The Girl Under The Mulberry Tree

Leyla

Every June there is one morning when this house forgets to be careful, and it is the morning we shake the tree.

I know it has come before I open my eyes. A mulberry has fallen on my pillow, in the night or just now in the grey before the call to prayer, and burst beside my ear. I can smell it, dark and sweet, a little as I imagine wine must smell, though I wouldn't know. For a moment I don't move. I lie on the roof with the stain spreading into Anne's good pillowcase, and I let myself be happy before I remember anything else. I've learned to do that. You have to catch the happiness first thing, before the day gets its hands on you.

The roof is still cool under my mattress. All around me my family is asleep in rows, as we sleep every summer from the end of May until the nights turn cold. Dede and Babaanne are at the far end by the water jars, Anne and Baba beside them. Cemil Abi and Nesrin Yenge have little Ömer flung sideways between them like a coat somebody dropped. Elif sleeps next to me with her mouth open. Tahir sleeps wherever he falls, which this morning is half off his mattress with one foot in the copper basin. Over all of us the sky is the pale pink of the inside of a shell, and the first swifts are already screaming round the minarets.

The tree comes up past the edge of the roof on the courtyard side. It was doing that long before I was born. In winter it's a tangle of grey branches that scratch at the parapet when the wind gets into them. In June it leans over the parapet heavy and dark and dripping with fruit, as if it wanted to see which of us was still asleep. Every morning there are more berries on the stones below and more stains along the parapet, until one day Anne decides it's time.

This year she decides it at the first words of the call to prayer. I hear her sit up. I hear her find the stain on my pillowcase by its smell before she finds it with her eyes.

"Leyla."

"It fell on me, Anne. I didn't eat it in bed."

"Did I say anything?

"You were going to."

"Get up," she says, and I can hear that she's smiling in the dark, which she never lets anybody see her do in daylight. "Wake your sister. Wake that boy. If we don't shake it before the sun gets into the courtyard, we'll be scraping it off the stones till winter."

So it begins, as it begins every year. Tahir has to be woken three times and then pulled by the ankle. Elif wakes complaining that she was in the middle of a dream about a film. Nesrin Yenge wakes because Ömer is already climbing over her to see what the noise is. Cemil Abi doesn't wake at all until Ömer sits on his face. By the time we come down the stone stairs into the courtyard, the light is turning from grey to white, and Babaanne is already on her cushion in the eyvan with her first coffee. I can't remember ever coming down those stairs before her.

"Not that sheet," she says to Anne, before Anne has even opened the chest.

"It's the same sheet as every year, Ana."

"It's a disgrace of a sheet."

It is, too. It was a bedsheet once, when Anne was a bride. Every June since, it has been spread under the tree and stained again, until there isn't a white place left on it. When Anne shakes it out over the stones it's blotched all over with old purple, faded rings inside darker ones. When I was small I used to lie on it and pretend the stains were countries. I suppose I still do, a little. Near one corner there's a stain shaped almost exactly like Cyprus, which the radio has talked about all spring. Every year I look for it, and every year it's still there, a little paler.

Tahir goes up the tree barefoot with the long hooked pole over his shoulder. On the ground he has to be told everything three times. Up a tree he knows exactly what he's doing. He climbs through the low fork where all of us went up as children, then out along the big branch toward the roof, and settles there grinning down at us as if he owned the morning.

The four of us take the corners of the sheet. Anne has the corner nearest the kitchen door, because she has always had that corner. Nesrin Yenge has the one by the pool, Elif has hers, and I have mine under the big branch, where the most fall. Ömer is told to stay beside Babaanne. He's under the sheet before anybody has finished telling him.

"Ready?" Tahir shouts.

"Not too hard," Anne calls up. "Gently, Tahir. I said gently."

He shakes it as hard as he can.

They come down on us all at once, hundreds of them, warm as summer rain. They thud into the sheet, into our hair, down the backs of our necks. Elif screams. Ömer shrieks with joy under the cloth, where he's being rained on like a little tent. Nesrin Yenge laughs so hard she nearly loses her corner. I tip my face up into it, which is a foolish thing to do and which I do every year. One bursts on my cheekbone. Another catches in my hair. By the time Tahir stops to breathe, I'm purple from my fingertips to my wrists, and I can taste mulberry at the corner of my mouth. I'm laughing. For a minute I'm not twenty one, and nothing is waiting for me anywhere. I'm only a girl under a tree in her father's courtyard on the best morning of the year.

