More: A Novel (45 page)
Authors: Hakan Günday
I know.
Shall we say good-bye?
Good-bye, Cuma.
Good-bye, little boy … now go and finish your story …
It’s finished.
I delivered Cuma home, whom I’d carried inside me since the day I took his life. I heard his voice years later only to say good-bye. I was in the Bamiyan Valley of the Hazarajat region of Afghanistan. Inside the gigantic groove which once housed the fifty-five-meter-tall statue of a Buddha … The statue had stood for 1,500 years at the very spot I was now standing and then gone up in a cloud of dust. I looked down and saw a boy. He was fifteen at most. He stood staring at me from between the nearby trees. He held a Kalashnikov. I smiled. The boy raised the gun and fired. I felt warmth bloom in my left shoulder. I looked at the perfect emptiness stretching out in front of me. I stood up.
14
Pun on the Turkish word for convict, “shovel prisoner.”
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