The Gelin Of Barat

Old folktale short story

Down the veins of the old carcass they called Constantinople, where the ochre painted houses clustered and hung low over the narrow streets that thrummed with a thousand faces, there was a little bookshop in the depths of Barat. It was a shop you would have walked past a thousand times without thinking, tightly bound like an old root between two towering apartments, flaking its blue oil-paint skin into the trodden out cobbles. A shop seldom if ever entered, seldom swept, panes of dust lined with window glass against her ancient walls. If you had looked up, which passers-by seldom did, you’d have seen the old sign swinging over head.

NADJARA’S BOOK

The ‘S’ at the end of the name was long gone, broken away by the rain, the wind, the long Ottoman summers and the creasing of age. The whole shop was shedding its coat now, a great phoenix peeling away feathers of yellow, cobalt, vermillion and sage, revealing previous fashions like the boudoir of a long dead wife. Bay Adem Nadjara was dead by then, of course, too. Had been for forty years.

Am I going on too long now? Forgive me. It’s been so long. Constantinople is renamed, repainted, and empires have fallen since I stood on that old corner in Barat. I’ll tell you about the Gelin. That’s what you’re here for.