Trabzon Weave

Aron Aji

1.
“Don’t take her down until ma’am the doctor arrives,” the officers had said, and that’s why the corpse was left hanging from the rope. Sevgi was awakened by the ringing telephone. It must have been quite early, although the tightly drawn curtains let in no light, not even a hint, and made it impossible to tell the hour. The caller clearly had something important to report, his voice carrying urgency beyond the usual in such circumstances.

She quickly washed her face and applied one of her pastel-colored eye shadows. This was the usual extent of her makeup. Whatever the occasion, solemn or trivial, she never neglected to paint her wide, rounded eyelids like pale clouds. The eye shadow allowed her to hide her eyes from the world, to cover the nakedness of her gaze and, in turn, hide her own being from the gaze of others. Her first boyfriend used to say, “You stare too much.” “Excessive.” She’d asked him once, “And what’s that supposed to mean?” but the right words eluded the young man who in the end had responded: “One often feels naked in front of you.” This is how she’d first discovered the power of her large, dark irises, which stared piercingly at people’s faces from underneath those rounded eyelids. Her lover’s words had explained once and for all why her mother used to scold her as a child, “Stop staring like you’re casting a spell!” and, too, why he eventually left her... Something about her gaze always frightened people, especially men. Hers were eyes that saw too much. A prosecutor had told her once, “You should have been a judge rather than a doctor. Your eyes render people defenseless; no one would ever dare lie to you.”

All these added up to explain the pastel-colored shutters she pulled over her eyes.

Some mornings you look at yourself in the mirror with the eyes of a stranger. This had to be one of those mornings.


The house they are looking for is located in an alley in Mushatlık on the way to Boztepe, in one of the low-income districts of Trabzon, far from the city center. Despite the early morning hour, a sizable crowd is gathered in front of one of the ramshackle two-story houses. This must be the house.

You can read in those faces not just grief but the distress of waiting; they seem not so much sad or mournful as curious.

Whispers and murmurs continue unabated while the neighbors exchange hearsay, giving it their spin, inflating it with each interpretation. No one seems to mind repeating to each newcomer everything that has been said before. More people huddle on the opposite sidewalk; their voices are louder, less inhibited, perhaps for being a little removed from the site of the event.

It’s not just any day that someone hangs herself. Try as they might to seem sad and shaken, the neighbors cannot help feeling the excitement of the uncommon event that has added color to their drab existence. It’s not that they are indifferent to the girl who hanged herself; rather, it’s their way of getting even with the humdrum lives assigned to them.

Sevgi knows that her dark-colored deux-pieces lends her the incontestable authority of a masculine uniform. Once she gets out of the car, the crowd, now even larger, recognizes right away that the woman in the deux-pieces is “ma’am the doctor.” At the first sighting of the car, the police officers had announced the coroner’s arrival. The onlookers find something familiar in her walk, her confident steps, which meet the ground so firmly. Unlike those frail-figured big-city girls sent here for national service, her grip could break steel.

“I just arrived, too,” says the district attorney. He takes a deep puff of his cigarette as if gnawing on it. He always has an apprehensive look, the look of someone tired of his job.

No sooner does she get out of the car than she’s greeted by the officers and the district attorney with the kind of deference reserved more for a supervisor than for a woman. The crowd doesn’t fail to notice this. Her confident demeanor naturally arouses obedience. Unsurprisingly, as she approaches the house, the people huddled in front of the door move aside without uttering a word, opening a path for her, yielding to her with unqualified trust born at first sight, so convinced are they that she could even tell, if she chose to, the exact reason why the girl had hanged herself.

Perhaps her prominent nose, proof positive that she, too, is a Laz like them, contributes to the public admiration.


The tenants of the household restlessly huddled at the doorway are eager to get on with the funeral. They are distressed that the corpse—the form of death it represents—is allowed to hang in the air like an ill omen. They also seem embarrassed—not because she died (they know death arrives for countless reasons) but because she killed herself; because she left behind a dark, inconclusive story with myriad unanswered questions; and because they don’t understand suicide itself, this act of taking one’s life. They must be hoping that once the girl is buried, all their questions and anxieties will be buried with her. They are huddled by the doorway because they want to escape the ill-omened uncertainty hanging in the air like the corpse upstairs.

