Mamali

1.

Mamali dishes food onto plates—two plates, four plates, six—and says to put them on the floor, where a tablecloth has been laid out for dinner. There are fewer people today than usual: Farid is still at work, Jalal has left for the city with his family, Sharut came home from school and went straight to bed, and their countless neighbors have stayed home for once. Neighbors often stop by Mamali’s in the evenings, especially the fat village ladies who at day’s end have nothing to do and no one to talk to—but today there’s no one. Maybe it’s the August heat: from early morning, the sun beat down, the air was thick, and people took refuge beneath outdoor showers to avoid heatstroke.

Ulfet eyes the food longingly, but doesn’t dare touch the warm rice, nor the dried fruit, nor the chicken. She’s been holed up all day with her books in the farthest, coolest room, and is dying to eat. Still, she waits, knowing that if she starts before everyone is assembled, Mamali will get angry and slap her hand. Or, at the very least, mutter something mean: “The food’s not going anywhere—don’t be greedy.” Ulfet isn’t greedy, but she hears the unpleasant rumbling of her stomach and feels resentful.

Her father, Maryam, and Farid arrive soon after. Mamali sits beside them and puts a bowl of chopped cucumber and tomato in the center of the cloth; her brother pours the cold feijoa kompot. Her father, with a smile, recites a one-word prayer, and then, finally, the family eats. Ulfet is always amazed by her mom’s cooking (everyone in the village calls her mom Mamali, although her name is something else entirely), and asks herself why, when her sister or other relatives and friends prepare food, it isn’t as good. Ulfet never cooks: there are plenty of people in the house to fill the kitchen, and someone else always takes care of it. Anyway, Ulfet is too small to be of real use around the house—she’s only ten; in her free time, she prefers to read or hang out with the neighbor kids. She and her friends spend hours exploring the nearby oak forest, playing hide-and-seek, and running to the seaside by the long tracks of the railway, picking rosehips and blackberries from the bushes and eating them as they go.

After satisfying her hunger and licking her fingers, Ulfet steals a glance at Maryam. Her older sister, usually pretty and smiling, is sad and distant today—not herself. Three days earlier, she got engaged, and all their family members in Lankaran assembled to celebrate; they ate, drank, and danced all evening, while the bride was silent as a stone. Maryam had just turned sixteen; her new fiancé was fifteen years her senior. An old man. When his parents first approached them about an engagement, Ulfet listened from the kitchen as Maryam begged Mamali not to consent. She wanted to go to college before marrying, start her career as a chemist or a biologist maybe, she was such a good student, please please please, why now? But Mamali would not be swayed. “What does a girl need with all that education? What good will it do you?” she asked in a tone that allowed for no objection. “High school is enough. They’re a good family, our neighbors. We know them. It’s done.”

After that, Maryam stayed in bed for more than a week. Ulfet, Sharut, and even their brothers visited by turns, trying to console her; at night, the girls, who all shared a room, took turns climbing into Maryam’s bed to hug her. Only Mamali never came. She sent the children in with food and drink and went into the room to get the laundry, but she was unyielding in her decision. Their father, too, sympathized with his oldest daughter but couldn’t, it seemed, do anything: against all tradition, the head of their family was Mamali. It was her the children feared, like the flames of hell, while their father was a confidant and consoler. “Djanali, my soul,” he said affectionately when he went to Maryam. He sat on a chair by the bed and put his palm on his daughter’s head, stroking her dark hair. “Djanali, that’s enough. No more tears.”

Maryam said nothing, but a few days later she came out to breakfast.

“Let’s make a bet!” says Farid, their middle brother, holding a tiny bone triumphantly above his head. Ulfet understands right away—it’s the wishbone, from the base of the chicken’s breast.

“Let’s make a bet!” Farid says again, looking at everyone on the floor one by one and then, suddenly, making a generous offer: “I’ll give it away, I’ve got nothing to bet on. Who wants it?”

Ulfet quickly volunteers to make a wish, and after her, for the first time that evening, Maryam speaks up, too. Together, they take the precious bone from their brother, give each other a look, and start pulling. The bone doesn’t crack right away—it bends but doesn’t break. Maryam’s round cheeks become flushed. A hundred thoughts rush through Ulfet’s mind in a second: getting a five in math that winter, a trip to Baku, hiding in the woods and not being found—no, getting a five in math, she hasn’t for the last two quarters, yes! The bone cracks and the larger half remains in Ulfet’s hand. She jumps for joy. She’s won!

Maryam is quiet.

“I’m full,” she says a minute later. “Thank you.”

Her younger sister stares at her, feeling a strange tickle in her heart, as Maryam wipes her hands on a towel, takes her nearly full plate from the floor, stands, and, looking at no one, goes out into the hall.

