The secret son, p.6
The Secret Son, page 6
‘Lucky we didn’t leave you there, you dickhead.’
Pollard rubbed his neck, smiling, his eyes locked on the spit of land growing faint in the distance behind them.
XI
James woke and it was dawn. For the first time in months he’d slept deeply. He kept checking the sky, aching but warm in his hole. He sat for about half an hour, thinking. The sun was starting to appear. He couldn’t deny it; he had been left behind.
They would come soon, he supposed. He made sure he had all his things packed; the items from the shrine he’d made in the little niche in the side of the dugout. He checked the photos of his parents, his favourite Cole’s Funny Picture Book that he’d carefully carried from home, and patted his waist for the nuggets. If he was taken, even if they killed him, he didn’t want to leave any of it behind. He held out his hand to Alphonse, who had begun to chitter with agitation. If he walked to the cove, he’d see the boats gone. If he walked to the cove, he’d see the enemy and they’d see him. He supposed that he might die, once they found him, but it was not such a bad place to do it, quiet as it was with the sun beginning to creep over the edge of the cliffs. He picked up a rosemary sprig from the shrine and stuck it under his nose. He breathed it in and thoughts of roast lamb from Sunday lunch at Charlie’s snuck into his head before he could push them away. His ears started buzzing with fear.
The light increased and still he sat there. The sun’s rays lengthened over the top of the trench and it was full morning. He had to do something, but just as he gathered his muscles there was movement at the top of the trench. A rifle first, a shadow and a face angling down at him. The face was a familiar one. It was the boy from the Red Cross tent, the one he’d seen near the tree when he’d gone out to collect wood. The boy’s mouth was moving, but James couldn’t hear anything above the buzzing in his ears. He lifted his hands and waited for the moment where he got shot, but a hand extended and James reached for it and let himself be pulled out. He stood with his hands above his head.
At that moment, Alphonse popped out of his pocket and the young Turk’s eyes widened in surprise. The boy stepped back and tripped over his feet. He lay on his back laughing, gun dropped to his side and his feet splayed wide in the mud. On his feet were two left boots.
‘Hello.’ The boy was laughing. ‘Yes,’ the boy said. ‘Hello. I Ferhat.’
The Turkish boy Ferhat walked James to a clearing where there were piles of stores, and some donkeys tethered to a small tree. James saw soldiers in the distance, kicking at uniforms and packing cases, holding up tins of food. He expected them to come over with raised voices, but Ferhat took his arm and led him to a place behind the Turkish frontline which seemed to house a temporary cooking area. There was a small iron barbecue with coals in the bottom and vegetables grilling on top. Nearby, a young girl used a thin wooden rod to roll and turn a large pancake-type bread circle on top of a dome-shaped cooking apparatus. James looked around. People were about, near and far, and all seemed busy. The atmosphere of the place seemed to be like that of a picnic.
Ferhat gestured for James to sit down on a thin flat-woven carpet which was spread on the ground, then went to the barbecue. He came back and passed James a folded-up pancake with vegetables on top. James looked around for a plate but there was none. Ferhat went back and got himself some food, then kicked off his too-large boots at the edge of the blanket, sat down cross-legged and started to eat. James ate too. The soft vegetables were delicious; he recognised green pepper, onion, but there was one he’d never seen before, it had seeds with a greyish flesh and purple-black skin.
‘Good?’ the boy said to him. ‘Bon?’ Ferhat was also eating a whole onion, biting into it like an apple.
James said yes, it was bon. There was a stretching in his pocket. Alphonse climbed out, nose twitching.
‘Allah-h’allah. Monkey. Come.’ Ferhat tore off a small piece of the flat bread and held it out to the marmoset, who ran and nestled at his neck. As he fed Alphonse, Ferhat pointed to the girls nearby with his chin and said something. He grabbed a rifle and held to his shoulder and peered through the sight, pointing it at a tree.
‘No,’ James said. ‘Not possible.’
‘Yes. Oui, si.’ The boy finished eating his pancake.
