Mrs Demirsoy had Abraham under house arrest, and he didn’t mind in the least. What’s the point of going outside, she asked him; it’s hot and dry and there’s nothing to do except watch the devils strutting.
‘I loved my town. But now it is a waiting room for death. And I thank God I will not be in it for long.’
So Abraham stayed at home. He helped prepare food, he washed up, he sat on his bed and looked for news of Sofia – and he talked to her, as Irene.
Mrs Demirsoy continued to comfort and scold him. She wanted to know about Ester, what kind of a woman she’d been before, who had cared for her, who had been there to help. That was the problem with families now, they had shrunk. Mrs Demirsoy was one of seven, her mother had been the youngest of eight. When someone died or fell ill others would take their place. But here was this man and this girl, expected to make a family on their own? It was like a piano with two strings. No music could come from it.
A great tragedy, all round. Not improved by you and your self-pity and your fear, though I understand both. The girl sounds as if she craves life, and yet she was shut in as surely as you are shut in here. When I was a girl we didn’t know life existed, and maybe that was better. A cage is not a cage if you cannot see beyond the bars.
I had no idea I had gone so wrong, he told her, and with a look she let him know that she’d tolerate none of that – the self-pity – and besides, if God let us see our own mistakes we would have nothing to learn on the Day of Resurrection.
Throughout these conversations, as Abraham sliced tomatoes or picked parsley leaves from their stems or spooned soup into his mouth, the more or less silent Mr Demirsoy would occasionally catch his eye and give him a rich look that said, My wife is an extraordinary woman, and I greatly respect what she says, but I am thankful that for once she isn’t saying it to me.
After lunch on the second day, as Mrs Demirsoy was bringing coffee to the table, the doorbell rang, and so timeless was life in the house that to Abraham the noise was instantly jarring, wrong. Mr Demirsoy made to get up but his wife held up her hand to stop him.
‘I will go. It might be important.’
As she turned, Mr Demirsoy smiled at Abraham fully for the first time.
‘If not important she also go.’
Looking pleased with himself for making a joke in Arabic, he poured the coffee and they sat in silence, Mr Demirsoy contented, Abraham unsettled, for reasons he couldn’t grasp. From the hall he heard a man’s voice speaking Turkish, and Mrs Demirsoy replying, curtly at first and increasingly firmly as he seemed to persist.
Mr Demirsoy reached across the table and put his hand on Abraham’s.
‘Polis,’ he whispered, and put a finger to his mouth.
Carefully he half stood, lifted his chair back from the table so that it made no sound, and with a glance at the door Abraham followed him, dazed, like a man who’d just been abruptly woken. Beyond the kitchen, screened off by a curtain, was a storeroom, and set in the far wall a small wooden door, a good size for a child. Mr Demirsoy opened it and impatiently ushered Abraham inside. Wooden steps led down into darkness. Abraham did his best to take them quietly and surely, crouching lower as he went; behind him came Mr Demirsoy, who closed the door and for a moment left them with no light at all. Then a click, and by the thin beam of a torch Abraham saw he was in a narrow cellar, the height of his shoulders and maybe three feet wide. Buckets and paint pots were piled on the floor, lengths of pipe and timber. There was nowhere to go. If anyone bothered to shine a light in here they were found.
‘Here,’ said Mr Demirsoy, and steered him by the elbow to the far end of the cellar. To their left was an external wall, bricked and finished; to the right, boxes and bottles and what looked like old phone directories were piled up on a ledge. Mr Demirsoy took one of the boxes and placed it on the floor, then another, and shining the torch through the gap that he’d made revealed a shallow space, at most a foot deep, between wooden floorboards and compacted earth. It ran under the whole house, and the torch barely reached its furthest limit.
‘In here.’
