She opened her eyes, saw him with the crumpled letter in his hand, smiled, sighed, and died.
Tearfully he clasped her to him, filling her hair with endless tender kisses. But she was already gone.
It took quite some time for the information to sink in. After the funeral he came home to an empty apartment, and for a while, his only feeling was grief for the only mother he had known. He had never grieved for his real family.
Now he felt that he had been pulled out by the roots; nothing that had been his remained. Even the twins were not and never had been his brothers. He was adrift in a sea of nothingness, with no stars to steer by.
He began to wonder how he could find out more about his original family. Who was his grandfather? Where had they lived? What blood ran in his veins? His only family had been Emine and her family. “So – who am I, then?” he thought. “A month ago, I was a Turkish boy called Selim – but I am not Selim. I am Salim. A Palestinian. Who is Salim? All I know is that I am twice orphaned and belong – where? Where do I belong now?” He knew no more of Palestine than he knew of Panama or Pakistan. It was a foreign place – was it a country? He knew only that it had reputedly insoluble problems. They had always been foreigners in Belgium, but he’d had a family, a community in the Turkish enclave of the city; now he was suddenly an alien with no home anywhere.
He learned that they spoke Arabic in Palestine, so he sought out online lessons and began to cultivate his Arabic-speaking colleagues at work. His company had a number of second-generation immigrants on the staff, and one of his colleagues turned out to be a Palestinian. He had casually mentioned that the Palestinian Delegation in Brussels was helping the compatriots, who were dispersed to the ends of the earth, to locate their own people in Palestine or Israel. Selim fished cautiously for information; perhaps he could find some clue with which to begin his search, an Ariadne-thread that might lead him to his family.
Many on the Delegation spoke fluent Hebrew. Perhaps someone would look up some old reports? He knew the year the slaughter had happened, and that it had been late summer. There might be something in the press, or somewhere. A young officer heard him out, noting meticulously all the details that Selim was able to give him and promised to contact him soon. “You’re not the first who has asked us to do this,” he said, with a kind smile, “and you won’t be the last. There are so many such tragedies these days.”
“These days?” said Selim bitterly. “It goes on and on. A war with no end in sight.”
“We try to keep complete records, help people track down their families. Forty years, so many terrible stories,” sighed the officer. “But we have some informants, records, newspapers, and there are some pro-peace NGOs that help us out as well. We’ll do our best.”
It was not even a week before Selim received a phone message from the Delegation office, and the next morning he was defying a strong wind early and eagerly on the steps of the building. The wait seemed endless; he nearly gave up, but the doors opened at last.
The officer smiled and handed him a folder of some faded photocopies of newspaper clippings. Most were in the square Hebrew characters, but some had French or English translations clipped to them.
As he read, puzzling over some of the words, he could feel the hairs of his neck rising. The story of the raid was reported in such dreadful detail it seemed as though the journalist had been present, though there had been no actual witnesses.
Except, perhaps, himself.
The family had been quietly at home that evening when a routine weapons search had become a bloodbath. A raw young corporal had lost his head, pulling the trigger of his rifle in a panic, blowing off the heads of the father of the family, the young son and the mother whose hands were still raised in a plea for mercy. No one was left alive; there were reported to be two younger children, but they were never found.
Two. So he might have a brother of his own blood, somewhere in the world… if he had managed to survive.
He stared at the grainy photographs. His father. His mother. They looked so young. His father in traditional dress, bound headdress, salwar kameez and a bushy moustache, standing under an olive tree. The picture of his mother, her hair covered in a white scarf, with huge worried eyes, was probably copied from her identity card. Had she known what worry lay in store?
And then, in the next article was a fuzzy black and white photo of the Israeli thug who had destroyed his life. Selim’s gaze was caught by bright sharp eyes, shiny as bullets, aiming out of the hazy photo, the eyes of a ruthless killer. His stomach churned. The name was given. Dov Ben Geffen. Now and forever it was engraved in his memory. This scum had taken his family, his identity, had ripped out his roots.
Selim had never before felt true hate. He had known occasional little fits of anger, but this was different. He could feel it sinking into his very bones. And as it penetrated, something inside him broke forever.
Over the weeks and months that followed, Selim’s brothers, who had no idea what had played out at their mother’s deathbed that night, muttered to each other that he seemed to be changing. When addressed, he replied monosyllabically, but there were no more discussions about local politics or the gaffes of the EU, or gossip about their cousins. He was withdrawing, becoming introspective, almost secretive. They shrugged it off, attributing his behaviour to the still-raw shock of their mother’s death, having been aware all their lives of that special closeness. It had caused a good deal of jealousy in its time. Now they were husbands and fathers with their own concerns, and just assumed that it would pass.
But the change seemed to be much deeper and more enduring than they had expected. They hardly saw him now. Most evenings, Selim shut himself in one room and remained glued to the computer screen all evening. Furiously, he surfed the internet, seeking for ever more information about Palestine. He worked hard on his Arabic, determined to access the plethora of material available online. He found a lot which had been translated into French or English and began to collect his own files. The more he read of injustices, the more fury ballooned within him. Where was the international outrage? Where were all the defenders of democracy and justice? The wild night of the massacre had been repeated again and again, and as the reportage seeped into his mind, he became aware of a growing thirst for revenge that would not let him see or think of anything else, directed against not only the Israelis but also all those allies in the West who supported them.
