The Rain in Şişle
This is an original translation of “The Rain in Şişle” by
Matthew Lundin of the Armenian-Turkish author Migirdiç Margosyan. The
short story originally appeared in the compilation Gavur District as şişlede yağmur.
Under the drenching rain, listening to Father Movses’ prayers as we
sent my mother off to the other side, the other world, I had the strange
feeling that she was coming back. But she didn’t. Never again.
She never wrote anything. Not even two lines. She actually didn’t know how to, as she had never learned to read or write. My mother was a peasant during the time when everyone else was becoming literate, she came from a family without education and never went to school herself. But you know, she was skilled in so many other ways. She learned so many useful things in her time. Well, for instance, she made the greatest dough. After having kneaded it, she put it in a pewter “teştin” to let it leaven. Before covering it with a thin cloth she would draw a small cross on the dough with her right thumb and prayed that it would have “Halil Ibrahim’s blessing” while it rose.
Have you heard of someone talk about prosperity or abundance by using the expression Halil Ibrahim? The first time I heard it used was while we sat around our kneading trough. Later I heard his name again at our dinner table. Well, table as a matter of speaking. When I say table, I’m talking about a copper tray laid over a wicker mat with a small saucepan on top. The saucepan would be filled to the brim with lentil soup. All of us sat on the mat: Grandad, Nana, Dad, Mom, all of my siblings, holding spoons in our hands ready to dig into the soup in the saucepan. When we started it was a flurry of spoons. We would make do of Halil Ibrahim’s abundant blessing of lentil soup, a few onions and tandoori bread, leaving nothing in arm’s length spared from our hunger. During supper nobody spoke, we were focused on the food. Whoever spoke would end up hungry. Besides, it was well known to be a sin to talk while eating.
We got to know the expression “Halil Abraham’s blessing” by grains of wheat. We heaved sacks of wheat onto our backs and all of us set off: my siblings, my brothers, my sisters, the whole battalion. We took our duties seriously, going from neighbor to neighbor and calling out:
“Sister Hıçe, we’ve got the wheat, come help us sort it out.”
“Sister Sebem, my mother wants you to come help sort the wheat.”
“Sister Sarik, bring your “Bırgiş” along, your tray, hurry over to where they’re doing the sorting”
Our call brought all of the sisters over. Those with large trays at home brought them along. Everyone squatted down together sitting cross-legged, all sorting the wheat together. Wheat to one side, rocks to the other.
Halil Abraham’s blessing, piece by piece, one by one, was picked free of all of the little devilish stones mixed in. The next evening we returned the sister’s trays, their Bırgişes, and their washtubs. They always gave us their best wishes.
“It was lovely wheat ma’am, may you eat it with health, with Halil Abraham’s blessing.” In order to actually eat any blessed wheat, you still had to send it to the mill to be ground into flour. And when the time came that’s exactly what we did.
The miller in town was a Kurd named Uso. His job required he knew how much wheat had been bought, by which sister and when, where, using whose wheat, in how many days it had been sorted, the quality of each type of wheat, and how much he had received. Not many other people knew this information. In fact, in a way, it was Uso’s trade secret. Having been a miller long enough to make his hair go grey, it was only natural that he knew these things.
His grey hair wasn’t from working in the mill like you might suppose, but from living in the Gavur District. He was responsible for when the wheat would be need to be brought to the mill, which sister would bring it, what day it would arrive, what road the wheat would come by, what time whose wheat would be dropped off. All of their relationships and decisions, it all came down to Uso. The sisters all had to wait on Uso, whether it was delaying for the wheat to be sorted, or on the sacks and blankets to be filled. He was always ready on the day they showed up, huge sacks and blankets of wheat on their backs, or heaped on their old white mules, tied on with thick rope in some ungodly Gordion knot. On the day he milled our wheat, he packed everything up and was ready to set off, when my mom called out:
“Uso, Zu Bine Ha!”
Speaking to a Kurd, my mom thought it would work better to say in his own language “Uso, bring it quickly, ha!” This kind of exclamation would usually not have any effect, but she did it anyway. That day, however, it turned out to be quite useful. Uso’s normally “stubborn mule” wasn’t acting in its normal way: ready to throw off its load, giving kicks or making impatient grunts. Instead, it just stood quietly eating its mix of wheat and barley. So when Uso heard my mom say the phrase in Kurdish, he repeated back “herei herei” which means “alright, alright”. The mule, usually hearing Uso use the Kurdish phrase with animals rather than humans, took it to mean something else, and set off immediately down the road.
