More: A Novel (12 page)

Ultimately the focal point of the paper and Kandalı was the photograph that also featured me. Standing behind the governor and smiling was Yadigar. You couldn’t really tell from the photograph, but I was actually looking at him. He in turn was looking at the district police chief. The district police chief was looking at the district gendarmerie commander. The district gendarmerie commander was looking at the mayor to his right. He in turn was looking at my father, who definitely didn’t want to be there. And my father was looking at the governor as if he would have slit his throat, because in his eyes the governor was a child thief. No one in that photo was looking at me. For the governor in his turn was looking at the watch he was handing to me. The face of the watch showed quarter past three and both the hour and minute hands were pointing and looking at the elderly janitor standing in the corner. The man, whom my father had informed me was the janitor, had been caught with his eyes closed. And so the entire chain of gazes ended at his wrinkled eyelids. It was an unbelievable photograph! An unbelievable scene! Of course I was unaware at that time of its likeness to the scene in that fresco of Da Vinci’s that I was to see in a book years later …

The Last Supper
… the last! Not because Christ had the last meal of his life at that table. The last because Christ was the main dish at that table. The first and last really! Because Christ’s first and last bite was consumed that evening. So with no Christ left, God, in his desperation, would reveal himself … but throughout the meal God was neither seen nor heard. The twelve apostles, their bellies full but their souls empty, placed the bones in front of them into grails to leave them at the mercy of dogs but still God would not appear. Just when they thought they’d killed the goose that laid golden eggs, they heard a voice. God spoke:

“Is there man?”

The apostles were so excited they first exchanged glances and then cried in unison, “Yes!”

“Are there then any believers of man?”

They were at a loss for words, and their gazes slid to the animals that were crunching the bones of Christ.

“Dogs!” they hollered.

Upon this there was a pause and God spoke again:

“If the only believers left of man are dogs … then there are bound to be ones among them who catch rabies and become enlightened.”

And as soon as He was finished, the dogs ran off, foaming at the mouth, and all that was left inside a small grail were Christ’s skull and three bones … Those who had dined at that table and watched it all to death said, so that no one would know the truth, “We’ll tell another truth!”

Judas was the only one who said, “No, I can have no part in such a lie.”

And he took the grail, with the last remainders of Christ, and left the table. As Judas sank into the quicksand of regret with each step, the remaining eleven apostles instantly thought up a story. This story would contain neither the contents of Christ’s meal nor what they had heard God tell them. On the contrary, this story would have Christ make the highly inviting suggestion to “eat my flesh, drink my blood,” but no one would eat or drink of him. Most importantly, Judas would be the traitor of the story. A traitor who’d left the table and gone to turn in Christ to the Sanhedrin Council.

So Christ would be crucified and no one would know that he’d been chewed up and consumed by his apostles that night. Essential details would further be added to the story for plausibility. Such as the number of the pieces of silver Judas received in return for his betrayal: thirty! Fearful that Judas might tell the truth, the apostles came to agreement on the story they had built and told the lie, which they referred to among themselves as
another truth
, to everyone who crossed their path.

But Judas was in no state to utter a thing. Whenever he opened his mouth, he was overcome by guilt. Even if he were to tell, who would believe him? Eleven against one! He didn’t stand a chance. He could endure neither the lies that were starting to be spread about him nor the truth he had witnessed. He stopped in front of the first wishing tree he came upon and buried the grail he was carrying underneath it. Then he hanged himself from the thickest branch of the tree … and a dog came upon the tree. It began digging and became rabid as soon as it reached the bones. Then another dog and yet another became rabid. Upon seeing this, the peasants dug a deeper hole, tossed the grail into it, and covered it with rocks.

