More: A Novel (13 page)

I didn’t. How could I have understood what Harmin was trying to say? I was thirteen. Maybe twelve.

“So, if you really want to live, you really want to have a purpose, you first have to shake off that fear of death! Fear of death, you know, the meaning that comes for free when you receive life, that they push into your hand the minute you’re born, you’ve got to toss it away! Only then can you be free! Only then can you go and find the true meaning of your life! Now make me a promise.”

“Okay,” I’d said.

“You’re not to ever fear death. Because that fear, that’s the one thing in this world that can blind you!”

“Promise,” I’d said. “I won’t.”

He had laughed. Then he’d rolled himself another cigarette.

“Well, do you know how not to fear?”

“No,” I’d said.

He’d shown me the tattoo on his wrist:
Dead to be free
. But I didn’t know English. Yet.

“Death includes life, Gaza. You know what they say, starting something is half of finishing it. So is being born. Half of dying. It’s enough that you accept that. I’m not asking you to believe. Because there’s nothing about that to believe. That’s nature for you. It’s enough that you see … see that you’re dead already and accept it. The rest will come.”

“What about you?” I’d asked. “Aren’t you afraid of dying?”

“Me? I’m a fool that’s afraid of even treading on the ground. All I do is sit around like this, on this boat! You know the lotus flower? It looks like the lily. I’m sitting on the water just like one of those. So is Dordor … he’s also sitting … other than that we don’t do a damn thing.”

That I thought of Dordor and Harmin every time I looked at the statues in that picture of Cuma’s didn’t merely have to do with their being two giants. There were also the lotus flowers … I learned about it years later. Why lotus flowers rested on the water and Buddha’s palm … I found out that their implications, as various as their colors, started out in wisdom, passed through enlightenment and rested in mental clarity before ascending to peace. I learned how they held their breath to dive into life’s depths and that, naturally, frogs lived among them. Frogs that looked as if they’d been folded out of wet paper … it took a while for me to find all this out. After all, I was finding out as I went along. Finding out as you went along made the journey longer, of course. But I wasn’t in any hurry. No one was running late to where I was going. They couldn’t have if they tried. There was no running late for those that knew where they were headed. If the destination at hand was somewhere you could be late or early to, it wasn’t even worth setting out. If Harmin had been with me now, he would have said, “Those that fear death are the only ones that make appointments. They’re the only ones with purposes that require making appointments. They’re bound to graduate in four years, go insane if they don’t have a job in six years, buy a house some way or another in ten years, and walk out of life in fifty years via one of at most ten varieties of death!” And since Harmin being on one side of me meant that Dordor was on the other, he would then noisily add:

“You’d think they made a fucking appointment to be born! What’s all this about appointments and being late and being early! If you can find a way, walk! Or sit down and stay sat! You know the lotus flower?”

If I were to say, “Harmin already told me, Dordor,” he would first give me a look and then take a drag from his joint before he spoke:

“Just wait till you hear it from me! Say, now I’m curious! How am I going to tell it, I wonder?”

I watched the group of thirty-three scatter to different points of the reservoir where they let themselves sink to the ground. Dragging their backs down over the wall, they squatted and sat. Only one remained standing. A young man, the frame of his glasses broken passing through God knows which hole and taped in the middle. He caught my eye. He raised his index finger the way I once had in school to ask permission to speak and said:

“I knows Turkish.”

“So do I,” I said.

He laughed.

I didn’t. I asked: “What?”

“When are we go?”

At least he could put together something resembling a sentence.

“What’s your name?”

“Rastin.”

“Are you all from Afghanistan?”

“Yes. But different different. There is Tajik, there is Pashtun …”

“You can understand them all, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re going to be my translator.”

“Okay … tell.”

“Not now. That’s all for now. I’ll come back later.”

“When go?”

“I don’t know, Rastin.”

“Your name?”

“Gaza.”

He laughed and spoke. “Gaza? You are mujahideen?”

He extended his hand. I assume we were supposed to shake hands. Below ground! I could try. I extended my hand as well, and we shook, as though we’d been introduced on an ordinary day for an ordinary reason. I even said, most likely out of habit, “Pleased to meet you.”