Anne lets go of her corner long enough to wipe my cheek with her thumb. She looks at me with her head on one side, at my black hair full of leaves and my face streaked purple from my chin to my eyebrows.

"Your grandmother's eyes," she says, "and my temper, and mulberry all over your face like a child of six. No family in Urfa would have you this morning."

"Then it's lucky nobody's asking."

"They'll ask," says Anne, going back to her corner. "Give them till the autumn."

Everybody says that about my eyes. Babaanne's eyes, blue and green at once, like the pool at noon when the sun is straight down on it. I've looked for them in the little mirror on the back of our door and only ever seen my own.

"Elif, your dress," says Anne.

"It was already old." Elif looks down at herself in horror. "It was already old, wasn't it, Leyla? Tell her it was old."

"It's old now," I say.

"Then it's a mulberry dress," says Anne. "Hold your corner."

The men come out while the courtyard fills with light. Baba comes last, buttoning his cuffs, ready for the bazaar. He stands at the edge of the sheet and looks at the four of us purple to the elbows, at Tahir up the tree, at Ömer crawling out from under the cloth with his whole face dyed. He shakes his head as if we were a great disappointment to him. Then he crouches down and chooses. He takes his time over it. He chooses mulberries as he chooses wheat, turning each one over and holding it up to the light.

He holds out his hand to me with six of them in his palm, the biggest and blackest of the year.

"The first ones," he says.

"Baba. I'm twenty one."

"I know how old you are. I was there." He tips them into my hand. "Eat them. They're and bring luck."

He has done this every June since I was too small to hold them. The first and best of the shaking go into my hand. Not Zeynep's, not Elif's. Mine. I've never asked him why. I eat them standing there with leaves in my hair. They're warm from the tree. Baba watches me eat them, then looks down at his own palm, stained purple right across, and laughs.

"Now look at that," he says. "I'll be selling barley all morning with the hands of a dyer."

"Wash them."

"It doesn't wash off. You know it doesn't. It has to wear off." He wipes his palm on his handkerchief, which only makes it worse. Then he kisses the top of my head, leaves and all, and goes to find his shoes.

I love my father. I want to say that plainly, here, with his kiss still in my hair, before I have to think about the other thing. I love the way he chooses the mulberries, slowly, as if it mattered which six. I love that it has always been his hand they come from. Whatever happens later, whatever he says to me about the other thing, I want it written down somewhere that on this morning, in June, he chose six mulberries for me and held them out on his palm.

Cemil Abi comes out behind him, knotting his tie, and steals a handful off the sheet. "Little professor," he says to me, "save me some for tonight. The good ones, mind. Not the ones Tahir sat on."

Then Dede, with his stick and his prayer beads wound round his wrist, moving as he moves now, slowly, as if the courtyard had grown since he was young.

From her cushion Babaanne says, "You're going past it again."

Dede doesn't stop. "It's on my way."

"It has been on your way for twenty years, Yusuf," she says. "It still hasn't moved."

"Neither have I," says Dede. He goes out through the gate after his son and grandson, and the gate bangs shut behind him.

Nobody asks what they mean. Nobody needs to. It's the warehouse by the covered bazaar, the one with the iron doors and a date cut into the stone over the arch. It belonged half to Dede and half to Rauf Demir when they were young men, and it has belonged all to the Demirs since around the year I was born. Nobody in this house tells that story the same way twice, and nobody tells it to the end. What I know, I've put together out of pieces, a sentence here, a silence there. They were boys together. They were partners for twenty years. Something happened in the war. Afterward our two families didn't speak for fifteen years, until my sister married Rauf Demir's grandson. At the wedding the two old men shook hands in our courtyard while everybody watched, slowly, like men lifting something heavy between them.

Since then we visit at bayrams, weddings and funerals, and we're all very polite. And every morning on his way to the bazaar, Dede still walks past that warehouse, though there's a shorter way.

⁂

By the time the sun is over the east wall, the tree is bare on the low side and the whole courtyard smells like a pot of jam.

Anne sorts as fast as she talks. The best go into the big copper bowl for eating, the bruised ones into the basin for sherbet. The ones Ömer has sat on she throws to the hens, with a look that says she'll be speaking to Nesrin Yenge about him later. She doesn't count out loud. She doesn't need to. Anne can stand in a courtyard full of baskets and tell you how many there are without turning her head, how much sugar they'll need, and how much is left in the house down to the last spoon.

