The Seventh Year
Every morning Halil walked down from the quiet streets above the Golden Horn, through the smell of coal smoke and fresh simit, the sesame bread rings boys sold from trays, to the courtyard of the old book market beside the Beyazit mosque, where the sellers of secondhand books kept their stalls and he kept his bindery. It was the age of gas lamps and horse trams, of ferries stitching the two shores together with white seams of wake. Halil was a mücellit, a bookbinder, and his hands were gentle with everything, and his sentences had gone short.
The shop smelled of paste, leather, and the dust of other people’s reading. He resewed loose signatures, pared morocco leather thin as a rose petal, burnished gold with an agate stone, and wove new endbands in colored silk at the heads of spines. Small exact mercies, none of which, it must be said, he had thought to bring home.
Home was Safiye, a judge’s orphan niece from Üsküdar across the water, married to him by the aunts of both houses in the usual way: a photograph, a visit, a prayer for goodness. In the first two years there had been small warmths. She had mentioned once that she loved apricots, Damascus ones in syrup, and twice he had brought some home wrapped in paper, and then, somehow, never again. Nothing had gone wrong. That was the strange part, the part no one warns you about. The fire in that house had gone out the way a stove goes out in a house where each person believes the other is tending it: slowly, blamelessly, entirely.
By the seventh year they spoke in logistics, and only in logistics. The coal is low. I will send the man. Your Thursday shirt is mended. My mother expects us after the bayram, the festival. The quince seller came; I took a kilo. Every sentence true, every sentence necessary, every sentence a small closed door. They were courteous with each other, always. Courtesy is the last furniture in an emptying house; it stays because it is too heavy for either person to carry out alone.
There was one room they never spoke of at all: the small one at the back that had been meant, in the wedding prayers of the aunts, for a cradle. It had become the sewing room. Safiye kept her frames there, and her spools of silk for oya, the fine knotted lace that edges headscarves, flower by tiny flower. On evenings when the neighbor women brought their babies to visit, she worked very late, and Halil, hearing the lamp go down at last, pretended with great care to be asleep.
They both prayed; that had never lapsed. But they prayed in the same house the way two clocks strike in the same house, the same hour, a minute apart, each in its own room. On Fridays, standing in the crowded coolness of the mosque, he felt a loneliness he did not try to name, and never once connected to the shape of his table at home. He was thirty-four. He assumed this was what the middle of a life was: a thing correctly assembled, and unheated.
Forty Years, Twice a Day
The old hoca, a retired mosque teacher from up the hill, came into the bindery on a wet March morning with rain on his shoulders and a parcel held inside his coat, carried the way men carry things that are not parcels to them. Inside the cloth was a Delail-i Hayrat, the beloved old book of blessings upon the Prophet ﷺ read daily in pious households, and this one had been read very nearly to death: spine gone soft, sewing burst, the endband unraveled to threads.
It has come off its şiraze, the hoca said: the binder’s word for the woven silk band that holds the head of a spine together. The market said it of men too. Şirazesinden çıkmış: come off his şiraze, come apart at the binding.
Mend it strongly, the hoca said. I read from it twice a day, morning and evening. It was my wife’s, may Allah have mercy on her; we read it together for forty years. He paused, looking at the wet window, and added, in the tone of a man reporting a practical arrangement: now I read her part too.
Halil took the book apart that afternoon with his thinnest knife, and found the forty years lying between the pages. In the margins, in a small pencil hand, a woman had kept the accounts of a life: the year of the fire, alhamdulillah, all of us safe. The boy’s birth. The boy’s fever, and then, three pages on, in darker pencil, gone to his Lord, my rose. A carnation pressed flat and brown at the section she must have loved. Halil sat with the dismembered book before him and became aware that his eyes stung. He had a wife and no margins. Their book was clean the way an unread book is clean.
