He’s just gone; he’ll come back shortly. He said that he would come back soon, very soon.  Maybe in an hour; or if he forgets what he said, his word, his promise, his commitment, he’ll be back by 10 p.m. at the latest. She’s done the dishes. She’s put her daughter to bed.  Once again, she’s left her sewing incomplete.  Again, she’s closed up her half-read book. She’s opened up the skein of restlessness for another night.

Maybe she’d better go to bed.  For the last time she takes a look at her kid and covers her body with the sheet.  She winds up the alarm clock.  She plugs in the electrical mosquito killer.  She turns off the lights.  Before going to bed as slowly and exhaustedly as always, she pauses to carefully review her evening tasks one by one.  She’s done everything -- all the small trivial domestic duties.  Yet one obsessive habit still remains undone: she goes by the window and stands there; half bent, her elbows leaning on its dusty narrow edge, her palms underneath her chin.  Is the ceiling of the sky high and far, or low and close?  Is the moon visible or hidden?  Is it cloudy or starry?

Tonight it’s a full moon; it appears and disappears.  It slowly creeps behind hasty pieces of clouds and softly slips over them; it moves with October’s cold breeze and breaks over the dark water of the pool in the yard.

Her knees bend. She restlessly lies on the bed.  She pulls the blanket over her head and closes her eyes.  Tonight, free from obedience, she should feel relaxed. No wonder that when he’s home she’s disturbed; that’s why she hangs around in the kitchen until he goes to sleep; or she pretends she’s sick; or she sleeps with him without passion or desire; or she just answers her own body’s need without enjoying it. No wonder such a night, infected by hypocrisy, or horror, or surrender, is full of tension. Yet tonight, when she’s alone, shouldn’t be restless.  She could feel calm and comfortable now if tonight were not polluted with this poisonous anticipation.  The day hides panic and unrest with its dazzling light, with ceaseless movement, with the load of duties and errands.  Whereas the night tears apart the hypocritical cover of the day with its darkness and acquiescence and leaves her alone and vulnerable in a crippling draft.  Why doesn’t she go to a sleep free from a dream or a nightmare?  Why is she so obsessed to avoid a mere surrender?  Why can’t she lend herself to a bold rebellion?  She can neither stay nor escape.

A car engine‘s sound falls upon the soundless moan of her worries.  She pulls away the blanket involuntarily and sits on the bed, motionless.  She listens alertly.  What should she do if he’s coming?  Should she remain sitting there to blame him with her silence?  Or should she vent her anger by nagging?  Or maybe she should pretend she’s asleep?  The sound grows nearer, then recedes, and finally dies away as it passes the lane and leaves her alone in her fervent silence.

She doesn’t want to sleep anymore.  Sitting on the edge of bed, she gazes through the window.  A piece of sky, half cloudy, half moonlit, framed in an ugly metal windowpane, a flowerbed sunk in a disturbed illusion, and a small shallow pool — all are her share from the whole external night. This share she can admit humbly is fair enough.  But within her internal night she gets more than her share.

She should get up; maybe she can rub this rust off her body and soul.  She stands by the window again.  She stares again at the moon half-lit, half visible — the same moon at which she stared while she waited for him; the moon whose beauty and grace reduced the bitterness of waiting.  But no, this moon is not the same moon.  She’s no longer young to flatter herself with a delusional love.  Neither is she old enough not to desire love.  It is October, a cold October. Her home is quiet, a cold silence.  No wonder her husband flees from this sly early cold, yet… no, he doesn’t have the right.  There is no right.  None of them has a right, or love, or affection.  Both of them are bound to a painful lying commitment.  They are unequal though.  The same punishment for different sins; or perhaps for a different innocence.  They soothe the suffering differently.  Her husband pretends he is almighty.  He goes wherever he likes, he does and says whatever he wants.  He is the boss of the house, he has the custody of their child, and he is the lord of his wife.  She soothes herself deceitfully too, though in a different way.  He deceives himself rather than her; he relieves the pain more than she does.  Her inevitable solution is a very old-fashioned one, a womanly surrender -- that kind of surrender contaminated by hypocrisy, shrewdness, and cowardice.  Though it hides her helplessness, this deceit makes her more wounded.

Once again she feels weak at the knees.  She lies on the bed again.  She listens to her daughter’s quiet breathing.  She pushes her face against the pillow and presses her eyelids.  She’s falling asleep.  She hears a sound. 

The sound came closer.  She didn’t want to wake up.  She turned over.  Nobody was beside her.  “He’s gone for a walk,” she thought.  The sound was drumming on her thin sleep: they were sailing over the water. It was sunset. The sea was green – of varied greens, like the wheat field of those early years. She was standing in the middle of the field. Up there, a bird was turning in the centre of the azure circle. It was hemming patches of clouds with the silky thread of its chirp. Here, behind the horizon, the sun was sinking into the sea. The boatman was looking at the horizon. There, in the middle of the field, she was lovingly looking at a man who was busy digging damp soft soil with a stick. Above, the bird was turning over and over.  Here, she bent over the edge of the boat and sank her hand into the water.  She could feel the warmth of her husband’s thigh, yet she was dreaming, asleep with the water.  The sharp cry of a seagull ripped into her delicate dream.  With envious eagerness her husband was staring at a young couple sitting at the other side of the boat, kissing and cuddling.   She felt indignant.  She wanted to sink her fist into his side, but she changed her mind.  She turned away.  Again, she sank her hand into the soft and cool water.  Again, she closed her eyes.

The sound was incessantly drumming with more vigour over the relaxed sleep of a woman who recovered without regret sfrom the exhausting tension of an old love.  Behind her closed eyes, the sound was coming up from the narrow steep stone-paved lanes of Istanbul to fall upon the sleep of her body tired of the journey. 

She turns over.  More and more she pushes her face against the pillow.  She doesn’t want to know what sound brutally overwhelms her daughter’s quiet breathing.  The sound was constantly drumming and ripping up the fine fabric of her dream.  She had got up angrily and sat on the bed. Her husband had been standing by the window, smoking.  He hadn’t gone out.  Annoyed by her cold unkindness, he had been leaning against the corner of the wall, looking at the lane through the lace curtain.  She had asked about the sound.  “It’s the drum telling people to wake up. The midnight drum of Ramadan,” he’d said bitterly, without looking at her.

They were wandering around the lanes proclaiming it.  The shadows were approaching and proclaiming something.  The drums were waking those who overslept.  She was not sleepy any more.  She had awakened and discovered she was not in love any more. The drums seemed to proclaim that she was free of her old love.  They were publicly announcing that she didn’t love her husband any more; that at nights she dreamed of unknown men as she was sleeping beside her husband and that, during the day, terrified and embarrassed, she wore the mask of a chaste obedient spouse.  It looked as if the drums were pulling away from her body and soul all the layers of deceit.

The drumbeats of bygone years, the proclamation of hidden shame, are still in her ears.  When she’s asleep, or home alone at night, the crazy rapid drumbeats make her feel dizzy.  The shadows approach and the drums proclaim.  She becomes disgraced and naked.  She is waiting for footsteps, or the echo of the doorbell’s ring.  She’s looking forward to hearing news.  Poison in her throat, she’s waiting — a black waiting contaminated by hatred and malicious desire for his death.

She’s shocked by the horrible attack of a sound, the drumbeat’s proclamation.  She jumps up. The darkness, the loneliness, the body’s shivering, and the familiar sounds — a motor engine, footsteps, a key turning in the lock. Another midnight has arrived already.  Another night she is torn apart by the uproar of the drums.  Another night the man returns to make her malicious waiting defeated by the fact of his presence.