Abraham looked at him and realized he had no choice. Above their heads a door closed and footsteps sounded on wood. He crawled head first into the darkness, floorboards brushing against his back as he went further and further in, lips shut tight against the dust. Behind him Mr Demirsoy replaced the boxes and crept softly up the stairs; the door opened and closed and in the pure black Abraham kept going, as far in as he could, squeezing through the narrow points where the rough floor rose up. Now he was under the kitchen, most probably, now the sitting room, and as his eyes grew used to the darkness he saw pale shafts of light showing through the boards above. Finally he stopped, let his head drop down onto his forearms, and waited. The earth was cool on his skin, its heavy musty smell somehow comforting, and Abraham listened to his breath panting and his pulse racing and imagined them slowing, slowing, slowing to a stop. Not a bad place to be forgotten. Not a bad place to be buried. Somewhere nearby he thought he heard a scratching in the dust.
Two men, at least two, their solid clumping sometimes obscuring Mrs Demirsoy’s tread altogether. They all seemed to go upstairs, and in two minutes they were back and in the room directly above, inches from Abraham’s ear. He heard Mrs Demirsoy say something and then they all left and he followed the footsteps as they made their way round the edge of the house, into the kitchen, into the storeroom. The cellar door opened, as he knew it would, and now there was quite a lot of talking, so much that he began to think that they’d decided to move on; but they hadn’t, they’d been waiting for a torch, and now one of them came down the steps, cursed in the near darkness as he hit his head on the low ceiling, and shone his torch round the cellar. Barely breathing, Abraham kept his head turned and watched the dim reflected light play on the earth below and the wood above. Something scratched in the dust again and he saw a grey mouse scuttle past, not a foot away from him. Don’t give me away, he thought, but the searcher had seen all he wanted to see and was on his way back up.
‘So you killed a devil?’
Mrs Demirsoy had left Abraham in the cellar for half an hour after the men had left, and from his hole underground he had listened to her talking quietly and urgently to her husband. He knew he must go. When night came he’d leave. Murat had said his papers should be ready by tomorrow, and then he’d be gone anyway – or detained at the border, one or the other. Even a night on the streets of Akçakale was better than the thought of bringing more trouble into this house.
‘I’m so sorry. I never meant this. What did they say?’
‘The idea of you a murderer. Dogs, they are, they make me rage. Look at our town. A thousand killers on our streets and they treat them like they are pashas. Who are they here to protect? A thousand killers and they pick a man who can’t even control his own daughter.’
Abraham felt like he’d been lanced by those crystal blue eyes. What had she told these people?
‘I wanted to say this but I did not. Before I give up a guest in my home I will decide if he is guilty.’
So Abraham was on trial. The three of them were in the storeroom, where the windows were too small and high for anyone to see in. Mrs Demirsoy stood in the doorway with her arms crossed; Mr Demirsoy was beside her, looking down at the floor and not taking sides.
‘Thank you,’ said Abraham, covered in dust and standing stiffly so that he didn’t dirty the place any more than he already had.
‘You may not thank me yet. Now. What is all this?’
‘A man died in my hotel. In Antep. They pulled me from my bed and accused me.’ Despite his innocence he was finding it hard to hold her eye. ‘They need someone for the murder. I didn’t do it.’
‘How did he die?’
Abraham hesitated.
‘I have seen more horror in my life than you, Abraham. I can look on horror.’
‘His throat was cut.’
‘You saw it?’
He nodded. ‘I can see it now.’
‘And they have met you, these police?’
‘They questioned me, and put me in a cell.’
‘They said you attacked a guard.’
Abraham shook his head and laughed at the banal horror of it.
‘Yes. That was me, too.’
Mrs Demirsoy breathed deeply and nodded once, with emphasis, as if congratulating herself on her initial judgement.
‘If you have ever so much as slaughtered a chicken I would be very surprised.’
He had no answer to that.
Until nightfall Abraham stayed in the storeroom. Mr Demirsoy brought him a cushion, and his phone, and the two Arabic books they had: a Koran and a guidebook to Damascus. When the curtains were drawn throughout the house he was allowed out, but not upstairs, since there was a window on the landing that couldn’t be covered, and Mrs Demirsoy wasn’t the type to take chances. That there were any policemen left in Akçakale after dark was as likely as Murat Felek doing anything for free, but the impossible was only impossible until it happened. The three of them ate, and as they ate she told Abraham how everything was going to work.