The Mill

By Sabahattin Ali

Translated by Aysel K. Basci

My namesake, have you ever visited the inside of a water mill?

It is worth seeing. Slightly crooked walls, small windows located high up close to the ceiling, and a black roof resting on top of thick wooden beams. Then, there are huge wheels, large rocks, mills, and dusty belts that continually shudder through never-ending revolutions. In one corner, sacks full of wheat, corn, rye, and other crops are piled one on top of another. In another corner are white sacks full of flour. The rotating stones spew tiny, warm particles into the air, forming a fume. In contrast, a small covering in the floor can be lifted up to allow a cool mist to spiral upward, bringing refreshing water droplets to your face.    

What about those noises, originating in different corners and producing different rhythms, but reaching the ear as one large sound wave? Water running through a wooden gutter placed high above sounds like swaying poplar trees on a windy winter day. The grinding stones’ constant whining alternates between high and low pitches, mixing with the belts’ splashing sounds and the giant rotating wheels’ constant squeaking.

A long time ago, I saw a mill like that, although I do not wish to see one again.

My namesake, do you know what love is? Have you ever loved?

Go ahead and say, “Many times!” Was your love beautiful? Perhaps she loved you. Perhaps you embraced her many times. Did you meet at nights to share kisses? Kissing a woman is nice, especially for young men.

Perhaps she did not love you. What did you do then? Did you cry at night? Did you wait for her in the neighborhood, hoping she would notice your pale face? Did you write her long letters describing your agony, trying to arouse her pity?

Yet it was probably not hard for you to jump to a second love. Initially, you must have felt ashamed of yourself. But did you know that easily exonerating ourselves is one of our greatest skills? Our remorse only lasts about a week. After that, even the most gruesome murderer finds enough excuses for what he has done and is ready to absolve himself of all wrongdoing.   

Later, perhaps you loved a third or a fourth. Maybe you still do.

But is this love? Kissing a woman and wanting her—is that love?

Can you get completely naked and run through the streets? 

Are you capable of sticking a knife into your leg or arm, jumping into an icy river, and swimming like that?

Do you have the courage to kill all the men in a town? Can you climb a minaret and scream loud enough for the entire world to hear you?

Can love make you do these things? If so, then I say you are in love…

What can you give your love? Your heart? What about to the second one? And the third and the fourth? You can’t fool me. How many hearts do you have? You must know this is foolish. Your heart is in its place, yet you give it to this or that love… If you could cut your chest open, remove that muscle and place it in front of your love, then you might be able to claim to have given your heart away…

The truth is you are not capable of love. Those of you who live in cities, those who give or take orders from others, those who threaten or are afraid of others, you cannot love. 

Only we know how to love… We, the nomads as free as the Western wind, the ones who recognize no God other than ourselves. We are the Gypsies.

Listen my namesake, I will tell you about a Gypsy’s love.

One day, the winter snow was just beginning to melt, and our entire clan—about 30 women, men, children, four carthorses, and twice as many donkeys—was migrating toward Edremit.      

After a boring and particularly disagreeable winter, the warmth of the sun and the newly greening Earth were giving us an unexpected liveliness. Children wore only short white shirts as they ran around, screaming and rolling into ditches along the roadside.    

Young men were walking while playing their violins and clarinets, and young women were singing folk songs with their beautiful voices.    

Meanwhile, I was on the lookout for a village, farm, or other suitable place where we could camp.

In the early afternoon, I saw some chinars and poplars among the darker-colored olive trees. They surrounded a small water mill. A plentiful stream flowed through a few small willow trees to a narrow patch full of river pebbles before dividing into four wooden channels. The branches of several large old chinars shaded the black-tiled roof of the old mill and extended to the wide-open area out front.      

The bubbly waters percolating beneath the mill drowned out the rustling sounds of the trees. The waters rushed through the center of two rows of young poplar trees and disappeared into a reed field in the distance.   

Laying over here was not a bad idea. The number of villagers leading loaded donkeys along the road suggested the mill was a busy place, which wasn’t surprising given the white minaret visible in the village a stone’s throw from the mill. 