All of my siblings, brothers and sisters, seven sisters to be exact, followed behind Uso and his mule like a convoy. Uso, using the sharp pointed rod in his hand, prodded the mule at every step.
“Deh, de mirat, deeeh!”
We kept trudging along up the hill as the poor mule started hissing and spitting from the combined exhaustion of hearing Uso incessantly call out “deh, deeeeeeh”, the weight of the sacks of wheat now even heavier with the blessing of Halil Ibrahim, and the constant harassment of horse flies buzzing at the corners of its eyelids.
Our convoy continued walking with heavy limping steps until it had reached the “Kastal”: the fountain that sister Arshuluys had donated in the memory of her husband Jirjin the Chaldean pharmacist. Once we reached the fountain Uso let out a loud “shooo.” The mule had its own way of speaking and so for him “shooo” meant “stooop.” The mule responded back in this same language by giving Uso an answer with a movement of his ears, then stopped. For Uso this “shooo” had two other meanings. The first was that it was time to drink water from a trough. Uso used a second language that the mule would understand: he whistled. With the sound of whistling the mule stretched out its huge head towards the water, gave the water a few sniffs, and then begin to drink. It drank to its heart’s content, without any idea of having had enough. I never saw anything drink as much water as Uso’s mule. I doubt you have either. As for the second meaning of “shooo,” it meant that it was time for Uso and his mule to start heading home.
So we turned back.
Two days later our blessing from Halil Ibrahim, crushed under the huge heavy round millstone, its shape changed, its white hair combed, its grains turned to flour, having become a little more blessed, thickened, and put in the earthenware jars, it waited to be shared with what little bread father Arsen would pass out on Sundays.
With Halil Ibrahim’s blessing, God forbid, we were never in want of anything in our homes or in our pantries. He was even a blessing to our mother’s wombs. How could any of us forget that we were a result of the abundance he provided?
Without fail I would have a new brother or sister every year, and my grandma would keep up by running to the pantry, snatching two palms full of Halil Ibrahim’s blessing, and tossing into a frying pan.
She roasted the flour in the pan and then poured a bowl of water onto the flour. The water was quickly absorbed into the mixture, and having been further blessed by Halil Ibrahim, it would sometimes overflow over the pan. It was my grandma, nana, who cooked “malez”. When it was fully cooked little bubbles puffed up, making little pit-pat sounds as they popped. The pit-pat sounds let you know that the malez was ready and that it could be taken off the fire. Then it was time to melt the butter and mix in the grape molasses. Having turned into malez we ate the Halil Ibrahim, greedily spooning it out. To the sound of our new brother crying in the house, the clinking of our spoons, and our constant bickering, we raced each other to the bottom of the pot. By the next year our new brother had joined us in eating malez and we didn’t even notice the wailing of yet another new sibling as we ate.
But eventually, and I’ll never be sure exactly how it happened, we found ourselves repeating the phrase “It’s a great city, it’s a big city.” And we immigrated to Istanbul.
Listen, whatever my mom did, if she could do it well she would do it to the best she could. She tried to bring along Halil Ibrahim’s blessing with us to Istanbul. She tried to bring rice, wheat, lentils, cracked wheat and chick peas, and beans in bags. She thought she would be able to bring all of Halil Ibrahim’s blessings with us, but she was wrong. Our Anatolian Halil Ibrahim wasn’t fit to last in our new home’s moldy basement. If it couldn’t fit into our huge big-bellied earthenware jars, how could it possibly live on in tiny plastic pots. Could you live on in such a way? It got up and left our home. My mother even tried unsuccessfully to cook malez. The malez began to taste like just some ordinary cake. Once Halil Ibrahim’s butter and grape molasses Malez began to be replaced by the taste of chocolate cake, she couldn’t bear it any longer. And she didn’t. She soon passed away.
I had one last encounter with Halil Ibrahim at my mother’s funeral in the Armenian cemetary in Şişli. Our beloved Diyarbakir Halil Ibrahim overflowing abundance now came in the form of rain; pouring down like the flood. The sound of pouring rain and father Movses’s prayer mixed together , and it felt as though Halil Ibrahim was saying.