Then the grocer's boy comes to the gate with the account for the month. She wipes her hands and gives it to me.

"Read it to me while I stir."

So I read it to her while she stirs. Sugar, so much. Rice, so much. Two packets of the good tea. She nods at each line as though she were checking it against something, and perhaps she is, some list she keeps in her head. She has handed me the bills and the letters since I was nine. We've never talked about why. I don't think about it, any more than I think about which hand I open a door with.

My hands are purple to the wrist. Anne says that if I touch one cushion in this house before they're clean she'll have the skin off me, so I go up to wash and change my dress. Then, instead of going back down, I sit on the floor of my room with the door half shut and take down the atlas.

It lives on the shelf over my bed, between my Çalıkuşu and the dictionary. It's too tall for the shelf, so it leans. My Çalıkuşu has been read so many times that its spine has gone soft. Every girl I know wanted to be Feride at fifteen, the girl who runs away to be a teacher in some mountain village because her heart is broken. I wanted it too. I still do, more or less. I'd only like to manage it without the broken heart, if that's allowed.

Baba brought the atlas home from Istanbul the winter I was twelve. He had been away three weeks on business, and he came back with presents for everybody wrapped in newspaper. A scarf for Anne. A penknife for Tahir, which Anne took off him the same night. And for me this, so heavy that he had to carry it in both arms. We lay on our stomachs on the guest room carpet with the lamp between us. He turned the pages and said, "Choose." So I chose. I chose places for the sound of their names. Valparaíso. Samarkand. A town in Sweden with two dots over its first letter. Baba said every name back to me slowly, as if he were tasting it.

"One day you'll go and see them," he said, "and come home and tell me what they're like."

I believed him. I was twelve, my father had said it, and I believed every word.

I still open it some nights when the house is asleep, at any page at all, and put my finger down without looking, and wherever it lands I let myself be there for a minute. A woman in a coat in a town I can't pronounce, with a classroom of her own and a window full of snow. It's a child's game. I've never stopped playing it. Some nights it's the only thing that lets me sleep.

Inside the atlas, at the page for Turkey, there's a piece of newspaper folded in four. It has been there a year. It has gone soft at the folds, like cloth. I take it out and open it on my knees, though I could say every word of it to you with my eyes shut.

The Gazi Institute of Education in Ankara announces its entrance examinations for the coming year. Written and oral. Open to graduates of the lise and its equivalents. Turkish language and literature, history, geography, general knowledge. Then the dates, a year old now and meaningless, and an address in Ankara that I've written to in my head a hundred times.

I cut it out of Baba's newspaper last August with Anne's sewing scissors while he was at the mosque. He never noticed it was gone. I don't think he ever reads that page.

I finished school three years ago this month. I was fourth in my class, out of eleven girls and twenty six boys. At the gate on the last day the headmaster told Baba I ought to be a teacher. Baba said, "We'll see." That September I asked him, and he said later. The next September I asked him properly, in the guest room, with reasons, and he said, "Later, kızım. When things are calmer." Last September I didn't ask at all. I took this notice out every night and folded it up again. I didn't ask, because I knew what he would say, and I couldn't bear to hear him say it a third time.

Things are not calmer. Things in this city are never calmer. There's always a harvest coming, or a harvest gone wrong, or a cousin's wedding, or some trouble between the two houses that nobody will explain to me. Meanwhile I'm twenty one. Half the girls I finished school with are married. Two have babies. One of them, Şükran, who sat beside me for three years and could never spell the word for Thursday, has a son who can already walk.

I don't want to be married yet. I'm not against it. I'm not one of those girls in novels who swears she'll never marry and then marries the first man who carries her parcels home. I only want something of my own first. I want to stand in front of a room full of children with chalk on my fingers and have them look at me as if I knew something. I want to teach a girl to write her own name, a girl who would never have learned it otherwise. I want to go to Ankara, and come back, and tell Baba what it was like. I want it so much that some nights it sits on my chest like a cat and won't let me breathe.

So this summer I've decided. I'm going to sit that examination next year, whatever anybody says, and I'm going to pass it. I'll read every book I can find, learn every date, and practice until I could answer in my sleep. The dates don't frighten me. What frightens me is the oral. I can test myself on the Tanzimat inside my own head, but I can't ask myself questions as a stranger would, some man in a grey suit behind a table in Ankara, looking at me over his glasses and waiting. I need somebody to be that man for me. I need somebody who knows what they ask.

