By the afternoon, I was there in that city that had been stained with the blood of thirty-four youths. A police siren seemed to be hanging above our heads, flashing blue high up in the sky. I went to the hospital.
“They were blown to pieces.”
The mothers kept repeating that over and over as they sighed in grief. The fact that their children had been killed was bad enough, but the explosion had been so violent that the bodies were unrecognizable.
“My daughter was like a porcelain doll. I loved looking at her.”
The mothers were in anguish.
“They have to run DNA tests to identify some of them.”
I recognized Pembe and Derin by their hair.
“Don’t pull the sheet back any further. I can tell it’s them.”
“They were thrown so far from the bus that their hair didn’t get burned in the fire.”
The body parts under the sheets were like the bloody pieces of a puzzle. The pieces were intact, but no one knew to whom they belonged.
“This is Derin.”
“That name isn’t on the list.”
“Her first name is Emine.”
“Emine D. Erdoğdu.”
“Here. Pembe is the one with blond highlights. Derin has platinum highlights.”
“Pembe Paris Yılmaz.”
“Her middle name was Paris? How did she keep that a secret from us? There was never a P on the attendance sheet.”
That was the last trick Pembe pulled on me. They were lying side by side on a metal table. Rivulets of blood coursed along the table’s surface toward the drains at each end. The blood made a sound as it flowed along the table. Then again, maybe I was the only one who could hear it. That was the last sound that Pembe and Derin ever made, and it gave me the impression that they were somehow still alive. Questions raced through my mind: How could they die like that? How is it that our loved ones die? How can they leave us like that, how can they just be wrenched from the world? The people we love can’t just die.
Thinking that we were related, the doctors showed me their faces. We were related in a way. Bound by blood. That much is true.
I will always remember the good moments.
As we sat there drinking beer, they shielded their eyes from the sun with their hands.
“So,” I said, pointing at my lip, “what do you think of my piercing?”
“Do you think you’re Amy Winehouse or something?”
We had wanted to bleach a lock of our hair like Amy had done. I wish I’d gone through with it. When Derin was worried about something, her expression would become inscrutable, as if a curtain of fog had descended over her face. Pembe had adorably small ears, and Derin’s upper lip was upturned like a baby’s. Pembe had a tattoo of an angel, which she was still rubbing every day with Bepanthol cream.
“It looks great!”
“You don’t think it’s too big, do you?”
“Not at all. If Amy saw it, she’d wish she had one just like it instead of that bimbo on her shoulder.”
“My nose is nothing like the noses of people from Bursa. I got it from my mother’s side of the family; they’ve all got nice noses. But I got my dad’s broad face, which ruins the effect.”
We would stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom at school and talk about the pros and cons of our features. That’s how I want to remember their faces. Smiling, laughing.
Both of them had beautiful teeth.
“Come on, give me a smile . . . I want a pic I can put on Instagram.”
They’d flash me a full-toothed grin.
“I have my mom’s dentist to thank. Did you know that a lot of dentists are real charitable people? They’ll fix up the teeth of anyone who comes along, just like they did for me. Those poor people with bad teeth have just never been to a dentist. That’s a true story. Spread the word.”
“Stop kidding around—we had to wear retainers for years.”
“I swallowed mine once. When I shit it out, my mom washed it and boiled it in a pot of water. Then she gave it back to me to wear, saying that the dentist had sent her a new one. Ha ha!”
My friends were lying on a metal table, their bodies now stitched back together.
How could you do that to my friends?
“It never occurred to me that they’d die. Not once did I think that they’d die like this at such a young age.”
Pembe’s father was devastated. Over the years, that philanderer from Bursa had developed a liking for the party in power and voted accordingly. In his mind, the state should have protected him and his children, but his lovely daughter had been blown to pieces.
“What business did she have being with those people?”
His wife, who I think I mentioned had once been an attractive flight attendant, screamed, “Enough!” It was like a slap to his face. “Get the hell out of my sight! I don’t ever want to see you again, you bastard!”
Their funerals were beautiful. We buried them on a nice summer’s day. If it had been cold and rainy outside, I would’ve been tormented by the thought of them lying in all that muck and mud.
“They’re gone, so it’s time to mourn for them. You’ll remember your friends for the rest of your life. Over time, the pain in your heart will quiet down, but that doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten about them.”
My mother had taken me to see a therapist. She had no choice. I was balling up my hands so tightly that my fingernails were cutting into my palms. One night I tried to jump into that pit behind our house, the one that nearly every woman in our family had thought of throwing themselves into. The thing is, I don’t remember doing it. Later, they told me that my mother held me back by one of my arms while my aunt—the other one, the journalist—held on to the other. In a panic, they had asked her to come talk to me.
She said to my mother, “I’ve missed Istanbul so much. I don’t like my job. I miss working for the newspaper.”
