The following chapter is from a novel excerpt I started. As the great Turkish writer Oğuz Atay once said “Dear reader, here I am, where are you?”
Alina
Alina was born in a small village by the Baltic Sea. Her mother jumped out of her child bed and ran into the street singing and dancing to declare the birth of her first baby girl. While Alina’s mother was giving birth, her father, Ivan, was playing cards and drinking vodka at the café of the village. His youngest son, Alexis, ran to the café and informed his father that the new-born was a girl. After five boys, Alexis’s mother had lost hope of having a baby girl and had given the sixth boy a girl’s name. She could hardly convince her husband it was also used as a boy’s name. She not only gave him a girl’s name, she raised him like a girl. She dressed him up in skirts and cute dresses when her husband left early to go fishing. She managed to grow Alexis’ hair down to his shoulders until her husband heard other kids mocking him “Alexis is a girl”. He grabbed Alexis by hand and dragged him to the house, made him sit down on the floor and shaved his blond locks ignoring the boy’s tears and his wife’s begging, and the next day he took Alexis with him to the sea with the other boys. From then on Alexis often ran away, sat on a rock cursing at his father, and looked at his hands wounded by the fish nets. He liked it better to stay at home with his mother and knit than going to fishing. Beating him up didn’t stop the boy from running away so Ivan let him get away with it. When Alexis whispered the news into his father’s ears, Ivan responded by inhaling smoke from his joint and laid one of the cards in his hand on the table. His friends called Ivan “The Bear” for he killed a bear when he was young. Bear fighting was a tradition for young Russians who were ready to prove they grew into manhood. The new-born was wrapped in pig fat and bear fur immediately. Ivan came home, took off his fur coat, poured some vodka into an oily glass and took a look at the new-born. He immediately sensed there was something wrong with the baby. She frowned like an adult and turned her hands into fists. The baby was named Alina, which meant “odd” in Russian. For a month, no one but the family members were allowed to see the baby. The curious neighbors knocking on the door with goat milk and rye bread were turned down politely. As time passed they were surprised by the newborns eyes with different colors, one being blue and the other green. The priest rejected to baptize her. Alina’s mother hardly convinced him with lots of begging, a sack of wheat, and a bottle of vodka as he lifted his brows twice, caressed his beard and nodded yes. Contradicting her mother’s expectations, in a few years, Alina grew to be a tomboy. She only played with boys, fought like a boy, and turned her nose up at girls. Other kids told her she was a witch or a source of bad luck for the village. When she was six, her father left home to chase after a monster supposedly seen on Estonian sea-shore and never came back. Stanislav, told Alina’s mother the bad news looking at his hat he played with in his hands. According to the story he told, the crew of the boat kept track of the monster of the Baltic Sea for hours and captured it three miles away from shore. There was a storm in the sea. Lightning momentarily lit up the dark sea that shook like a glass of water. The watchman yelled out the appearance of the monster on the surface of the water. The monster was at least ten feet long. It escaped the fish nets and the gunfire wasn’t enough to take its life. Three members of the crew had disappeared. Ivan was one of them. Stanislav’s freckly cheek blushed with excitement as he told the story. He breathed fast and spat as he talked. The sun was sinking at the window. The fire in the fire-place had grown weak. The woman tucked her mouth with pieces of bread listening to Stanislav’s story. Her eyes fixed up somewhere on the wall. A tear came down her face when she had trouble swallowing a big piece of bread. She disappointed Stanislav who thought she would say something when she coughed. On a summer day, when Alina was twelve, two little girls ran into their garden. They told Alina and her mother that Alexis was fighting with a bear at the village square. They followed the two girls to the square and walked into the crowd. Alexis was lying on the ground with his shirt ripped and stained from blood. They brought him home where he lay unconsciously for a night and died the next morning. Nobody took responsibility for the death. Alexis wanted to prove he was a man just like his father Ivan, the Bear. He had so much pride and was tired of being called nicknames. He could never find a wife unless he proved he was a real man. They went to Nikolai, an old man who traveled from one village to another with his bear that he taught how to dance holding on a stick. The crowd gathered in the square around the old bear and the boy who stared at each other for minutes. The bear got bored and laid down. The crowd got impatient and booed Alexis. He shook in fear, waiting for the bear to make the first move, but the bear was domesticated and lazy. Somebody in the crowd threw him a stick. He hit the bear on its head. It stood up on two feet and roared, yet didn’t attack back. He hit it again in the stomach. The bear roared so loudly that everybody in the village heard it. When Alina was fourteen, a Turkish man who was visiting the village for business purposes at the time laid eyes on her. For the first time, somebody wasn’t frightened by her eyes. On the contrary, the next day the priest was sent to her mother. The priest told the mother the Easterner was willing to pay a lot of money to have the girl. If she didn’t accept the offering, he would burn down the whole village. He was a friend of the Czar’s and was going to make people sit on sticks, and throw them into boiling water. One afternoon, as the sun descended below the horizon, the cow Alina took to the grassland outside of the village came back to the barn alone. Nobody answered her mother when she ran the streets calling out Alina. The housekeeper of the mansion that the Turkish man stayed at told her to pray the Virgin, the girl was in good hands, already in a ship that was sailing towards Istanbul.
