More: A Novel (4 page)

He said and vanished from my world. When that phone call was over, the rotting teeth of life completely severed the delicate thread holding us together. I neither talked to Felat again, nor joined the military … I did, on a few occasions, call “Cuma!” into a crowd. In hopes someone would call, “Çiçek!” in return … but no one ever did. No one replied to my password. Except, one day I did come across an article in the paper:

A young Kurdish man of Swedish citizenship murdered by relatives in Stockholm, on grounds that he was gay
…

Although a rarity, some parts of the world still treasured persons more than the events surrounding them; so the details of the victim’s love life or even his identity weren’t disclosed. Plus up until this part, the news was pretty commonplace. The killing of homosexual relatives was basically an ancestral sport to some families. What was not commonplace, though, was this:

The victim’s will included, right under his wish to be cremated, a request to be wedded with his lover, identified by name, in the likelihood that he was killed by his relatives or parties solicited by his relatives.

In Sweden it was legal for gay people to marry, but in no country of the world was marriage a right available to the dead. The lover who was named in the will took the matter to court immediately to make this marriage happen. With its main themes of death, humanity, romance, and the meaning and tragedy of life, so began one of the most Shakespearean lawsuits in history.

The cowards who squirmed to make sure that the rest of the world could also be crushed under the reign of the moral code they themselves couldn’t stop hauling around were quick to build their opposition. Their mouths and tongues became loudspeakers blaring that
living
homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to marry, let alone dead ones. Especially the nameless relatives of the deceased, scattered over three continents … They who had assumed that murder could put an end to any love affair were so infuriated by their victim’s parting gesture that Swedish flags were already catching on fire on various sidewalks of the world. During this time of foaming saliva and soaring affronts, the expected decision was announced on an unexpected morning:

No case had been made against the marriage of the gay lovers, one of whom was dead and the other alive … At least half a kilo in ethical weight and wrapped in a very long rationale, the decision could be summed up as:

As long as it wasn’t with a legally impermissible entity—an animal, a child, etc.—as long as no third party was hurt—in cases where there was an ongoing marriage prior to death, for instance—and with the certified consent of both parties, everyone could marry whom they wanted. Dead or alive …

The unprecedented decision of the Stockholm District Court was an inspiration to all homosexuals, mostly immigrants, who were being threatened by families or acquaintances, leading them to write single-clause wills immediately. The practice surged out of the borders of Sweden with the velocity of a vaccination against a lethal disease. Future prospects arose in Sweden for homosexuals who’d tried to bury themselves in every desert charted on the map, as deep down as possible, so they wouldn’t be seen. For the event that someone anywhere in the world was killed due to their homosexuality, volunteer lists were made in Sweden of people who were ready to marry them. Homosexual people from all over the world who felt themselves under threat picked the name of a Swede from the list, wrote it in the form titled
Posthumous Marriage Request,
and sent it to the foundation in Sweden. This newly established foundation was named
One More
! That by itself summed it all up. In capital letters, too:

“You killed your relative because he was gay, but see, now you have one more gay relative! Will you kill him, too? Then you’ll suddenly have one more gay relative. Then more and more and more …”

It was a symbolic reaction, of course. Yet weren’t all hate crimes of the world grounded in symbolism? Weren’t the victims attacked because of whatever it was they symbolized for their murderers? A hate crime wasn’t a
personal matter
. It was an objective kind of violence. Hating the victims didn’t necessitate taking the time to know them in person. Taking a few hits of the pandemic hate floating in the air would suffice. In this way it wasn’t so different from the past, current, and future wars that would be waged over symbols. Yet if those symbols were to be swept out of the picture, all that would be left would be a territorial dispute concerning the distribution of resources. All the wars of the world were basically civil wars. But democracy and liberty and religion and sect and the flag and every symbolic ideal imaginable rippled so alluringly in the wind that it was almost impossible not to be swayed by them. On the streets, in the trenches, anywhere the darkness of the night and systemic violence could reach, all was symbolic. Except the blood that was spilled. Although even that might have been symbolic … It did inspire the color of many flags … the whole symbol-laden world was a shitty alliance dipped in gold paint. When all those symbols fell off, it would reveal the conspiracy underneath. Because there always was one. Just like the one in Sweden …