2.

Autumn comes as a relief. The temperatures drop and the days get shorter, but also quieter, softer. Ulfet likes school. In August, she’d managed to finish all the books assigned for the summer and to review math, as well as Farsi and her dreaded Russian. Russian doesn’t come easily to her: no one speaks it in their home, so there’s no one to practice with, and it sounds so jerky, so strange—it won’t lie on her tongue. At least she doesn’t have to learn Cyrillic from scratch. But Farsi is a totally different story: musical, strange, unlike her native Azerbaijani both in writing and speech. Despite its foreignness, she likes it more. But here in the Soviet Union Farsi isn’t essential, Russian is, so there’s nothing she can do. It irritates her to no end that she has such a hard time with it—why should this be so? She keeps trying.

Playing with friends is different now, too: the kids get together in each other’s yards because their parents, who are home more often, want them nearby. Ulfet isn’t discouraged: she runs around the yards figuring out how to quickly open or jump over their neighbors’ gates and finding new ways to sneak into other people’s rose gardens and orchards. She clambers up trees better than any of the boys to pick the ripest bunch of grapes or quince, and then has the freedom to decide whether to keep it for herself or share it with her friends. Sometimes they manage to get a little pocket money off their elders and the whole gang goes down to the stream in the woods to buy ice cream from the stand run by Uncle Ali, and then sit down to eat it, dipping their feet merrily into the gurgling water.

The falchi appears in late November. Ulfet is seeing her for the first time, but Sharut, the middle sister and a big gossip, tells her about this woman from the neighboring village of Astara who hardly ever visits. In some ways, the woman looks like Mamali—maybe it’s the colorful scarf wrapped around her head—but she’s smaller, younger, and more composed. And if Mamali’s prominent features make her resemble a bird of prey, like a falcon, then the little falchi reminds Ulfet more of a fox.

When the woman enters the yard, the grown-ups greet her warmly, like an old friend. They seat her on a bench at the wooden table left there from the summer and bring her thyme tea, lumps of sugar, and jam. Later, they approach the guest one by one, hold their right palms out, and shyly ask questions. Even the men go. The falchi, it turns out, is a cheerful and chatty khanum—she’s quick to joke, drinks a lot of tea, and devours Mamali’s homemade apricot jam. Almost everyone leaves her smiling, though there are those who are unhappy. After some hesitation, Mamali herself puts some bills on the table and sits. Through the kitchen window where they stand, watching eagerly, Ulfet and Sharut catch the name of Maryam, whose wedding took place two months earlier. After the wedding, their older sister came home twice, both times in tears. Finally, she revealed the bruises on her shoulders, back, and hips to her sisters and mother—her husband was beating her every day but she had stayed quiet about it, not letting on, so as not to make a mockery of herself before the neighbors.

“I can’t keep living with him,” Maryam said, crying, each time her family got together in the kitchen. “I need a divorce!”

Mamali cut her off: “You’ll be dead before you come back here.”

The falchi holds Mamali’s palm in her hands for a long time and then starts speaking with a slight smile (Ulfet listens as hard as she can to make out the words): “He’ll die before her.” The falchi says something else but the girls don’t catch a word of it. Mamali’s face is like a stone, not giving anything away. Unable to restrain herself, Ulfet runs into the yard. Seeing her, Mamali jerks her hand away from the falchi, shouting: “Off with you! Fortune-telling isn’t for children!” But the falchi narrows her eyes.

“No, no, no, let’s see her. Don’t you worry, it’s free of charge.”

She looks at Ulfet’s palm for a few minutes, running her rough fingers over the lines. Mamali sits nearby and Ulfet can feel her mother’s anxiety: is she afraid that the fortune-telling will negatively affect the fate of her youngest, still unmarried, daughter? Finally, the falchi raises her eyes and says in a sweet, foxlike voice: “You’ll marry someone close to you, a friend, and live very far away. Your husband will be a bigshot. People will point at you and say: ‘That’s so-and-so’s wife!’ A happy fate. You’ll have”—another glance at her palm—“six children. Yes, six.”

Ulfet wants to ask whether she’ll become a doctor, a pediatrician, but Mamali quickly says “enough,” grabs Ulfet’s wrist, pulls her up, and sends her back inside. Ulfet shrugs and runs inside, where Sharut awaits, her face glowing with curiosity in the kitchen window, as round as a wheel of cheese.

3.

Sharut’s wedding is in the spring, four years after Maryam left the house.