Only one of them is crying: an elderly woman sitting on the doorstep, her hands clasped on her lap, hiding her face with her scarf, which is damp with tears.

They climb the creaky wooden stairs. The house smells of poverty and hopelessness. On the floor, unmade beds obviously still warm, a bunched pillow with a clump of cotton jutting out of a tear in the casing, garments in long-faded colors with patches visible even from a distance, striped pajama bottoms obviously removed in a hurry and thrown in a corner—all of these complete the picture of poverty.

With habitual motions, she puts on her mask and gloves. The mask covers most of her face, makes her eyes seem even larger, her gaze all the more piercing. These acts—sliding the mask over her face, adjusting the gloves around her fingers—which have long since become ordinary for her, still have the effect of a magic ritual on the people surrounding her.

They gesture toward a back room. The wooden door, its lock dangling like a broken tongue, creaks mournfully as it opens, revealing the female corpse hanging from the ceiling joist. A slight little girl. Almost a child. The dusty, burnished light streaming in through the window feels as if it might reveal the secrets that the night had concealed; everyone turns away from the corpse to look at the window. Just beneath her body is an old prayer rug, one of its corners folded over.

“She must have finished the morning prayer before hanging herself.”

Sevgi turns toward the gravelly voice coming from behind her shoulder. It belongs to the woman who had been crying at the doorstep moments ago. She speaks as if apologizing for the girl. She stands by the door, her shoulders hunched, her hands folded at her waist, as if she doesn’t want to leave the girl alone among strangers. Her wrinkled hands reveal her age, which can’t be read on the face hidden under her cotton scarf. She is told to leave the room. “Ma’am the doctor will examine her.”

Sevgi wonders about the effect of the statement on the old woman. The sense of hope implied by the word “examine” makes her cringe.

Nothing about the young girl’s face speaks of death. Not the slightest sign of resistance to death is noticeable on her body. She hangs like a piece of clothing. In complete surrender to the rope, to death. Her body seems to have experienced no spasm, no reflex struggle, even in her last breath. Desperate and silent, she must have waited for death to come and take her away. The greenish hue of her face, the dark purple line etched deeply around her neck, the rest of the preliminary evidence are all too familiar to require further examination. Sevgi wants to describe the cause of death not in medical terms but in plain words: dead from hopelessness.

She knows there is something about young people’s despair that renders death familiar, intimate. Already in her not-so-long medical career, she has taken many bodies down from the rope, out of the bathtub, has seen her share of knives, razors, needles. Death in youth is as possible as love. She knows.

The light streaming in through the window grows vibrant, hinting at the approaching noon hour. In the new light, her eyes are drawn to the gold bracelet hanging loosely around the girl’s right wrist, as if it’s about to slip off. With tender curiosity, she leans toward it, as if the arm belongs to a friend who is extending it so she can take a close look. It is the Trabzon weave! Like her mother’s Trabzon weave! Sevgi knows from her mother that the Trabzon weave means future. It means hope. Promise of life. It glows around the dead girl’s wrist.

The unexpected glow of the bracelet in the midst of abject poverty utterly transforms the meaning of this death in her eyes. A flash of dread streams through her being. She is not just standing beside a corpse; she feels as though a door has suddenly opened to her own past and she is standing on the threshold. She stares at the hypnotic glow of the bracelet as if staring into a chasm inside her. Certain moments last a long time. This is one such moment, as if bent on spanning her entire life.


2.
She hears her mother’s voice, as if she were speaking to her at this very moment, repeating what she’d told her countless times when Sevgi was just a child: “A trade is a golden bracelet, my girl. Learn a trade! It doesn’t matter what, so long as you learn a trade.”

She used to speak those words as if revealing life’s secret. Of course, what she’d had in mind were modest, typically feminine occupations. When she used to repeat her adage, she could never have imagined that her daughter would grow up to be a doctor, never mind a forensic examiner who cut and sliced corpses without blinking.

As she stares, as if spellbound, at the Trabzon weave bracelet barely hanging around the girl’s frail wrist, a heart-wrenching thought crosses her mind: Sevgi could easily have been this girl. If not her, then her mother could have been this girl. In the checkers game played with the dark pieces of fate, perhaps one different move had altered the entire game and carried her mother or her away from here, delivering her to a different life.