A few months later, all of this international movement was abruptly cut off by a piece of razor-edged news. A rusty razor at that … The
Velvet Mafia
, an invisible organization composed of homosexuals with political and economic power of the caliber of mythical gods, were exposed as having blackmailed and bribed the board of the Stockholm District Court into running the famed decision through. That power-hungry arrogance, fearful of deadly consumption unless it reigned over every single thing, had shown up once again and in trying to save the applecart, shit on it instead. Soon after that day, all dead-living marriages were annulled. Only one of them remained still valid:
symbolically
, that is …

In the end, the one who had made it all possible, the owner of that initial will, inside his urn of Roosendaal china, was wedded to his lover in a magnificent ceremony for all the cameras to see, and had his revenge on the murderer who was now in prison and all those who had hated him in life. It was only then that his name was made public. Or rather, his moniker:
Blomma
… it meant flower in Swedish. Çiçek … was Felat?

Or was he just one of the bodies unearthed every spring by wild animals from the bottoms of hills following one of the PKK’s interorganizational execution festivals? If so, had he mentioned me in the
self-criticism
he’d given in a last hope of survival, which would now be filed away in the organization’s archive of
Pre-State Bureaucracy
persuasion? Perhaps he’d made it to counselor status in the expertise of confession and was busy chasing debentures in Istanbul … Or had he committed suicide? Or had he already run off to a quaint corner of the earth and sat gazing at sky-tinged seas … I doubt it … If I’ve learned anything from this disease called life, then he was sitting in Daddy’s chair, holding Aruz’s phone in his hand. It’s that simple … The new Aruz wouldn’t remember Felat any more than he remembered me or our password … I was the only one living in the past, no one else. I was alone in that mausoleum of horrors that no other living thing would set foot in. Horrified … because I’d turned into my father, too! I was Ahad! I was worse than Ahad, in fact …

Yet on the other hand,
blomma
… did that not mean
çiçek
? Çiçek … Cuma, then! Felat! Cuma! Against chance, Cuma! Against the predictable flow of time! Against all odds, Cuma! It’s Gaza, Felat! Cuma! Don’t kill me! Cuma!

Sawdust makes me nauseated. Whenever I see sawdust on the ground, I know a life of filth has been lived there. The shed where cock fights were held three days and two nights a week, the broken-down tavern one slipped into by ducking under the shutters during Ramadan, and where I learned to knock back a couple shots and screw up my face, the police station that was open 24–7 and where I stayed for two nights, though I didn’t sleep: they all had sawdust.

Kandalı was the town we fought one another to live in. I’d come too late to see the days it had been called Kandağlı. The letter Ğ didn’t wait for me and had long taken its leave. Seated in the middle of Kandağ, which resembled a couch more than it did a mountain, and thus not a recipient of much wind unless it one day chanced to get lost, Kandalı was a small town that everyone insisted on calling a county. Perhaps calling it a county brought them close, if only phonetically, to the possibility of living in a city. In reality Kandalı was a town-sized pit where the humidity was practically a glass curtain, so you had to part it with your hands to move forward, measure it with scales instead of a barometer. A flowerpot that couldn’t pull any more than its weight in population, where anything that overgrew would dry up and croak before long. It was a place of olive consumption, of olive tree harvesting, of downing a spoonful of olive oil to fortify oneself for rakı drinking. And sawdust was all over the place.

Wherever I looked I saw sawdust scattered everywhere, so that whatever was about to be spilled would be easier to sweep up later. There was sawdust in all of its five town buses, four coffee houses, its one main street, and numerous small streets no one cared to count. Sawdust in the houses, sawdust in the shops, on the soles of shoes and the knees of children, everywhere. All of Kandalı was covered in sawdust like it’d rained from the heavens. So that nothing would be left of Kandalı and of us …

It was in the back of our truck as well, of course. I scattered it on and swept it off. I did it so often it felt like it would stay in my life no matter where I went in the world. Maybe that was as it should be: the whole world should be covered in sawdust! That would make it easier to sweep up entrails spilled by knife, sword, or lead, or the blood from the rape of girls by baton, prick, or fist, everywhere in the world. Because sawdust was magic! It absorbed everything and was cleared away with the sweep of a mop. That was what sawdust did: it sucked up the shitty past and cleared the ground for an even shittier future.

