Within the darkness of the house of the Hanged Jew, Shekure furrowed her brow and began raving that I might easily stick the monstrosity I held in my hands into the mouths of Circassian girls I』d met in Tiflis, Kipchak harlots, poor brides sold at inns, Turkmen and Persian widows, on prostitutes whose numbers were increasing in Istanbul, leingerians, coquettish Abkhazians, Armenian shrews, Genoese and Syrian hags, thespians passing as women and insatiable boys, but it would not go into hers. She angrily accused me of having lost all sense of de and self-trol by sleeping with all manner of cheap, pathetic riffraff—from Persia to Baghdad and from the alleyways of small hot Arabian towns to the shores of the Caspian—and of having fotten that some women still took pains to maintain their honor. All my words of love, she charged, were insincere.
I respectfully listeo my beloved』s outburst, which caused the guilty member in my hand to fade, and though I was thhly embarrassed by the situation and the reje I was suffering, two things
pleased me: 1. that I refrained from l myself to match Shekure』s wrath with a response of similar hue, as I often had reacted viciously to other women in similar situations, and 2. that I discovered Shekure』s particular awareness of my travels, proof that she』d thought of me much more than I』d assumed.
Seeing how downcast I』d bee at being uo carry out my desires, she』d already begun to pity me.
「If you truly loved me, passionately and obsessively,」 she said as if trying to excuse herself, 「you』d try to trol yourself like a gentleman. You wouldn』t try to offend the honor of the woman toward whom you eained serious iions. You』re not the only man who』s making motions to marry me. Did anyone see you on your way here?」
「Nay.」
As if she heard someone walking in the dark and snow-carden, she turned her sweet face, which for twelve years I hadn』t been able to recall, toward the door and gave me the pleasure of seeing her profile. When we heard a momentary clattering, we both waited in silence, but nobody entered. I recalled how even when she was only twelve, Shekure had aroused in me an odd feeling because she knew more than I did.
「The ghost of the Hanged Jew haunts this place,」 she said.
「Do you ever e here?」
「Jinns, phantoms, the livihey e with the wind, possess objects and make sounds out of silence. Everything speaks. I don』t have to e all the way here. I hear them.」
「Shevket brought me here to show me the dead cat, but it was gone.」
「I uand you told him that you killed his father.」
「ly. Is that the way my words were twisted? Not that I killed his father, rather that I』d like to bee his father.」
「Why did you say that you』d killed his father?」
「He』d asked me first if I』d ever killed a man. I told him the truth, that I』d killed two men.」
「In order to boast?」
「To boast, and to impress a child whose mother I love, because I realized that this mother forted those two little brigands by exaggerating the wartime heroics of their father and by showing off the remnants of his plunder in the house.」
「Go on boasting then! They don』t like you.」
「Shevket doesn』t like me, but Orhan does,」 I said, in the prideful glow of having caught my beloved』s error. 「Yet, I shall bee father to them both.」
We shuddered anxiously and trembled in the half-light as though the shadow of some ent thing had passed between us. I pulled