Unlike the other sisters, Sharut never liked to study. Quite the opposite, she preferred sitting around and sleeping late, her head was always in the clouds, and for this reason—as if out of spite—she was always given the hardest chores in her parents’ home. Despite their differences in age and personality, Ulfet has always felt especially close to Sharut, much more so than to Mamali’s other children. Yes, with Sharut she has a real friendship—as much as two sisters of fourteen and eighteen can. The summer before last, Ulfet, at her peril, decided to cut off her long hair, which was usually plaited into a thick braid, the envy of all. To do so without asking Mamali’s permission was a bold decision. That day, she hurried home from school, hoping to run into her room before anyone noticed the haircut, but of course it didn’t work. It was Sharut who saved Ulfet from their mother’s wrath: ahead of their brothers and aunts, she ran into the yard, exposed herself to a wave of shrieks and beatings, and managed to drag her younger sister into the house, where she stood guard, not letting anyone get to Ulfet. Mamali eventually calmed down and even apologized, but from that point on the sisters knew they could count on one another.

This made it all the more painful for Ulfet when she could not repay the favor: she simply wasn’t home. A family from a neighboring village visited about Sharut’s engagement—the sisters had seen these people a few times at big events, but by no means knew them well. Their eldest son, Agil, an engineer and Sharut’s suitor, might even have been called handsome, except for one thing—a large white spot on his left eye.

Later, Sharut told Ulfet how she’d gathered up her courage and gone into the sitting room, where she wasn’t allowed without permission, and announced in front of all the matchmakers: “I won’t!”

Having somehow escorted the stunned guests out, Mamali locked her in the bedroom where no one could hear and gave her a severe beating. “So you don’t like the white spot on his eye? Think he’s ugly? He’s ugly, huh? And what are you, a beauty?!”

“And what am I, a beauty?” Sharut mimicked bitterly later that evening.

In time it became clear that her sister had actually been lucky. Agil turned out to be a kind, smart, and somewhat sarcastic guy who didn’t bother Sharut with prohibitions or jealousy, even during their engagement. The white spot on his eye, Agil said, was recent—a work injury at the factory, very unexpected, the doctors had done all they could. “Of course I was afraid,” Agil had said, “that no one would love me now, though my parents told me that was nonsense. Though how would they know? If you want to break off the engagement, that’s fine. I’ll help you. But let’s get to know each other first, all right?”

Sharut’s wedding takes place six months after her engagement. Ulfet has turned fifteen. Her older sister seems happy, full of anticipation, and crowds of strangers gather once again for the celebration, ready to scatter enough money over the heads of the newlyweds to cover both families’ expenses. As always. This time, Ulfet takes the role of a bridesmaid, carrying a mirror. According to tradition, the bride is brought to her husband’s house just before the ceremony amid music and singing, where she stops in front of the threshold of her future bedroom, dips three fingers in a bowl of honey, and smears it on the doorpost—so the life before her will be sweet. Usually the girl with the mirror leads this merry procession, bringing a gift into the bedroom—this mirror symbolizes protection against the evil eye and, after the wedding, must always remain nearby.

“I hope you’ll be happy,” says Ulfet, bending down to kiss her sister.

“Thank you,” says Sharut, smiling. In a white dress with a wide red ribbon around her waist, she looks unbelievably beautiful today. “I wish all the same for you.”

Normally Ulfet is terribly annoyed by the loud music at weddings, but this time she enjoys it. Maybe it’s her good mood. A white party tent has been pitched in the yard for dancing, and people stream through it to the street, the garden, the house—they flow ceaselessly, all over. The crowd looks to Ulfet like an upside-down sky full of noisy, multicolored birds—just the kind of image she sees when she lies on her back on a hill in the forest, folds her hands behind her head, and keeps staring, staring upward.

Now Ulfet runs back and forth between the tent and the house, carrying food at the request of Mamali and her older aunts, chatting with friends as she goes and, of course, making time to dance. “Oh, shaitan!” Her happy neighbors smile at her, pinching her cheeks, when, having kicked off her shoes, she breaks into a lezginka, as good as any of the village guys. Her feet, moving to the beat of the music, become nearly invisible, bolts of lightning. Her father claps and smiles along: he loves it when his daughters show off what they can do.

While dancing, Ulfet feels someone’s gaze upon her. She turns and notices her school friend Rasim, with whom she often played as a child. Rasim is all grown up now and has fallen hard for Ulfet’s school friend, while she, Ulfet, has had to play the role of messenger, passing love notes back and forth. But things aren’t looking good for the pair: Rasim’s family is very poor, and, from the moment of her daughter’s birth, the girl’s mother has been planning to marry her off to an extremely rich man. Because of this, the romance has had to be kept under lock and key.

But actually, Ulfet realizes, it’s not Rasim looking at her. It’s his brother Maksud. She’s only seen him a few times—he’s six years older and left years ago to study in Odessa, returning only rarely. When the news of his departure for school swept the village, Ulfet caught herself feeling a bit envious: Where had this guy learned Russian well enough to get into college in Russia? How had he managed it in their village? Not fair. Later, she remembered that Odessa isn’t in Russia, it was somewhere in Ukraine, but you could still study in Russian there.