I sit with the notice on my knees and go through everybody I know. There's nobody.

My sketchbook is under the atlas. While I'm sitting there, I try to draw Baba's hand as it looked this morning, holding out the first ones. It comes out wrong, as hands always do with me. Too many fingers, or too few, and the ones I manage look like a bunch of radishes. I can draw the arch over our gate so well you'd know which gate it was. I can draw the covered passage at the end of our street, and Babaanne asleep with her mouth open, which she has forbidden me to show anybody. Hands beat me every time.

The door bangs open. Elif.

"Can I borrow your blue dress for Sunday?"

I shut the atlas on the notice. "Knock."

"I did knock. You didn't hear me, you were drawing radishes." She looks over my shoulder. "Is that supposed to be Baba's hand? Can I borrow it? The dress, I mean. You never wear it."

"I'm saving it."

"For what?"

"For something.“

"You've been saving it for two years," says Elif. "By the time something happens it'll be out of fashion. What did you put in there?"

"In where?"

"In the atlas. You put something in the atlas." Her whole face lights up. "Is it a letter? Is it from a boy?"

"It's Africa," I say. "Go and help Anne."

"You're so strange," says my sister, who is fourteen, and who once spread a whole jar of Babaanne's rose jam on her face because a magazine said it was good for the skin. She goes, and leaves the door open behind her.

I sit there a little longer with the blue dress hanging on the back of the door and the notice folded back inside the atlas, both of them waiting for something to happen. Then I put the atlas back between Çalıkuşu and the dictionary, where it leans, and go down to help Anne with the sherbet.

⁂

At noon in June nobody in Urfa goes anywhere. The heat comes down into the courtyards like a lid on a pot. Anne closes the shutters, the hens go under the stairs, and the whole house lies down on its cool floors to sleep, or to pretend to, until the worst of it has passed.

I can never sleep at noon. I lie on the stone floor of our room upstairs with my cheek against it, because the floor is the only cool thing in the house, and I listen to the city not moving. Somewhere a radio is playing very low. Somewhere a baby frets and is hushed. Down in the eyvan, Tahir is taking the neighbor's radio to pieces on a cloth, which he promised Anne he wouldn't do at noon. Every so often a tiny screw rolls across the stones, and I hear him swear at it under his breath.

Then I hear a carriage.

You don't hear carriages at noon. First the horse's bells, faint, from the end of the street by the covered passage. Then hooves on the stones, then the wheels. They come all the way down our street. They stop at our gate.

I'm at the gallery rail before the driver has knocked. Tahir gets to the gate first, wiping his hands on his trousers, and opens it.

It's Zeynep.

She comes in out of the white glare with İsmail asleep on her shoulder, his face red with heat and creased from her collar, and Bahar holding on to the back of her skirt. Behind her comes the driver with a bundle on his back so big that he has to turn sideways to get it through the gateway. He puts it down by the pool and goes back to the carriage. When he comes in again he's carrying Zeynep's embroidery frame under his arm, the big one on legs, with the work still stretched in it under a cloth.

My sister looks up and sees me at the rail, and she smiles. It's Zeynep's smile, the one that made Selçuk Enişte stop in the middle of a cousin's wedding and forget what he was saying for the rest of the night. Today it's a little too wide, and it stays on her face a little too long.

"We've come for the mulberries!" she calls up.

"Mama says we can stay till the tree's empty," Bahar tells the whole courtyard.

"Bahar."

"But you said."

I come down the stairs. I don't remember coming down them. I remember being at the bottom with Zeynep's free arm round my neck, and the smell of her, rosewater and road dust and İsmail's hot hair, and her arm staying there a moment longer than a visit needs. She's holding on. My sister, who has always been the one I held on to, is holding on to me. Over her shoulder I'm looking at the bundle by the pool.

It's tied the way Zeynep ties things she means to keep, each corner knotted twice and the two long knots crossed over the top. Six years ago I sat on the floor of our room and watched her tie her trousseau bundles exactly like that, with pins in her mouth. Anne said it was bad luck to tie a bride's things so tight, people would think she never meant to undo them. Zeynep said that was exactly what it meant, and laughed.

A corner of İsmail's little pillow is poking out of the side of this one. So is the leg of Bahar's rag doll.

You don't bring your children's pillows to eat mulberries.

"Abla," I say into her hair.

