More: A Novel (28 page)

“Put this all behind you!” he said. “There’s a brand-new life awaiting you … and don’t you neglect your studies. We believe in you! You’ll grow up to be someone important, Gaza … If you ever need anything, we’ll be right here …”

We were in the state office. Across from me, the prosecutor kept nodding in assent to all that was said. My statement had been in condemnation against Yadigar and the mayor just like he’d asked. Ender would’ve killed me if he knew, but the prosecutor promised me that the court would keep my identity confidential. Because I’d told him I was afraid. “I’m afraid they’d do me harm!” I didn’t actually care … all I wanted to do was go home to collect my things and get on the bus that would take me to Istanbul. The governor stood first, then the prosecutor. Lastly, I did … We were done with one another. I had nothing more to ask of them, or they of me. I extended my hand. They preferred to draw me toward themselves and bump their temples against mine.
⁷
That was how the state and I parted ways. In a cloud of still-steaming-fresh negotiation and temples bumping …

When we left the room, I saw the Kandalı chapter sitting in an old chair. The old man had his eyes closed again. So not only photos but real life captured him that way too … Then I was introduced to a middle-aged man. He was a driver working for the governorship.

“This is Faik Bey … He’ll take you to Istanbul.”

Faik, not knowing what to say, was only able to blurt out his get-well wishes. He didn’t look like he was looking forward to a long trip with the boy who’d been dug up from underneath corpses. But I was pretty sure he was getting expenses. The thought of that travel allowance must be keeping Faik sane. After all, working for the government was an art of survival. The only problem officials had was that they never knew what to do with the life they clung to with tooth and payroll. The memo on that had yet to come in …

The bus would depart in four hours. We left the building, and I climbed in the white car Faik pointed out. Rolling the window down, I took a last look at the Kandalı Government Office. I thought of the day I’d climbed up its front steps with my father and gone in, then left again with a watch on my wrist. A few seconds sufficed to run through the whole day. As for my whole life, I was finished recalling it by the time we turned into Dust Street. I felt as if I’d been away for a century. In reality I’d stayed in the hospital for only eight days. The doctors had told me, “You’re much better! Totally fine!” and discharged me that morning. So I’d only been away from the street, signpost erected by my own hands, for twenty-one days …

We ground to a stop in front of the house.

“I’ll wait here,” said Faik.

I got out of the car and, as I walked, took from my pocket the key the prosecutor had given me. I opened the door of the house and entered. I knew where we kept our only suitcase. Underneath my father’s bed. Pulling it out, I carried it to my room and put it on my bed. I opened my closet and started to place my clothes in the suitcase. I was finally leaving! I was getting the fuck out of there! It was all over! No more Ahad, no more immigrants, and no more Kandalı! I was packing a suitcase for the first time in my life … It wasn’t as hard as I expected, I thought. Neither leaving, not running away, nor disappearing, none of it …

My suitcase was ready. I went back in Ahad’s room and opened the drawer of his bedside table. I found my mother’s necklace and photograph as quickly as if I’d put them there myself. There was some money with them … I took it all and put it in my pockets.

I didn’t wish to stay in the house any longer than that. Taking the suitcase, I walked to the door. Drawing my last breath within that house, I opened the door and saw Ender. He was standing next to the car, talking to Faik. Seeing me, he went silent and started walking toward me. I took the time to shut and lock the door. As I did I tried to calm myself by thinking that if he’d found out about my statement about his father, he’d run, not walk.

Ender walked right up to me and stopped an inch away from my nose, and something unexpected happened. Without a word, he wrapped his arms around me. I did not remember the last time someone hugged me. I didn’t know what to do. First I met Faik’s eyes as he stood watching us. Then I looked away, but didn’t have much of a choice of things to look at, as I couldn’t move my head. My jaw planted on a foreign shoulder, I stood rooted in place. I’d inadvertently put the suitcase down to raise my head and hug Ender back. But standing silently poised like that felt so pointless I just wished more than anything that it would stop. More accurately, I was afraid my inhumane sentiments would be deciphered. I was especially wary of Faik being able to tell that I felt nothing in the face of such a friendly hug from another person. I don’t know why, but I was wary. Maybe I was ashamed. So what was Ender doing right then? What was he looking at? I wished I could see his face. At least then I could imitate him! I met Faik’s eyes again, and this time I had to lower my eyelids to avoid his gaze. Yes, this was better! Shutting your eyes during an embrace ought to make one look more genuine. But then I thought my tightly shut eyes made me look as if I were beside myself! As if I were being overly dramatic …

Those few minutes’ worth of hugging seemed to stretch on for never-ending weeks. Finally Ender relaxed his arms, removed them from my back, and spoke.