Maksud, compared with fumbling Rasim, is intriguing: he’s tall and thin with tight curls, but seems cocky—he stares and stares at her, smiling and not even bothering to avert his eyes, though she’s noticed him. Is he drunk? Ulfet snorts and turns away, putting her shoes on and returning to her friends in the house.

In the kitchen, instead of her friends she finds Maryam. After a year’s seclusion, her sister is out in company for the first time; with her fresh face and long black lashes, she’s still beautiful and always attracts notice, though her belly is round again, which she tries to hide beneath her clothes. A year ago, Maryam’s eldest son, who was just two, died after a pot of boiling water turned over on him—at a crowded gathering like today’s. Although such things happened often enough in the village, people still talked behind Maryam’s back, calling her a bad, careless mother. But Maryam was beyond all the gossip—for a whole year, she’d been so stricken with grief that even Ulfet hadn’t been able to get through to her.

“See what he did?” Maryam asks, winking, strangely lighthearted, when her younger sister puts a plate of fried eggplant in front of her. “That older brother of your friend?”

“What?” Right away, Ulfet feels uncomfortable. Has everyone noticed Maksud looking at her and started to gab about it already?

Maryam goes on: “He went into the living room where our photographs are hanging. There are a few framed photos there, you know? On the wall. Well, he took one—yours!” Now she is actually laughing. Ulfet has a funny feeling of relief seeing her sister so cheerful. At least, she thinks to herself, something good is coming of this stupid conversation.

“I bet he’ll whisk you off to Odessa, now,” says Maryam, smiling. “Mahabbat—love.”

Ulfet shrugs. A cocky boy, just like she thought. Well, let him worship her photograph, then. What’s it to her?

4.

“No,” Mamali says curtly.

The fight has been going on for three weeks already. That’s when Ulfet decided once and for all that she wanted to go to the nursing college, and not in Lankaran, but in Baku: first of all, because she knows she’s unlikely to be taught much of anything in her small provincial town, and second, because she wants to be out of sight of her neighbors, who love nothing more in life than to gossip. Ulfet has given up on the idea of going to a university instead of a nursing college, and of studying to be a pediatrician rather than a nurse: she’s got to be realistic, and the college will take just two years, compared with five years at a university! Ulfet will definitely never get her mother to agree to the latter option, but with the former, she has a chance.

At least a slim one.

It helps that, around the same time, her older brother Jalal has moved to Baku with his family. They even have a guest bedroom, which Ulfet noticed on her first visit to the capital. Since childhood, she’s had an affectionate and trusting relationship with Jalal: even though he’s been mostly absent for many years, he loves to spoil his younger sister. Indeed, with age, he’s come to look more and more like a boisterous, good-natured Santa Claus who gives gifts to children on New Year’s Eve. Except that Jalal would never wear red—he hasn’t become that much of a city person.

Seizing this chance, Ulfet convinces her brother to let her stay with him if she gets into the college. His wife, tight-lipped and self-centered, is clearly unenthusiastic, but doesn’t oppose her husband. Nonetheless, the news that Mamali’s youngest daughter has decided to go study in Baku somehow spreads quickly through their village—much more quickly than Ulfet has counted on.

“She’s losing her mind!” Sharut says uneasily on the phone. There’s no need to ask who “she” is. From the very beginning, Ulfet has obviously feared Mamali’s reaction. But she thinks that her brother’s support and her excellent grades in high school will work in her favor. No matter how conservative Mamali is on the question of her daughter’s education, she is also very vain: if her youngest daughter manages to get into nursing college in the capital, this would at least bring up her value on the marriage market. And her older brother’s involvement will help protect her from the nasty rumors Mamali, like everyone in the village, fears most.

But this is all just in theory. In reality, Ulfet has spent three weeks trying to get through to her mother: with tears, hysterics, even threats. Mamali has failed to beat her into submission as she’s done in the past. Perhaps this is because of her bad legs, which serve her less and less. Or perhaps it’s because of Ulfet herself, who, after their first blow-up, runs into the yard where all the neighbors can hear, and starts tearing down the laundry on the clothesline, throwing it on the ground, and yelling: “Don’t you know what people will say?! That there’s something wrong with Mamali’s youngest daughter! Mamali’s crazy youngest daughter! She’s a lunatic, she’s insane! I’ll make sure everyone knows I’m crazy! The whole village will be talking about it! Everyone!”