When the hoca came back for it the following week, Halil wrapped the mended book slowly, and then asked, in a voice that surprised him: forty years, hoca efendi. What is the craft of it? And the old man looked at him the way old teachers look at a long awaited question, and did not smile, and answered as a craftsman answers.
In his own house, he said, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was in the service of his family. The Beloved of Allah patched his own clothes, mended his own sandals, served with his own two hands, and called none of it beneath him. And when he drank after our mother Aisha, may Allah be pleased with her, he would ask where on the cup her lips had rested, and set his own lips there, on purpose.
None of it announced, my son. Announced kindness is asking for wages. Wudd, the love that is one of His own Most Beautiful Names, is affection with its sleeves rolled up: it serves first, never mentions it, and it is Allah’s own way with His servants, morning after morning, unthanked.
Then he took his book, and at the door he stopped, because craftsmen also leave instructions. A marriage comes apart the way a book does, and it is mended the same way: thread by thread. Begin anywhere, he said. Begin with one thread. And he went out into the rain, an old man off to read the evening portion for two.
Without Announcement
That evening Halil stood outside his own front door in the blue dusk, like a man about to enter a country he had left. Then he went in and said the salaam properly, es-selamu aleykum, aloud, warm, the way it is sunnah to greet one’s own house, instead of the cough and the shuffle of shoes that had announced him for years. In the kitchen the ladle paused, half a second, the way a page pauses in turning. Aleykum selam, said Safiye, to the doorframe. It was nothing. It was one thread.
He began, and he announced nothing, which was the whole instruction. He rose earlier and carried the water jars up from the courtyard fountain before she woke, so the day’s first weight was gone before her hands found it. He saw to the coal before the sentence about the coal could be needed. At the low table he stopped rushing off; he stayed, and ate what she had made as if it were worth attention, because it was, and one evening over the beans he said, quietly, eline sağlık, health to your hands, the old blessing for a cook, unsaid since the second year. She did not answer. She refilled his bowl without being asked, which was an answer.
On a Thursday he came home with a parcel wrapped in paper and string, the way he wrapped mended books, and set it by her sewing basket and said nothing. Damascus apricots. He heard her find them later, the paper opening in the other room, and then a silence with a shape he could not read. They never spoke of it. On the following Thursday he did it again.
He did the things she had stopped asking for, in the order she had stopped asking. The sewing room hinge, which had complained for two winters. The loose stair tread. The lamp wick that smoked. He worked through them the way he worked through a damaged book, patiently, and if he wanted, some evenings, to say look, see how the door swings now, he remembered the hoca, and drank his tea, and let the door say it.
It would be handsome to report that his heart sang while he did these things. It did not, at first. He felt clumsy, and sometimes foolish, a man speaking a beautiful language out of a phrasebook, unsure of the grammar. The hoca had promised nothing about feelings. Begin with one thread, he had said, not feel one feeling. So Halil sewed on, without weather in his chest, for weeks. He was a craftsman. He knew that the glue is blind long before the book is whole.
And once, in the second month, he stopped. A great order came in, forty volumes for a paşa’s library, and for ten days he left at dawn, returned past supper, and reverted, without noticing, to the cough at the door. By the tenth day the house had cooled by the exact number of degrees it had warmed, and he felt it the moment he entered, like a draft from a window he thought he had sealed. It frightened him more than the seven years had, because now he could tell the difference.
He took off his coat, went into the kitchen, and washed the dishes of the meal he had missed, badly, splashing, a binder’s hands lost among plates, and behind him Safiye stood in the doorway watching, with an expression that had not been on her face in years.
What Safiye Noticed
Safiye, for her part, kept accounts the way quiet women keep them: exactly, and in no book. She had noticed the salaam on the first evening. She had noticed the water jars full at dawn, her hand resting a moment on the cool clay. She noticed the coal and the stair that no longer needed mentioning, the apricots that arrived on Thursdays like a shy tide. She counted it all, and did not trust it, because this is true of every heart that has learned to live on little: kindness arriving without explanation frightens before it warms.
