‘Hey! Hey!’ An Armenian priest was stooping over Ibrahim, shouting, and rubbing his hands and face. They were at the edge of an icefield, high in the mountains of Hakkari. Around them the snow lay light on the rocks, the wind catching and blowing it down towards the valley. The sun was thin and pale behind wispy gray cloud. It was perhaps noon. Hajji Ibrahim opened his eyes, blinked, sat up, and stared out in the distance, trying to recollect his thoughts. The vardapet sat down beside him and pulled a blanket over him.
‘Who are you? Where am I? Where are the others?’ After a moment Hajji Ibrahim spoke, in a blank, monotone voice, to no one in particular. He weakly waved his arms about, then sat back against the stone. Vardapet Gevorg replied, ‘We, my companions and I, were in a village on the lower slopes of this mountain. We are passing through these cursed hills, on our way to Erchitzian, on account of a rebellion among the Kurds south of Bitlis. The khan of Hakkari is—never mind though. I am Vardapet Gevorg, and this is Vardapet Shiroyan. Over there is a boy from the village, a Mehmed I think. We are in the midst of the lands of the khan of Hakkari, though I am not sure where exactly we are, to be honest. We became lost two days ago in a snowstorm and only by the grace and providence of God we found our way into a village near here.’
‘The mountains of Hakkari? How—how did I arrive here? Are you speaking the truth? Swear to me on the Gospel sent down from God that you are speaking the truth!’
‘I swear to you! To the east of here are the lands of the Persian shah, I am quite certain. The road we were following crossed another path coming in from the east, and some days ago, before the snowstorm, we met a group of peddlers who had only the day before been forced to pay a toll to exit the Safavi lands, of which they complained for quite some time to us… Whether shah or sultan has any writ in these lands, I do not know. Some strength greater than either seems to be about, though. So it feels, at least. I am not sure…’
Hajj Ibrahim blinked, and nodded. ‘Your sense is right, I am afraid. But you would not believe what I have seen. I do not believe what I have seen, but I am certain of one thing. This morning I was in the hills north of Halab, I swear to you on our Prophet and upon the exalted Qur’an. My companions and I—though I do not know whither they have gone—took refuge in a cave from bedouin. Then—then I awoke in a place full of terror, a well of hell, beyond all story and knowledge… But I will not speak further of it here. I do not know how I arrived here, I do not know where my companions are… We take refuge in God… a well of hell…’ He sat back and began to shiver violently. Gevorg motioned to Shiroyan and the two lifted Ibrahim up, his hands trembling, his legs barely able to move. They noticed that it seemed as if all the color had drained from his face and his hands. ‘How… why… you came?’ He muttered as they bore him down off the boulder field to the edge of the scraggly tree line, below which the boy Mehmed was now waiting with one of their horses.
‘We saw a fantastic light exploding and enveloping the mountain, whirling around it all night. In the morning I had to come and see; it is a habit of mind to seek out strange and rare things, you see. So we struggled up from the village and came to this place, and saw you—and tongues of blue flame up above, higher on the cliffs and the ice. It was… ungodly. Never have I seen such a thing, or heard tell of it save in stories. My grandmother used to tell me of such things, but only in fun, or so I thought…’
They gingerly lifted Ibrahim onto the horse, and he slumped forward and weakly grasped the animal’s neck. Then, slowly, they worked back down the mountain, retracing their tracks in the snow, the trees growing taller and darker, the snow denser and heavier. On and on they went, retracing their steps, though it seemed as if the time needed had doubled since their first passing. The sun was setting. Behind them Vardapet Shiroyan could have sworn that he heard shrieks and moans in the blackening forest, but he chose not to mention them to the others—fear lay on all well enough. Night fell, but the moon was bright, and lit the snowy forests and wastes in an erie glow. Two hours after night had fallen, the temperature dropping rapidly, they reached the edge of the village. It huddled along a precipitous ridge plunging down from the icy peaks behind, the two or three streets—paths, really—threading the village dropping down endless steps and stairs, the houses all but piled one upon another, like terraces. The boy Mehmed, as they drew nearer to the village, had suddenly bolted and run home, leaving the two vardapets and the barely conscious merchant alone.
The village was completely silent, and every door was locked, with only tiny glimmers of light coming from under the cracks. The windows were all locked shut. They could see Mehmed’s tracks disappear into the fourth house from the edge of the village, but despite knocking repeatedly no one answered, even so much as to shoo them away—a marked contrast from the hospitality, if someone bemused, of the very same people earlier in the day. What had changed?