Snipers? The girls were about sixteen.
‘Your prens,’ said Ferhat. ‘No come English.’
James couldn’t understand. The buzzing in his ears was a little better but it didn’t matter. He supposed he was a dead man but, strangely, the next morning he was still alive.
XII
Ferhat seemed to be getting ready to leave. He handed James a rifle and the reins of a mare and James rubbed a bent index finger against the softest part of her nose. He barely allowed himself to hope as they collected three donkeys from a ravine, roping them easily as they stood drinking at the small stream that flowed there. Loaded with their supplies, the guns, ammunition, food and canvas, the donkeys were nimble-footed and comical as they waited on the shale slopes. Ferhat worked like a demon and all that morning no one came and asked who James was or what he was doing there. No one came at all.
‘Where’s your captain?’ James tried to ask. ‘Your boss?’
Each time Ferhat shook his head to the side as if to say ‘no’, always smiling, showing those clean white teeth.
At the top of the cliff they stopped to look down onto the beach where an orderly line of dead horses stretched on the sand. To the rear were whole cities of tents, vast piles of clothing, bully beef. Hills of timber. They stood looking out; James in his regulation uniform, dirty and damp, and the young Turkish soldier wearing a strange ensemble comprising an Australian hat, puttees wound around his midriff, breeches cut from canvas and on each foot a left British trench boot.
XIII
They rode for twenty-two days. Ferhat pointed to things and said the Turkish word, and James gave him the English word in return. Outside villages, Ferhat made small camps and left James with the horses and donkeys while he went to ask for bread and onions. Once, he brought back olives. The first one James tried he found extraordinary, loving the salt and the bite of the flesh between his teeth. For breakfast they ate eggs and black bread. They got water from fountains at the side of the road and Ferhat made a different gesture each time he tasted; pinched fingers and palm up or a showy spit to the ground, but to James all were sweet and cold.
One night, James showed Ferhat the pocket watch that had stopped the bullet. The boy turned it over and over in his hands. He understood immediately what had happened.
‘It was here,’ said James, touching his breast. ‘In my pocket.’
‘Allah-h’allah,’ said Ferhat.
Often at night, before they slept, Ferhat talked. James didn’t understand and his thoughts drifted towards the land back home in Beechworth and what Betsy Lester might be doing right then. He thought of what it had been like to swim in the dappled water of the river in summer, to sit before a roaring wood fire in a stone hut with snow on the hills in the distance. He thought about his mother and about the man in the photograph who was his father. He thought about Linda and the bookseller Cole. He even thought about Hawker, the big-toothed pilot who’d made Linda so angry. The only thing he didn’t think about was the Australian Imperial Force.
His ears were still buzzing, but he found the tinnitus a comfort. It was as if he had bees with him. Sometimes, though, as Ferhat slept, James would stare at the sky and wonder what in God’s name he was doing there.
They passed around a small mountain, the end of the Sultan range, where they had to cut through to the other side. Ferhat rode with his revolver resting on top of the pommel and James’s hands were red and iced tight onto the reins. The wind had become cruel and his neck was locked as he swivelled, seeing men in the shadows. Ferhat had stopped talking, had stopped his whistles too. James swayed in the saddle with fatigue. How would it be to swim in a summer ocean without fear of bullets? The water would hold him, let him float free, and afterwards he could lie in the sand and feel the sun on his skin. A game of cricket. He shut his eyes and his shoulders rocked to the side and he hit the ground hard. Ferhat came to him and pulled him upright.
‘Mayte. Bon?’
‘I am non-bon, mate.’ James’s legs buckled as he tried to get up.
Ferhat’s eyes were ringed with black and his teeth clacked. ‘Come.’ He pulled at James and got him back on his horse.
It was Christmas morning, the twenty-second day of riding, and the two men began to climb a steep section of trail. James saw Ferhat peering up at the sky. Soon, a fresh load of snow started drifting down between the trees. He smelled wood fires, they must be close.
‘Come,’ Ferhat said. He was smiling, his teeth still playing castanets. They continued up the path. At the first house lay an enormous mustard-coloured dog.
