The Hunger (13 page)

“I guess you can stop talking to the wagon now, boy,” chuckled the uncle maliciously as he walked back to the inn.

“Are you all right?” called Saad tremulously.

Marta shook with fear as she gripped onto the axle. She did not answer.

“He killed her,” cried Saad as he stumbled back to the inn.

Marta dropped down onto the dusty laneway in exhaustion. Her hands were blistered from gripping the axle with such force. She knew she had to get away from the wagon quickly, but there was no place to hide. The area had no trees large enough to hide behind, and the dwellings were few and far between. There was only one place to go—onto the roof of the inn. Marta scrambled up as quietly as she could, then lay flat, trembling with fear.

Early the next morning, Marta watched from her rooftop abode as Saad went to the wagon and feverishly threw items out of it onto the ground. He shook his head in confusion as he got to the bottom and still hadn’t found Marta’s dead body. That’s when he noticed the missing plank. Crouching under the wagon, he traced an outline of Marta’s rag-bound footsteps and then looked in the direction it pointed. The inn.

He followed her steps to the inn, and Marta lay frozen on her belly in fear as he climbed onto the roof.

He crouched down beside her and looked her in the eye. “You told me the truth about your money,” he said. And then he reached into his pocket and drew out both of Marta’s gold coins. “We can each have one.”

Marta was stunned by this unexpected generosity. She took the coin, then leaned forward and gently kissed Saad on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

Saad smiled. Then he got up and left.

She heard the wheels of the wagon creak away some hours later, yet she still stayed on the roof, afraid to come down in the daylight. Once night fell, Marta waited for the noises of the inn to subside, and then climbed down. She ran down the road to Aintab, putting as much distance between her and the inn as she could.

Keeping the road in sight while remaining unseen was difficult, but Marta managed to get to Aintab in four days. She stayed hidden at the outskirts of the city until it was night and then crept in. She walked up and down the still streets, sure that even the soft rhythm of her rag-bound feet was loud amidst such silence. She walked for hours. Then, as the first rays of morning were lighting up the streets, she spied the distinctive silhouette of an Armenian church. At the top of its tall cone-like dome, a crucifix stood out in sharp relief against the dawn. The door opened a crack as she pushed on it. Marta looked in—empty. And looted.

She stepped through the threshold and was instantly enveloped in a vast coolness. Bits of dawn shone through the shattered windows and she could make out the familiar cross-like shape of the stone interior. In spite of the shards of glass that littered the floor, Marta felt safe.

She gingerly picked up bits of glass and set them to one side, and then cleared away torn prayer books and
rags and other bits of dirt. When she was finished, there was a clean space large enough for her to lie down in. She curled into a ball and covered herself with the cloak. She fell into a vast sleep, her cheek pressed against the cool stone floor.

She dreamt that she was floating above herself, hovering beneath the arches that held up the dome of the church. She looked down at the tiny form that was Marta, huddled amidst the shattered debris. It wasn’t loss that she felt at the sight, though. It was triumph. Her heart beat strongly in a body that wouldn’t surrender.

Adila

She woke up with a start when someone’s foot crashed into her spine. Peeking out from under her cloak, she saw a woman covered from head to toe in black. Her work-worn hands were massaging a sore shin. Marta could hear her muttering away to herself in Armenian. Armenian?

“Excuse me,
Mairig”
Marta said excitedly, as she sat up, the cloak falling away from her shoulders.

“Ahhhh, it’s a ghost,” the woman screamed.

“I’m not a ghost, I’m an Armenian girl.”

The woman, who was still gasping for air, said nothing.

The old woman was indeed an Armenian, but she had lived in a Turkish harem in Aintab for decades.

“Please help me,” Marta begged.

She took the veil from her face and squinted her eyes at Marta. The woman was not as old as Marta had thought, perhaps only forty. She wrung her hands together nervously, as if fighting an inward battle. “I must help you,” the woman murmured more to herself than to Marta. “Could God forgive me otherwise?”

She advised Marta to cover herself and wait. She hurried out the door muttering, “What will I do with her? What will I do with her?”

Marta waited. The woman did not come back that day. Marta was hungry and her bladder was full, but she dared not move.

At mid-morning the next day, the woman came back. She lifted her skirts and took out a chador, identical to the black garment she herself was wearing. When she removed her veil, Marta realized that the woman’s face was freshly bruised.

