(after all she is pregnant) for even I couldn’t have predicted it, and my baby’s instincts are very powerful. In the blink of an eye she veered the car towards a cliff! I still do not know whether she was angrier with me or with herself.
But her plan didn’t work, I didn’t die! I didn’t! By the time the air ambulance arrived my mother had already breathed her last. The blue shirts immediately opened up her belly there and then and took out what was inside. Me – blind, but full of life.
The Seed
Into whose soul it was first cast I know not. Yet what I know suffices for me. All the same, I will not bore you by telling you everything I know.
Although not altogether certain, it is possible that it all started with my father’s father’s father’s father. And that is because I can only retrace our genealogy back to him. My conviction is that it goes even further back. The mountains, however, conceal footprints well, that is true, but my father’s father’s father’s father was a nomad.
Legend has it that the budding of the seed of evil began with my grandfather Nusrahit when he murdered his wife. Quite out of the blue he slit her throat one night while she was asleep. Was he already sick but didn’t show it? Or had the sickness taken hold of him in a single day as if he was possessed by a demon? No one knows. What is known is that he woke up (whatever got into him) from his sleep (whatever he might have been dreaming of) and sunk the knife he used to cut sheep and goats with into Mother Haşimet’s throat. It's the mountains. There’s no gendarme, no police. What were they to do? He must be punished for the sake of peace among the nomads. Kabil, the elder son, took on the job of punishment, but there was to be no killing, no rape, and no torture. What else is there? Crude beating. Kabil beat his father to death. Yet, there is something strange here; Nusruhat, the younger son, told the Elders that one night he had seen Kabil and his mother embracing, that his father was most probably aware of this sin and that’s why he killed Mother Haşimet. But then, the daughter of the house took the floor. She claimed that Kabil and her mother could not have been lovers because Kabil was in love with her. And Kabil (perhaps to save his neck) admitted that he belonged to Zenina. And when the Elders asked him to prove his love he gave his sister a long kiss on the lips.
It appears Kabil’s hands had not been wetted enough with his own father’s blood, word goes round that he also sold Temcit, his daughter born of his wife (not of Zenina, for he did not marry her) to the bandits in exchange for ten goats. We do not know where the bandits took the girl. The greatest evil, however, lies not in giving Temcit to the bandits but in stripping her of her tongue as well. Because Temcit always contradicted her father, because she never paid him filial respect, because she always humiliated him publicly and told everyone how he beat his father, grandfather Nusrahit to death, Kabil was full of resentment towards this ungrateful girl. On the night before the morning he would deliver her to the bandits he put her to sleep (who knows with what) and cut her tongue off with the knife he slaughtered sheep and goats with. And to make sure she would not bleed to death before she was delivered to her new owner, he wrapped the wound up thoroughly. Temcit woke up the next morning to find that she had no tongue. The bandits took her away as she was, no tongue and all.
Damdız, was the younger one of the two sons Surtun, and Damdız, the quiet one, the kind-hearted, the skilful, the one who looked after the family – the kind to watch out for.
Damdız was not troubled with his wife like his grandfather Nusrahit or with his daughter like his father Kabil. They say he is a pederast. Rumour has it that this story is true. As Damdız is very handsome, all the girls in the tribe are crazy for him. But he only had eyes for one: Kunduz. Kunduz was married though. He had a gorgeous wife with hair down to her waist, long legs and sky-blue eyes. And Kunduz only had eyes for her. One day, mustering up all his courage, Damdız told Kunduz about the fire that was burning him up.
But what did Kunduz do? He rained all kinds of insults at him. He must have given him a couple of blows too, I believe, for Kunduz was that kind of man. Then, not having been able to vent his spleen, he went and told everyone that Damdız was a pederast. Damdız was devastated, not because all the tribe found out that he was a pederast, but because he had been so badly slighted by the object of his affections. One day, as Kunduz’s beauteous wife Aybalam was grazing the goats, he took the woman forcibly (even though he could hardly find it in him). But that’s not where the greatest evil lies: he did this when Kunduz was around, so that he would come too. Then, taking out the knife he used to slaughter sheep and goats with, he cut Kunduz’s statuesque manhood at its root. It is said that Kunduz bled to death and that his wife threw herself off a cliff of shame and a broken heart, after giving birth to the baby inside her.
This child of rape, Sülyon (for whatever reason the tribe named him so), happens to be my father. If you ask me whether that seed of evil has passed down to him, I do not know for certain, but the fondness for cutting certainly has! For if it had not been for that, why else when waking up one night (who knows whatever got into him), would he have violated me at the point of the knife he used to cut the strings of the mushroom sacks!
Dimwits
I told these buggers, ‘if you must do it, do it on the quiet’, I said. But do they have that sort of sense? If they did, they wouldn’t be giving inadequate sermons in ruined parish churches for years – they’d be the Pope, like me. I had to pontificate so much to hush it all up: about Iraq, about the civil war in Sudan, about the seminary in Turkey, about Muslim terrorists. But it seems a bunch of journalists have it in for me. Faggots. So what if my men have groped a couple of children? Doesn’t this ever happen in Islamic orders? They say I’ve sheltered paedophiliac clerics! They say I hushed up criminal records during my tenure as a cardinal with the admonition: ‘Always keep under lock and key. Top secret.’ They grope their pupils at schools, their patients in their clinics, and their own children in their homes to their hearts’ content, and then clamour at me to clear their consciences. Everyone envies the Vatican. They envy our power just as they envy our gold-embroidered clothes and our spectacular sceptre.
Wreck
I told mum. ‘This boat is not safe, it won’t take us there and back,’ I said. ‘Let’s not board it,’ I said. ‘I have a bad feeling about it!’. ‘You think you know better than your father? He says it’s safe,’ she said. ‘Now stop complaining and help me get these pies on board,’ she said. ‘Buzzing like a hornet around my head again,’ she said. My big brother made fun of me, saying, ‘well, she a girl isn’t she, scaredy-cat’. My kid brother – he’s the only one who opened his eyes and looked at me.
All of a sudden the weather turned. A storm broke out of nowhere; how and where, we never understood. Mum can’t swim. My big brother jumped after his father who fell overboard. They didn’t surface. But I felt a strength from within, I swam, and swam, and swam.
My big sister – she’d dug her heels in, refusing to get on the boat with us. She hates the sea. She’d run away and hidden again, risking a beating by dad on our return. She called the coastguard when the storm broke. They pulled me aboard, not far from the shore, just as the strength in my arms failed.
Mum, dad, my big brother... it’s not them... but I feel like cutting off that hand of mine which slipped out of my fourteen-year-old brother’s grip.
Pippa
It was me. I killed Pippa. By disclaiming her as soon as she was conceived. By moving heaven and earth to stop her from being born; existing after she is born.
I noticed her too late anyway. I had let her grow inside me for four months unawares. I begged the doctor: get this thing out of me, I pleaded, but he wouldn’t. In our Catholic village there were only a few doctors who would do the job anyway. And my doctor said: ‘this has grown too much, I can’t abort it now.’