It got to its feet, stretched its legs and lowered its bulbous head. There was a spiked iron collar around its neck and the chain chinked as the animal edged forwards and sniffed the air.
‘Hello, mate,’ said James. He clicked his tongue at the dog and it sat. Ferhat twisted around in his saddle, looking back. The dog was making a friendly whine in its throat.
‘That Yoldaş,’ said Ferhat. ‘Bad dog.’
He pointed at a structure up above the village on the side of the slope. ‘Honey house.’
The building’s windows were dark.
Ferhat moved his horse on and James followed. Ferhat pointed to each building and spoke. He pointed to the drinking fountain and its beaten metal cup, to a group of barking dogs at the end of the street. Doors started opening and they stopped outside one building and Ferhat got down, calling out to the people inside. James tried to dismount too but his knees had locked and he was faint and he fell in the narrow road to lie flat on his back in the snow as night began to claim the day.
Chapter 4
I
At the beginning of 1990, Cem was twenty-three and a kind of shrug. He was one of the sugar men, but his sweetness was diluted in Melbourne.
‘Yeah, it’s pronounced Jem,’ he’d say. ‘The c’s like a j.’ He’d run a hand through his hair and look the other person dead in the face, legs open, jeans tight. Girls loved his name. ‘There’s something about you,’ they purred in bars or at parties, in pubs and clubs. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘There is something: Ben Osman.’ He raised his orange juice or his Coke in a salute to their puzzled faces and put a clenched fist over his heart, smiling around his teeth. The girls laughed.
‘What?’ they’d say. ‘What’s that?’ And he’d explain.
‘It means, “I’m Ottoman.”’
The thrill of him made them stay, holding their own glasses frozen to bottom lips, eyes flashing and alert to the beauty of him.
In the kitchen, his mother wrung her hands in her thin apron and begged him to stay away from Australian girls.
‘You do know,’ his grandfather said, ‘we had an Australian in the village, a long time ago.’
‘Really?’ Cem looked out the window, bored.
At meals, his father, Ali, tore at the bread and Cem nodded and chewed and avoided looking at his father’s dirty fingers and his mother’s tired face. After dinner he went to his room, took his poor tortured cock in his hand and thought about the neighbour’s sister’s mouth.
II
When Cem was small, he looked for his dede as soon as he came out of the classroom. He didn’t see that his grandfather’s suit was shabby and that he always wore it, even in summer, when the tomato leaves at the back of their house drooped in the heat. He didn’t notice that Ahmet never stood with the other adults. His grandfather waited, alone, in the shadows at the periphery of the playground, always under the same tree. Cem would run out and there he was, flat cap shading his eyes: Ahmet Keloğlu, former child soldier of Atatürk, ex-shepherd of the Anatolian mountains.
‘See this tree?’ Ahmet would say. ‘It’s a wishing tree. We had one in our village.’
Cem ran his hands along the trunk.
‘But there’s something missing, isn’t there?’ his grandfather said.
‘Wishes?’
‘Yes, like dreams but different. You are like me. You will have big dreams, not the small ones of your father.’
Ahmet would pull a paper serviette or a strip of rag from his coat pocket and hand it to Cem. The boy reached up and tied it in a knot around one of the branches. Once, Ahmet had made him climb, pushing him up the tree with his cajoling words, but the boy had clung to the branch and cried, saying he couldn’t. Ahmet scoffed. He said Cem wasn’t a man, but he let him climb down again.
After school, they walked home holding hands, Ahmet making comparisons to the village back in Turkey. Cem knew his family had wanted to go to America (the better place, his grandfather had said many times) but for some reason to do with money, a reason that he wouldn’t understand because he was too little, they’d settled in Australia instead.
‘There are no such even and regular walkways back home,’ Ahmet said. ‘But on the other hand, there are no good rivers near here. When I was a boy our clothes were washed in the river.’
Cem looked up, worried. Sometimes he made brown stains in his underpants. ‘Mum loves our Whirlpool. Did she have a Whirlpool in the village?’
