, so scared and cold she couldn’t even cry.
A tall man with green eyes and black hair spoke to her: ‘Are you lost, little one? I’ve not seen you around here before.’
Gül nodded.
‘Shall I take you home? Come on, first we’ll put this jumper on you. That’s right… Where do you live then?’
Gül shrugged.
‘Whose daughter are you?’
‘The blacksmith’s daughter.’
‘Right, then I’ll take you to the blacksmith.’
The young man hoisted Gül onto his shoulders, and Gül enjoyed the perspective from up there; she enjoyed the feeling of being carried for so long and listening to him asking the way of two passers-by. Eventually, the man knocked at a door, lifted Gül down and waited. A woman opened up, and they could see a man and children in the background, eating their dinner.
‘A blessed evening and a good meal to you,’ the man said, and then he went on: ‘Blacksmith, I’ve brought your daughter back to you.’
‘My daughter?’ said the man who’d got up and come to the door. ‘Don’t be silly, that’s not my daughter. I’ve already got four girls, what I want is a son. The merciful Lord hasn’t granted me a single son. You get out of here with yet another girl.’
‘Oh,’ the green-eyed man said.
After the door shut behind them, the man asked Gül: ‘What’s your father’s name, then?’
‘Timur.’
‘Timur, not Tolga. You’re the blacksmith Timur’s daughter?’
Gül nodded and said: ‘We live in the village.’
‘I know,’ the man said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take you to your father, we’ll just have to borrow a horse.
And so the man, who later turned out to be a sieve maker, took Gül home to her parents in the village and had to stay overnight in the end, because he couldn’t ride back in the dark. Gül had thought her mother would tell her off and her father would shout, but neither of them said a thing.
Once the sieve maker had set off for town with her father the next morning, Fatma took Gül aside and gave her a clip round the ear.
‘You are never, do you hear, never to run away like that again, no matter what happens. And never, never go anywhere with strange men again. They might do bad things to you, very bad things. Promise me you’ll never run away again. Promise me!’
Gül got her second clip round the ear then and there, and she saw the tears in her mother’s eyes. There was something in Fatma’s face that scared her, scared her more than her grandmother’s voice.
Fatma pulled Gül into her embrace, stroked her hair and said: ‘My dove, never again, promise?’
‘I promise.’
It was a hard winter, though they always had enough wood, they had plenty of flour, bulgur and beans, they had thick grape molasses which tugged at the bread when you dunked it in. It was an unusually hard winter, and there were days when the blacksmith did not ride out to work but stayed at home with his pregnant wife instead. It was the first winter that Fatma and Timur had their own bed from the first snow to the last. Relatives and acquaintances married, but there was no chance of transporting the bed through the snow-packed streets.
At school, it was so cold that the firewood ran out. Every day, two children had to bring wood from home, but even then, it was never really warm in the classroom. Fatma spoke to Timur, and one day he rode to the school, taking as much wood as his donkey could