As soon as she stepped out of the van, Hana was blinded. The sun reflected off the bright surrounding cliffs, creating a stillness and warmth that made her instantly sweat inside her winter jacket. She slid on her sunglasses, and when her eyes adjusted, she saw shapes – squares, arches and rectangles – carved into the limestone pinnacles and cones that surrounded the canyon. A honeycomb of windows and doors, entrances to houses of ancient people who were long dead – returned to the dust that settled over everything here on the central plateau of Anatolia.
The other travellers from the tour party disembarked from the van and shuffled towards the gate of the open-air museum. They were a spectrum of bright puffy jackets, holding selfie sticks aloft and stopping occasionally to gather in colourful, smiling flocks. The tour guide, Murat, yelled, ‘We’re here for an hour only. Be back to the van by four thirty please otherwise you’ll be sleeping here the night.’ He laughed and sauntered over to briefly talk to a man inside the ticket booth. When he came back, he lit a cigarette, leaned against the tour van and began talking to a young woman from the group who had been patiently waiting for him to return. He dragged deeply. Smoke poured from his mouth as he chuckled with his new friend.
Hana couldn’t bring herself to look at his crop of virile black hair or the beard that set off his pretty lips. Lips still swollen from the kiss they shared the night before on the rooftop of their cave hotel. She turned away from the flirting and walked through the gates.
A path wound its way slowly upwards, through a canyon flanked by several pillars Murat had called ‘fairy chimneys’. In the distance, a larger cliff rose – huge and striated in pink. It was like a giant terrestrial ship that had turned to stone. Hana felt alien herself, so far from home. Nothing here was familiar except the few cherry blossom trees that lined the path. She paused under one of the gnarled trunks and closed her eyes, breathing in the sweetness. In her good ear, she heard the drone of bees as they sought nectar and pollen above her. In her bad ear, her deaf ear, she could hear the faint whisper of her daughter, Rata, humming with the bees. ‘Bees, bees, bees, Māmā. Honey makers, shimmy shakers, sweet gold takers …’ Rata whispered.
Hana felt dizzy, as she always did when Rata spoke to her. Her baby girl. Dead now for two years. She had gone wandering back then, instead of watching the TV that Hana used as a babysitter whenever she took a shower. Later, someone found one of Rata’s polka dot gumboots on the bank where the Waikato and Waipā rivers meet but not her body. Her tiny bones were resting some place dark and soft and wet.
The day Rata went missing, the whispering began in Hana’s pakaru ear, which had been deaf since she got an ear infection as a teenager. Hana had been pacing across the floor, wringing her hands and raking her arms with her nails to distract herself from the guilt and pain. Then she heard Rata whispering.
‘Māmā, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Taniwha is taking good care of me.’
Hana whirled around, looking for her baby. She searched in all the cupboards.
When she realised her daughter wasn’t in this world but only in her head, she crumpled on the kitchen floor and sank into a welcome blackness. Her daughter’s voice was still there when she woke up and has been ever since, along with a brain fog that made it hard to think. Rata never answered her mother’s questions or engaged in a back and forth, but she would talk as if it was a one-way conversation. Rata was always there, like a shadow or an echo. It was both a comfort and a constant reminder of Hana’s loss.
Hana looked around the canyon. Rata would have loved to explore these fairy chimneys. She plucked a blossom from above her and absently pulled it to pieces as she walked up the dusty path, which criss-crossed through grasses and tussock. Occasionally, she’d stop to take a photo. The sun made it hard to see the cell phone’s screen, so she was barely able to see the images she was taking, but it didn’t really matter. She had no one to show the photos to when she got home. Rata’s dad had left her a year ago because he said Hana was broken and didn’t want to be fixed. He was right.
The cliffs towered above her, and the path turned into steep stairs that led to the dwellings. She followed it upwards. The others from the tour group were exploring caves on the other side of the canyon. Hana could hear them but not see them. A cat bounded out of nowhere and rubbed itself on her leg. It rolled in the sun and purred loudly, its fur detaching and floating away in tufts. Hana reached out to pet it, but then she saw one of its eyes was weepy and blueish. When she retracted her hand, the cat seemed to meow louder. Hana walked off, but the cat followed her.
