The Canal

A story from the masterpieces of Turkish literature

When the Çumra canal leaves Lake Beyşehir, the color of its waters is the ordinary color of water; but scarcely do they reach the Konya plain before their color turns to the color of blood.

You may suppose that the waters took on this color from passing through the red earth of this plain; but here I am to tell you that the waters took their color from the blood of Mehmed of Dedemköy and from the blood of his brother.

Nor is the color of the horizon that bounds the Konya plain a purplish blue; it is yellow — yes, yellow.

You may suppose that it took this color from the dust the winds stir up; but I tell you that it took it from the pallor of Zaghar Mehmed, who is in the Konya prison.

...

In that steppe no harvest is gathered except after exhausting hand labor. That land, before which the plow is helpless, grows nothing but thornbush and grasses an inch tall, and consents to nothing but to expose its surface, scorched by the scarcity of water, bare to a sky empty of clouds.

As for the waterway dug by the hand of man, it serves only to increase these plains' thirst for water. Those slow, muddy waters that saunter along their course scowling, as if angry at flowing in that place, not only fall short of quenching the thirst of the earth whose cracks cry out demanding water; they also give it nothing in recompense by way of vapor or moisture. It is more like a river of olive oil moving on slowly and gloomily in a turbid bed.

And in the parched villages of that plain — villages that resemble heaps of ashes — toil men whose hands are covered with sores from labor and whose faces the sun has scorched; they work and drudge to extract from that meager earth a little on which to feed themselves.

The village of Dedemköy lies close by the canal; but by the time the waters, after leaving Lake Beyşehir, reach the village, they have dwindled in quantity to less than would suffice to water a vegetable garden the size of a handkerchief — let alone many feddans of fields.

And so you find the smiling faces and the eyes brimming with cheer during the season of rains straining and scowling in the years of drought. You find these eyes fixing their gaze on the yellow waters of the canal — neither leaving them nor expecting any help from them, since they know the futility of such a hope. As for the season of rain, it comes but once in every five years.

...

Mehmed of Dedemköy and Zaghar Mehmed were neighbors, and there was no difference in age between them. In their childhood they played together upon the sands of the poor earth and rolled together in the dust and dirt of the street. Together, carrying sticks taller than themselves, they drove lean cows to the herd that used to pass by the edges of the village; and together, too, they would pelt the frogs in the canal with clods.

And when they had grown somewhat older, they were accustomed to go with their mothers to the market to sell ghee and yogurt. They would go together to fetch wood from the mountains, a journey covered in seven hours on donkey-back; indeed they would sell this wood each in the other's presence, and if they managed to sell it for a few piasters above the market price to some official from another region unversed in prices, they would buy from the same cloth two lengths, from which they made themselves two matching shirts.

As youths they would go to the wedding feasts together and watch the women dance. And, as is the case with all the men of central Anatolia, the friendship between these two men was a silent friendship, empty of phrases; but its outward signs showed, from the dawn of their youth, in their habit of walking side by side, the hand of the one in the hand of the other.

As they advanced in age, the gravity that marks those who drudge to wring their daily sustenance from the earth made their relations still further removed from outward show. And when it fell to their lot to bear the responsibilities of a family, they met less often than before. Zaghar Mehmed had married; as for Mehmed of Dedemköy, his father had died, leaving him to support his mother, his elder sister, and a younger brother of eighteen springs.

It would sometimes happen that the two old friends met at the approach of night beside the wall of the mosque, where they would sit watching the flocks returning to the village; and they would remain for close upon half an hour in silence, exchanging not a single word; then the one would look at the other, and nothing would come over their faces but a smile; then they would leave their seats and return to their houses.

At last, so as to add to the working hands in the house, Mehmed of Dedemköy and his brother Mustafa married on one and the same day, and two brides who had not yet seen their twentieth year came to live under the roof of the one house built of mudbrick.

And so life ran on in its course, as it had run for centuries past, in the shape of a quiet struggle to wring a bare pittance of food from a grudging earth.

And in the thick of the thought of food, which claimed for itself all else, friendship and outings began to fold away, little by little, into the folds of oblivion, sinking gradually behind its veils, until with the passage of time they were erased even from memory.

One day Zaghar Mehmed went to water his field from the canal and found the channel empty of water, with nothing in it but a layer of yellow silt. Then he raised his head and began to look along the canal; then he looked toward the field of Mehmed of Dedemköy, whose field lay a little above his own, and found that they had built a dam across the water and were busy watering their land.