Even before we set up our tents, Atmaca (“Hawk,” in English) was playing his clarinet near the half-open gate of the mill. Upon hearing the music, the villagers inside the mill quickly gathered outside to listen. The owner of the mill was among them, stroking his white beard while letting his careless gaze travel over the visitors.  

Did you know that villagers, despite always complaining about us and accusing us of stealing their chickens and baby goats, are actually fond of us? These villagers were already collecting a bushel of wheat to give to Atmaca, to which the mill owner added two pots of yogurt.

Encouraged by these generous gifts, we set up our tents within a nearby olive grove. 

All was going well. Our women were weaving baskets from fresh willow branches and had no difficulty selling them in the nearby villages. Our musicians were invited to play at weddings in villages as far as half a day away. Of course, Atmaca was in the highest demand. 

I bet you have never met anyone like Atmaca. He was very handsome, with dark skin, pitch-black hair constantly being pushed back from his face and beautiful dark eyes. Then his nose…long, pointed, and slightly beaked—this is why we called him Atmaca.

Like thoroughbred Arabian horses, he held his noble head high above his wide shoulders. In truth, he was no less agile than those horses. No Gypsy could talk about Atmaca without also mentioning his courage, beauty, and music.

Atmaca did not play the clarinet like other Gypsies. He could read music. He had studied in and graduated from city schools. He also poured his passion into his music. When he played, it was as if the breath was not coming from his lungs, but directly from his heart.

In the evenings, he would sit under a tree alone. We would all come out of our tents, lie on our stomachs on the ground, prop our chins against the soil, and listen to him.     

Atmaca had never fallen in love—not with the rosy-cheeked beauties in the Turkmen villages we passed through nor with the thin-lipped Gypsy girls. None could hold his gaze for more than a second.

However, when he played his clarinet, his large eyes often watered, as if trying to douse the sparks in his eyes, and a few tear drops would attempt to roll down his cheeks only to dry out instantly, as if consumed by fire.  

He was mostly quiet. When he talked, he did not reveal much about himself. What was inside him? What were his thoughts? What were his feelings? What tied him to this world? None of us knew. Was his music so moving because he had loved someone in the past or because he had never loved anyone?

Every now and then, he would disappear for long periods of time. We wondered if he spent time with other clans or went to the city to share the company of the educated city gentlemen who treated him as their equal and with respect. 

Almost every night we gathered at the open area in front of the mill and enjoyed ourselves while listening to music. We had not taken anything from the area, so the mill owner was pleased with us. He and his daughter often threw down a straw mat under a large chinar so they could sit crossed-legged and listen to our music.

The mill owner’s daughter was a real village beauty, with her round face, full lips, and hip-long braided hair. However, her face was always pale. She looked at everything with an empty gaze, like it had nothing to do with her, while a half-smile struggled to escape from the corners of her mouth. 

She was a cripple, having lost her right arm as a child to the mill’s wheels. Now in its place was an empty, dangling sleeve tied to the waistband of her shalwar. 

And this separated her from the others.

Can you imagine what it means for a beautiful girl to be missing an arm? She could certainly not mix with the other girls as they bathed in the creek. She had to cover her body and her missing arm at all times. She could also not join the other girls in the tents to have fun because she could play neither the tambourine nor the wooden spoons. 

It was clear she had spent her childhood with endless longing. She must have watched the other girls with painful envy when, like squirrels, they climbed olive trees, wrestled with each other rough-and-tumble, and sprayed water at the boys. By now she must be used to it. She knew she could not do many of the things others could do, and she did not desire anything.  

During the days, she sat on a stone seat near the mill’s gate for hours, her eyes half-closed as she sent long, empty looks toward the chickens and the leaves of a huge chinar. This sad image of her was enough to fill one’s eyes with tears. 

In the evenings, she accompanied her father, kneeling down next to him to watch us.

To cut a long story short, our proud Atmaca fell in love with this crippled daughter of the mill owner. The wild bird who could not bring himself to even look at a peacock or a pheasant fell prey to a woodcock with a broken wing. 

