More: A Novel (27 page)

The nurse came and saw me shaking. The bulb she broke to draw into the syringe in her hand read
Diazem
. But I needed something else! The only thing that could stop the downpour of pain suffocating me. The only thing that could fill the void left by Cuma’s absent voice and help me take enough of a breath to be able to pass out. Just as those two statues had been dynamited, so it was the only thing that could destroy the pain inside me. We hadn’t met yet, but the day would come … first letter morphine, last letter sulfate. We had the same birthplace: pain. For I was born not of my mother, but of labor pains. I’d been born not because I was wanted, but because I was in pain. I’d moved past spasms and aches to take my first breath. It had all left its mark on me. All those pangs and aches … I was covered in birthmarks all over. My insides, my outside, all over. As soon as I felt the morphine sulfate through my veins, I’d comprehend it all. I wasn’t the son of a woman who birthed me by way of her own pain, no! I’d see that my real mother was the morphine sulfate that drew into itself all the pain I had. It wasn’t long before I was adopted by an angel that came with a red prescription! When she came, I’d finally have a family too! And what a family:

The two Buddha statues that no longer existed,

Their shadows Dordor and Harmin, long dead before the statues,

An opiate known as morphine sulfate,

Cuma’s voice, which I didn’t know if I would hear again,

The void left by Felat, forever gone from my life, which he’d entered like a fifth season,

And me!

An extraordinary family! A perfect family! We even had a pet. It was a paper frog, but there it was!

The next day the prosecutor came into the room to collect my statement. Pulling up a chair to sit next to me, he eased into the conversation by saying, “My condolences. We’ve buried your father,” then adding, “Those dead immigrants … We’re working on identification … Is there anything you’d be able to tell us? I mean … maybe there was some list your father kept …”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything. My father never told me anything. I wasn’t allowed to go into a lot of parts of the house. Like I couldn’t go into the shed. If there’s anything, that’s where it would be.”

“We already looked there,” he said. “We checked it out. We found the reservoir too … He was clearly keeping the people in there … We also found his computer.”

A knot looped in my throat.

“Computer?”

“Yes … your father apparently monitored everything on it. He had cameras installed in the reservoir. Took a whole bunch of notes …”

Another knot looped over the other one. I swallowed but it didn’t go away. In fact, it got even bigger. Right then the prosecutor asked, suddenly as though he’d just thought of it:

“You’re that whatsit, aren’t you? The kid who made top scores in the high school entrance exams? That was you, right?”

He wasn’t a Kandalı local, after all. So he could remember facts correctly!

“Yes, but my father didn’t send me anywhere,” I said. “Anyway, he asked me to drop out of school as well. So I did. So my father had a computer, huh …”

Smiling, the prosecutor leaned in close and whispered.

“You’re a very clever boy … but it’s a nasty habit you’ve got. Underestimating other people’s intelligence!”

The second he saw me draw a breath to reply, he touched my forehead with his index finger and continued, still whispering.

“You were found in a truck filled to the gills with illegal immigrants, do you realize that? So don’t you dare tell me you don’t know anything! I know that that prick Yadigar is in on this … Now a man is going to come in here. He’s going to write down everything you say, and you know what you say? You say that your father was conspiring with Yadigar. You say that you saw the mayor coming to the house. You say that your father bribed them. Do you understand me?”

All the knots in my throat had come undone, and I was ready to rat everyone out.

“I’ll say whatever you want me to!”

The prosecutor smiled again. “That you will. I’ve no doubt about it. What I’m actually interested in is what else
you
want to say!”

Could he have figured out that the files on the computer belonged to me and was just egging me on? The files were brimming with the evidence of the torture I’d inflicted on the reservoir dwellers! I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Would it to any good if I told the lie about my father putting out cigarettes on me? Or should I talk about Aruz?

“Well?” said the prosecutor. “Is there anything you want to say to me? Something I don’t know?”

I couldn’t hold it back any longer. I had to cry. I did cry.

