The Snake Stone

16

Widow Matalya’s brow furrowed and uncreased as she made her count. She champed her toothless gums together, and the hairs trembled on a large black mole on her cheek. Now and again her fingers twitched. Widow Matalya did not mind, because she was asleep.

She dreamed, as usual, about chickens. There were forty of them, leghorns and bantams, scratching about in the dust of the Anatolian village where she had been born more than seventy years ago, and the chickens in her dream were exactly the same as the chickens she had tended as a young woman, when Sipahi Matalya had ridden through her yard and sent them all squawking and flapping onto the roof of their own coop. Sipahi Matalya had taken her to Istanbul, of course, because he was only a summer sipahi, and they had shared a very happy marriage until he died; but now that her children were grown she thought very often of those forty birds. Awake, she wondered who had eaten them. Asleep, she checked that they were all safe. It was good to be young again, with all that ahead of one.

Twenty-nine. Thirty. She scattered a little more grain and watched them pecking in the dirt. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Or had she gone wrong? The noise of the chickens’ beaks hitting the earth was confusing her. Bam! Bam! Thirty-two, thirty-three.

The lips stopped moving. Widow Matalya’s eyes opened. With a sigh she levered herself ponderously off the sofa, adjusted her headscarf, and went to the door.

“Who is it?”

“It is Yashim, hanum,” a voice called. “I have no water.”

Widow Matalya opened the door. “This is because the spigot in the yard is blocked, Yashim efendi. Someone is coming. We must be patient.”

“I have my bowl,” Yashim said, holding it up. “I’ll go and find a soujee in the street. Can I get some water for you, hanum?”

Yashim was gone for half an hour, and he came back looking exasperated.

“You needn’t worry about the standpipe. It’s the whole street,” he said. “Plenty of water beyond the Kara Davut. Here, I filled your bowl.”

“Thank you, Yashim efendi. I will send the man away if he comes. They will fix the pipes, and tomorrow we shall have water again, inshallah.”

“Inshallah, hanum,” Yashim replied.

He was a good man, the widow Matalya reflected as she closed the door.