“The paper says he immersed himself in dye for medicinal purposes,” the driver says.
It’s not the first time Orhan has heard this preposterous theory. It’s a story crafted, no doubt, by his cunning little aunt. Though Dede had been a well-respected World War I hero-turned-businessman, he was also an eccentric man, living in a place where eccentricities needed to be explained away or covered up.
In villages like Karod, every person, object, and stone has to have some sort of covering, a layer of protection made from cloth, brick, or dust. Men and women cover their heads with skullcaps and head scarves. These standards of modesty also apply to their animals, their speech, their ideas. Why should Dede’s death be an exception?
The car veers left onto a loosely graveled road that leads into the village. Orhan searches for the wooden post that used to announce the village’s name in unassuming hand-painted white letters, but it’s nowhere to be found. A young boy in a bright orange shirt and green shorts walks behind a herd of cows. He sweeps a long stick at their backs, ushering them into one of many narrow corridors sandwiched between mud-caked houses.
“Is this it?” asks the driver.
“Yes,” says Orhan. “Just follow this road until you see the house with the large columns.”
The sound of crunching gravel comes to a halt as the car stops. Orhan extinguishes his cigarette and steps out. He can hear the singular sound of hired wailers, their practiced percussion luring him out of the car: two, maybe three female voices filled with a kind of sorrow and vulnerability that comes only with practice. The two-story family home is a dilapidated old ruin by any standards, but here in the forgotten back pocket of Central Anatolia, it is considered a sturdy and grand affair. A thin film of mustard-colored stucco advances and retreats over hand-cut stones of putty and gray, reminding Orhan of a half-peeled piece of dried-out fruit. The Victorian-looking house, complete with parlor and basement, is the birthplace of Tarik Inc., which began as a small collection of workshops and which, over the past six decades, grew into an automated firm, exporting textiles as far away as Italy and Germany. Here, inside these ruinous walls, according to family legend, Orhan’s great-grandfather had woven a kilim for the sultan himself. That was before the empire became a republic, before democracy and westernization revolutionized what it meant to be a Turk. In the courtyard to the left of the house, the massive copper cauldrons stand guarding the wilting structure. Through the decades they’ve gone from holding fabric dye to sheltering children playing hide-and-seek, to storing the discarded ashes of hookah pipes and cigarettes. These vessels have contained the many bits and pieces of Dede’s life. Perhaps it is only fitting that they also housed his last breath.
Orhan weaves a familiar path around the cauldrons. All empty, except one holding a murky sledge like dye that looks more black than blue, the color of a good-bye.
Above the wooden frame of the front door, a stone arch inscribed with indecipherable script and the date 1905 welcomes guests into the time warp inside. No one really knows what these letters above the door announce or in what language they’re written. Orhan hunches his six-foot frame in order to step inside the home and into a sea of curious townspeople and villagers come to pay their respects and graze on food and gossip. The head wailer, a rich woman by the looks of her gold teeth, orchestrates a powerful atmosphere of lamentation with a chant from the Koran.
“He drowned himself,” someone whispers.
“If he drowned himself, why is his head not blue?” another asks.
“Consider how neatly he folded his clothes,” someone else says, as if that alone could prove something.
“Apparently, medicinal dye is all the rage in Istanbul.”
“He was always a forward-thinking man.”
Orhan recognizes only a handful of people in the room. Anyone with any sense or prospects left Karod a long time ago, peeling it off like an ill-fitting coat. A few old men and women, the aging parents of his childhood friends, people he politely calls auntie and uncle, pat his face and shake his hand. Village girls, none older than twenty, roam around the room offering tea and cookies on plastic trays, their black head scarves framing eyelids lowered in modesty. They wear traditional baggy ?alvar pants beneath their brightly colored cotton dresses. Orhan thinks he recognizes one or two of them. Suddenly conscious of his Italian suit and loafers, he grabs a cup of tea and makes his way to the living room, where every flat surface—tables, bookshelves, mantels, even the television—is covered with handcrafted doilies. Their intricate geometric and floral designs in various shades of beige provide every exposed horizontal surface with a measure of modesty.