“Zo woman, have you bid your final farewell?”
She never wrote anything. Not even two lines. She actually didn’t know how to, as she had never learned to read or write. My mother was a peasant during the time when everyone else was becoming literate, she came from a family without education and never went to school herself. But you know, she was skilled in so many other ways. She learned so many useful things in her time. Well, for instance, she made the greatest dough. After having kneaded it, she put it in a pewter “teştin” to let it leaven. Before covering it with a thin cloth she would draw a small cross on the dough with her right thumb and prayed that it would have “Halil Ibrahim’s blessing” while it rose.
Have you heard of someone talk about prosperity or abundance by using the expression Halil Ibrahim? The first time I heard it used was while we sat around our kneading trough. Later I heard his name again at our dinner table. Well, table as a matter of speaking. When I say table, I’m talking about a copper tray laid over a wicker mat with a small saucepan on top. The saucepan would be filled to the brim with lentil soup. All of us sat on the mat: Grandad, Nana, Dad, Mom, all of my siblings, holding spoons in our hands ready to dig into the soup in the saucepan. When we started it was a flurry of spoons. We would make do of Halil Ibrahim’s abundant blessing of lentil soup, a few onions and tandoori bread, leaving nothing in arm’s length spared from our hunger. During supper nobody spoke, we were focused on the food. Whoever spoke would end up hungry. Besides, it was well known to be a sin to talk while eating.
We got to know the expression “Halil Abraham’s blessing” by grains of wheat. We heaved sacks of wheat onto our backs and all of us set off: my siblings, my brothers, my sisters, the whole battalion. We took our duties seriously, going from neighbor to neighbor and calling out:
“Sister Hıçe, we’ve got the wheat, come help us sort it out.”
“Sister Sebem, my mother wants you to come help sort the wheat.”
“Sister Sarik, bring your “Bırgiş” along, your tray, hurry over to where they’re doing the sorting”
Our call brought all of the sisters over. Those with large trays at home brought them along. Everyone squatted down together sitting cross-legged, all sorting the wheat together. Wheat to one side, rocks to the other.
Halil Abraham’s blessing, piece by piece, one by one, was picked free of all of the little devilish stones mixed in. The next evening we returned the sister’s trays, their Bırgişes, and their washtubs. They always gave us their best wishes.
“It was lovely wheat ma’am, may you eat it with health, with Halil Abraham’s blessing.” In order to actually eat any blessed wheat, you still had to send it to the mill to be ground into flour. And when the time came that’s exactly what we did.
The miller in town was a Kurd named Uso. His job required he knew how much wheat had been bought, by which sister and when, where, using whose wheat, in how many days it had been sorted, the quality of each type of wheat, and how much he had received. Not many other people knew this information. In fact, in a way, it was Uso’s trade secret. Having been a miller long enough to make his hair go grey, it was only natural that he knew these things.
His grey hair wasn’t from working in the mill like you might suppose, but from living in the Gavur District. He was responsible for when the wheat would be need to be brought to the mill, which sister would bring it, what day it would arrive, what road the wheat would come by, what time whose wheat would be dropped off. All of their relationships and decisions, it all came down to Uso. The sisters all had to wait on Uso, whether it was delaying for the wheat to be sorted, or on the sacks and blankets to be filled. He was always ready on the day they showed up, huge sacks and blankets of wheat on their backs, or heaped on their old white mules, tied on with thick rope in some ungodly Gordion knot. On the day he milled our wheat, he packed everything up and was ready to set off, when my mom called out:
“Uso, Zu Bine Ha!”
Speaking to a Kurd, my mom thought it would work better to say in his own language “Uso, bring it quickly, ha!” This kind of exclamation would usually not have any effect, but she did it anyway. That day, however, it turned out to be quite useful. Uso’s normally “stubborn mule” wasn’t acting in its normal way: ready to throw off its load, giving kicks or making impatient grunts. Instead, it just stood quietly eating its mix of wheat and barley. So when Uso heard my mom say the phrase in Kurdish, he repeated back “herei herei” which means “alright, alright”. The mule, usually hearing Uso use the Kurdish phrase with animals rather than humans, took it to mean something else, and set off immediately down the road.
