Towards The Summit

The End

I can’t write deeper introduction on this strange incident so I will just write the thing. Sema's door was knocked melodically, something she got used to. When she opened it with a box of cookies in one hand, she couldn’t make two little faces out in the darkness for a minute. Then, two high-pitched voices in unison came from the  the ground:

“We  brought you beautiful flowees, can we have cookie?” a girl and boy around age four spoke and giggled quietly.

They were bare-naked. The boy covered his genitals with both hands and the girl looking to the opposite direction handed Sema two small pieces of branches. That was the most unexpected thing she was expecting to see. She automatically gave them the cookie box. The girl took two cookies and gave the box back to her. “Thank you!” they sang in unison, turned back and disappeared in the dark.

She was telling me this one day for the ten thousandth time but it was the first time we were not laughing. Isn’t it unbelievable how I can not and will not see the meaning of this picture of naked kids asking for cookie in exchange for dead branches? It’s almost like a famous portrait made by a renaissance artist. It could be hanging on the walls of a famous museum somewhere in Europe, that’s visited by hundreds of tourists everyday. Even if I go there one day, look at this picture for hours and after being told the purpose of the portrait by a guide, I will not understand and most of the people will not, either. They will just know the story but the meaning will not pass through their skin and join their souls.

***

Her following onedays included additional careers as a midwife and a farmer. The schools started in late october in villages around Sivas. Kids spent the harvest season helping their families and Sema preferred joining her students in the rye. Her parents, obviously, were not thrilled when they read on her rare letters that she was not coming in summer. “It was a disappointment for me to learn the phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was actually true. I didn’t worry about it much, though. I had tones of things to do I should say those days were the happiest days of my life even when I realized I stopped being the little daughter of my mom and dad long ago” she told me.

I met Sema’s mother and father on the last new year’s eve. They were exactly the stereotypical grandma with cookies and grandpa with a newspaper on hand. Although, I didn’t agree on her idea about retirement from being someone’s child, I couldn’t find the right spot to interrupt her and share my thoughts. That was kind of the place I got lost in the story, an awkward movement where I seemed to listen but, in fact, I was trying to construct perfect sentences in my mind.

She hooked me again with her oneday when she strangely ended up being a midwife. She didn’t remember how it all started. The midwife of the village died two days before a woman who was pregnant to triplets began crying in the middle of an December night when the snow was a meter tick. The triplets were about two weeks beyond their schedule Sema’s husband said. There is no need to say that Sema’s husband was a male and that’s why when he arrived to the woman’s house he was not accepted inside. Sema was with him to help the relatives and calm the crowd that was gathering around the house. Eventually, nobody was doing anything, they couldn’t take her the hospital because of the snow. They obviously didn’t have time to call a midwife from another village. Sema rushed into the small bedroom full of ,basicly, women who were just staring at the crying woman and shouting out prayers. “ı was the only person who could get the thing done. However, it wouldn’t be honest to say that I did it. The babies came out by themselves and then only thing I had to do was cutting the umbilical cord which was some work that made me feel glad about my choice of profession.” She atteneded three more labours until she came back to Istanbul.

The last one day she told me about was when she was on the top of the mountains. It was toward the end of her second school year, she really took the boundaries of education to the top. None of the villagers knew what was on the top. Honestly, they never thought about it before so Sema invited all of the kids in the village to a school trip to the top. She drove the bus full of kid herself, the kids stopped talking and sat quietly as she drove up into the fog and the earth was erased slowly. Even sunlight couldn’t get through the fog. When they got out of the minivan, everything was silent. As if they were standing on the only piece of territory left in the earth, they stared at the infinite space and listen to each other’s fast breaths. Then, they looked at the ground and saw the smoke. The smoke was coming from different spots on the ground that were about twenty meters apart. It was hard to believe that this place was discovered by human kind but it was hard to believe, as well, that nobody had been here.

People had been living there for ever. They lived in the caves and the smoke was coming from the chimneys which those people put up in the caves. People of this primitive settlement welcomed sema and her students and invited them to their cave-homes which wasn’t much different than apartments we live in today, only the walls were not steep and it was  much darker inside. They didn’t have electricity but they constructed a sewage system. A new continent was discovered but this time, the people who discovered it had gone by afternoon and they never came back. Sema sometimes thinks about the mountains and wonders ob the continent still remains unknown to everyone but her and the kids who discovered it with her.

Her approval from T.C. Ministry of Education came one month before her husband’s obligatory duty ended. She was paid one month salary and resigned.

They left the village in July, 1985. The  day she settled down she was glad not to see her students who branched to different parts of Turkey to continue their education. Most of her farewell crowd was the parents of her students who were more thankful for Sema’s presence than they were proud of their kids. Mothers prapered them chicken soup for the travel which she wanted to refuse but couldn’t.

After a short research she did before she left, she knew that Şarkışla was a village where only the men were allowed to wear coat and chickens were sacrificed for blest people.  

At this moment we’re sitting in the kitchen she is smoking and reading exam papers. I am looking forward to going back to the living room. I am almost freezing so I can not stand up close the window. I can not tell her, either because I don’t want to distract. I guess I am typing not to fall a sleep.

I am thinking about myself and my recent goal of achieving selflessness, a combination that’s disturbing me. I should be thinking about what Sema is feeling. This is her story after all. As I am trying to edit this story, I see that I have a habit of putting the subject at the beginning of the sentences. I can not undo it.  See what I did there? How important is the subject?

I see lots of subjects, people, around me who are very successful and full of selves. They look down to objects, other people. Or maybe I think they do because I want to convince myself that I am a better person. And the previous sentence proves that I am as egoist as those people I am talking about. Now, I am disturbed again. Why am I writing a ten page long story instead of four pages? Am I trying to prove something? I could be finished by now, doing what? Reading? Or doing something I hate?

I hate hating things. You hate something? You think you are more important than the thing you hate because it doesn’t deserve your love.

I want to take my self off and hang it in the wardrobe but I am afraid of other selves that will pile up and crease mine. Besides, it’s too cold.