“They’ve laid my father off … He’s going on trial …”

What was I supposed to say?

“I know … The prosecutor threatened me. To get me to incriminate everyone …”

“Son of a bitch!” said Ender.

“But I didn’t say a thing … He’d have put me in prison too if he could!”

“Son of a bitch,” he said. Again …

“Yeah!” I said. “A total son of a bitch!”

Then Ender abruptly embraced me again to whisper this time. “I mean you’re the son of a bitch, retard! I know you told them everything! I’m going to fuck you up!”

I tried to disentangle, but Ender held tight and continued to hiss into my ear:

“You’re done! I’m going to do you in!”

He lowered his arms and stepped back.

“I swear I didn’t tell them, Ender!”

Right then we heard Faik calling. “Kids, come on!”

“Hold on a minute!” I called. Then I whispered back at Ender, who was breathless with fury. “You can believe whatever you want to! But I never said anything to anyone!”

At this Ender licked his chapped lips before speaking. “Fine, if you say so … but don’t you think about coming back here! I’m going to burn this house into the ground!”

“Be my fucking guest,” I replied.

Then I walked off … I knew Ender watched me from where I’d left him on the front stoop. I could feel the weight of his glare on the nape of my neck and my back. Faik opened the trunk, and I put the suitcase inside. I got in the car.

“I can give your friend a ride if you’d like,” said Faik.

“No,” I said. “He has stuff to do …”

The car started and pointed in the direction of Dust Street. We were riding over that dust-covered fragment of a road my father had never bothered to have tarred. I saw Ender in the rearview mirror. Fists clenched, he stood like a scarecrow and his stance alone looked like it might blow the car up. He could burn the house all he wanted! I was never coming back to Kandalı. Never ever! Only the trees and a bit of sky were left in the mirror as Ender vanished. I never saw my childhood friend’s face again.

Actually, no one saw Ender after the age of nineteen. He went to do his military duty and never returned. He was blown to pieces by a PKK landmine on the Süphan flatlands, somewhere near Felat’s village. The land he stepped on let forth death … You could say he had his revenge on me, though. Just a week after that seemingly endless embrace, I received word from Kandalı. It was the prosecutor.

“Someone burned your house down,” he said. Then he asked: “Who do you think might have done it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I’d made a principle of not turning in two members of the same family. It might very well be the only principle I had in life …

I could surmise that Ender never forgave me. He hated me until his last breath. Of course he knew I was one of the people that put his father in prison. It was Kandalı! Privacy wasn’t a court order there, it was a tale. And I’m sure that for as long as he lived, Ender dreamed of killing me at first sight. But he’d gotten mixed up in another tale. In that tale Felat, who’d been turned over to the mountain guerrillas of the PKK by his father, put a landmine in Ender’s path in order to save my life … As I said to Ender, believe whatever you want! In the end no one can fool you except for yourself. In the circumstances of the twenty-first century, that’s better than nothing, right?

I was sixteen and Istanbul was excellent. My school was excellent. My dorm was excellent. My grades were excellent. Time was excellent. Life was excellent. The only trouble was with the word
excellent
. It was insufficient in conveying just how good I felt. Other than that, everything was excellent.

I was so used to the dorm Faik had delivered me to in person a year ago, it was like I’d spent my whole life there. Two floors had been arranged as the dorms, and two other floors had been designated for the common areas. Really, that was what every room without a bed was called: common area! The computer room, the TV room, study hall, hobby room, and other rooms … On a sign nailed to the wall next to door of each room was its respective name. In that building, every spot I happened to be in had a name. Even Istanbul had names: weekdays, weekends, and day trips. All this certainty and order enthralled me. There was no way of getting lost in this building. Even the toilets and showers were numbered. The space had been conquered by man and doled out evenly.