Later, when Sharut and Farid ask what came over her, Ulfet doesn’t know what to say. She jokes that she was “possessed by a djinn,” but wonders if this actually might be true: that day, a wave of rage crashed down on her with a force she’d never before known. Deadly black fury. Scattering clean linens on the ground as though they were wet rags, Ulfet saw Maryam with bruises on her back and her dead child, she remembered Sharut before she’d been happy, and felt something else complex, heavy, and slippery that seemed to bite into her solar plexus. Maybe it was the sharp understanding that now was both her first and her only chance.

Jalal finally gives up on trying to help from afar and comes to the village. “What, Mama, you don’t trust me?” he repeats gently, day after day. Sometimes it even seems that Mamali hears him, nods, yields, softens. But the next morning it starts all over again. When Ulfet has already abandoned hope, help comes from an unexpected place—her father returns early from work. Usually at this time of year he’s in Russia selling flowers, vegetables, goat cheese, katyk, and farmer’s cheese, but the goods have gone faster than usual, and he decides not to linger in a foreign land. At home, listening to the arguments for and against, he shows some backbone regarding the children for the first time in Ulfet’s memory: with a single harsh word, he rejects his wife’s objections and tells his youngest daughter to go pack her things.

“Jalal will take care of you,” he says, nodding. “If he doesn’t, canını alaram—I’ll take his soul.”

Then he smiles.

Ulfet looks at her older brother, then at her father, and her gloomy, unhappy mother. She turns and goes to her room. There, standing in the doorway and looking at the narrow beds where her sisters once slept, at her desk, strewn with notebooks, books, and some pins and jewelry, she inhales the familiar smell of the dry floorboards, trying to calm her racing heart, and with each breath becoming more and more certain that no, no—she’s not going to cry.

5.

The yard is covered in blood.

There’s no moon in the sky, no voices in the forest. A barefoot woman in a turban sits on the wet ground. At her feet, unnaturally splayed, lies a limp body. The woman takes the body in her arms—it’s still alive and convulses, groans, trembles. One minute, three minutes. An hour. Blood streams down the woman’s palms—as the accompanying sound slowly grows quieter, weaker. The woman doesn’t seem worried, though. She just sits there. The dark night encloses this murderer and her victim, along with a single accidental witness. This person sits on the steps that lead into the house. And he can’t move. He too is shoeless and has left sticky dark footprints on the bare steps. Probably, he came out into the yard just a few minutes earlier.

This witness raises his hands slowly to make sure that his own throat hasn’t been cut. But his gaze rises involuntarily with his hands. The woman sitting on the ground looks at him, unblinking, and thick hot blood begins to run down his arms.

The day before the entrance exam, Ulfet calls her sister, complaining of insomnia.

“I’m so sick of these nightmares! As soon as I fall asleep, all sorts of filth creeps into my dreams.”

Sharut, who’s just been gushing about how, for the first time in her life, she can sleep in (her husband lets her stay in bed until noon, getting himself ready for work, instead of waking her at dawn), falls anxiously silent. Then she speaks up, uncertainly: “So you haven’t heard about Mamali’s gurban . . . ?”

Then the words spill out of Sharut’s mouth, she trips over them, unable to keep them in: A few days ago, after their father left for work, Mamali went to the local mullah and performed a gurban ritual—the sacrifice of a lamb. The animal’s throat was slit, accompanied by a prayer, and its meat, as required, was distributed to the poor. A person who initiated this ritual could perform it for no reason—out of the goodness of his heart—or could make the sacrifice in exchange for a niyyət—heart’s desire.

“Her wish was that you fail the exam,” Sharut blurts out. And then, right away, she falls silent. Ulfet understands that her sister is ashamed for telling the secret, but she can’t take it back. Feeling nausea rise in her throat, Ulfet makes some joke, quickly ends the conversation, and then lies face-down on her bed to muffle her voice in the pillow.

Then she begins to yell.

6.

Obviously, she doesn’t get in anywhere.

The exam in literature—an essay—is harder than expected, and she gets the one question she hasn’t prepared. Unsurprising that Ulfet, with her terrible insomnia, gets the lowest score. The good results in chemistry don’t help—no, there’s too much competition. Things might have gone differently had the principal of her high school passed along her certificate of excellence in advance. This ordinarily would be sent on Ulfet’s behalf at the end of the school year, but if it had been submitted early, with the other application documents, the entrance exam committee would have allowed Ulfet to take an oral exam in literature instead of the written one. But the principal demanded a bribe for something that Ulfet was entitled to by law and so she refused.

She gets home to Lankaran and chats with her mother as though nothing has happened. And a couple weeks later, at dinner with her family, she says casually: “I’ll get in next year, with God’s help.” Her father simply nods: “Good, balam, go ahead, it’s in the hands of the Almighty. But you’ll need some work experience”—and he keeps eating heartily, scooping up the hot plov full of fatty lamb chunks with his fingers. He always eats with the sincerest pleasure. Meanwhile, Ulfet keeps a close watch on Mamali, who evasively, assiduously, avoids her eyes and whispers “God be merciful” under her breath.