But since they were unable to keep their mouths shut, they told of the cursed grail that turned rabid anyone who came near and brought about the crucifixion of Christ, even if only in whispers. The story was shaved into shape like a sculpture as it moved through the ages and from ear to ear. Who would want their village to be remembered by a cursed grail? Thus the first thing to be forgotten was the spot where the grail was buried. Then Judas was eradicated from the story. After all, it was a sin to even mention his name. All that remained was a grail that had belonged to Christ. And it came time for the bones and skull in the grail to evaporate. Due to technicality, it was easier to start the tale, “There was once a grail.” instead of, “There was once a skull and three bones inside a grail.” The story’s reach depended on it being easy to remember.

Lastly, the word “curse” from the story became
sacred
because it scared children. In fact, with time that grail took on the form of bowl, or chalice. After all, those that had buried it were long gone and there was no one around to belie what was told. And so in order to recover what one generation had thrown into a hole and covered with rocks to get rid of, other generations started wars and called them the Crusades. Everyone’s after it still. Even if they don’t know it, they’re all after gnawing on whatever is left of Christ and hearing the voice of God … but what could He say even if He did speak again? Would the answers to the questions be any different after all this time? Weren’t dogs the only believers in man? Was there any point in chasing after the Holy Grail just to hear the tone of God’s voice? After a skull and three bones!

As I left the Government Office, that was about as much as was left of me, you see! A skull, three bones, and empty space, that was all. A Gaza filled with nothingness or nothingness encased in Gaza …

Certainly with such doors open in front of me and the population of an entire town behind me ready to push me forward, it would have been only right for me to cross that threshold and receive the education I deserved. But I didn’t and so remained rooted in Kandalı, that wormhole, like a thousand-year-old tree. Even despite the fact that my situation had been taken over by the town the minute the school principal disclosed my score and things had immediately progressed outside Ahad’s control.

So I could have escaped … but I couldn’t. Simply because my father had said he loved me … pressing down on the blister on my wrist all the while! If Ahad loved me, it didn’t matter that I didn’t love myself. I couldn’t leave Ahad … perhaps I hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place. To leave and get away from that reservoir … I had merely distracted myself with the possibility of leaving. For actually my father, me, and the reservoir, we were the Trinity itself! We were the
real
Trinity! My father and I were an eight-legged insect. We scrambled over the wet walls of the reservoir. We had been speaking the same tongue from birth. No one could understand this tongue, that served only to speak of the reservoir, except for us. Other people may have been created or spewed into the sky out of some white hole in the solar system but we were different. We were the only living things on Earth that had come to life through evolution. Whereas other people were different probabilities of one soul, we were the beginning, middle, and end of one probability! We lived in a place only accessible by holding your breath. Outside the universe. In the reservoir … our mothers had shot us at the world. We had been born as bullets and whizzed around in the reservoir to pierce the stomach of whoever happened to cross our path. Our range was our lives. Our name was the Story. We were about two men and a reservoir.

But the paper
From Kandalı to the World
didn’t care enough to cover the
renunciation
chapter of the story. More accurately, it specifically didn’t care. Because at the head of those who had promised to aid my education came the owner of the paper. Therefore some foray into the matter might have cost him! Also, the memory of Kandalı was known not for its capacity for forgetting but for misremembering! Before long they started believing that I’d gone to Istanbul and always remembered it that way. And when they saw me on the street, they remarked that I looked like that boy who had gone to Istanbul … and I went back to my reservoir and hung on one wall a large clock with a white face, of which the second hand ticked every 150 milliseconds because I’d messed with the mechanism. A clock that slowed down time by one and a half.