Her first theory was that he had done something wrong and was paying it off. Her second was that his mother had scolded him. She had no third, so she watched.
The theory broke on an ordinary afternoon. She came back early from the neighbor’s, soundless in her house slippers, and through the open kitchen door she saw her husband at the table with her own half finished tea glass. He turned it a little in the light, to the worn place on the rim where the gilding had gone from her drinking, and he set his lips exactly there, on her place, and drank her cold leftover tea with his eyes closed, like a man at a spring. He never knew she saw. She went back out into the hall and stood with one hand flat against the wall, and the wall was no steadier than she was.
Her grandmother in Üsküdar, who had buried one husband and outlived the pity of it, used to say while knotting lace: watch what a person does when no one is thanking them, kızım, my girl. That is where the truth of them lives. Safiye stood in the hall a long time. Then she went into the sewing room and cried, once, briefly, in the efficient way of women who consider crying an errand, and came out with her mind changed about the shape of the world.
She answered as he had spoken: in acts, unannounced. The good cushion moved to his corner of the divan and stayed there. His dinner began to wait for him hot instead of correct. When the north wind came down the Bosphorus, he found his prayer clothes had been warmed at the mangal, the coal brazier, before the dawn prayer, and said nothing, and prayed warm, shaken by how small a thing it was and how far it reached. And on his plain handkerchief he found one day that she had worked a border of oya: a single line of tiny almond blossoms, flower by knotted flower, a sentence in a language they were both only beginning to remember.
In December it rained on the ferry crossing back from her mother’s in Üsküdar, rain in curtains, and they ran the last stretch from the landing under his one umbrella, pressed shoulder to shoulder, her scarf soaked anyway, his fez shedding a ridiculous stream off the tassel onto his nose. She laughed. It escaped her like a bird out an opened window, a real laugh, loud, undignified, seven years old. He stopped dead in the rain and looked at her, and then he laughed too, and neither had heard the other laugh since the second year, and it was like finding a coin in the pocket of an old coat. It had been there the whole time.
That evening the talk at the table crossed, for the first time in years, out of logistics. He told her about the hoca and the book that had come off its şiraze, and the margins, the fire, the fever, the carnation, and she listened and asked a question that was not about coal or quinces: does he still read it, alone? Both parts, Halil said. Morning and evening. She was quiet awhile. Then she said: your back, does it still catch when you stand at the sewing frame? It was not poetry. It was a bridge made of planks. It held.
The Night the Wall Was Thin
In late winter the family in the next house had their first child, and the child cried at night, and the wall between the houses was old and thin. The first night, Halil lay in the dark listening to the small distant siren of it and felt Safiye beside him lying too still, breathing too carefully, a woman pretending to be asleep with all her strength. Every night of the years before this one, he had matched her pretense with his own, and the two of them had lain there being asleep at each other for hours, which is a thing that can be done and should never be.
This night he did not pretend. He sat up, and turned up the lamp a little, and took her hand, and said nothing at all, because the mender does not lecture the page. She held very still. Then she turned her face into his shoulder and wept, at last, audibly, the sewing room grief, seven years of it: the cradle become a spool cabinet, the visits smiled through, the bayram questions of the aunts. He did not say it will be alright. He did not know that it would. He stayed. That was the whole of his sentence, and she heard every word of it.
Seven years, Halil, she said finally, against his shoulder, and it was not an accusation, only a measurement, the way you measure a torn sheet before you cut the patch. And he said the truest thing he had ever said in that house: I know. I was away for most of them, and I never once left the house. She laughed then, wetly, terribly, into the lamplight, and something in the room that had stood between them for years, patient and grey and unnamed, picked itself up quietly and left.