“I told my husband that my sister’s daughter has come to stay with us. He wasn’t happy, but how could he refuse to help family?”

The woman’s Moslem name was Adila, changed from her birth name of Anah when she was kidnapped. She never used her husband’s actual name. He was simply, “my husband.”

Marta had heard quite a bit about Turkish harems,
so she was quite shocked to see Adila’s abode. The house was in the poorest part of Aintab, and was nothing more than a glorified mud shack. There was a hallway of about six feet wide by six feet long which entered into the men’s living quarters, or
salemlik.
This was perhaps twelve feet square. The only furniture in this room was a built-in sofa made of dry hardened mud protruding from the wall. The floor was covered with brightly coloured carpets.

The
haremlik,
or women’s quarters, was the back portion of the room divided off with a single sheet of cloth. Though Adila shared this portion of a room with another woman, it was much smaller than the
salemlik.
It featured no built-in sofa; the women slept on the carpeted floor. Beyond the
haremlik
were two small rooms. One was the bathroom—no more than a hole in the ground and a pail of water. The other room was the “shower” a small cubicle furnished with an upper ledge holding pail equipped with a spigot.

The other woman was older than Adila by a decade, and Turkish by birth. The “first wife” ruled Adila. This wife, known as Idris, was not happy with Marta’s arrival.

“The last thing this house needs is another female,” she said.

Adila was anxious to get her new charge cleaned up before her husband returned home for the evening
meal, so she hurried Marta off to the public baths down the street.

A flurry of memory came to Marta as she stepped through the doors at the
hamam.
How long had it been since she had been clean? At the orphanage, the children would be taken to the public baths once a week. The girls’ time was Tuesday morning, and she always looked forward to it. She also remembered the many baths that she had taken with her mother and sister. If only she knew where Mariam was now. Was she still alive? Marta had a feeling that she was. An image of Onnig flashed through her mind too. Her little brother had been too young to bathe with the men, and he considered it quite a treat to splash around in the warm pool, playing with the other children.

“Remove your clothing, please.” Marta was startled out of her reveries. An enormously fat bath attendant who was naked, save for a towel around her ample middle, stood beside her. She tried to hide a look of distaste as she regarded Marta’s attire. Marta undid her tattered cloak and handed it to the attendant, who wrinkled her nose and held it away from her body with a finger and thumb. “You can put your clothing here,” she said, placing the cloak in a pile on the floor, far away from the other bathers’ bundles.

Marta sat down on the stone ledge in her open cubicle and slowly began to unwind the rags that bound
her feet. They were encrusted with layers of dirt and her heels and toes were covered with calluses. She set the rags down beside her on the ledge, then unbuttoned what was left of her shirt. She rolled the shirt and rags into a bundle and placed them on top of the cloak. She untied her leather belt and her men’s trousers dropped to the ground. Marta looked down and gasped at the sight of sharp hip bones nearly protruding from her skin. She placed her hands on her hip bones and carefully traced upwards towards her chest. Each rib bulged against a thin layer of skin. Where breasts should have been was nothing but skin-covered bone. Her pants went into the same pile of rags.

The attendant handed her a pair of
pattens
—the wooden sandals on a platform sole that bath goers wore to keep their feet away from the slippery wet floors.

“Follow me,” the attendant said, leading Marta to a small room with a stone platform in the middle. The attendant laid a towel on the platform and Marta lay down on it. The woman threw pails of hot water over Marta, soaking her thoroughly, then she threw a few cups of cold soapy liquid onto her and began to scrub her vigorously with a loofah. Marta obediently turned this way and that, while the woman pummelled away the months of dirt with the soapy foam. Shampoo was lathered into her hair, and Marta felt scabs and dead bugs worked loose and washed away. More pails of hot water were thrown onto her,
and then pails of cold water. Marta watched a dirty stream of soapy water splash off the platform and down to the drain below. When she was finished, the woman led Marta to the communal area—a huge stone pool of steaming water. Adila was already there with a towels wrapped around her. Her shoulders relaxed noticeably when she saw Marta, looking clean and almost human, walk into the room. Marta stepped into the warm pool and plunged down, ducking her head under. It felt so good to be clean again. She quickly came up for air and hoisted herself onto the side of the pool beside Adila, who handed her towels to dry and cover herself with.