By now they were quite tired, and cold, and the horse was limping, exhausted from the snow. They furiously banged on every door, slogging through the snow banks from house to house, yelling and cursing, growing more frantic with fear and frustration, even as their bodies burned and ached, their fingers and faces bitter and cold. No one would open, nor even make a sound from within. At one house they heard furious whispers and a low wail, then silence. In frustration, they returned to the center of the village, an irregular meydan where two roads—paths, really—intersected. They eased Haci Ibrahim down from his mount and let him rest against the saddle bags, but as they did, the horse turned wild with fright and bolted into the night. Vardapet Gevorg threw up his hands in desperation, but as he did, he recalled the tiny village shrine, up on a knoll at the back of the village. Perhaps they could force their way within and stay there for the night?
So, lifting Haci Ibrahim to his feet and leading him behind them, they pushed up the hill to the shrine of the village saint, an Ereklı Dede, a holy man of some distant or not-so-distant past. It was a half-crumbling domed box of a structure, the dome barely visible in the heaps of snow, gnarled old fir trees hunched around the walls, a thin light streaming through a mostly covered-over window. Someone was inside. They pounded furiously on the door, and, against hope, it opened. A hunched-over old man, a dervish of some sort, wearing headgear stood in the doorway, his tongue lolling and his hair wild and disheveled. Fear was in his eyes. He stared at them with his wild eyes, then cried: ‘In the name of God, the Forty Men of the Unseen, our Master’s herd of holy deer, and the Green One, enter, you’re no spirits, no! Well, in you go, now!’ The old man slammed the door shut behind them, bolted it, and paced about the interior of the shrine, muttering imprecations and jumbled Arabic-sounding formulas all the while, swinging his hands back and forth, his long matted hair swaying.
After a few moments of pacing, interspersed with long intense gazes at the guests, he turned to face them and cried out in a loud and high pitched voice, ‘They’ve awoken! My shaykh, God enlighten his spirit-face, yes, yes, foresaw ‘em, he did, in the world of dreams one night, he saw… Listen to me! It was terrible, terrible, we take refuge in the Almighty! They came last night, at midnight, right at midnight. Took a whole family, I swear, a whole family, just walked right through the door, it was locked and all. We found them in the morning, all of ‘em as white as fresh linens, looking like they’d seen Shaytan himself, worse maybe. Not dead. Not alive either. Breathing, sitting up, but that was it. I pricked each one of them, I did, with a needle, just blood came out, blood turned all white, I swear on the grave of our shaykh Ereklı Dede! Then we found the goat—it was inside out, would you believe me! Insides all on the outside, and not a lick of blood, but walking around, silent as death, just the back of its eyes going back and forth looking at us. One of the locals went crazy seeing it, went after it with a big old blade, lopped the head clean off. You know what happened?’ At this he positively jumped up and down, his dirty long hair sloshing from side to side, grinning and grimacing by turns. ‘Goat just hopped around, guts swinging this and that a way, and butted the fellow with his stub of a neck, you know, marrow and veins and skin poking up, and—hey presto! Just popped his head right back on, took off for the wilds, skipping and prancing and making nary a bleat. Silent as death, I say. Same as the family they came for. I mean, they took off to, we haven’t seen them since. Awful, just awful!’
He fell silent, and retreated to a little alcove at the back of the shrine, the noise of his shuffling in some books or loose papers coming dimly from behind the wooden sepulchre. The vardapets and the merchant had by now sat down and positively slumped against the wall, their heads spinning and aching, silently soaking in the warmth of the charcoal brazier the old man had burning next to his mattress, which was itself wedged between a wall and the tomb of the saint. He quite clearly lived here, tending the shrine and attending to the spiritual needs of the villagers. A couple of candles were burning down on a stone at one end of the tomb, which was itself overlaid with a beautiful green fabric interlaced with designs of flowers and trees. The ceiling was low and close, and the rafters were crammed with deer antlers, the skulls of birds, bits of talismanic paper and votive rags, all sooted with black, some deeply, some slightly, from years of candles burning and the dervish’s brazier in the winter. Coffee paraphernalia littered one corner, while in another there were a couple of pieces of bread, a jug of water, and what looked like some dried fruits, the dervish’s meager diet, not doubt. The dervish returned, clutching some pages, which he deposited in front of his exhausted guests. ‘Bread? Coffee?’ he asked, and they accepted the bread, and some water, asking if perhaps there were anything more for the clearly ill merchant. The dervish seemed quite thrilled by this request for some reason, as he had a small hearth and enough cooking things to make some soup. Before he did, he motioned to the just deposited pages. ‘Read! Read!’ The vardapets picked them up, but they were all written in Arabic, which they did not know. They could decipher the vivid, if rather crude, illustrations though: in them, dark spirits rose from the earth, their visages followed in consecutive pages by images of humans and animals turned topsy-turvy and rendered in horrifying, unnatural colors and shapes. Finally, on a page at the bottom of the heap, was the image of a great seething void, Arabic magical phrases and numbers and prayers scribbled in minuscule hands all around the margins, confining the foul being to the center of the page. Vardapet Gevorg shivered, and began to repeat a prayer under his breath.