He laughed again. “No death, no pleased.”

“What?”

“When mujahideen die, then pleased.”

I would have left, but he wouldn’t let go of my hand. I didn’t get people who shook hands for so long. They’d cling on to the accosted hand as if they’d waited to hold it their whole lives. Also, instead of practically dying of exhaustion like he should have been, he was still peering into my eyes and laughing as if to convince me that what he’d said was amusing. Just as I was about to withdraw my hand and leave he asked:

“You, student?”

“Yes.”

I was lying.

“Me also student. Kabul University. Law.”

I pulled my hand away as soon as he loosened his scrawny fingers, every bone of which I could feel. I pulled back a little too fast. His hand was left hanging in the air. But I didn’t care. After all, we weren’t about to be friends.

“I’m going to give you some buckets now. You can hand them out.”

“Bucket?”

“No toilet, only buckets, you understand?”

The smile covering his entire face vanished in an instant. That the topic had suddenly come to his bowels, and the shittiness of the situation he was in, right when he had believed himself to be in an everyday social interaction, had punched a bucket-sized hole in his pride. I was able to tell things like that now. I could feel how stung those still capable of shame were. I hadn’t been able to set foot outside Kandalı in fifteen years, but people from at least three continents had come to my doorstep. Some had not only come to my doorstep but walked all over my feet too, but by now I knew them all. There wasn’t a variety of immigrant I was unaffiliated with. This Rastin, most probably, was one of those that left his country on political grounds. Because they were the most likely to wear broken glasses. Since every policeman that crossed their path would find a way to break them! To make sure they wouldn’t read any more books. But Rastin got himself back together.

“I see, bucket! You collect sample, for test!” he said, and laughed again.

I didn’t reply. I just shook my head and left … I locked the door to the reservoir and went to sit at my desk. The metal table in the shed was my office now. My father’s carpentry was in the past. There was a monitor on it where I watched the reservoir and took notes on the groups. I even had a computer next to it along with a printer. In its memory were hundreds of files. In those files, information about the hundreds of people that had passed through the reservoir … First of all, I’d divided up the groups by the duration they stayed in the reservoir: there were four main sections,
2
,
7
,
14,
and
Over 14 Days
. Because the greatest variable of their behavior was the duration of their stay in the reservoir. So, their reservoir lifespan … They displayed a distinct change between day two and five. But when they finished out seven days and started to think they might have to stay another seven, their reactions quickly changed too.

Aside from that, the number of men and women was also important. I had three subsections called
Male Majority
,
Female Majority,
and
Equal
. The groups where women were predominant in numbers were more patient and extraordinarily resilient in the face of ever more difficult circumstances. In groups where men were predominant, the rate of me being presented with the woman I wanted to fuck, surprisingly, was higher.

Also, the numbers of the people in the group was also a key element. For that I had four files named
5
,
15
,
30
, and
Over 30
. It was extremely difficult to undermine a group of five or play them off against one another. But it was possible to make a lynch mob out of thirty people within three hours of arriving at the reservoir. Or, whereas crowds of more than thirty people unhesitatingly sent me the women I wanted, groups of five were willing to put their lives on the line to prevent that from happening.

And besides all of this, I had files opened under the names of
Nationality, Ethnic Origin, Average Age, Level of Education, Profession, Amount of Food Consumed, Endurance to Thirst
, and any other measurable attribute pertaining and imaginable to man. For I had something very important now: time. I had left school. With my father’s arms, and my own hands, I’d strangled my educational life. It was all for the best, really. Because I’d started at another school. A school that had humanity for all the subjects. What was more, I could read all I wanted. Though I wasn’t interested in adventure novels any longer. When I went to the bookstores in the city, I beelined to the shelves no one went near and flipped through books no one cracked open. On the trail of every author whose name appeared in Dordor and Harmin’s shady books, I spent the money that my father gave me, now upgraded from allowance to salary, and sank my teeth into my finds like a vampire to suck on to the very last word. Of course other people also read the human-related theory hidden inside those books. But no one else had a full laboratory of humans right underneath their feet, as I did. There was a huge difference between listing on fine-quality printing paper the probable reactions of an adult against the rising temperature of a crowd, and experimenting with and observing it. A difference the size of reality!