I was too late in noticing it, and by the time I figured it out, the fire was already burning red hot. Had it still been smoldering, I would have gathered the clan and moved elsewhere.

Atmaca stopped talking. He no longer played at weddings. He just sat alone under an olive tree and played his clarinet. In the evenings, flat-out exuberant, he fixed his eyes on the mill owner’s daughter and sent every note out to her. Meanwhile, we, the shivering audience, felt a desperate urge to talk, scream, or simply throw ourselves to the ground and cry. His playing was full of urgency reminiscent of screaming fire worshipers dancing around a pile of burning wood or of sea waves’ bitter groaning while striking a sinking ship.

Atmaca’s wings wilted. He grew pale. On days that the mill owner went to town, Atmaca sat on the stone seat at the mill’s gate with the daughter. His nails would scratch the stone seat under him, as if trying to tear it apart. I quickly realized this situation could not continue much longer.

One night I summoned him. We walked together to the lower section of the stream and sat under the young poplar trees. It was quiet, the only noise coming from the stream’s waters as they skipped over the pebbles and the frogs singing along with the gurgling. 

Atmaca was looking down. He did not ask why I summoned him or what I wanted to speak to him about. As he lifted his eyes to me, I put my arm around his shoulder and said: “You are in love!”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“What are you going to do?”    

He turned his eyes to the starry sky, as if searching for an answer there, and looked for a long time. Then, he abruptly said: “You are our leader. You have seen more places than I. You are more experienced and smarter and wiser than all the other Gypsies, so I must open up to you.”

He did not look down, continuing on as if conversing with the stars.

“I love her and have no idea about what to do,” he said. “You must know what love means to me. I did not even turn my head or listen when rich ladies living in large mansions sent their servants after me to profess their ladies’ love. Rich, notable men ruling over many villages often pleaded with me, saying, ‘My daughter has fallen ill because of her infatuation with you. I am more than ready to forget you are a Gypsy and embrace you like one of my own, if only you will take my daughter’s hand and end her misery.’ But I went on my way without even responding. 

“And now I am in love with a girl who is missing an arm. I can neither take her as my wife nor runaway with her, although she loves me too. She told me so, full of tears, just a few days ago. When I begged her, ‘Let’s run away together,’ she laughed bitterly and said, ‘My lord, I am defective. Are you offering me charity?’ I explained how I loved her and said, ‘Instead of your arm, you are giving me your heart. Is a heart worth less than an arm?’    

“She continued to cry and said, ‘No, it is not possible. Think about it: Every time you see me, I will be embarrassed and will avert my gaze. Do you wish to belittle me? Leave me with my father, knowing what I am, and never come back. You made me forget my defect and dream crazy dreams. For that, I thank you and will remember you until I die. But if you really love me, you mustn’t try to convince me to believe impossible things. You must leave immediately.’”

At this point, Atmaca took a breath and lowered his eyes. Finally, he spoke again.

“I am thinking that our union will indeed be torture for both of us. We will constantly feel an unnatural, suffocating air flowing between us. What will I do if she can’t open up to me completely, if she can’t embrace me freely, if I can’t tease her, and if her eyes are continuously asking me, ‘Why did you waste your youth with me, isn’t it a pity?’ What if every word I say and my every attitude make her uncomfortable? When I am angry, she is hurt; when I try to love her, she feels like I am pitying her; when I try to embrace her, she feels a pain in her missing arm. What if this situation continues with no end?

“Don’t ask me what I will do. I have no strength or rational thought left. All I have left is love. Love that, like a bullet, rips through everything it touches. I cannot even flap my wings any longer.”

He fell silent then. His last words came out of his mouth with such misery that trying to say something to comfort him would be pointless. Under the circumstances, there was nothing for me to say and nothing for him to hear. 

I took his arm and walked with him back to his tent.