The websites he was exploring made no reference to the Holocaust, to the reasons Israel was established nor any historical perspective but their own. One evening, in his endless searches, he encountered the blog of Ali, a Palestinian ‘Jihadist’, written in Arabic and in English. The blogger described, in the darkest colours, yet another Israeli invasion of a Palestinian village and the massacre of innocent Palestinians, including several children and babies under the pretext that they were hiding arms and weapons in their houses. This, he claimed, was a shameless lie. The site referred Selim – no! Salim – to a host of videos, always depicting devastating raids of the Israeli occupation army against Palestinian civilians. Again, according to the blogger, Israelis always used the same excuse to use their weapons against civilians: their suspected participation in illegal actions against the Israeli army and the Israeli state, an excuse for genocide. Ali eloquently urged all young Palestinians of the world to Jihad, to holy war against the State of Israel and Jews everywhere and their supporters in the West.
Selim knew little about Jews. There weren’t any in the Brussels Turkish enclave where they lived. As Selim read the black details of the deadly raid, he saw his own family falling under a hail of bullets. He found his father’s name, Lutfi El Amin, his mother, Fatima, his brother Kamal, and one other who was never found. He would call him Ismail, lost somewhere in the desert. His brain felt as if it were on fire as, with trembling hands, he drew the computer mouse towards the comments in English at the bottom of the page: ‘Death to the Jews and their state forever! Death to all infidels!’
It was one specific Jew he had in mind. He banged his fingers violently on the computer keyboard to vent his bottomless anger. He pressed to confirm and saw his comment published immediately, signed as ‘Nobody’. He looked at it for a few seconds and then slammed the lid of the laptop.
All the next day at his job, he could not dislodge the blogs and his words from his mind. And when he was again alone in his room with the computer, he revisited the site, very curious to see if the writer-blogger had written some new story or had posted a new video to encourage his fighters for Allah. There was no new addition. But he was surprised to discover that someone else had left a comment just below his own, addressed to him, to ‘Nobody’:
“Allah is great, but the blood on the hands of Jihad is not so.” They had responded in English, signing with the pseudonym ‘FO’. He made a face. He did not like this comment. It irritated him. He had a vague feeling that he might not have meant what he himself had written in a fit of anger. But without losing time, Selim replied in turn with his own comment: “When the weapons of Israel hit your own family and destroy them, then you will understand and tell me if the Jihad is right or not!”
An exchange of brief messages continued with arguments from both sides. Selim found himself becoming strangely addicted to this debate, as if trying to justify his arguments to himself as he wrote them to this unknown FO. So, every night at the same hour when he shut himself in his room and opened his computer, his first care was to check out the blog and see if the unknown person had replied.
“You must not allow your anger to rule you and alienate you, because it will make of you a beast. We are human beings and we must learn to control our anger, and not let the poison of vengeance consume us. Spreading death and destruction is not what our religion teaches us,” was one of the other’s responses, which might be reasonable, but Selim could not accept it. It was impossible to forget what had happened to his family. He would never again be free of the tragic truth and the terrible consequences.
The Jihadist writer of the blog eventually replied to him. “My brother, welcome! Join our righteous war against the infidels and the torturers! You belong with us. You know we are fighting for your home, your family, your honour and for the glory of all-merciful Allah. We are your true family, your true brothers...” How did this Ali know so much about him? His correspondence with both him and the unknown continued. The mysterious FO presented arguments civilly but with fervour, while Ali’s comments grew more and more bloodthirsty, rejoicing at every suicidal sacrifice that hit the papers, regardless of the body count. His messages were frequent, violent and repetitive. Selim, who’d gladly greeted him as brother, was occasionally reminded of the twins.
The other’s comments were reasoned, compassionate. “With every death we cause, I believe we lose a fragment of our souls,” FO mourned. Their correspondence went on and an imperceptible bond began to connect him with the other. At some point they agreed to exchange private emails, and with the passage of time the messages became increasingly personal. In the solitude of their computers, they both began to open up, and, masked by the anonymity of the internet, to share more and more small pieces of themselves.
Two months passed until one evening Selim discovered to his astonishment that his contact was a woman. At first he was shocked. He had been chatting like this, with interest, with a woman!
His stepmother’s religion had been more or less casual. Although Emine’s schooling had been limited, her ideas could even be characterised as progressive. She had thrown off the headscarf from the moment that the family had left Adana, and always supported her children in their studies and in following a more or less European lifestyle. But politics and religion were not the concerns of women. There were limits to her modernism. And now he was confronted with an eloquent and knowledgeable woman who had emerged from the chaos of the internet, who intrigued, even mesmerised him. The way she spoke was so like Emine, always ready to support strong principles and logical arguments. And after this first revelation, a few days later came another surprise; his unknown internet friend turned out to be a compatriot.