"Not in the courtyard," she says, so quietly that only I can hear it. Then, brightly, to the whole house, "Is nobody going to give a guest a glass of water in this heat?"

The house wakes up around her. Anne comes out of the kitchen with her scarf crooked from sleep. She sees Zeynep, then the bundle, then the frame. Her face does one thing and then another. Then she holds out her arms for İsmail and starts talking, all at once, about the sherbet, about the heat, about how the tree has been the best in years, about everything in the world except why her elder daughter is standing in the courtyard at noon with her bedding. When Anne is frightened, her hands and her mouth both go faster. She takes the baby and doesn't stop talking for a quarter of an hour.

Elif comes flying down the stairs barefoot and scoops up Bahar. Nesrin Yenge comes out with Ömer on her hip and says, "Well, look who's here," in exactly the voice she uses for rain. Babaanne, on the divan in the eyvan, opens one eye. She looks at the bundle for a long time. Then she looks at Zeynep.

"Sit down, girl," she says. "Sit down before the sun does it for you."

Later, when the children have been fed and İsmail is asleep on the cushions in our room with his fist in his mouth, Zeynep washes Bahar's hands at the basin by the window. Bahar has found the mulberries. Her hands are purple to the wrist, as mine were this morning. Zeynep scrubs them as though it mattered, finger by finger, and talks.

She talks about the price of embroidery thread, which has gone up again. She talks about Saniye Hanım's niece, who is getting engaged to a boy from Siverek, and what the women are saying about the boy's mother. She talks about İsmail's new tooth, about the heat, about a pattern she saw in a shop window near the post office. She's twenty eight and the most beautiful woman I know, with her thick dark plait down her back and her sleeves pushed up, and she's standing at my window talking about thread in a voice so steady you could set a glass on it.

I know my sister. When Zeynep is happy, she's quiet. When something is wrong, she talks about thread.

"Abla," I say. "How long are you staying?"

"Till the tree's empty. Didn't you hear your niece? Hold still, Bahar."

"Abla."

She stops scrubbing. She doesn't turn round. Bahar, who is five and knows exactly what a room feels like when the grown ups in it go still, looks from her mother to me and says nothing at all.

"Don't, Leyla," Zeynep says to the window. "Not today. Please. Let me sit in a room for one afternoon where nobody tells me how to hold my own son."

That's all. She goes back to Bahar's fingers. But I've heard it, and she knows I've heard it, and the whole room is different now, after those few words.

Six years. Six years of bayram visits and wedding visits, and Zeynep saying everything was fine. Saniye Hanım is a little particular, but her heart is good. Selçuk is wonderful. The children are wonderful. The house is so big you could get lost in it. Six years of her laughing in our courtyard and going home before dark. I believed every word. I'm her sister, and I believed it. Now she's at my window with her back to me, scrubbing hands that are already clean, and I want to walk across this city to the Demir house and take every one of its doors off its hinges.

I don't. I sit on the edge of my mattress and say nothing, because she asked me not to, and because I don't know what I would say. My throat has gone tight. I keep looking at the back of her neck, bent over the basin, at the little dark curls there that came loose from her plait, and I think, she was nineteen when she taught me to plait my own hair, and I never once thought to ask her whether anything hurt.

When she married I was fifteen. I held a candle at her henna night, and the next morning I cried so much that Babaanne sent me out twice to wash my face. Selçuk Enişte had seen her at a cousin's wedding the summer before, and according to his mother he refused to hear another girl's name. Everybody said it was a love match, which was true. Everybody said it was a blessing for the two houses, which was also true, because after fifteen years of silence Dede and Rauf Demir stood in our courtyard and shook hands over my sister's head. I remember thinking that day that Zeynep was a bridge. That now anybody could walk across her, from our house to theirs and back again.

I didn't think about what it's like to be the bridge. I was fifteen.

In the afternoon, while the house is still half asleep, Zeynep takes the cloth off her frame and sits down at it by the window. It's a bride's cloth for a neighbor's daughter, red silk on white, half finished and half paid for already. Her hands, which weren't quite steady on Bahar's fingers, go perfectly still as soon as they find the needle. I watch them. I've been watching them since I was small. She taught me my first stitch at that frame, sitting behind me with her arms round mine and her chin on my head.

"You're staring," she says, without looking up.

"I'm not."

"You're drawing me in your head. I can always tell. You forget to blink."

"I don't."