Sevgi watches the girl’s limp body being released from the rope, and knows that the act of remembering every dreadful possibility one escapes in a life full of traps only reawakens the feeling of terror lying in wait inside one’s being. To her, life has always seemed sinister, arbitrary, untrustworthy, and more than a few times she has felt that she faced life like a guilty person, in constant anticipation of misfortune. It’s as though the cruel fate she managed to escape has now decided to appear to her in the form of a bracelet, dazzling her with its sinister glow, testing her fears by reminding her of every threat evaded, the dreadful calculus of its probability; of every menacing coincidence, its infinite capacity to repeat itself; of life, inexorably unreliable.

Sevgi was an only child; her parents had spent their lives taking turns blaming each other, and counted on Sevgi to fulfill the hopes they had for her and for the brother that never arrived. When Sevgi traces her steps back into her past and revisits her experiences from the vantage point of the present, her own life ceases to be believable. She is struck by the strange irony that it was through Patricia Cornwell’s forensic novels that she gained a degree of self-confidence, the strength to believe her own life was real.

Her parents had tried to take her out of school and saddle her with a job, but she’d finished first in her class every year, bringing home glowing report cards full of “superior” grades. Throughout, she’d benefited from every assistance, every scholarship and grant available to the children of the poor. Neither ashamed nor discouraged, she’d resisted the example of those who over time turned their poverty into morbid pride or came to resent life altogether. Even in elementary school she’d known that the affluent parents were scolding their lazy children by praising Sevgi and describing the abject conditions of her life. She did not compete with them. As hard as she worked, she also knew to stand aside and settle for life’s meager returns. Poverty had set in her being like mildew, and she never quite escaped feeling inferior. Even all these years later, there are nights when she jolts out of bed, rushes to the living room, and, seeking reassurance, scans every piece of furniture—the couch, the dining table, the sideboard, the television, the stereo, her reading chair with the overstuffed ottoman—calling each, “Mine, mine!” She sits in the quiet of the night, staring at these objects for a while, until she calms herself down and believes again in her own reality; then she shuffles back to her bed.

Gifted with the Laz obstinacy she inherited from her family and forebears, Sevgi never stopped working, intent on proving that she could learn, that she could become educated. Her father had seemed almost wary of his daughter advancing too far and becoming a professional; actually, both parents had acted as though they didn’t want her to grow up too much. They were afraid of the unknown. They hoped that sooner than later a suitable admirer would appear and tie the knot. They wanted a husband for her who lived within his means, a son-in-law raised on honest milk, one who would appreciate their modest life, treat them well, and take the place of the son that God didn’t give them. Their daughter should of course continue to excel, but only as far as they could reach. They didn’t want to feel distrusted or rejected. They hoped instead that Sevgi would continue to need them. After sacrificing their years to Istanbul without ever getting used to it, they didn’t want the city to take away their daughter altogether. Each time they felt squeezed, they mentioned going back home. They had married young and left for the big city, nursing ever since the hope that they would one day return to Trabzon and prove to their relatives that they weren’t lost. They’d dreamed of buying land again, starting a job, opening a store in the market district. They’d lived their entire life for their relatives whose scrutinizing gaze they never escaped, even in Istanbul.

When Sevgi had requested her transfer to Trabzon, her parents were no longer alive. The deep, radiant shade of green unique to the Black Sea region took the place of her parents. Year after year, she had heard them talk about this green. She was now in her parents’ bosom. This is how she recognized that her heart had secretly promised them her return.

In their ramshackle house in Istanbul, on the kitchen wall there was a copy of a painting, a folio with faded colors and worn-out edges, taken from an old magazine found on the curbside. Mounted on the wall with asphodel glue, Mahmut Cuda’s From Trabzon had for years kept staring at Sevgi with an alien gaze that made her feel she would never be able to share in her parents’ aching homesickness. When she’d transferred here following their death, that ache disclosed its meaning to her.

When death became her measure of life, she attained a degree of inner calm. Blood, pus, saliva, sweat, urine. Human. Life. Time.