“My father killed someone … Actually, he killed two people. One he buried in our backyard. The other, in the forest over near Derçisu. He said if I told, he would kill me too! So I couldn’t tell anyone! I couldn’t say a thing to anyone!”

Now that wasn’t what the prosecutor expected! As a matter of fact, I existed to underestimate people’s intelligence! Because I didn’t care about anything and I was the secret champion of the fast chess tournament. And I had just returned from hell, too! No prosecutor on the face of the earth stood a chance against me. I wasn’t the devil’s advocate, I was the devil himself!

The prosecutor was only able to say, “Calm down,” while at the same time shouting, “Nurse!”

Because I was shaking and crying and, with my remaining breaths, hollering, “Dad!” I was a local hero having a meltdown. I was sure my voice carried out the window of the room to the reporters on the lawn. I was the most interesting story to come out of Kandalı since the day it was established. In fact, even the largest news agencies of the world would take my story at face value. A boy emerging alive out of a pile of bodies! What prosecutor could presume to whisper me into a corner? I’d come from a place even worse than the Auschwitz I’d read about in books. Who cared if I was guilty or not? Even if I were guilty, a thirteen-day inferno had washed me clean of my sins. Nobody could touch me. Like that old man had said, I was a miracle! They’d covered up my mother with my father, but they wouldn’t do the same to me. I’d have the last word in everything for as long as I lived!

They dug up the weakling first. I didn’t feel anything. I only thought of Rastin and what he’d done. Then we went to Derçisu, and they dug up the spot I pointed to through my tears. It had been on my mind so often that I found the spot my father had dug years ago in one guess. How was I supposed to feel about remembering the site of a grave so accurately without a gravestone? Was there an emotion reserved for this type of situation? Or did one have to invent one? I could neither smell lavender nor see the trees around me. I merely waited as though it was my grave being dug and my body that would emerge shortly. I was a type of non-matter. And I had no intention of becoming matter … The remains of Cuma were take out piece by piece and put in a body bag. The sound of the zipper plunged into my stomach like a knife …

The next phase was the autopsies. They would be carried out on both the bodies. The Ankara embassy of Afghanistan, ailing from a form of cancer known as civil war, was in no state to deal with the problems of its dead citizens. It therefore looked like they would be buried in the cemetery at Kandalı after everything was over. That would mean that Cuma was to be buried in the place I was born. So what did that mean? Was there meaning to be found in these types of situations? Or did one have to invent one?

The prosecutor kept scratching his head and staring at me while all this went down. There was nothing he could say. He was aware of staring savagery in the face. More importantly, he’d grasped that this savagery was part of my daily life and was apparently starting to feel sorry for me. That was why the man who’d interrogated me in the hospital as if he would bite my face off was now replaced by someone I could almost call affectionate. He even finished off his questions with “that’s OK if you don’t remember.” But I did!

“The one that you dug up from the yard, he beat to death. He suffocated the other one with a bag over his head.”

When asked, “Do you know why he did it?” I’d reply, “Because of the women.”

“If there was a woman he fancied, he’d forcibly take her out of the group and rape her. Naturally there were times someone would object … That’s why he killed these two … At least as far as I know …”

I was talking about all that I did for years as though it had been my father who’d done it. It was true in a way. I couldn’t be that far from Ahad genetically, right?

The prosecutor’s eyes opened wide as he listened, his stomach rising and falling. “We can stop if you’re tired,” he’d say. But I knew it was he who was tired. I’d been let off from the hospital for the day. You could say I was all better. The mysterious ache hadn’t stopped by again since then, and I didn’t feel so bad at all.