Hana entered the closest doorway so she could escape the cat’s mews and neediness. She found herself in an antechamber. Here, deep depressions had been carved into the earthen floor – two large ones and three small ones. They were body shaped.
‘Babies used to rest here, Māmā,’ whispered Rata.
Hana steadied herself as the room appeared to expand and retract for a moment. She moved slowly forward into a larger room. It was slightly darker here but not gloomy. Light entered a small, round window and then reflected onto the walls, effusing everything with a warm glow. There was a view of the valley below through the window, and a cool spring breeze that made Hana stop and breathe deeply. There were several round pits dug deep into the floor of this cave, perhaps for storing water or cooking. Hana made a couple of small cooees, and her calls echoed. A song rose in her throat before she even had a chance to think. It was ‘Purea Nei’, the song she sang to Rata when she was a baby. Her song reverberated against the walls and returned to her changed, richer somehow.
When Hana was finished, she felt like she was floating. She sat on the floor of the cave, grounding herself. Her thoughts went back to the night before.
The cave hotel had a rooftop deck, and from there, you could see views of the village spilling down the valley. Mount Erciyes lay in the distance – it looked exactly like her maunga in Taranaki. She had been enjoying watching the sky change colour to a deep cerulean blue and the moon begin to rise over the desert. Then there was a cough behind her. Turning, she found Murat smiling. He flicked a cigarette over the edge and stepped towards her, his arm brushing against hers.
‘I’ve been watching you, Hana.’
Hana kept quiet. She looked skywards.
Murat continued, ‘You seem quite alone. There is sadness. Excuse my forwardness. But perhaps I will help you with this?’
An answer wasn’t needed. He leaned in closer. His aftershave was an acrid odour, like pine needles soaked in rubbing alcohol. His hand was suddenly on her lower back, pulling her inwards. All she could see were his pink lips coming at her in the dim light, standing out against his black beard.
Then his mouth was on hers. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it wasn’t pleasant either. It was just wet. He lazily let his tongue wander. She waited for him to stop. But then something surprising happened: the kiss actually started to feel nice. Something awoke in her like a hungry animal. An urge that made her kiss him back.
That’s when Rata started screeching in her ear.
Hana bit down on Murat’s lip as Rata’s scream enveloped her entire body. She doubled over with nausea. Murat pushed her away. There was blood on his lip.
‘That’s what I get for feeling sorry for an old, ugly bitch like you.’
He spat at her like she was a dog as she writhed at his feet. After he left, and Rata was finally silent, she lay on the rooftop until she couldn’t feel her body in the freezing desert night.
Now, remembering it all, she felt nothing. Not shame or longing. She felt nothing, and it was a relief. She gathered the sand on the ground nearby into one of her hands and let it trickle onto her other hand, like an hourglass. She lifted another handful to her open mouth and placed a pinch on her tongue, letting the sand turn to mud with her saliva. Eventually, she swallowed.
She could hear the others making their way down towards the van. She stood up and walked outside. It was warm and bright, and the others were almost back to the carpark. She followed the steps that led down to the centre of the canyon. There was a fence here so that tourists were stopped and essentially corralled back to the carpark. But a path continued beyond the fence, and it took just a second for her to decide. She easily climbed under the wire, and suddenly she was on the other side, looking down the valley. She turned and began to walk upwards.
After a while, she took off her jacket. She stuffed it into her backpack and took a swig of water from her drink bottle. She walked on for another hour, then she rested on a large, flat rock. The landscape had hardly changed, but the dwellings got fewer and fewer until there was no longer any sign of humans. Even the path was barely there. And the rock formations were becoming stranger and more impressive. Sometimes the rocks looked like mushrooms or dunce hats or capped dog dicks. Not far off were a row of columns with large oval rocks perfectly balanced on top. They were impossible and beautiful. It was as if a giant child had left its toys scattered mid-play.
