Signatures
The young man from the Writers’ Union came on a Tuesday, in the afternoon, when the light in Gülsün’s room is best and she is least likely to be asleep. He had a cardboard folder and a cake from the Altyn bakery, which told her that he had asked someone what she liked.
“Gülsün Apa,” he said at the door, and bowed a little, the old way, with his hand on his chest. “You won’t remember me.”
“No,” she agreed, and let him in.
He was perhaps thirty. He had the beard they all had now and spectacles with heavy frames, and he sat on the edge of her good chair as if it might report him. She made tea. He told her his name, which she forgot at once, and that he wrote poems, which she had expected, and that he had seen her as the mother in Desert Sun’s Rebellion when he was a boy, which she had not.
“Everybody remembers me as somebody’s mother,” said Gülsün. “I was a girl once, you know. On that stage.”
“I know, Apa. Bermet.” He said it shyly, as if it were her real name. “My mother saw you. In the first production. She said she cried for a week.”
“Everybody cried for a week,” said Gülsün. “It was 1967. There was nothing else to do.”
The letter was two pages, typed. She read it without her glasses, holding it at arm’s length, and then with them.
It was addressed to the government of the Democratic Republic in Talas and to the clan leaders of the Popular Front, together, as if they were the same kind of thing. It said that Talas was not a fortress but a city, with hospitals and schools and churches and a theatre and nearly a million people who had chosen neither side. It recalled the siege of 1992, the hunger and the shelling of the Old City. It asked both sides, in the name of everything Iradis held sacred, not to make the city a battlefield a second time. Spare Talas. It was signed by a list of names already twenty lines long: writers, actors, two composers, a painter, the rector of the Pedagogical Institute, a bishop’s secretary, four priests.
Near the top, in a hand she knew from the dedication in her own copy of the novel, was Kemel Ishakov.
“He signed first,” said the young man. “He asked to sign first. He said that at his age, if they shoot anyone, it might as well be him.”
“That sounds like Kemel,” said Gülsün.
She put the letter down on the table between the teacups.
She did not sign it then. She said she would think, and the young man said of course, Apa, of course, and drank his tea too fast and burned his tongue and left the cake. She sat for a long time after he had gone, with the letter on the table, not looking at it.
It is not true, what the young say now, that in the old days everybody knew what would happen if you signed a letter. Nobody knew. That was the point. Sometimes nothing happened. Sometimes a man signed a letter in 1966 and nothing happened, and he signed another in 1968 and the theatre found that it had no roles for him that season, or the next, and his son did not get the place at the Polytechnic, and his name stopped appearing in the newspaper, even in the lists of people who had attended things. Sometimes a man signed nothing at all and the same thing happened anyway. You could not calculate it. You could only decide what you could bear.
Gülsün had signed nothing in sixty-five years. She had been careful. She had been careful in 1967, when they cut the last scene of the play. She had been careful in 1986 and in 1991 and in 1992, when the shells were falling on the Old City and the actors of the Drama Theatre had slept in the costume store in the basement for nine weeks. She had been careful under the Americans, which was easy, because the Americans did not care what actresses thought.
She was sixty-five. Her husband was dead. Her son was in Yekaterinburg and telephoned on Sundays. She had a pension from the territorial administration that the new government in Talas had not yet decided whether to pay.
What could they take from her? She sat in her chair and tried to count, honestly, and it came to very little. That frightened her more than if it had come to a great deal.
At nine o’clock that night she put on her coat and her good shoes and took the letter in her handbag and walked to the theatre.
It is not far. Nothing in the centre of Talas is far. The streets were empty and cold, and on Manas Avenue there was a police car parked across the road with its engine running, and the policemen inside looked at her and did not get out. She went in by the stage door, because she still had a key that no one had ever asked for back. Old Abylkasym, the night watchman, was asleep in his cubicle with his mouth open.
She did not turn on the stage lights. There was a working lamp at the side, a bare bulb in a cage, and she turned that on, and it lit about a third of the stage and none of the auditorium. Out there the seats went back into the dark, row after row, and she could feel them as you feel the cold from an open window.
She took her coat off and laid it on the boards. She stood where she had stood in 1967, a little left of centre, by the mark that was no longer there.
In the novel, and now in the play, since they restored it in 1990, Bermet comes home alone at the end.
It is the spring of 1918. She has been to China and back across the glaciers. Her grandfather is buried on the far side of the passes, with nearly all the clan, in the snow. She is fourteen. She comes down out of the mountains above the Talas valley on foot, and at the top of the last pass, in the last chapter, she sees a rider on a white horse, standing very still on the ridge above her. He does not speak. He turns his horse and rides down ahead of her, and she follows him all the way home.
In 1967 they cut the rider. The censor said it was mysticism. The play ended at the top of the pass with Bermet alone, looking down at the valley, saying her grandfather’s name. Gülsün had said that name on that stage two hundred and eleven times. She had never said the lines after it. She had learned them anyway, from the novel. Kemel had given her the uncut chapter in typescript in the dressing room, in 1967, folded in four, and told her to burn it, and she had not.
She stood in the light of the working lamp. Her knees hurt. Her voice, when it came, was not the voice of a girl of fourteen. It had not been that voice for forty years.
She said her grandfather’s name. Then she said the lines after it, the ones that had been cut, to the dark seats, to nobody.
He is standing on the pass. His horse is white as milk. He does not look at me, and I am not afraid. He turns and goes down, and the stones do not move under the hooves, and I go down after him into my own valley, and the dogs of my own village bark at me as if I were a stranger, and I am not a stranger. I am the one who came home.
The seats said nothing. Somewhere in the building a pipe knocked.
Old Abylkasym was awake when she came out. He had heard her, of course, and had not come. He stood up in his cubicle and took his cap off.
“Gülsün Apa,” he said. “It’s late.”
“It’s late,” she agreed.
She took the letter out of her handbag, unfolded it on his little shelf, beside the visitors’ book that nobody signed, and asked him for a pen. He gave her his own, a cheap ballpoint chewed at the end. She signed below the last name on the list, carefully, in the Latin letters, the whole of her name, the way it had appeared on the posters.
Then she held the pen out to him.
He looked at it. He looked at the letter. He was seventy-two and had been the night watchman of the State Academic Drama Theatre since 1979, and in all that time no one had ever asked him for his opinion of anything.
“Me?”
“Why not you?” said Gülsün. “You live in Talas.”
He took the pen. He signed under her name, slowly, in Cyrillic, because that was the alphabet he had learned. Then he looked at what he had done for a long moment and laughed, once, quietly, like a man who has found a coin in an old coat.
She folded the letter and put it back in her handbag. She walked home through the empty streets. The police car was still on Manas Avenue with its engine running, and this time she raised her hand to the men inside as she passed, and after a moment, uncertainly, one of them raised his.
In April the Front surrounded the city. In June it came in. The theatre was not hit, though the windows on the street side were broken and the brass doors stolen. The letter, with sixty-three names on it, was printed in the Talas Herald on the thirtieth of March. Kemel Ishakov’s name was at the top. At the bottom, the last two lines, which the typesetter thought were a mistake and nearly left out, were an actress who had played a girl in 1967 and the man who locked the theatre at night.