Memed, My Hawk - Yeshar Kemal

Deyirmenoluk village is surrounded by a plain of thistles. There are no fields, no vineyards, no gardens, only thistles. The snow-capped peaks of the Toros Daglari are very close from here, almost within arm's reach.

It is white on the peaks of the mountains. On the craggy inhospitable upper reaches of Ali Dagh it is virgin snow and your footsteps leave a trail everywhere, but if you drag a thick branch of blackthorn brush behind you it disperses the snow and in half an hour the tracks are gone and Sergeant Asim and all the king's men can't even make out that you are here. Blackthorn is the best for covering your tracks.

But if it is Lame Ali that is on your trail then it becomes a different story. Ali is so fond of tracking that he often gets diverted from his objective to follow the fresh spoor of the jackal through the woods. Lame Ali is a genius - show him your quarry and Lame Ali bring you to his door. Once on the trail, he has no sense of right or wrong, of which side he is on - it is like an intoxication leading him inexorably down the trail.

There are brigands in the mountains at the foothills of the Toros. There is blood here, but it does not stain your fingers as you turn the pages. Indeed there is more milk than there is blood. Milk comes from the cows; every family has one but they actually belong to Abdi Agha the big landlord. But the milk that permeates this book springs from a gentle humanism, and human kindness exudes from the very rocks and stones of the story.

Life in the village is controlled by the Agha. He owns the land, the shop, the livestock, and at harvest time he takes two-thirds of your grain, and sometimes even more if he is in a foul mood. Villagers are forbidden to go to town, but once in a while there are some who will defy the Agha and visit the town. Perhaps it is the stories that Dursun is telling that affects the young minds. In town they wonder at the richness in the shops - the glitter of the brass and the smell from the Kabob restaurant where they treat everyone alike, and they ask - "Who is the Agha here?" Corporal Hasan, who has even seen Istanbul, takes a while to understand the question, but then he smiles and says that there is no Agha here. Everyone is an Agha, everyone is the owner on their land, their shops, their piece of mother earth.

In the village lives a dark thin boy called Ince Memed, or slim Memed. At times there is a spark that enters his eyes. He is young, only sixteen, when he runs off with his girl to go to the town, where with Corporal Hasan's help, they can surely start a livelihood free from the Agha's tyranny. But the girl has already caught the eye of Abdi Agha's nephew and is already his official betrothed, so this is a big insult to the Agha. Lame Ali is fetched, and despite himself, he follows the trail to Memed. There is a showdown. Memed himself doesn't know how he gathers the courage, but he takes his gun and fires into Abdi and into his cousin. And then he runs away, telling his girl, "You wait for me in the village."

That is the start of Memed's life as a brigand in the hills. Brigandry is the same everywhere. To begin with, there is a lot of injustice already in the system. The forbearance of the human mind is legendary, especially if the rules are specified clearly up front - I am the boss, and your lives are mere whims to me. But even in the midst of such misery there are the rebels, the outcasts, the champions of the downtrodden. These are the brigands, the Robin Hoods of the Dagliari's the world over. The trick is simple - you are good to most of the people most of the time, and you have many helpers in the villages. That is why Sergeant Asim has such a hard time catching Memed, but then of course, Sergeant Asim is really incompetent, and Memed could have shot him out many times over, and realizing this, the Sergeant has become quite mellow himself.

In its essence, Memed my Turk is little more than an adventure tale, but how elegantly it is told. You can feel the thistles as they bite into you when you are running away from the village, from Abdi Agha, from the life that is worse than death when alive.. And you can see why Memed asks his villagers to burn the thistles, even though the cityfolk don't understand. And then you are in the fertile fields of Chukurova, where it looks as if a cloud has sunk into the black earth, there is so much cotton. And then there is mad Durdu, who even takes even the underwear from his victims, and you are with him on his last day when he is rampaging a village, and suddenly everything is lost in a sea of dust. You are in the middle of the duststorm, and you climb onto a roof with Horali, and when you come down mad Durdu is no more; he has been trampled to death by the crowd. On the slopes of Sulemish, far above the Savrun river, you can smell the deep green myrtles that reminds one of the julep that makes people drunk, madly drunk. It is an intoxicating mix.

I read through this epic work by Yashar Kemal at one stretch, from just after midnight to about seven in the morning. It was a labour richly rewarded. I still have the taste of soup in my lips as it was served Suleyman's house - a broth of crushed wheat and milk (what else?), eaten with wooden spoons. I remember when Big Ahmet the legendary ex-brigand calls over Memed and his friend from his roadside meal - "Help yourselves, young men," but the boys are too timid - "Good appetite to you," they say politely, but they stop to hear his stories, and are mesmerized by his eyes that are blazing like kindling. This is a story imbued with magic, but it never stretches reality in any way. It makes me look up the Atlas but there is no Chukurova, but the marshes of Anavarza were there, and the towns of Adana and Konya and all the snow-capped Daghs you can wish for...

Towards the end of the book, as the thinning pages betray the impending end, one senses an uncertainty in Yeshar Kemal as if he is changing his mind from page to page - should this be a tragedy, after all? Should Memed survive, or will he really die as the innumerable rumours have it, recounted over tears at every hamlet through the land? Will the governmental reprieve, the "bayram", reach them while Memed is still alive? What about Abdi Agha, will Memed ever exact his revenge? Will he survive the attempt? As the pages begin to thin down this uncertainty grows, and Kemal seems hesitant. There is a buildup to a different storyline, but then it is suddenly replanted by a different tale, as if Kemal undid the plot, but the poetry already wrought was too good to undo. Or is it all part of the storyteller's art, this weaving in and out of likely endings, as if someone dragged a blackthorn bush over it? Or is it the storyteller's kindness coming in the way of his perception of reality...

But it is sheer pleasure, going with Kemal Agha as he follows the bandits through the foothills of the Toros Dagladi, where the thistles are in bloom at summertime, and at sunset they sway in the wind like ripples of the sea, and Memed is hovering above us, somewhere in the snowhite crags of Ali Dagh, the benign bandit looking after me. Memed, my hawk.