So much about her trip so far had been surreal – even the events that brought her here. She had been invited to speak at a writers’ festival about the book of poetry she had written after she lost Rata. It was so last minute that she barely had time to think it through. One moment she was getting an email inviting her to the festival as a replacement for someone who had had a family emergency, and the next moment she was on a plane to Turkey. She suspected she was the token Māori at the festival, but this hardly bothered her. For the first time in ages, she had something interesting to do.
In that time, she had seen the ruins of Troy, visited the Virgin Mary house at Ephesus and walked down the cascading silica terraces of Pamukkale. Because she loved Rumi, she’d gone to see a whirling dervish show in a renovated Istanbul bathhouse. She was mesmerised as they propelled themselves around and around. Later, she found they weren’t really Sufis, just dancers who could twirl really well. But then she wondered, what right did she have to witness such a sacred dance anyway?
Even this morning, as she had watched colourful hot-air balloons rise and float over this magical moonscape, something inside her felt detached. She had collected these memories in lieu of photographs, but even the memories seemed pointless. How many people had stood in the same place she had and seen the same things she did? Her sense of wonder was diminished. Hana felt like a ghost wandering from one beautiful site to the next.
But most of all, she was tired. Exhausted to her very bones. As she lay against the sun-warmed rock, she began to drift off. The sun itself was getting lower in the sky, and she wondered if they had started to look for her. Maybe they had just left her behind. She fell asleep.
She woke to a bleating in her ear.
‘Look, Māmā, billy goats gruff!’
A crowd of goats had surrounded her rock. Hana pulled up her legs, away from their nibbling mouths, curled horns and strange eyes. A woman, not much older than she was, stood watching from a distance. She looked amused by Hana. She came closer, speaking in Turkish.
Hana held up her hands, as if surrendering. ‘Sorry, I only speak English and a little Māori.’
The goatherd smiled again and said something else in Turkish. She pointed to Hana’s neck. Hana reached for her clavicle and realised she was talking about the pendant Hana had bought at the Grand Bazaar. It was a half-man, half-bird figure called Ahura Mazda, an ancient god.
The goatherd brought a pack over to the stone Hana was sitting on and opened it up. Inside was a bowl. She walked over to one of the goats and pulled at its horns so that it was facing the way she wanted. She reached underneath, placed the bowl on the ground and proficiently jerked at the dangling teats. Steamy milk was released. When the bowl was full, she brought it over to Hana and gave it to her. The milk was still warm from being inside the goat. The offering wasn’t particularly appetising, but Hana didn’t want to offend. She raised the milk to her lips, closed her eyes and sipped. When she opened her eyes, she smiled at the goatherd. The milk was creamy and deliciously sweet. She raised the bowl to her mouth again and again. She handed the bowl back to the goatherd and bowed in thanks.
The goatherd seemed pleased. She looked again at Hana’s necklace. And she pointed to the sky as she spoke. Hana caught the words Kök Tangri, and recognised the name from something she had read at a local museum. It was a sky god, an equivalent to Ranginui. They sat for a moment, side by side on the rock, looking up.
‘I don’t like this lady, Māmā,’ whispered Rata. ‘Let’s go.’
The goatherd looked at Hana then, and she reached towards Hana’s head. She cupped her hand over Hana’s pakaru ear and held it there for a moment, with her eyes closed. She muttered something, and Hana caught the word jinni. Before Hana could move, the goatherd flicked her hand outwards and upwards, like she was releasing a bird. Hana thought she saw a puff of smoke. And then, with something close to horror, she realised that she could hear the goats’ bleating in both ears. Her Rata was gone.
She began to cry, and the goatherd came to her then and held her as she wept and grieved for the loss of her child a second time. The woman placed something in Hana’s hand.
‘Matar,’ said the goatherd.
Hana looked in her palm and found a clay bead in the form of a seated woman with pendulous breasts and a sagging belly. She tightened her hand around it.
The sun had set, and it was dark when Murat, the ticket-booth man and a few others came up the canyon with torches looking for Hana. They found her alone, lying on the rock.
‘We worried packs of wild dogs had eaten you,’ Murat said, wheezing from the climb.
‘No such luck,’ said Hana. And she burst into laughter that echoed off the walls of the canyon.
Murat looked at her like she had lost her mind. Hana thought that, perhaps, she had finally found it.