On the way back, I saw the latest issue of
From Kandalı to the World
in the prosecutor’s car and couldn’t help laughing. On the front page was the photo of that watch ceremony in the governor’s office. Yes, it was the same photograph, with only a small difference. There was a black strip over my eyes. I was mentioned only in my initials. The headline was “Villains!” The heads of the villains were circled in white so they wouldn’t be confused with the others. Although there wasn’t yet a ruling made in their case, in the paper’s opinion the mayor, my father, and Sergeant Gendarme Yadigar, once a hero, were definitely guilty. The white circles around their heads resembled halos. It wasn’t for nothing that that photograph had evoked
The Last Supper
for me! The bureaucratic and political world of Kandalı was quaking. It was highly probable that the newspaper archive didn’t have another photo in which we were all together. So it must also have been due to a lack of means that the photo had been recycled. After all, the piece featured a paragraph on everyone in the frame, with the exception of the janitor. A statement from the governor, the opinion of the District Gendarmerie General, the Chief of Police’s placations of, “Those responsible will be duly punished, lest anyone have any doubts!”; allegations of mistreatment at the gendarmerie headquarters concerning Yadigar, some dramatic words about me, curses circling around my father, and evidence, item by item, about why the mayor was the most incompetent local official in the world!

In fact, I only understood why they would involve the mayor when I read those lines. With the help of the old janitor’s asides, I put two and two together and figured it all out. The mayor was not of the party that the sect named Tanzim supported, was all. Therefore there was no reason why he shouldn’t be banished down to the core of the earth. Aside from that, had he really committed a crime? Possibly … in fact, if you ask me, everyone in the photo had everyone else’s number. Some were guilty of keeping quiet, while others were guilty of being singularly involved. All in all, no one in that photo was really innocent. That photo had been taken after we’d had Jesus for supper! There the dogs were, lined up in the hospital lawn brandishing mikes and waiting eagerly to scrape the bones clean.

Passing through them, the prosecutor’s car ground to a halt in front of the building when one of the dogs pounced at the window I was resting my head against. An aide came to open my door, and I climbed out. Right then a wave of pain the size of Kandağ poured on the back of my neck like glue and I collapsed onto my knees and one hand at the hospital entrance.

Cameras encircled me and the word spilled from my mouth, along with a lot of saliva, “Saliva!” I’d gone rabid instead of the dogs!

As the aide took my arm and pulled me to my feet, I glimpsed the eyes and raised eyebrows. The murmuring lips and the way they withdrew the mikes extended at me … There were no questions they could ask me. They could tell this wasn’t anybody that could give them answers. All I’d done was trip and look at the saliva spilling into my hands before saying, “Saliva!” but that was sufficient in itself.

I was like a child raised by wolves to become one myself. I’d lived with corpses for thirteen days and become one too. Those corpses really had looked after me! They’d kept me from freezing, even fed me with the milk I’d suckled out of a dead tit. Now I had the look of one who was one of them. I had such a look the dogs all bowed their heads and their cameras and pulled away. I didn’t quite have the
third-page news
vibe I was supposed to. I was nothing like what they were familiar with.

The news agencies, papers, and TV channels had sent all the wrong people to that hospital lawn. Only a war correspondent could hope to talk to me! I
was
a war and dead people came out of me!
The Physics of Living 101
… and not just any old war correspondent, I needed a civil war correspondent! Only they could take the annihilation of the two gigantic Buddha statues and the things I had to tell. None of the others could stomach it. And they didn’t! They shut off either their gaze or their cameras. Because they knew! I was a piece of news that had hell between the lines. Something readers would turn the page and TV audiences would change the channel at. So I needed to stay as merely a headline! Hell was only a word and needed to stay that way. The devil did not
hide
in the details! He lived there. The detail was his home. His address! It was hell! No one wanted to go there if they could help it. So the details were hidden away. We, all the news, were all just digests for one another, nothing more. A news digest! Someday someone would have to write a digest of this whole world to avoid boring anyone with unnecessary details.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. According to a newsflash, people were born, lived, and died on a planet known as the Earth. Now, on to the next piece of news …”

I was to be placed in an orphanage in Istanbul and resume my studies. That was the governor’s plan. As an orphaned boy who was supposed to be dead but had survived, he didn’t want me living anywhere remotely near Kandalı. He thought I should be cast away. The sooner I, along with all the horrible things associated with me, was erased from memory, the better. Well, I’d be happy to be! It was no trouble at all. He kept glancing at the prosecutor next to him and then turning his head to address me.