The place where she’d been living was, in her own words, a dumpy little town, and she had a dumpy little flat that looked out over some farm fields. One day, she went to the one and only beer hall in town. When she sat down at a table, she realized that everyone in the place—they were all men—had fallen silent. The only sound was the chirping of a canary in a cage. One of the men said with a leer, “That bird’s male. Starts singing whenever it sees a woman.” My aunt got up and left.
“I’m fed up with everything.”
I’d never heard my aunt complain before.
“Our lives have all gone to shit.”
My mind was mush because of the medication I was taking. They made me sleep in the living room so they could keep an eye on me. I wasn’t feeling tranquil like I’d felt on the night that Amy died. On the contrary, I was stuck in my grief. It was as if I were at the bottom of a pit and couldn’t get out. I constantly felt like I was out of breath. My two best friends hadn’t been buried that day, I had—and I was pounding my fists against the boards that had been placed over my body.
“Get me out of here!”
When I started having the nightmares, they put me on heavier sedatives but, of course, they didn’t help because my waking life was even worse.
I’m here because I wanted to get away from that miserable life.
Once I screamed at a man while I was on a ferry. There was a television in the seating area. The man, who was watching the news on the TV, had said, “Look at that. Those kids are blowing themselves up.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I shouted. That day, I was on my way to Pembe’s mother’s place on Bağdat Street, which was on the other side of the city, for my friend’s memorial service.
The man tensed up when I stormed toward him, one hand raised threateningly. “Who’s blowing themselves up?”
Without an ounce of shame, he said, “Those young people. The terrorists.”
“You prick, can you even hear what you’re saying?”
I was shouting so loudly that the veins in my neck were bulging. Ever
yone on the ferry fell silent. The ferry itself seemed to have fallen silent. It was as if the engine had stalled and the hull was just gliding through the water with its own momentum. As one of the crew members stared at me through the window, the only sound I could hear was the cries of the seagulls, which also seemed to be watching me.
“My friends died in that explosion! My friends!”
I was pounding my chest as I yelled.
“They’re anarchists, the whole lot of them,” he said. “All they want is to destroy this country.”
“Screw your country, fuckface!”
“You better watch your tongue. The state will come after you.”
“Fuck you and your damn state!”
He snapped. “You anarchist bitch, shut your trap! You’re probably just a damn Armenian, like all the others! A damn Kurd! I’ll bet you support ASALA! You frigging PKK terrorist!”
Even though he was seething with hatred, I could tell that he was afraid of me. As he leaned back in his seat and crossed his legs, I wanted to strangle the life out of him. I was so enraged that I was grinding my teeth. Sometimes I wonder if it was the medication that made me speak out that day or if I was trying to be more like Derin and Pembe to keep their memory alive. Either way, it was the pills that got me off the hook.
“A young woman attacked her mother while she was on the same medication. Do you remember that incident? She was beautiful, just a university student at the time. She slit her mother’s throat, killing her. Everyone was surprised when she was being taken to prison because she was all dolled up. The medication was the problem.”
That’s what my lawyer was saying in the public prosecutor’s office. My father had even gone to the trouble of showing up for the hearing.
“It’s your fault that I had to talk to that bastard!” he yelled at me afterward.
Indeed, he had talked to that piece of shit in an attempt to get him to retract his complaint, begging him for my sake. Muttering to himself, the man finally backed down.
“The public prosecutor is on their side. He would’ve thrown you in the slammer!”
Everyone in the world seemed to be on their side, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Do you have to be evil to win in the end?
After I gave my statement, an older cop walked up to me and said, “Do you know what they do to girls like you? They throw you into the worst ward with the worst criminals. You won’t get a wink of sleep because the women there will feel you up all night long. Those lezbos have got tongues bigger than the biggest cock you’ve ever seen, and they wouldn’t be able to get enough of a green girl like you. Then the guards would send you over to the men’s ward so they could have their fun with you, and you can be sure that one of the male guards would take a shine to you too. And you were involved in those protests . . . They’d screw you over just so they could get in good with the head guards. After a few weeks of getting fucked every way possible, you’d be shitting and pissing yourself.”
I puked. As that pig of a cop was telling me those things, I puked right there in front of him.
“You filthy bitch!”
Some other cops ran over and held him back. I figured he’d been a torturer at the peak of his career.
“Chief, cut it out. You’re going to retire soon, right? Enough already. You should be ashamed of yourself, trying to scare the poor girl like that.”
I was on the verge of laying into him like I’d done to the guy on the ferry. If I had, I would’ve wound up in prison, not in the treetops. That day, I even had a scarf in my bag so I could cover my hair. I said that I was going to a memorial for my friends. I slapped the guy across the face. He wasn’t expecting that. He started swinging at me.
“You Armenian slut! You Kurd whore!”
God give the Armenians patience. They always get the short end of the stick.
A few people ran up and tried to pull the guy off me.
By that point I was on the floor. He got in a few kicks, swearing up a storm as the other passengers tried to shove him away. Later, at the police station, I found out that six months earlier he’d beaten his wife so badly that she ended up in the hospital. Despite that, I was the guilty party while he was as pure as the driven snow.