After that, things took a bad turn. Atmaca’s condition worried me, but nothing could be done, so I decided to let things drift along for a while. In the evenings, I watched Atmaca sit under a large chinar and wait impatiently with open arms while the mill owner’s daughter—a huge smile on her face and her normally pale skin replaced with unusually rosy cheeks—would run to him. But each time they got close enough to jump into each other’s arms, an invisible barrier sprang up between them, like continuously spinning wheels that constantly grew in size to keep them separate.

Days passed one after another like white cumulus clouds being pushed by a strong wind. We could sense it: Eventually, a storm would erupt. Everyone was afraid that something bad would happen. A sense of unease spread across the clan.        

The old, experienced women cast spells and begged all the good and bad spirits to come to Atmaca’s rescue. When Atmaca passed by with his sunken cheeks and unfocused gaze, the young men looked down and the young women, their lips quivering, looked away from him. Man, woman, young, old—nobody could decide what to do, so we just waited. It was as if a rough wind was blowing away all our thoughts and keeping us down and confused.        

One day Atmaca came to me and said, “I will be playing at the mill tonight. I talked with the mill owner and he agreed!”

It was drizzling. Summer downpours were expected that evening. When I told him that, he said, “I will play inside the mill.”

I responded, “The mill works at night too. Are you going to play in that noise?”

With a strange smile on his face, he said, “Don’t worry. You will hear my clarinet even in that noise. The strength of my breath has not declined significantly yet.”

As night fell, the storm indeed started. One bolt of lightning after another struck the oak forest, stretching out across the peaks. Large raindrops pounded the dark leaves of the olive trees.

We all crowded inside the mill. Two gas lamps hanging from the ceiling offered a dim light. The mill’s wheels, grindstones, and dusty belts continued turning. The ferocious noise they collectively made was mixing with the sobbing noise of the rain attacking the low ceiling. This awful harmony was accompanied by the scary sounds of consecutive thunder cracks. The mill owner and his daughter were sitting on a mat next to a wall. The gently swaying lamps were reflecting weird shadows on the daughter’s face.     

Suddenly a thin and pleasant sound dominated all the other noises.

Atmaca was playing in a dark corner of the mill.

Even after I die, I will never forget what I heard that night!

Outside, the storm raged on as the wind whipped against the adobe walls. The rising waters sloshed over the wooden channels to churn into the ground.    

Inside, the grinding stones were grumbling with endless exuberance, the madly revolving belts were making mourning sounds, and the interlocking teeth of the wooden wheels screeched as if crying. Still, a foolish clarinet sound, louder than all these other noises, alternated between begging and twisting in pain, occasionally falling silent only to rise once again.    

In the twilight, Atmaca’s shiny black eyes were fixed on the mill owner’s daughter, whose struggling, enlarged eyes were full of sadness. He kept playing melodies that no words could describe.     

At times, it was a caressing, warming morning sunshine. Then it instantly transformed into a desert-storm blinding our eyes, smashing our faces, and scattering its fire around like burning grains of sand or a knife stabbing deep into our hearts. 

At one point, after a particularly severe scream, I saw Atmaca get up. He took a few steps and threw his clarinet into a corner.

We all got up and stared at him with worried eyes.

With his hand, he brushed his black hair from his face. His eyes surveyed us before fixing on the mill owner’s daughter. He stared intently, never looking away.

I will never forget that minute. The storm outside was getting stronger; the walls were shaking, and some roof tiles were flying. The mill continued to operate like a wild howling beast. Under the dim lamplight, Atmaca looked larger than he was. His eyes were still on the young girl, his face now unrecognizable from unbearable sadness. The blood in his veins under his dark skin rushed to his face, and his lips turned white from his teeth biting them. Those lips were moving like they wanted to say something, but the corners drooped as if about to cry.

And then Atmaca closed his eyes. Shaking, he almost collapsed. But then he composed himself. Once more he looked around as if he were waiting to be saved from his own heart-crushing pain. Finally he groaned as if something has hit his head. He turned around and ran into the opposite corner where the mill’s wheels and belts were fiercely rotating.

For a second, we froze. Then, yelling like lunatics, we ran after him.