Our own sweet home was at the end of a two-hundred-meter-long dirt road just past the sign at the town exit, one side of which read “Welcome to Kandalı!” and the other “Good-bye!” As for some reason my father refused to have the road paved, we’d emerge at the main road covered in dust. So I’d made a sign reading D
UST
S
TREET
and tacked it up at the entrance of the road. The sign had been so well received even the postman had written it in his address book. Henceforth our address was Dust Street, Kandalı. No number, since ours was the only house there. I even hated our address. If it were a living thing, I’d kill it! Anyhow …

Our plot of land was one and a half acres. Left to my mother by her father who’d died when she was just a girl. It was basically as if the plot were the only relative I had besides father. We had no one else. I had absolutely no knowledge of the whereabouts or activities of my father’s family. Father didn’t tell me anyhow. All I knew was that he’d come from far, far away. He had up and come to Kandalı from Bosnia or Bulgaria or South Africa or some other place I couldn’t care less about, maybe lost his family on the way.

He must have seemed interesting to my mother because his looks differed from that of the town average. He was pale, with eyes of even paler blue, and he was handsome as a cat. Genetically speaking he was a dickhead. So it hadn’t taken him long to catch my mother in his web, and then I was born. And when mother died, it was my turn to fall into the web. I don’t know if at any point in his life he had a legitimate job. Perhaps he had gotten into this line of work at nine, like me! Ultimately, all I knew was that the house, shed, and the reservoir underneath the shed were his places of business and that he occasionally transported vegetables and fruits. For the sake of giving the impression he was working, I suppose …

Aruz’s eighteen-wheelers took off from Kandalı into the depths of Asia Minor, arrived at the entrance of the village of Derç that was three hundred kilometers away, and drove along the Derçisu Creek, in the winter a thousand times its summer width, before entering the forest. The road ended a few hundred meters in, but the huge eighteen-wheeler would already have been swallowed up by the surrounding red, black, and stone pines, becoming invisible. That was the exact point at which the fifteen-minute run of transporting the goods would take place and, having nothing to do except open and close the vault doors, I’d breathe in the fragrances of thyme, sage, and lavender and imagine burning down the whole forest so it would smell even more strongly. That was the precise spot my father had buried Cuma. Among the lavender …

That morning, I’d neglected to turn on the conditioner when I was supposed to, and then forgotten about it completely. According to father’s plan, we were to put Cuma on the boat toward nightfall and then return to Derçisu to pick up new goods. Father must have counted on me, since he didn’t check the back when we were setting out. But when we made it to the cove where the boat was waiting and opened the back, we’d encountered not Cuma, but his corpse. This had forced my father to make a decision. He would have to either bury Cuma somewhere in the cove and be late for the delivery, or take him to Derçisu and figure it out there. He chose not to be late. And to give me a lesson … thus I’d had to ride to Derçisu not on the passenger seat next to my father, watching the road, but in terror in the back, trying not to look at Cuma’s corpse. For hours on the road—trying to stay as far away as possible from Cuma’s constantly shifting corpse …

When we got to Derçisu, my father dug away like a beaver and quickly buried Cuma. That was why the forest was as cursed to me as it was sacred to the immigrants. Because there they were one step closer to their goal. When their transition to the truck was complete, there was a brief transaction, then the same three hundred kilometers back until we entered Dust Street. We’d park the truck in the shed and open the doors of the vault. As we opened the lid in the corner of the shed, we’d say, “Come on!” and even if they didn’t know the words, our gestures would immediately tell the immigrants what to do and they’d disappear through the hole just wide enough for a human to fit through.