Strangely, she had always thought that the term “water hardness degree” referred to a unit of measurement that must be used in measuring life; yet during her university years she had started thinking that the most correct “measure” of life was “death.” She was aware that this extremely idiosyncratic mode of reasoning probably meant nothing to others and, worse yet, struck them as odd, if not altogether terrifying. Only someone as confused as Sevgi could entertain such thoughts. If she didn’t fear death, she concluded, she would stop fearing life, too. She’d come to this realization in the second year of her training, during a course on forensic medicine. In her eyes, life became calm when she discovered the restful lividity of death. Her inner turmoil eased off, the everyday rush subsided. She saw the world with new eyes and accepted it. She began to think that one grew inured to life not through the elements of life but through the elements of death. As she came to rely on death’s intelligence, time became expansive, able to hold everything in, unbound; it turned into something that consoled her spirit.

She understood why the easterners lived bosom-to-bosom with their dead, why neighborhoods and cemeteries were intertwined. They didn’t allow their dead to get too far out of their sight. Death, too, was a kind of life.

During the first lab session, the forensic medicine professor had drawn her students’ attention to her hands by announcing with a lustful tone she obviously could not restrain, “This, kids, is the most satisfying sound,” and ripped a cadaver’s brain membrane, as if tearing a linen napkin down the middle. Her large upper teeth had sunk into her fleshy lip while she demonstrated, and later bore traces of her vampire-red lipstick. Indeed, her garish clothes, hairstyle, and makeup always gave her the air of a perennial vamp of low-budget horror films. Another time, she had wrenched the lungs out of a cadaver and, like an illusionist, switched them between her hands several times before asking the students, “Tell me, which is left, which is right, which is left, which is right?” as if treating them to an amusing little magic trick. What horrified Sevgi from the start was not so much the act of touching a dead body or cutting into it as it was the pleasure her professor derived from playing such appalling games; she was convinced that women could be at least as savage as men. Later she wondered whether her professor had flaunted her mastery of death to exert control over her students and life. To understand this woman, Sevgi thought, would amount to understanding a fundamental dimension of life. There were open as well as secret rules of staying alive and on one’s feet.

So many years have passed, stripping everything of its significance. She is thinking: “Elementary school will be enough,” they said. It wasn’t. “Secondary school will be enough,” they said. It wasn’t. “High school will be enough,” they said. It wasn’t. Starting early in adolescence, she worked every summer to save for her school allowance: she worked in textile shops, she worked as a store clerk, she worked as a baby-sitter, she moved from job to job, too many to keep count. When she gained admission to medical school and her parents realized she would become a doctor, they didn’t know how to be happy. Their daughter had not turned out the way they’d hoped, their modest dreams were shattered, their hearts divided. Even when the entire neighborhood cheered her on, her parents put up all sorts of obstacles at first. They of course acknowledged that a daughter who was a doctor would gain them an advantage against mortality; yet they couldn’t reconcile themselves to the possibility that her entire life would change into something altogether alien to them, a life that would have no room for them. What they feared the most was that their daughter would disparage them, that she would be ashamed of her father and mother in front of her friends, husband, colleagues. Sevgi had often heard her mother say, “The chick broke out of the egg and scoffed at its shell.” Her parents had died still convinced that their relatives back home viewed them as lost souls.

The old woman was her aunt. They ask her. “She never wore it,” she says. “She kept it in her bride’s chest. Every now and then she would open the chest, look at it, wrap it around her wrist, then put it away. Death’s bride. She wore the bracelet for her death instead of the wedding she never had. Unlucky child. She never knew a mother’s face. Her father was worthless. She grew up in her uncles’ homes. The bracelet was a keepsake from her aunt, her only belonging in this merciless world. She endured all that poverty and never once thought of selling it.”

If they let her, the old woman would keep talking and talking.

Sevgi takes the Trabzon weave bracelet that she has been holding and, as if handing over a sacred heirloom that has traveled across countless generations, places it between the ancient hands resting on the knees of this woman who, Sevgi is convinced, truly loved the ill-fated girl.

She descends the wooden stairs she had climbed a little while ago, this time the wood creaking more loudly under her hurried steps, and she knows that what she is leaving behind is not just death but a life that, with the slightest twist of fate, could well have been hers. As if the rope around the girl’s neck had also twitched around hers, she brings her hand to her neck and rubs away the invisible line.