I know I should try to forget about that day.
My grandma used to say, “Forgetting is the only way to get through life.”
Or was it: “Forgetting is the only way to get through this screwed-up life.” Is that better? “If we didn’t forget, this fucking life would be unbearable.” She’d roll over in her grave if I were to forget the curses with which she peppered her aphorisms. Here’s the thing: we can’t live our lives by forgetting. All we can do is transform our past experiences into something else. And that’s what we should do, turning them into memories that won’t weigh on our hearts or drag us down into misery. While it may be true that stories of suffering cannot be transformed into wondrous tales in the way that coal becomes diamonds, if we go on living in spite of them, we ourselves can become something else, like a treasure chest, or an oyster containing a huge pearl. My friends died. I lost two people whom I loved deeply. Tell me, whose heart can I break? Whom can I hurt? What harm could I bring to others?
I knew that the sun was about to set because the birds were returning to their roosts. I wished that I could speak their language so I could ask them, “How is the city that I left behind? How is life going without me?”
If I didn’t know how to forget, who could? I found myself in the treetops because I was stuck with my memories. Because I longed to forget. Because I couldn’t forget.
11
SEND A REQUEST
Encounters between lonely people only occur in solitary places. I saw Yunus on top of the wall looking like a frightened—yet adorable—cat. At the same time, he struck me as being more handsome than ever. I was surprised, and my first reaction was to say something the likes of which would’ve fallen from the lips of Derin or Pembe.
“Hang on a second, I thought you were afraid of heights! What are you doing up here on the wall?”
“Come over here.”
Based on the brevity of his answer, I guessed that he was still afraid, and he seemed confused himself about how he’d managed to get up there, straddling the wall like a horse. I saw that he was sitting on what appeared to be a fur coat. When I first saw him after emerging from the seclusion of the laurel tree, for a moment I imagined that he’d arrived on the back of some mythical beast. In turn, that made me wonder if—or when—I was going to lose my mind. At the time, all I could hold on to was my obstinacy: I wasn’t going to descend from the trees or set foot on the ground. Maybe fear as well: terrible things had happened to me, and I was incapable of dealing with the pain and loss I’d suffered. And there was a desire to seek refuge: if it was possible, I would’ve gone back to my mother’s womb. I also longed for seclusion: I could have slept for a hundred years. Like I may have said before, I wanted to experience death before actually dying. Don’t be surprised if I repeat that hundreds of thousands of times because that is the story of my existence. So let me live out my story however I see fit because our lives can so easily be taken from us. You know what happened to Derin and Pembe. Why should two young women be plucked from this world when they were so full of life? They wanted nothing more than to bring hope to a war-torn town in a desert; and then they were blown to pieces. If the sorrow and grief I felt were to sprout leaves, branches, and roots, it would’ve been as massive as the trees in the park. I had no idea how to console myself, and I wished that I’d been committed to an insane asylum, as at least there I would’ve been able to find some respite. My sole desire was to slip into the cool dark of unconsciousness. Yet I was fully conscious and sound of mind even if I was living in the treetops. That’s what I was thinking as I looked at Yunus, who had somehow mustered the courage to clamber atop the wall: I am of sound mind.
“I thought you were afraid of heights.”
“I was.”
“How did yo
u get over your fear?”
“Fears exist so we can overcome them.”
“If you ask me, you’re the one who’s going to be overcome. Not your fears.”
Yunus was like a knight waiting for me as he sat astride that strange creature. I couldn’t understand how he’d made the leap from the fire escape to the top of the wall, as I knew that fears cannot be conquered so easily. My guess was that he’d tossed the fur coat onto the wall and then jumped atop it like a cavalryman mounting his horse.
The wall was very tall. I cannot emphasize that point enough. It was even taller than the stately three-story mansion that had been turned into a shoddy hotel. The red tiles of the hotel’s roof were practically beneath us, seeming to float in the air like a flying carpet.
“Why were you crying?”
I surmised that he’d seen me weeping in my perch in the laurel tree. Meaning that he’d been watching me, even if for a few moments. We could even say that he was observing me.
“You kept wiping away your tears.”
I got the point. He didn’t have any bad intentions. Right?
“You were sobbing like a child.”
That much was true. The urge to weep had risen from the furthest depths of my heart.
“What’s wrong, Girl in the Tree?”
That question made the tears well up in my eyes again, but it also made me laugh. He’d said that to bring a smile to my lips: “Girl in the Tree.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The world is what’s wrong.”
“If you have a problem with the world, your problem is as big as the world.”
“Yunus Emre said that.”
“He was one of my father’s favorite poets. He named me after him.”
“I’ve never met a person whose name didn’t have a story behind it.”
“Maybe people who lead simple, ordinary lives don’t have such stories.”
“If your heart is beating in your chest, you have a story. Everything you feel, your life, hopes, dreams, and moments of darkness are all your stories.”
The Girl in the Tree Page 11