During Ulfet’s short trip to Baku, her mother’s health deteriorated considerably. It’s even harder for Mamali to walk now, she sits a lot, her breath is labored. Farid tells Ulfet that, when he went up to their tiny attic recently to fix a leak in the roof, he found some rotten eggshells covered in Arabic script. They had some kind of strange garbage smell, so he quickly gathered them in a towel and burned them in the yard. The last time he was in the attic, just six months earlier, the empty eggshells weren’t there—he’d have noticed. Still, that was around the time that Mamali’s legs started to go.

They suspect the neighbors, but, even more so, their father’s eldest sister—she’s always been a jealous, conniving person with the evil eye, and sometimes still comes around, clearly wishing them ill. Despite everything that has happened, Ulfet pities her mother: She’s aging right before Ulfet’s eyes, the world she knows with its old rules is receding into the past, and every day she has less and less strength for the incomprehensible new one.

To get into the nursing college next year, Ulfet needs at least six months of work experience. So, with her father’s help, she gets a job at the state flower farm near their home—it’s right by the railroad track and the woods where she played as a child. At the state farm, she works in giant greenhouses: makes sure weeds aren’t growing, looks after huge fragrant roses, tulips and gladioli, and carefully packs flowers into containers that are sent directly to Moscow by train. Ulfet likes this life among the flowers—they transport her to another world, completely unlike the one that awaits her outside the borders of the farm. What’s more, she enjoys earning her own money and saving a little. “You could buy something for the house once in a while,” her mother says sometimes, mildly reproachful, but Ulfet pretends not to hear.

One day walking home, she sees someone waiting for her across the railroad tracks. Ulfet is frightened at first, but then recognizes Maksud: he looks older, stands straighter, and is more tanned than before, but his smile and curly hair are the same. When Ulfet gets close enough, Maksud greets her and holds out a small box of chocolates from Lviv—exceedingly rare in their little town.

“I’ll walk with you for a while,” Maksud half-asks, half-states, squinting his eyes meaningfully. His eyelashes are black and long like a girl’s. She didn’t notice this before. “Not all the way home, so your parents don’t see, but almost. If you don’t mind.”

The annoyance that she felt a couple years ago is gone. Ulfet turns the gift over in her hands—a nice gift—and puts it in her purse. Once home, she’ll say it’s a gift from a coworker. She looks straight at Maksud, drawing out the silence, then says nonchalantly: “I don’t mind.”

7.

The rest of the year flies by.

Two months after they first meet, Maksud returns to Odessa. But not before revealing to Ulfet that he’ll probably be sent to Siberia after graduation—to help open a wine and vodka factory in a small industrial town close to Irkutsk. Ulfet has heard almost nothing about Irkutsk, so, like the names of all Russian towns, it means little to her. Still, she knows it’s far away and he has prospects there, so she tries to encourage Maksud, whose parents are skeptical.

“My dad says I’m living in a dreamworld!” Maksud says with a sneer during their calls. “That’s me, a dreamer. I want such big things. And meanwhile we have so little that my family can’t even come to yours with a khoncha.” In these moments the tone of his voice changes sharply. “But I’ll make sure they come soon.”

A khoncha is the name of an elaborate pastry arrangement. Without it, in the countryside, there can be no matchmaking. A family that brings a skimpy khoncha to a girl’s home risks mockery, and no one wants that. But Ulfet isn’t particularly concerned about such formalities—they’ve been discreet, but the whole village already knows that Maksud has taken notice of her, which means that, on her end, it’s as good as done. Mamali is of course unhappy that the young man’s family is taking so long with the official engagement but, nonetheless, has already turned away other, less fortunate, suitors for the hand of her youngest daughter.

Moreover, Maksud isn’t against Ulfet continuing her education. He can’t afford a costly wedding in the next couple of years, not to mention an engagement party, so Ulfet can do as she likes. Besides, nursing college is considered an excellent type of education in the Soviet Union, especially for girls.

A month before the entrance exams she quits her job at the farm and lets Jalal know that she’ll be coming back to Baku. Her brother doesn’t object. This time her father, who is still home, volunteers to take her to the city himself. When she gets into the car, he suddenly grins from ear to ear and announces: “Djanali, the principal of your school called me. He wanted to pass along the reference letter, with no bribe. He’s had it for a year. I picked it up this morning to surprise you.”

And he holds out a folder with the document.

Mamali stands in front of the house with a pitcher of water, leaning on the wall. As the car carrying her husband and daughter pulls out of the yard, she splashes water after them—for a smooth road ahead.