Then Zaghar sent his six-year-old son over to them, and the child set off running barefoot over the dried cow dung until he reached the field of Mehmed of Dedemköy and called out to them: "Father says you must let the water go."

Mehmed did not answer; the child waited a moment, then turned back, running, to his own field.

After that the two Mehmeds stood watching each other across a distance of no more than a hundred and fifty yards.

That look disclosed many things; but the first and most important thing that came of it was that from that day there broke out between them a quarrel that admitted of no settling. The look held no hatred, for nothing had passed between them to cause it. There was in that look only the specter of a quarrel whose source was land and water — a specter that draws blackness over the thoughts of men. Nay, perhaps the look held something of sorrow as well — a sorrow born of their knowing that an exchange of mortal blows was inevitable: how else could life go on, and how else could that meager piece of chalky land be kept; how else could a handful of grain be got out of this divided field.

For apart from that, there was nothing between the two men to cause hatred. Zaghar Mehmed could not stand against the two brothers, and so peace was his first object; but he knew that it was impossible, that the water would not suffice to satisfy the need of both sides, and that for this reason, too, Mehmed of Dedemköy would not answer his message.

And yet Zaghar Mehmed waited. He kept going to his field and watching the water channel and the dry yellow silt in its bed, then turning his gaze for a long while toward Mehmed as he moved about his field. He waited, and looked up at the sky. He searched for clouds. And still he went on waiting.

As for the ears of grain — the thin ears — they shrank gradually until they stood no more than a span in height.

After that the sun gave up all its other offices and concentrated its rays upon that small spot in the steppe country, drying up that small green patch. And under the rays of the sun those delicate little blades fell to quivering like the tongue of a dog worn out by the heat.

Those ears never grew beyond a span in height — those small, wretched ears. But the ears in the field of Mehmed of Dedemköy grew until they reached to the knee. All this while the sun kept its rays concentrated upon the field of Zaghar Mehmed, where the color of the ears, no more than a span tall, began to turn toward yellow.

In Çumra there was an office for supervising the distribution of the water; the office had a chief, and it had collectors of water taxes and other officials besides; and in spite of all that, not so much as a single drop of the canal's waters passed beyond the field of Mehmed of Dedemköy.

Zaghar Mehmed saw that his wife and his mother of sixty years, who worked in the field bent double the whole day long, and likewise his son of six years — he saw pallor spread over all their faces, as it had with the ears of grain whose color had turned to yellow while they were still but a span tall. And Zaghar thought, and waited. And there is none who knows the depths of what passes in the mind of a peasant of the steppe, nor what it is he waits for.

...

Early one morning Zaghar took his rifle and set out for the field, and lay flat in the dry channel until he saw Mehmed of Dedemköy and his brother; then he fired five shots.

And there is nothing easier than dying and killing in those barren fields.

Zaghar Mehmed asked his wife, who came hurrying up, to open the channel of the canal and to water the field, and told her that from that day on they would let no one hold back the waters of the canal, for not one of the men of the upper field remained.

And while his wife was on her way to the dam built across the canal to remove it, he called after her, charging her that the boy's gifts must not go to waste, and asking her to bring him from time to time to visit him in prison, and not to treat his old mother badly.

Then Zaghar sat down at the edge of the field and gazed long at his wife as she opened the way for the water, waiting for the coming of the policeman and the village headman, who appeared from afar making toward him.

The waters of the Dedemköy canal are a deep crimson red — red with the color of the blood of Mehmed of Dedemköy and his brother Mustafa. And the horizon that bounds the Konya plain is yellow in color — the color of the skin of Zaghar Mehmed. And in the prison there was a shepherd from Dedemköy who had been sentenced to two years' imprisonment on hearsay evidence that he had stolen a ewe because his master had not paid him a year's wages. The shepherd was accustomed to sing a Dedemköy song to his fellow prisoners, who would gather around him in a spot not far from Zaghar Mehmed's cell. The shepherd would close his eyes, throw back his head, and chant:

"Death comes and hovers before our house,
And the two brides wail and cry like the bleating of sheep.
Do not wash our bodies; let our blood run;
Leave our friends to lament,
And our enemies to watch and stare."

And because Zaghar Mehmed could not bear to listen to that song, the shepherd was accustomed to fall silent whenever his figure appeared in the distance.