"You've forgotten now," says Zeynep, and I blink, and she smiles at the needle. For a moment she's my sister again, the one who walked me to school and stole my bread on the way, and not this careful woman who has come home with her children's pillows.

⁂

By late afternoon the whole house knows, though nobody has said a word.

Anne makes stuffed aubergines, which are Zeynep's favorite, and which she only makes for bayrams and sickness. Elif takes Bahar up to the roof to watch the swallows and keeps her there for two hours, the kindest thing Elif has done all year, which she'll deny if anybody mentions it. Tahir puts the neighbor's radio back together, not very well, and carries it out into the courtyard. He finds a station playing songs from films, for Zeynep, because she used to love them, and turns it up until Anne shouts at him from the kitchen.

Nesrin Yenge catches me on the stairs with a basin of sherbet and stops me with a hand on my arm.

"Don't make a face like that," she says. "You've got a face on you like a funeral."

"I haven't got any face."

"Every bride goes home to her mother once, Leyla. It's practically part of the wedding. I went home twice in my first year. Twice! Once over a cooking pot." She laughs. "And look at me now. You'd have to pay me to leave." She takes a glass of sherbet off my tray, which nobody is supposed to do before it's chilled. "Your sister will go back in a day or two, when that husband of hers has missed her enough. Don't go making it bigger than it is." She looks at me over the glass. "And don't waste that face on worrying. With those eyes, there'll be mothers at the gate for you by the autumn, and then you'll find out about mothers in law for yourself."

She means it kindly. Nesrin Yenge came to this house from Birecik at twenty two, and for two years she and Anne fought over the kitchen like two cats over one roof. Then one day they stopped. Now they run it together, and they'd both defend it with their lives. She's happy here. It's true. It can be true, in a house like ours.

But I saw my sister's back at the window, and I don't think this is one quarrel over one pot.

All afternoon one thought keeps coming back to me, however many times I put it down. Zeynep married for love. Everybody forgets that now, because of everything that came with it, the two houses and the handshake and the fifteen years. But she did. She looked at Selçuk Enişte across that cousin's courtyard exactly as he looked at her, and she'd have said yes before anybody asked her properly, if Anne had let her. And still she's here, with her pillows.

So if love doesn't keep you safe, I think, then what does?

I go and stand in the doorway of our room, where the blue dress hangs on the back of the door and the atlas leans on its shelf. I think about Şükran's son, who can already walk. I think about a man in a grey suit in Ankara asking me the year of the Tanzimat. I think, something of your own. That's what keeps you. Something nobody can take back off you when you go home with your pillows.

Unless, says a small voice in me that I don't listen to. Unless it's the right person. Unless it's somebody who would never try to take you back. I put the thought away. I'm twenty one and I've never been in love, and I decide, standing in the doorway with my hands still faintly purple, that love is lovely and dangerous, and that I'll be very careful with it, when it comes.

Baba comes home before the evening call to prayer, ahead of Cemil Abi, with his jacket over his arm and his palm still faintly purple. He comes in through the gate and stops.

Zeynep is sitting on the edge of the pool with İsmail in her lap, trailing the baby's feet in the water. She's laughing at something Bahar has said. When she sees Baba, she stops laughing and stands up too fast, and the water runs off İsmail's feet onto the stones.

Baba doesn't say anything at first. He looks at her, then at the children, then at the bundle that nobody has carried upstairs yet, because nobody wanted to be the one to carry it. I see his jaw. I know that look. It's the look he gets when a man in the market tries to sell him wet wheat by weight, very quiet, and it frightens me more than shouting would.

Then he crosses the courtyard and puts his hand on Zeynep's head, as he used to when she was small, his whole palm on her hair.

"Welcome, my girl," he says. "Welcome home. This is your house."

That's all he says. Zeynep's face comes apart for one second, and then she gathers it up again and says, "Thank you, Baba," in a perfectly ordinary voice. He takes İsmail from her and swings him up over his head until the baby shrieks. He asks Bahar whether she has eaten all his mulberries. He doesn't ask anything else. Not in front of the children. Not in front of anybody.

Later I see him standing alone by the gate with his hands behind his back, looking at it as if he were expecting someone.

He doesn't have to wait long.

⁂

They come just after the evening prayer, when the light in the courtyard has gone soft and brown and the swallows have given the sky over to the bats.

Dede has stayed on at the mosque to sit with the old men on the step, as he does most evenings. So it's Tahir who opens the gate, Baba who stands up in the eyvan, and I who see them first, from the gallery, where Anne has herded all of us women the moment the knock came.