8.

The chemistry exam is written—difficult, but still more or less OK. I’ll definitely get a three or a four, Ulfet thinks afterward. The literature exam that she failed so disgracefully the year before is in four days, and all four nights Ulfet is once again sleepless: on the first night the dreams about the bloody yard, the faceless woman, and her own cut throat all come back. She awakes in pitch darkness, clutching her neck, coughs violently, chokes, and tries to calm down.

No way Mamali has been performing that ritual again. No way, no way, no way, no way.

She wants to call Sharut and ask what’s going on at home, but it’s the middle of the night. It would be rude. So instead of calling her sister, Ulfet goes to the kitchen, gets out a glass, pours herself some water from a pitcher, and sips it, trying not to make noise and wake her brother’s family. She goes out onto the balcony. It overlooks a public road and there are few cars at this time, but the bright streetlights and the aroma of the southern night calm her down a bit. I’ve studied it all, Ulfet tells herself firmly. I know all there is to know. I don’t believe in any of that stuff!

I don’t believe in that stuff, Ulfet repeats to herself, as she walks back into the kitchen in the dark, not turning on the lights, and feeling around for the salt dispenser on the table. I don’t believe in it, she repeats as she finds the salt dispenser, heavy and full, and pours a mound of salt into her palm. I don’t believe in it, Ulfet repeats as she walks back onto the balcony, shuts her eyes, squeezes her hand closed, so as not to lose a grain, and waves her fist around her head.

“Göz vuranın gözü çıxsın,” Ulfet whispers. “Let he who gives the evil eyes lose his eye. Let he who gives the evil eyes lose his eye.”

With the same hand she taps her right shoulder blade, then carefully approaches the edge of the balcony, opens her palm, and stares as the grains of salt fly down in a white cloud, dissolving into the darkness.

The one who watches is still sitting on the steps to the house but can now look around.

This is the yard of his childhood: a wooden gazebo, a table, an outbuilding attached to the right for summer suppers; blackberry and wild rose bushes growing at every step.

Now he can clearly see the face of the woman sitting before him—and it’s not the face he expected. Father’s older sister looks at him, smiling, her white teeth shining brightly like stars on earth. Her eyes, always small and narrowed, are now completely gone. Two bottomless wells of darkness yawn in their place.

But he recognizes her.

“Salt!” the woman says, grinning. “Would you look at that, she remembered the salt!”

He panics. He tries to recite the spell, but his lips won’t cooperate. Göz vuranın . . . Göz vura . . .

“Good for her,” the woman says suddenly. “Smart girl.”

And she stops smiling.

The questions she gets are about the poet Samed Vurgun. Ulfet knows his work inside out, even recites his longest poem with ease. Thanks to the certificate of excellence that her father passed along, she gets to do an ordinary dictation instead of writing an essay. Later, she hardly remembers what it was about, but the capital letters, colons, dashes, and painstakingly checked commas stick in her mind. Could she have made some mistake? She can’t have, no, she has a knack for grammar.

She’s supposed to get the results in a week. Ulfet doesn’t know how she’ll survive it. Seeming to intuit her sister’s anxiety, Sharut comes to visit from Lankaran (once again, Jalal’s wife isn’t happy about having guests, but only her sour expression reveals it). As usual, Sharut brings the latest gossip: Maryam is pregnant again, Mamali fell in the yard and can hardly walk, Farid will be getting married soon to that girl from the factory, remember her? That awful little girl you can’t stand?

“I think she’s knocked up!” Sharut says, sniggering. “At the engagement party she was sucking her stomach in so hard she turned red like a tomato. And remember your friend Rasim?”

“What about him?” Ulfet hasn’t seen him in a long time. And he’s not the only one.

“Oh, nothing. Got engaged, too,” Sharut says, shrugging. “To a different girl. Your friend’s mother turned him down in the end. ‘I won’t give my daughter to a pauper!’ Just like we thought. They were forbidden to see each other; the girl cried her eyes out. He nearly tried to steal her, but nothing came of it. The end.”

The end.

Ulfet starts running a high fever. She feels like a balloon that’s been stuck with a needle, and can no longer walk or stand. When she closes her eyes, there are clouds, trees, and, strangely, dead dogs swimming before her. Lots and lots of dead dogs. So, when the strong, herbal aroma of smoke enters the room, she thinks that it too is a dream.

“Inhale, inhale,” someone whispers in Sharut’s voice. “I’m burning herbs to protect against the evil eye, üzərlik . . . Inhale the smoke, come on. Inhale!”

Ulfet obediently inhales.

The woman coughs from the acrid smoke: she no longer looks calm, nor mocking. And the witness no longer has to sit still. He can move around the yard looking for a way out, but each time he thinks he’s found one, it turns into black, boggy nothingness. Then he looks down and sees that the dark, hot liquid dripping from the murder victim’s corpse is covering his thighs, arms, and chest.