Much later that night, when the street was nothing but rain, he woke, and made wudu in the cold, and then, gently, the way the Prophet ﷺ commended, he woke her, saying only: pray with me? They stood side by side in the lamplight, the first prayer of their marriage prayed at the same hour on purpose, and Halil recited what he had learned as a boy, Surah al-Buruj, the constellations, and passed, in its middle, over four words he had recited a thousand times: wa huwal Ghafurul Wadud. And He is the Forgiving, the Most Loving. His voice caught on it like silk on a rough nail.
He had carried that Name his whole life the way a man carries a key to a house he has never visited. Al-Wadud. Not love felt at a distance, the scholars say, but love enacted: the Lord who does not merely regard His servants warmly but feeds them, mends them, shields them, morning upon morning, unannounced, unthanked, and calls Himself, in His own Book, by the name of that kind of love. Halil had been an apprentice of those four words for one autumn and one winter. They had been true from before the first dawn. He finished the surah with wet eyes, and beside him his wife prayed on, and did not ask, and kept what she had heard.
In the morning nothing announced itself, because that was no longer their way. But the house had changed temperature for good, and both of them knew it. Grief did not leave the house; grief was owed, and they had finally paid it together. It did not leave. It moved over, and made room.
The Dowry Qur’an
In the chest under the window, wrapped in green cloth, lay her dowry Qur’an, the mushaf her dead mother had left her, carried from Üsküdar on the wedding day. Its spine had cracked in her girlhood; she had mentioned it once, in the first year, in passing, and never again, and it had lain wrapped ever since, read from carefully, mourned a little every time. In February, while she was three days at her mother’s, Halil took it, and told her nothing, and carried it to the shop under his coat the way the hoca had carried his.
He worked on it only after hours, once the courtyard emptied. He resewed it on new cords, each signature snug against its sisters. He pared a morocco leather the deep red of Damascus apricots, and tooled it blind, without gold, because she was not a woman for gold, with a border of almond blossoms copied, petal for petal, from the oya on his handkerchief. For the endpapers he asked the ebru master, the marbler, for a particular thing: two colors, rose and a deep tea gold, drawn side by side down the whole sheet, close, distinct, touching everywhere. The marbler drew his comb through the floating paint and said nothing, because craftsmen understand one another.
Last of all he wove the şiraze with his own hands, the endband at the head of the spine, in two silks, rose and gold, over and under, each thread holding the other down the whole length of the binding. It was the finest work he had done in his life, and no paşa would ever see it, and he whistled at his frame like an apprentice, and the booksellers in the courtyard heard it and raised their eyebrows over their tea.
He gave it to her on a plain Tuesday, because announcements had ruined nothing in that house for a year. She came into the sewing room and found it lying on her frame, wrapped in paper and string, like apricots. She undid the string. She was still for so long that the lamp had time to settle. Then she opened the cover and saw the two rivers of color running side by side, touching everywhere, all the way down, and she understood everything at once, the way you understand a whole winter when the first window is opened on it.
I noticed, she said at last, without turning around. The salaam. The water. The stairs. The Thursdays. She turned then, and her eyes were bright and level. I saw you once, with my tea glass. I thought at first you had done something wrong and were sorry. Then I understood you were doing something right, and were shy.
Halil stood in the doorway of the sewing room with his hands empty at his sides, a binder with nothing left to mend, and said it, the word neither of them had said in seven and a half years, the word he had been sewing into the house all year. I was never taught to say it, he said. So I have been binding it. I love you, Safiye. And she came across the little room and put her forehead against his shoulder, on her place, and said: I know. It is sewn into this whole house. And I have loved you since the apricots, I think. I had no margins to write it in.
That night she sharpened a pencil, and on the flyleaf of her mother’s mushaf, small, in her careful school hand, she wrote the date and one word: elhamdülillah, all praise belongs to Allah. It was the first margin. Books that are read together fill with them; theirs would take forty years, in two hands, morning and evening. And by now every reader has understood that the Name had been at work in that house long before either of them said its meaning aloud: the One who does not announce His affection but serves it, warm and daily and unseen, until even the coldest house notices. And He is the Forgiving, the Most Loving.