Selçuk Enişte comes in first. He holds his hat in both hands like a boy outside the headmaster's door. He's a handsome man, my brother in law, with a face made for laughing, and everybody likes him, me included. Tonight his face is grey. He looks up at the gallery once, quickly, and then down at his shoes.

A step behind him comes his cousin Halil.

I know Halil Demir as you know the furniture in somebody else's house. I've seen him at Zeynep's wedding and at every bayram since, at engagements, at a funeral two winters ago, always somewhere near the edge of the room. He's the one who teaches Turkish and literature at the lise. He's the one who went away to Ankara for years and came back. He's the one Saniye Hanım calls the quiet one, in a voice that isn't quite a compliment.

Tonight I look at him properly for the first time, perhaps because there's nothing else in the courtyard I can bear to look at. He's tall, taller than Selçuk, and lean, with his jacket hanging off his shoulders as if it had been cut for a heavier man. His hair is dark and falls forward over his forehead, and where the last of the light catches it, it isn't quite dark at all, but the brown of honey when you hold the jar up to a window. He has the kind of face I'd want to draw if faces ever sat still for me, all long lines and quiet, with a mouth that looks as if it's in the middle of deciding something. He's handsome. I don't think he knows it, or if he does, he doesn't seem to think it's any of his business.

Once at a bayram, when Bahar was three and her doll lost an arm, he sat on the step with her for twenty minutes, mending it with his own handkerchief and a pin, while the men talked about wheat over his head. It's the longest conversation I've ever seen him have with anybody.

Of course Selçuk brought him. Everybody brings Halil when they need someone to stand quietly in a room.

Baba takes Selçuk into the guest room. Cemil Abi, who came home a little after Baba, goes in after them and shuts the door. Halil doesn't go in. He stays in the courtyard by the pool with his hands behind his back, not far from the tree, as if he understood that this wasn't his quarrel and was trying to take up as little of it as he could.

Upstairs, Zeynep has gone into the back room with the children and shut that door too.

For a long time nothing happens except voices. Baba's, low and even. Selçuk's, going up and coming down again. Cemil Abi's, once, short and sharp. Anne goes back and forth between the two shut doors with her hands wrapped in her apron. Every time she comes up the stairs she goes into the back room, and every time she comes out her mouth is a little tighter. Babaanne sits on the top step with her beads and doesn't move at all.

Then Anne puts a tray into my hands. Two glasses of tea for the guest room, which Tahir will carry in, and one for the courtyard.

"Take it to him," she says. "He has been standing out there like a lamp post for half an hour. Go on. Don't look at me like that. He's your sister's husband's cousin. He's practically family."

My hands are still purple. Mulberry doesn't wash off. Baba's right, it has to wear off. I hold the tray so that my fingers are underneath it, and I go down the stairs watching the tea, so as not to spill it, so as not to have to look at him.

He turns when he hears me on the stones. He takes the glass from the tray, carefully, so that his fingers don't touch mine, and thanks me. Then, because I'm still standing there, he says, "I'm sorry we've come at an hour like this. It isn't a decent hour to come to anybody's house."

"There isn't a decent hour for this," I say, and wish at once that I hadn't, because it sounds rude, and he has done nothing.

But he only nods, as if I'd said something sensible. "No. I don't suppose there is." He holds the tea without drinking it. His hands are long, with the knuckles showing, exactly the kind of hands I can never get right. "How is she? I mean really. And the children. Selçuk says Bahar asked for her grandfather all week, but he says a great many things when he's frightened."

"She's tired," I say. "She's talking about thread."

He looks at me properly then, for the first time, as if he hadn't expected that answer. In the light from the guest room window his eyes are the color of the tea in his glass, a clear deep amber, and for a moment I forget the end of what I was going to say.

"That bad," he says quietly.

"You know about the thread?"

"I've lived across a courtyard from your sister for six years," he says. "I know about the thread. When she's happy she sings to İsmail on the stairs, very low, an old song from Siverek about a girl at a well. She hasn't sung on the stairs since the spring. I noticed it in April, and I didn't say anything to anybody. I'm sorry for that now."

I stand there with the tray. Nobody in my family noticed that she'd stopped singing. I didn't know she sang on the stairs at all. And this man, whom Saniye Hanım calls the quiet one, has been listening to my sister through a courtyard for six years, and noticed when she stopped.