Alas, it was too late! Atmaca turned back toward us and nodded, as if saying, “It is too late. What is done is done.” 

His right arm was missing, replaced by gushing blood. After a few steps, he collapsed at our feet.  

There, the story of a Gypsy in love! 

In early spring when the flowers are blooming, it is nice to sit at the water’s edge, away from prying eyes, and kiss your love who smells like flowers until your muscles give out.

It is also nice to tell your closest friends, tearfully, how under the moonlight you wandered until morning in front of your love’s door, that beauty who cruelly turns her head away from you whenever your paths cross.

But cutting off and throwing away a part of you that you can no longer bear to carry because it is missing from her beloved body—only this is love.  

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Translator’s note:

Sabahattin Ali’s short story, “The Mill,” which he wrote in 1929 when he was a 22-year-old enthusiastic and sentimental young man, is one of his first published works, and it is the epitome of ‘tragic romance and dark realism’ for which the author would later be known. 

Ali’s stories are not narratives of happiness and harmony at all. He mostly liked to write about the bitter facts of the lives of the poor and wanted to use his fiction as a vehicle to bring about positive political change. However, he had a dark and pessimistic vision of life, punctuating his stories with tough conditions and disheartening themes. Ali persistently presented insoluble conflicts between people, and the characters in his stories and their outcomes were often suffused with a sense of hopelessness. (1)      

A closer analysis of Ali’s stories reveals that his work generally comprises fictionalized accounts of the struggle between two diametrically opposed social groups: the peasants and the intelligentsia. (2) His stories often revolve around conflicts between these two groups. In some of his stories, he depicts the peasants as affectionate or abused. In contrast, he brands the intelligentsia as materialistic, corrupt, or idealistic (these are the real intellectuals). This is the blueprint for most of his stories. 

In “The Mill,” the villagers living around the mill, including the mill owner himself, fall into the ‘affectionate peasants’ category. These are people Ali considers to be honorable, philosophical, and naïve, yet perfectly intelligent. As an example, the short, paraphrased dialog from “The Mill” below shows how Ali conveys his message. An old gypsy describes how peasants like and help gypsies, despite the minor robberies they carry out in the villages through which they travel: 

“You know what? Even though these peasants complain about us for stealing their chickens and baby goats, they still like us. As soon as we arrived, these villagers quickly collected a bushel of wheat to give us, to which the mill owner added two pots of yogurt. Encouraged by these generous gifts, we set up our tents within a nearby olive grove.”

In closing, perhaps the following quote from Ali best summarizes his vision and philosophy: “Should it be so hard, so full of troubles, and even so dangerous to try to make a living without thieving, without leaving people with hunger even after they feed you, without leaving them naked, even after they dress you?” 

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Photo: Nuri İyem, Oil on hardboard, Ordinary Sweethearts, 1979

Footnotes:

1. Daily Sabah, Sabahattin Ali: Tragic romance and dark realism, April 4, 2015

2. Murat Yiğit, An Approach to the Stories of Sabahattin Ali within the context of Marxist Literary Aesthetics, Journal of Education and Learning, 2016 

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Sabahattin Ali (1907-1948) was a prominent Turkish novelist, short-story writer, poet, journalist and teacher. He was probably the most powerful and effective of the 20th century short-story writers in Turkey who addressed social themes. Although he died in 1948 at the age of 41, his writing and poetry remains very popular. Ali’s short novel “Madonna in A Fur Coat” (1943) is considered one of the best novellas in Turkish literature. This novel’s translations have recently hit the best seller lists and sold record number of copies. With this novel, Sabahattin Ali became one of the two Turkish novelists whose works became Penguin Classics.

Aysel K. Basci is a nonfiction writer and literary translator. She was born and raised in Cyprus and moved to the United States in 1975. Aysel has retired from the World Bank Group where she worked for many years and resides in the Washington DC area. Her writing and translations have appeared or is forthcoming in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Entropy, Critical Read, Bosphorus Review of Books, Aster(ix) and elsewhere. You may find more of Aysel's work here: https://www.facebook.com/ayselkbasci/

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