As her English was as imperfect as his own, he had assumed that she was not a native English speaker, not Anglo-American. With the revelation of her nationality, their correspondence entered a new phase as they shifted to Turkish. And more was to come; before long she confessed that her real name was Feridé Ökem and that she was not in Turkey but in Brussels, where she headed the Turkish Delegation for Rural Affairs and Fisheries to the European Union, in view of the future participation of Turkey in the Union. She was playing a part in these important negotiations!
When he read these last lines, he could not believe his eyes. Not only was she Turkish, but was in the same city he was, breathing the same foul air, sharing the endless mouldy winters, the same summers capped by thick clouds in leaden skies. His curiosity was immense. He had been wondering for weeks what she might look like, this unexpected friend. His imagination painted her as a tall, slender brunette, with a contagious energy and boundless kindness. But he had still kept many parts of himself reserved. While he had often thought of confiding in her, something always stopped him at the last minute. He hadn’t even the courage to disclose the fact that they shared the same city. He had just said that he too lived in Western Europe outside of Turkey, without ever being specific.
There was a faint chance that he would some day run into her in his work; his company was responsible for the security of Commissioner Paulauskas, and he often met with high-ranking delegations of persons concerned with agricultural policy. She could be one of them. He might even have seen her already... could she possibly resemble the image he’d painted in his mind?
But he always braked his thoughts at this point. He had no business musing about dating, not any more.
He wasn’t even Turkish now. So much for compatriots.
He was a Palestinian with a grim mission of vengeance. There could be no relationships in his life. His mind had become a tumult of competing obsessions, conflicting desires and profound confusion. Since the realisation of what had happened to his real family had invaded his consciousness, inverting every sense and balance, his whole philosophy of life had been overthrown. The moderate Islam views of his mother faded into an indeterminate memory while that of the Jihad possessed him more and more. Feridé Ökem only weakly tethered him to her world.
As time passed, the transformation of Selim into a person who had no connection whatsoever to his previous self, continued gradually but relentlessly. Even his appearance was changing. He had lost several kilos, now a lean, streamlined version of his former self, and a thick moustache and pitch-black beard had almost buried the features of his face. Yet he clung to that tenuous electronic connection with that gentle voice of reason.
But he thought: Once I was Salim El Amin, which means peace; then I was a false Turk, Selim Çelik. Now… now who am I?
One Monday morning, as he was making the usual inspection of the list of the Commissioner’s visitors for the week, Selim sprang abruptly from his chair as if galvanised by hundreds of volts of electricity. Right before his astonished eyes was the name of the policy representative from the Turkish Permanent Representation in Brussels, Madame Feridé Ökem! She had an appointment with the head of the Commissioner’s cabinet and two members of the office tomorrow, Tuesday, at nine o’clock. His mysterious internet friend would be there herself, in person. They would meet at last. He drifted into a happy daydream. She would be beautiful, of course, whatever she looked like, with warm bright eyes and an elegant figure, and when she heard his name – had he ever told her his name? – she would smile, and...
Some time later, he hauled himself back to the real world, thrusting dreams of escaping into love back into the mist. A moment of dangerous weakness. Sighing, ‘Insh’allah, as God wills,’ he returned to the appointments list.
When he turned the page to Wednesday, he received another even sharper shock, diametrically opposite to the fir
st.
At precisely the same hour, nine o’clock on Wednesday, the Israeli agricultural representative, accompanied by the military attaché of the Israeli Delegation to the European Union, was to discuss a subsidy from the Mediterranean Cooperation Programme regarding new cultivations on land which, for some reason, was claimed by the army of Israel. His eyes were drawn to a name written in flame. He could not look away from it. He burst into a cold sweat and his heart began pounding like a maddened drum. Colonel Dov Ben Geffen! That name had been hammered into his memory from the moment he had read the news reports of the massacre of his family. This man had to be the corporal who had destroyed his father, his mother, his brothers – and him. Not only did he seem to be alive and unpunished but he had been promoted to a high rank! What kind of monsters were these Israelis, rewarding a cutthroat killer? Had he received medals for the butchering of Selim’s – Salim’s – mother and father? He trembled with shock and outrage. The object of his vengeance would be here, in his workplace. He shut his eyes on a brief vision of this Hebrew soldier, armed to the teeth, his UZI submachine gun spitting hot bullets as he ravaged the office, slaughtering him and all his colleagues. Who knew what such a man was capable of? Selim struggled for control, told himself to get real. Nobody would be allowed into the building with such weapons, military attaché or not. But bile was rising in his throat, choking him... “Insh’allah!”
And then, like a stroke of lightning, he grasped at this clear sign from Allah. He realised that in fact, completely unexpectedly, his target was being handed to him on a plate, without any effort on his part. Now it was suddenly clear. Salim was the past, Selim was the past. Allah had spoken. He had two days to devise a perfect plan, complete in every detail. He sent his final message to the website, signed, ‘Tair, the Avenger’, and sent a message to Ali. There could be no turning back.
The Next Stop Page 22
