Before death and birth (short story)

Author: Feyza Hepçilingirler web site
Translator: Hande Özdemir

I felt as if I were being dragged to the seaside. Some source of power always kept pulling me in that direction. I walked without any resistance. Till I saw her. I couldn’t believe it; I would never have believed that I’d recognize her. I had no idea what she was like at that age; but I recognized her immediately when I saw her. Then it must have been clear how much I needed to see and talk to her, especially at that very age, at the very beginning of all that was going to happen, right before the marriage. So that’s why I had been sent.

She was sitting alone on a faded park bench that was about to collapse, looking out to sea. I suddenly remembered how much she liked it here and this was the place we visited most often after I started walking, especially this point where the waves break and the sea suddenly deepens and turns dark blue, at the very top of the hill here where no one ever bothers to climb. I went and sat down beside her quietly. I thought she hadn’t noticed me, but she turned and smiled at me. To be sure, she didn’t recognize me. I didn’t exist when she was that age. She fixed her eyes on a point where the deep blue water crashed against the steep cliffs of the hill and whirled up in a white foam; she stared there most perniciously. I tried to see things through her eyes, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t permitted that, it seems.

Just to start a conversation I remarked, "You look a bit worried," and she didn’t seem to mind my unnatural interest in sharing her worries. She turned her head slowly and smiled, then she hastened to find the same point she’d taken her eyes from; she kept on staring at it as if that were her task.

I couldn’t say, "I’m the daughter whom you haven’t yet born." I wasn’t allowed to say this much or to change the stream of things. In fact there was nothing I could do, but I wanted to see her anyway. I couldn’t prevent her from marrying my father or giving birth to me or committing suicide. That was actually what I most wanted to do, but no. Let everything happen as it is to be! It’s not permitted that things happen any other way.

"I know you," I said suddenly.

"From the neighborhood?" she asked. If she hadn’t said that I don’t know what I would have said or how I would have explained how I knew her. I seized the opportunity. "Yes," I said. "You are Havva Hanım’s daughter and your name is Emine." She didn’t see anything extraordinary in what I said. She nodded her head. Something inside me spurred me on to tease her. "You’re in love with Mustafa. Kamile Hanım’s son. He’s in love with you too."

This time she glanced at me suspiciously. "How do you know all this?" Her voice seemed to be scolding me.

"You’re about to marry him." I couldn’t keep it back.

"Or are you a sooth-sayer?" she asked. The tone in her voice was teasing.

I couldn’t say I wasn’t; instead I warned, "But you won’t be happy!" She didn’t smile. "We love each other," she said.

"Perhaps," I said smiling.

"Who are you?" she asked. "You’re not one of the girls in the neighborhood, I know all of them. You’re not even from around here, and you’re lying, aren’t you?"

I couldn’t take it any longer . Accepting all the consequences, "I am your daughter," I said. "The one that you haven’t born yet."

I thought that the moment I said it everything would change, that there would be an incredible clap of thunder, the rain would pour down, the lightning would flash and rainbow-colored smoke would pervade the air; nothing of the sort happened. There was just an ordinary silence!
"Is that so?" asked the teasing voice of my mother. "I am very pleased to meet you." Standing up and walking away from me she added: "My dear daughter, my dear, dear daughter who hasn’t even been born." I felt that if she had been in good spirits, she would even have laughed. However, she was too busy thinking about the petty problems and the disagreements that kept arising before the wedding.

Don’t go, Mommy! I thought of telling her that she was proceeding towards her death, but that was of no use. Calculating the date, I knew that she was going to give birth to me exactly one year later—but she didn’t. I also knew she would commit suicide exactly fifteen years later. Moreover, she was going to throw herself into the sea from the very spot where this bench was—off the cliff into the swirling foam below my feet. I would be fourteen then. I also knew that after she was gone they would say, "She never loved her husband. She had a lover, and when he left her…That was it!" I knew too, that it wouldn’t be my mother but my father who would fall in love with someone else, and my mother wouldn’t be able to bear the pain of being betrayed by her Mustafa, that dear man.

"Don’t go, Mommy!" I called after her. "Don’t marry my father! He’ll drag you to your death."

"Everybody is being dragged to his own death," she said. "You, whoever you may be! If you are my daughter you will realize that death by choice is not actually a death but a scream. A scream uttered with the very last remnant of your power. If you don’t realize that, then you don’t deserve to be my daughter."

She walked away. Towards whose death, towards hers or mine? I didn’t know whose life would be more deserving or whose death would be more meaningful.