Adila then gave her an embroidered bag filled with clothing. “Put these on,” she said, “and put your rags into this bag so we can burn them at home.”

Marta went back to her cubicle and pulled out a light cotton outfit of the sort that Turkish women wore. It consisted of a pair of baggy striped trousers, a plain long-sleeved shift that reached almost down to the hem of the trousers, and a long loose vest to go over that. She pulled out a worn pair of women’s cloth shoes and put them on. It felt so good to be in clean clothing again. And the outfit was surprisingly cool and comfortable. She looked at herself in the little wood-framed mirror that was also in the bag. It was too small to see all of her, but what she saw was not Marta, but a
fragments of a strange thin Turkish woman. She held the mirror up to her face and saw that her hair had begun to grow back. Now that it was clean, she could see that it was almost chin-length. The eyes were Marta’s, although the hollow hungry cheeks belonged to someone else.

Over the indoor clothing went the black hooded chador. She waited at the exit as Adila paid for them both.

When they got home, Adila threw the bundle of Marta’s rags into the fire before Marta could tell her about her hidden coin. Marta poked around in the ashes with a twig and found it. Adila wanted her to give it to her for safekeeping, but Marta was desperate to keep this last coin close. So with a mallet and nail, Adila pierced a hole through the centre of the last gold coin and slipped it onto a thin strip of leather.

“Wear it around your neck and out of sight,” she said.

Marta was cleanly dressed and presentable by the time the husband came home from his stall in the market.

“So this is your ‘niece,’” he said, amused eyes looking at Marta. “I don’t notice much family resemblance, but we can use an extra pair of hands.”

Idris also realized that Marta was not Adila’s niece. She let her know, with a hard look in her eyes,
that if Marta were any trouble at all she would be reported in an instant. Marta was expected to do the bulk of household chores, and the numbing routine was repeated without end.

She was the first one up each day. Before the sun rose, Marta would knead the dough for the daily bread, then set it aside in a covered bowl in a warm place outside. Then she would sweep out the hearth, saving any live cinders to light the outdoor oven, and then sweep out the rest of the little hut. She would prepare the Turkish coffee just as the others would begin to waken. The husband would lay down his prayer mat facing Mecca, and say his morning prayers. Then Idris would bustle in to pour him his coffee and glare at Marta to get moving on the bread. It was always a rush to get the first batch of bread ready before the husband asked for it.

There was a small wooden table with a smooth flat surface that Marta used for shaping the bread. Quickly, she would take a handful of the dough and pound it into a smooth round circle. The oven, which had been heating since dawn, would be opened, and she would put in the first piece of dough on a metal sheet with a long handle. Within minutes, the first pita would be ready. Idris, all smiles, would present it to the husband for his breakfast.

The rest of the bread was made more methodically. Marta would shape the dough into flat circles, tossing
them on top of one another into a waiting bowl. Then she would take the uncooked pita loaves out to the small stone oven and stand there, baking each one until they were all done. The husband would be long gone by this time, and so Marta would serve Idris and Adila their breakfast. Only after they had eaten would Marta break her fast for the day. Marta gobbled down not only her own breakfast, but any crumbs and scraps that had been discarded by the husband and his wives. She was desperate to nourish her body now that she was again surrounded by food.

Marta scrubbed the laundry by hand outside, then hung it up to dry. She chopped vegetables, and aired the bedding. And then the day’s chores really began.

The husband sold a variety of goods at his stall in the market, but one of the most popular items was a certain wicker basket that Adila had devised years ago. The baskets had delicate geometric patterns in different colours of wicker on the outside and were prized for their beauty. But their real value lay in the fact that they were waterproof. Adila weaved them so tightly that once they were filled with water, the wicker reeds would expand slightly and block out all the holes. Women in the area loved these baskets because they were so light to carry to the well. Before Marta’s arrival, Adila would make the baskets all afternoon, and Idris would sort out the wicker and decorate the outsides of the baskets. But after Marta
came to live there, Idris would go up onto the roof and sulk or she would go the mosque or the baths. Marta assisted Adila in her place. The husband would come home and beat her, yelling “You lazy Armenian. An extra pair of hands, yet no more baskets.” Idris would watch, a look of satisfaction on her face. Adila was afraid to say anything for fear that Marta would be turned out of the house.