From: yamen@cae.wisc.edu (Soner Yamen)
Subject: turkish literature
Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering
Date: 1 Oct 92 19:04:02 CDT

     Blind

     a short story by Necip Fazil Kisakurek

     Zehra Teyze was blind.  In her childhood, a droplet of lead spilled
into her left eye when a lead-caster woman was pouring melted lead from
a ladle into  a bowl of cold water over Zehra's head to cure her
illness.  Ever since, for about sixty years, she has occupied herself
with lead-casting.  For the last forty years, she has been the lead-
caster of the Erenler village.
     Having lost an eye, she had not been asked for in marriage despite
the fact that girls would get married when they were sixteen and she was
already twenty-three.  Nobody cared much about her.  Meantime, she spent
all of her time by melting lead in a rusty ladle and pouring it into
cold water in order to read the mysterious figures of cast lead, which
had caused her to lose her eye, and then try to get an interpretation
about future.
     She was told:  "You don't understand this!  What is it that day and
night, like a toy, you occupy yourself with melted lead?"  "I enjoy it,"
she used to say.  "I admire the forms and shapes of melted lead cast
into water."
     And, gradually she began to get the special knowledge of decoding
the shapes of the cast lead:  "Look!  This shiny button like thing is
the heart...  The black dots encircling the heart are the eyes...  Evil
eye!  Look, look!  How they inflate the heart!... Oh my God!  The heart
looks like it is going to explode!"
     She had a dream while making all these proprietary experiments.  In
her dream, a white-bearded man took away her ladle and threw the melted
lead into air like water.  Then he said:  "Don't you dare read the
mysteries of God from these strange lines and shapes!  You may see
terrible things!"
     This advise increased her interest rather than kept her off the
melted lead.  Yes, Zehra Teyze, a twenty-three-year old spinster, dove
into the "ocean" of melted lead and started to "undulate."  Soon her
secrets were discovered, and she became the lead-caster of the Erenler
village.
     In a nearby village, a villager would be talking:  "Oh friend, my
child is very sick.  He turned pale.  He doesn't eat; he doesn't drink
anything.  He stares at the ceiling all day.  The poor thing is getting
weaker and weaker staying in bed.  We took him to a doctor; it didn't do
any good.  We went to a breath-healer; nothing happened.  I don't know
what to do!"  His friend would respond:  "You know the Erenler village,
four hours away on foot...  There is a lead-caster named Zehra Teyze
over there...  Her hand is as sharp as a sword to cut the evil eye.  Go
to her!"
     Paralyzed people, tuberculosis patients, melancholy patients,
people smitten by an evil spirit ... they all would come to Zehra Teyze
for the cure.
     This continued for years, and Zehra Teyze turned thirty, forty,
fifty, and sixty still remaining on the shelf. Yet, she became so famous
that people from a distance of three-to-five days of walking would bring
her patients who had turned pale because of some illnesses without a
known cause or cure.  Zehra Teyze would melt the lead in her ladle over
a brazier, then covering the patient's face with a cloth, she would pour
it into the water over the patient's head.  She would look at the cast
lead in the water with her sound eye closed.  Zehra Teyze would read not
the mysterious branches of the cast lead in the water but the lines of
the spirit of her patient:  "Give this girl to the young man she is in
love with.  Otherwise, her heart will crack, and she will die!"
     One day, after a splitting headache, she took her ladle and water
bowl, and poured the melted lead into the bowl over her head.
"Jizzzz..."  It was not clear if she were truly looking at the cast lead
in the water.  Her sound eye was closed; and her blind eye, open.  The
way she looked declared that her blind eye could see better than her
sound eye.  And she murmured:  "Finally, my bad luck is over!  A trooper
on a tar-black horse is coming to the Erenler village gallopingly to
take me away!"
     Her headache was gone!  Nothing bothered her anymore!  Zehra Teyze,
for the first time in her lifetime, got across the mirror and adorned
herself with great care.  She took her mother's decked-out showy silver-
tread embroidered wedding dress out of her leather chest and put it on.
She sat on a pillow in a corner of her room.  Her attention was outside
at the village youth's loud cries mixed with the sounds of horse shoes.
With her open eye she kept staring through the window which encircled
the mosque and the cemetery at the entrance of the village.
     The next day, the people who knocked at her door and couldn't get
any response forced the door open and found her with one-eye open,
dressed in her mother's wedding dress, sitting on a pillow in the
corner, dead!...

     January 10, 1968 
Xref: sparky soc.culture.turkish:10341 talk.politics.mideast:20653 talk.politics.soviet:8272 soc.culture.greek:9383 soc.culture.europe:8704 soc.history:8672 eunet.politics:1395