‘Your mother loves that machine too much. People shouldn’t become too fond of electrical appliances.’
Ahmet noted the inferior gardens they passed and all dogs were deemed miserable urban creatures compared to the enormous Kangal beasts that worked the vast plains of central Anatolia. They would stop to peer at small white frothy things that yapped behind fences; Cem’s grandfather called them sons-of-donkeys. He spoke about the men back home, men who filled their tea with cubes of sugar. He recalled mesmeric fairytales told from ancient doorsteps in the village. The talking animals, the jinns, witches and monsters. Zeynep, the dancer so beautiful she would make your eyes bleed and your pants rise in the middle. ‘Here, your yarak goes up.’ Ahmet plucked at the boy’s crotch.
‘Are they true stories, Grandfather?’
‘Of course. I do not lie.’
Over time, the stories became as ordinary and familiar to Cem as the feel of his tongue against his teeth. ‘Are the people still there?’ he asked many times. ‘Back home in the village?’
‘Unless they’ve jumped down the well or rolled off the side of the mountain.’ Ahmet hawked into the gutter. ‘My cousin is an old man like me, but he’s a liar and stubborn and only has one hand. He fell off his horse; he is a poor rider, not like your grandfather. I don’t miss those people in my true heart. I was glad to leave all of them behind.’
‘I wish I had a cousin to play with,’ Cem said. He was often lonely. At home he had only his parents and his grandfather, and the hours at school were long and empty. He spent recess and lunch standing by the fence; the other children wouldn’t play with him because his English was no good.
‘Well, sometimes it’s best to be alone in the world. Cousins can make trouble.’ Ahmet’s glance shifted to a cracked garden stake holding a bean plant. ‘Look at this bean. These people don’t know how to garden.’ He reached over the fence.
‘Why did you leave?’ Cem said.
Ahmet straightened and reached for the cigarette packet he carried in his shirt pocket. He passed the matchbox to Cem. ‘It was your mother, stupid girl. She did something bad so we had to go.’
Cem could imagine; he was ten and tired of his mother’s fussing. She treated him like a baby with a peanut between his legs. He struck a match and held it out. ‘Did she tell a lie?’
Ahmet exhaled smoke into his grandson’s face. ‘It was something much worse, but forget about that now. Let’s go home and play cards. I have a new game to teach you.’
III
Cem went to his mother. First, he had to let her hug and kiss him. He was growing up too fast, she cried. She missed him and he never came to sit with her in the kitchen anymore. She held on to him as he asked his question.
‘No, it was not me.’ She laughed and wiped at her eyes. ‘Your grandfather did the bad things, but these are secrets, so soos.’
IV
Ahmet listened carefully to the boy then sent him to bed. The old man finished his last cigarette for the night and stood to shut the window. He would talk to her tomorrow. He smelled the wetness of the garden outside and felt the chill through the glass. He got into bed only to lie awake a long time. Over the years, he had become scared to sleep. Something had followed him here. Was it Al Bastı who called her cats into the back garden? At night, when he heard them scream, he pulled deep into his heavy blankets. During the day, the birds would sing, making all their sounds as normal—but this terrified him too, because Al Bastı could speak to the birds and make them gather around the house. Make them do her dark, unsettling work.
V
Cem lengthened as he grew and began to lope when he walked, hands in pockets, chin dropped to the ground. He didn’t look people in the eye because inside all of his stretched new form, he hadn’t even begun to reach his own edges, and he was unsure about everything. He was on the verge of something, but he wouldn’t have been able to say what. His family, though, never tired of telling him what kind of person he was.
‘You’re like me,’ his father said and his grandfather too. ‘Oh, we know,’ they cried, passing him the end piece of the bread, the hottest of the peppers, not seeing that he left them beside his plate. ‘You are always hungry; you are a dreamer; you are quiet.’ The problem was that, as the person in question, the one who should know most about what it meant to be him, it did seem that they understood more about him than he did himself. He had no fucking idea.
