Fairy Chimney Soda

Ercan Kesal

FAIRY
CHIMNEY SODA

FAIRY
CHIMNEY
SODA

Ercan Kesal

Translated from the Turkish
by Alexander Dawe

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Original title: Peri Gazozu

Originally published by Communication Publications

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number:2019949891

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-149-6 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-149-0 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

To the blessed memory of my father
Mevlüt the soda maker

Contents

Preface

1.Kurban

2.I Am an Orphan, Press Me to Your Chest

3.What Has That Got to Do with It, Dad!

4.I Am Grown Up, Dad

5.The Weight of Your Coat

6.“We’ll Ask Someone for Our Name, and She’ll Tell Us”

7.The Seal

8.Whose Blood Is That on the Photo?

9.The Smell of Bread or Blood?

10.What’s Left for Us

11.A Drop of Water

12.Just Let Go

13.Turkey at the End of Its Rope

14.Hearts in the Palms of Our Hands

15.The Burnt Smell Inside Us

16.The Quilt

17.Where Are Our Dead?

18.Mothers Sniff Out Their Lambs

19.The Soul of a Word

20.Three Kinds of Truth and Us

21.The Country Doctor

22.The File Under My Arm

23.The Country of the Forgotten Dead

24.The Coming of the Fiancée

25.The Lie

26.Why These Scars?

27.The Municipality Man Who Drew a Gun

28.Tell All Your Friends, I learned How to Die

29.God Willing, He Is Dead

30.Come Along, Let’s Start off by Saving Ourselves

31.A Whistle Out of Chestnut

Glossary

Preface

“All works of art rely on memory. Making memory crystal clear is how we make something tangible. Like an insect in a tree, an artist feeds like a parasite on his childhood. Then expending what he has gathered he becomes an adult, his maturity his final achievement,” Tarkovsky said. I am of the same opinion.

I kept my glossy, yellow Avanos Public Library membership card cut from cardboard tucked away between my books until I started university. A genuine memento from childhood. With that card I could check out any book from that humble library and crawl into my hideout under my mother’s loom where I would lose myself in the golden dreams of my youth, free of all the cares in the world. So I never actually chose one book or author over another. I couldn’t tell the difference.