"Is she unhappy?" I say. "In your house? You can tell me that much. I'm her sister."

He doesn't answer at once. He thinks first, looking down at the tea, and I see that he's deciding whether to give me the true answer or the kind one.

"She's unhappy in one room of it," he says at last. "Not in all of them. With the children she laughs. In her own room with Selçuk she laughs, I've heard her through the wall. It's the big room at supper, with my uncle and my aunt, that she can't breathe in. If you're asking me whether she's unhappy with him, no. If you're asking whether she's unhappy in that house, then yes. I'm sorry. I thought you'd rather have the true answer."

"I would," I say. And I find that I would, and that nobody has given me a true answer about Zeynep in six years, and that my eyes are stinging, there in front of a man I hardly know, and I can't do anything about it with a tray in my hands.

He sees it. He looks away at once, at the tree, to let me have it.

We stand there. The voices go on behind the guest room door. I think he's going to leave it at that, and I'm turning to go, when he says, quietly, as if it costs him something to say it at all, "He isn't a bad man, Leyla. I know that isn't much to hear tonight. He's slow, that's all. He has been slow about the one thing a husband must never be slow about, and he knows it now. I think tonight is the first time he has understood how much he knows it."

"What thing?" I say.

He looks at me. I watch him understand that she hasn't told me. I watch him decide.

"That's hers to tell you," he says. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said even that much."

I want to be angry with him for that, and I can't quite manage it, because it's the right answer, and because he looks so unhappy giving it. So I say nothing. He drinks half the tea in one swallow, as if he has only just remembered it. Then he looks down at the tray, at my hands underneath it, and I see him see them.

"You've been shaking the tree," he says.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Only on your hands." Something moves at the corner of his mouth. "Tahir has it all over his face, so I'd guess he was the one up the branch."

I laugh. I don't mean to. It comes out of me in the middle of all this, small and surprised, the first time I've laughed since the carriage came to our gate, and for a moment he looks so pleased, so quietly and completely pleased, that I nearly laugh again just to see it. Then the guest room door opens a crack. Cemil Abi calls for more tea, and I take the tray and go.

I don't go all the way up. I stop at the turn of the stairs, where the lamp from the guest room doesn't reach, and I don't know why I stop.

From there I can see the whole courtyard. The pool with the last of the light in it. This morning's sheet, washed and hung over the line, stains and all. The tree, almost bare on the low side, still heavy toward the roof. Halil Demir by the pool, alone, with nobody watching him that he knows of.

He sets his empty glass down on the edge of the pool. He looks up into the branches for a long time. Then he steps forward and puts his hand flat against the trunk.

He doesn't lean on it. He doesn't reach for any fruit. He only lays his palm on the bark, carefully, with his fingers spread, and keeps it there with his head bowed a little, as you'd put your hand on the shoulder of somebody you haven't seen in years and aren't sure will remember you.

I stand on the stairs and watch him, and I don't understand what I'm looking at. I only know that I can't look away, and that I'm holding my breath.

The guest room door opens properly. Selçuk Enişte comes out first, alone, his hat in his hands again, and his eyes go straight up to the window of the back room, where the lamp is out. Baba comes out behind him and puts a hand on his back.

"Give her a few days, son," Baba says. "Then come back. And when you come back, bring her something better than sorry."

Halil takes his hand off the tree as if somebody had caught him at something. He picks up his glass, puts it down again, and goes to his cousin's side. At the gate they say their goodnights as men do, too many times over. Then the gate shuts, and the dark street takes their footsteps away.

Later we all go up to the roof to sleep. All of us, Zeynep too, with the children beside her on her old mattress, which Anne has kept rolled up in the chest for six years. Nobody says a word about it. Anne just takes it out and unrolls it, as if she had always known it would be needed again.

Zeynep falls asleep almost at once, with one arm over İsmail and her face turned toward the parapet, as she used to sleep when we were girls. I lie awake on my back. Below us the tree stirs a little in the dark. There's no wind tonight, none at all, and still it moves.

I lie with my stained hands folded on my chest and think about Halil Demir's palm on its bark, flat and careful, as if he were telling it something. I think about the true answer he gave me, and the way he waited before he gave it, as if he were weighing whether I could carry it, and decided that I could. I can't remember the last time anybody decided that about me. I think about my sister singing on the stairs of a house I've never slept in, and a man across the courtyard who noticed when she stopped.

I've known that tree for twenty one years. I can't imagine what he could have to say to it.