I was fifteen and had neither a conscience nor any friends. On his first week at the private school he was enrolled in with his share from the bribes taken by his father, Ender had been subjected to disciplinary punishment for extorting money from his classmates. A month later, he had gratuitously lit up a cigarette in class and started a fire, though small, and was expelled three months later for punching a teacher. Now and then I glimpsed him pacing up and down the only main street of Kandalı with the other cactus-kids that were rooted here. Ender also no longer cackled to himself. He never laughed at all, actually. His brow, crushing down his eyes, gave the impression of having either just left a fight or being about to enter one, while the cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth made it seem as if he were looking to star in an animated film called
The Kandalı Mafia
or something. And even more strange was that I’d heard Yadigar tell my father in conversation:

“Everything I do, I do for my son!”

Where had I heard that one before … ? But Yadigar was serious. Yes, he himself might be sunk into everything illegal up to the badges on his shoulder, but all he wished for really was for Ender to grow up to have a life in which he answered to no one. For that he wanted to make sure his son receive the antibiotic that was
a good education
, which had been forsaken from him in his time. No matter that the mere mental image of said reception made Ender sick to his stomach!

Yadigar was also a dreamer. For the status of junior officer that he would never deem worthy of Ender didn’t exist in the army only. Even heads of state were sometimes junior officers. In fact they took their orders not from above but from other heads of state, who in theory were of the same rank as themselves. In the end, despite all the conscientious tear-soaked wet dreams Yadigar had about his son, Ender’s sole career plan appeared to be becoming part of the Kandalı Mafia. But what Ender didn’t know was this: the Kandalı Mafia was his own father. Along with Ahad and myself … Perhaps there were others, but for now I had no interest in them.

When we ran into each other on the town’s only main street, I only nodded to him imperceptibly and wondered at how it was that he had transformed from the clueless little boy who had been my desk mate into a black shirt. His transformation had even given me inspiration for a new research topic. The only explanation for Ender unexpectedly donning all black and starting to wave around a string of prayer beads as if he would have poked out someone’s eye with the marker was a quest for power. To be the only holder of power in any territory he entered. Spreading fear through the evocation of violence and becoming powerful through spreading fear. In this way, once he gained the power he was looking for, the flaws that he loathed in himself and held responsible for making him an outcast in school, would disappear forever. This would be made possible by the other boys that now accepted Ender as their leader. Ender as leader could claim that the sun rotated around the earth, and no one would contradict him. Because the first condition of accepting someone else’s monopoly on power was denial. Denial of oneself and of facts. And especially denial of the shortcomings of one’s leader. Therefore the only way of Ender, as a fool, to be respected and to live his life without anyone telling him to his face that he was a fool, depended on him being the only authority in his colony of vermin. Yes, the issue was that simple.

But it didn’t end there. Because all of this was connected with another issue: one’s internal wish to rule. It was about the wish to have power over others or to become an authority of any scale … Why was it that in some this wish was lighter than their shadows, when in others it was dense enough to hemorrhage a thousand veins? How did it come about that some people felt like sorry sons of bitches unless they reigned over everyone else? Was authoritarianism a virus? Did the immune system of society have to collapse for it to arise? Was leadership addicting? If so, who was the dealer of this drug, how much for a dime, and did achieving the same effect every time require increasing the dose? Lastly, why did man, that toy, take himself so seriously and thrash like a beached fish for the sake of being taken seriously? In all probability the answers to these questions were based in the fear of death, as Harmin had explained. For the individual who found the meaning of life in a fear of death, this was a way to feel invincible: to become an authority. It was a subject much deserving of contemplating and experimenting on. After all, Enders were all around. From one-on-one dealings to political relations involving millions, all around. Every single one was after the tiniest opportunity they could come across. Every day we walked past secret tyrants who had been lying in wait all their lives to seize and overtake power at its weak moment and might die waiting. They might even be those closest to us. In our families, among our friends, everywhere. Who would dare call out another for a dictator? It didn’t exactly show when they were walking down the street by themselves! Or sitting in a reservoir with their heads between their hands …