All of my siblings, brothers and sisters, seven sisters to be exact, followed behind Uso and his mule like a convoy. Uso, using the sharp pointed rod in his hand, prodded the mule at every step.
“Deh, de mirat, deeeh!”
We kept trudging along up the hill as the poor mule started hissing and spitting from the combined exhaustion of hearing Uso incessantly call out “deh, deeeeeeh”, the weight of the sacks of wheat now even heavier with the blessing of Halil Ibrahim, and the constant harassment of horse flies buzzing at the corners of its eyelids.
Our convoy continued walking with heavy limping steps until it had reached the “Kastal”: the fountain that sister Arshuluys had donated in the memory of her husband Jirjin the Chaldean pharmacist. Once we reached the fountain Uso let out a loud “shooo.” The mule had its own way of speaking and so for him “shooo” meant “stooop.” The mule responded back in this same language by giving Uso an answer with a movement of his ears, then stopped. For Uso this “shooo” had two other meanings. The first was that it was time to drink water from a trough. Uso used a second language that the mule would understand: he whistled. With the sound of whistling the mule stretched out its huge head towards the water, gave the water a few sniffs, and then begin to drink. It drank to its heart’s content, without any idea of having had enough. I never saw anything drink as much water as Uso’s mule. I doubt you have either. As for the second meaning of “shooo,” it meant that it was time for Uso and his mule to start heading home.
So we turned back.
Two days later our blessing from Halil Ibrahim, crushed under the huge heavy round millstone, its shape changed, its white hair combed, its grains turned to flour, having become a little more blessed, thickened, and put in the earthenware jars, it waited to be shared with what little bread father Arsen would pass out on Sundays.
With Halil Ibrahim’s blessing, God forbid, we were never in want of anything in our homes or in our pantries. He was even a blessing to our mother’s wombs. How could any of us forget that we were a result of the abundance he provided?
Without fail I would have a new brother or sister every year, and my grandma would keep up by running to the pantry, snatching two palms full of Halil Ibrahim’s blessing, and tossing into a frying pan.
She roasted the flour in the pan and then poured a bowl of water onto the flour. The water was quickly absorbed into the mixture, and having been further blessed by Halil Ibrahim, it would sometimes overflow over the pan. It was my grandma, nana, who cooked “malez”. When it was fully cooked little bubbles puffed up, making little pit-pat sounds as they popped. The pit-pat sounds let you know that the malez was ready and that it could be taken off the fire. Then it was time to melt the butter and mix in the grape molasses. Having turned into malez we ate the Halil Ibrahim, greedily spooning it out. To the sound of our new brother crying in the house, the clinking of our spoons, and our constant bickering, we raced each other to the bottom of the pot. By the next year our new brother had joined us in eating malez and we didn’t even notice the wailing of yet another new sibling as we ate.
But eventually, and I’ll never be sure exactly how it happened, we found ourselves repeating the phrase “It’s a great city, it’s a big city.” And we immigrated to Istanbul.
Listen, whatever my mom did, if she could do it well she would do it to the best she could. She tried to bring along Halil Ibrahim’s blessing with us to Istanbul. She tried to bring rice, wheat, lentils, cracked wheat and chick peas, and beans in bags. She thought she would be able to bring all of Halil Ibrahim’s blessings with us, but she was wrong. Our Anatolian Halil Ibrahim wasn’t fit to last in our new home’s moldy basement. If it couldn’t fit into our huge big-bellied earthenware jars, how could it possibly live on in tiny plastic pots. Could you live on in such a way? It got up and left our home. My mother even tried unsuccessfully to cook malez. The malez began to taste like just some ordinary cake. Once Halil Ibrahim’s butter and grape molasses Malez began to be replaced by the taste of chocolate cake, she couldn’t bear it any longer. And she didn’t. She soon passed away.
I had one last encounter with Halil Ibrahim at my mother’s funeral in the Armenian cemetary in Şişli. Our beloved Diyarbakir Halil Ibrahim overflowing abundance now came in the form of rain; pouring down like the flood. The sound of pouring rain and father Movses’s prayer mixed together , and it felt as though Halil Ibrahim was saying.
“Zo woman, have you bid your final farewell?”
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