The immigrants didn’t have blisters on their wrists that you could press. Their wrists had watches. And I collected those watches the moment they got off the truck. They never had phones. For fear of getting robbed, they swathed themselves in fabrics with a thousand secret pockets and carried only meager amounts of money on them. I wasn’t interested in money. My preoccupation was with time. I was interested in the immigrants’ gradual decline into head-bashing as they looked at that clock and the minutes that just wouldn’t pass. Only then would they know the pain Ahad inflicted on me with one finger. If I couldn’t put myself in their place … we would just have to try the opposite. Not just the opposite, we would try everything … They would teach me about humanity. I in turn would share my pain with them. If my father had said he loved me … then this was our only salvation. Then of course we could all commit suicide and end the matter. All those immigrants and myself. But out of all the religions, they had to believe in the ones that forbid suicide! I was aware of all their minute calculations. I wasn’t that dumb. Not all that dumb! Perhaps because I didn’t put on the watch that the governor gave me and jump on the first bus to Istanbul … I was that dumb, dumber, and dumbest! Because what I always kept on my person, rather than the watch, was Cuma’s paper frog. It didn’t even leap anymore when I pressed onto its back. The only thing it did was talk to me in an imitation of Cuma’s voice. Or I was simply hallucinating and what was talking was the picture on the paper Cuma had folded over and over into a frog. A picture he’d drawn himself. The picture of a mountain. Or a hill. Or a reef. Two cavities in its slope that was like a straight wall. And a statue inside each cavity. Around them, other reefs and other dark cavities. Black dots resembling cave entrances. In his Turkish comprised of three words he had said, “Me, home!” It didn’t make a bit of sense to me. I’d thought he was crazy. Huge statues carved into a reef and a Cuma that lived in one of the tens of holes in yet another reef!

Seeing that I didn’t believe a single word, he had laughed and begun folding the paper … how could I have known? That there was a valley called Bamiyan in an area called Hazarajat in a country called Afghanistan and that people there lived in caves carved into the reefs by Buddhist monks 1500 years ago? How could I have known that every morning, since the sixth century, they woke up to two statues of Buddha, one fifty-three and the other thirty-five meters tall, also carved into the reefs? How could I have known that the larger one, Buddha, was the
Vairocana
that represented the embodiment of the void, and that this could be derived from looking at the posture, or the
mudra
, of the statue? How could I also have known that Buddha came from the Shakya Dynasty, and that was why the smaller statue was named
Shakyamuni
? And who could know who it was that spoke to me? The frog, or one of the two Buddhas? Who knew? That every time I looked at the two giants in that picture, Dordor and Harmin came to mind … in truth even I didn’t know. I didn’t know why I thought of them when I looked at that picture. Maybe it was because they had been two colons that rose up on either side of me and held up my childhood. Because once upon a time they had stood on either side of me and prevented life from crashing down on me … maybe there was yet another reason that I thought of them …

“You know what?” Harmin had said. We were sitting on deck. The sun seemed about to come up, and the sky changed colors as it rose and fell.

“A vicious cycle never disappears. It just expands and makes itself forgotten. Why? Because what you call a cycle is just your basic circle. It takes so long to make a full tour that you don’t even notice you passed the same spot twice. Sometimes the vicious cycle grows so much you don’t live long enough to get back to where you started. One keeps galloping on it like a blind horse. Thinks he’s going in a straight line. That he’s making progress. Even thinks he died while making progress and breathes his last in peace! Blindness is imperative, of course! Otherwise you’d know you’re running around in circles. That’s why old people lose their eyesight, you see? So they won’t know they’re passing over the same spot twice. Blindness is a natural defense against the vicious cycle. A mechanical response! Like life itself … In fact, that’s why life is so boring! Because life is also just a response. Now, take a look around you! Everything antagonizes life! What you eat, drink, say, the breaths you take, everything! So that’s life, only a response against that! Against death first and foremost, of course! They must have taught you at school. What’s the basis of science? Cause and effect, right? You know what that means? It means nature’s tenacity! Everything’s a matter of tenacity. Especially life. And that’s the very reason life is as boring as watching a team of tenacious parasites that think just getting to be in a game is as good as a consolation goal. So you don’t need hope or a purpose to survive. It’s enough to know you’re going to die. You’re alive because you’re in danger. You’re alive because you’re dying by every second. That’s all. That’s the meaning of life: fear of death! Are you following me?”