Haci Ibrahim had barely managed to stay awake once he settled onto the ground of the shrine, his back against a thin bolster, the cold melting out of his bones. Only the sharp pain of hunger and thirst held him back, his mind a tangle of sensations and barely cogent. He gathered very little of what the dervish said, his words coming and fading, but anyway he already knew everything, having seen it, seen it all in a moment, a counter-revelation, an inner experience yes but a strange and infernal one, for which he came up short in explanations that comforted him at all. We take refuge in God… The two vardapets were chattering in their funny tongue… What strange colors, what strange shapes overhead, these mountain shrines, so interesting… he lifted his head as one of the vardapets gave him water to drink and some bread and dried fruit to eat, he slowly chewed, tasted every particle his mind following every bite back into cosmic origins, divine oneness, how tired he was, so tired… a little of the hot soup, his throat burned, but that was all…
In his sleep he passed over Mount Kaf, gliding, like a crane or stork, his heart quiet and peaceful. Coming to rest on a cypress tree beyond the world, he found himself reciting odd lines of verse, which he had never heard and which followed no rules or order he knew in waking life.
There is a river of fire before the Throne. There is a river of stars being born.
There is a basin of holy boiling blood. There is a fountain of dying stars.
There is a river of the flaming interiors of hearts being transfigured and transfixed
By His gaze, the force that quickens and wrecks every world in every configuration,
In every spin of the dervish’s dance a billion worlds are born on other planes.
The contours past place, his heart became inscribed with the Divine Names
A map not scribed by hands, ‘this’ and ‘that’ passing away, passing away…
When Haci Ibrahim awoke it was well into the morning, but the snow was coming down again, big heavy flakes now, only the almost silent sound of snow on snow filtering under the door through the window. The two vardapets were soundly sleeping, wrapped in colorful Turkman blankets. Haci Ibrahim found that he too had been wrapped in such a blanket. It smelled of horses and distance. His head ached, the un-sound of the snow was almost too much, it was too quiet. The dervish was awake, or at least he was sitting up, cross-legged, but he was silent. His lips were moving, wordlessly. Haci Ibrahim watched him, wondering under the pressure of his throbbing head. He stirred a little, and asked himself silently whether there was coffee to be had here. The dervish opened his until then closed eyes and spoke, looking directly into Haci Ibrahim. ‘Yes, yes, we’ll drink and be merry soon, soon, my son. And then!’ The dervish stopped speaking for a moment, his eyes dancing. ‘Then, then my son, you’re in for a show! Yes, quite a show. The saints are coming! The saints are coming! A whole host of ‘em—just you wait!’
Haci Ibrahim had no idea what the wild dervish meant about the coming of the saints, though little of what had happened over the last few days—or was it weeks, or months, or years?—made much sense to him. ‘My son! My son!’ The dervish was now standing, positively dancing about with joy or glee, and gesturing at Haci Ibrahim, which caused the vardapets to awake and stir. ‘Look out the door, go, now, look!’ Ibrahim slowly lifted himself, thinking it best to humor their host. The blanket stilled wrapped around himself, for the shrine was quite cold, he pushed open the door, snowflakes gathering about his head and gently whitening the red and yellows of the blanket. Silence without. But the space beyond the shrine was not empty. Not by far. Above the pillowing snow banks, as silent as the fallen snow, an ethereal herd of magnificent deer, half antlered, half not, stood guard around the shrine, their hooves resting lightly upon the surface of the snow, their bodies awash in holy light, alert, nimble, waiting. The saints were coming, and the holy deer of Ereklı Dede would greet them when they came. And then…
Sohbetname 