I was sharing with others for the first time in my life. This was quite a novelty for someone who’d spent years deciding the living conditions for strangers. Just a few seasons ago, I was the one dispensing while others shared. Now the dorm principal Azim did the dispensing, and I shared the dispensed with the other kids. Although I’d grown up on the
dispensing
end of this practice, it was an arrangement I was no stranger to. The only thing one had to do was to form good relations with the person with dispensing power. In fact, the stronger the relationship, the more advantageous the transaction! The dorm was a kind of reservoir after all. You had to keep close to the one running the reservoir …

Next to all this, time had also been split up into fastidious portions and turned into a volume of weekly programs. Every action had a starting and end time. On a board in the entrance floor were marked breakfast times, study hall, times allotted for the use of each common area, dinnertime, lights out, waking-up time, exit times, return times, and times for everything else, and on our wrists were watches with black plastic straps courtesy of Azim. Yes, I’d left the governor’s time frame and entered Azim’s. Time here was like a tamed predator. We were its only owners and it was magnificent! Neither space nor time had the smallest fissure or hole. Neither leaked a single drop to be lost in nothingness. They’d been designed with the utmost functionality, turning us, ages ranging from thirteen to eighteen, into life machines. We led a life as precise as a flawlessly manufactured time bomb.

Azim was highly impressed by my file that was forwarded to him by my school in Kandalı. As soon as Faik left, he’d said, “We’re going to do great things, you and I!”

I completely misunderstood him at the time. It was also out of habit. After all, most of the adults I’d known until then had been absolute frauds. I thought Azim was looking for a partner in crime, just like my father had once. What Azim really meant was university. I was to finish high school with a top average after all! There was no need to go into it. The real concern was which university to go to and what kind of academic education I was to receive. I was in complete agreement with Azim! Our meeting was that of a naturally born champion and the trainer who’d waited for that athlete his whole life. It was ambition at first sight!

Unfortunately I’d arrived midterm and wouldn’t be able to start school right away. It would be unacceptable, however, for me to do nothing. Azim immediately found a sponsor to help pay for language courses for me, saying, “You’re to learn English!”

Just when I started going to the classes, fourteen hours a week, he turned up with a retired high school teacher, this time saying, “You’re to study mathematics.” In the meantime he enrolled me in chess club and said, “I’m expecting you to place at worst third in the first tournament!”

And I did everything Azim said. It was all so soothing and kept me so occupied that I thought neither of the darkness I’d come out of or those bodies. It didn’t even enter my mind. It was forgotten. Actually, it had been wiped clean the moment I stepped in the dormitory. I never even dreamed of those faces. I dreamed of other things. Dreams about the future. Dreams about chess, about college, about books and the Gaza I would become …

There was just the one night when rather than all this, I dreamed of myself coughing. Then a key appeared in the palm of my hand. A small black key. I recognized the damp key in my hand.

“This is the key to a safe,” I said in the dream. “The key to the safe in my mind. Everything about my past is in that safe. It’s all locked up in there. That’s why I remember none of it. And since I don’t happen to have a sea inside to toss this key into, I threw it up … Nothing to worry about … go back to sleep …”

It was actually a dream of reason. It was an attempt at rationalizing my being able to avoid remembering a hundred times a day all the hells I’d traveled through. I didn’t remember because I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t remember because I was strong enough not to. It was the kind of strength that made my past and memories subordinate to only me. Most importantly, the horrendous ache that had assailed me several times in the hospital seemed to have left me for good. It, too, appeared to be subordinate to me. I’d banished the ache and it had fucked off. That was as it should be! Because in just the same way, I would bring my future to its knees before me and do whatever I asked of myself! With the support of Azim, naturally. I couldn’t do it without him. My only link with the external world was Azim. At the moment, he was the navigator of the gondola that would take me into the future.