“Blood,” says the woman, when she’s able to stop coughing, “demands blood.”

The witness turns and notices that her face is trembling and changing. Instead of Father’s elder sister, the falchi sits before him—that old village fortune-teller. He recognizes her but for some reason feels no fear.

“Blood requires blood,” the falchi repeats. Turning away, she leans over the body of her first victim. The witness finally realizes that it’s not a person, but an animal. A dead lamb. The woman puts her hands beneath the lamb’s wool palm side up, and when she pulls them out, there are six gemstones that look like rubies in her hands—three in each palm.

“Blood demands blood,” the woman repeats. And unhurriedly, as though in slow motion, she starts to squeeze her left hand into a fist.

Immediately, the witness feels a cramping pain deep in his belly. He cries out but doesn’t hear any sound. The woman opens her fist: there’s nothing there now, except for blood.

“I didn’t take any payment for her daughter,” the witness hears, “but for this mother’s stupid acts I’ll now take a great price. For her günah.”

Her sin.

Just as slowly, the woman starts to squeeze her right hand into a fist—the witness’s pain becomes so unbearable that he falls to the ground. The sour smell of blood hits his nose. The woman opens her fist—it too is covered in blood, but one red stone remains. The falchi looks at it with mild surprise—the witness observes her surprise—and then starts to laugh. The falchi laughs with her round, empty eyes dripping; she laughs silently, then deafeningly, at the top of her lungs. Finally, without warning, she jerks her hand and throws the stone in his direction.

He jumps to catch it . . .

“Can you talk?” Jalal asks cautiously. Her brother is standing in the doorway to her room with the phone, unsure whether to come in. Ulfet has spent the last two days with a fever in complete delirium—her temperature rose to a hundred and four degrees, she had trouble breathing, and then, according to Sharut, she even began to bleed heavily. They called the emergency line and doctors came to examine her. They gave her some kind of injection, after which she stopped thrashing around and started to get better.

Mamali calls her for the first time—maybe she’s heard about the illness, or maybe she’s found out that Ulfet has gotten into the nursing college. Ulfet couldn’t go get the results herself, but her brother went and got them for her. A three plus in chemistry and a solid five in literature. She’s passed! Ulfet nods, takes the phone, and answers her mother, not getting up from the bed. After a long lecture about health and how she needs to take care of herself, Mamali finally says, with some warmth in her voice:

“Congratulations, balam. You got what you wanted.”

“Against all odds,” Ulfet wants to say.

Mamali continues: “Maksud’s parents visited yesterday, brought a khoncha and asked for your hand. He’s being sent to Siberia, apparently. Did you know? To Russia. They won’t be able to afford a wedding for a long time . . . So, you’ll have a long engagement.”

You’ll live far away.

“How old were you,” Ulfet asks, surprising herself, “when you got engaged to Dad?”

She is met by an uncomfortable silence. Such questions, no matter how innocent, are taboo in their family—considered indecent and closed to discussion with unmarried children, especially daughters. But now that Ulfet’s status has changed, she has the right to try.

Finally, Mamali gives a reluctant reply:

“Twelve.”

Ulfet feels a strange prickle in her chest, as though a needle has passed through her skin. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine her mother’s face as a child: vaguely familiar, but completely youthful, not yet haggard from anger or anxiety. Something very much like her own face.

There are no photographs of her at that age, the thought occurs to Ulfet. Nor of me.

“And when you got married?” Ulfet asks. “How old were you then?”

“Fourteen.” Now that the initial shock has passed, Mamali answers without hesitation. “My family wanted us to get married sooner, but your father’s grandfather died. We had to put it off.”

They are both silent for a few seconds.

“Times were different then,” Mamali says suddenly. Now she sounds almost guilty. “Everything was simpler. Clearer. Things aren’t like that now.” She thinks a little and adds: “Maksud will be leaving for a very long time, balam. Hopefully no one gives the two of you the evil eye before the wedding.”

Ulfet thinks about the lingering cramps deep in her belly. About the falchi, who took five of the six rubies promised to her, but for some reason left one. About the two years of long-anticipated study ahead, and about Mamali, who is now sincerely congratulating her, despite having prayed that her youngest daughter’s life would be different. Would Mamali forgive herself if she found out about Ulfet’s dreams? Would she believe the falchi’s words about punishment suffered for a mother’s sins? Or would the whole story go in one ear and out the other, just a folly and coincidence?

Somehow, Ulfet knows the answer.

“I don’t believe in all that stuff, Mama,” Ulfet says, smiling broadly into the phone. “And you shouldn’t either. It’s going to be fine.”