A man.
There’s a man sitting in one of the kitchen chairs.
Right in front of the kitchen window. The sun is inundating the room, I can only make out his backlit silhouette, the broad shoulders, the baggy, worn clothes, the black balaclava that is hiding his face.
A dark and menacing presence.
And he’s pointing a gun at me.
I stare at the intruder, frozen on the spot, unable to move a muscle, my mouth hanging open.
—16—
“There you are,” the intruder grumbles in English after what feels like eternity. His voice sounds familiar. I detect the barest trace of an accent, too. Most surprisingly, the man sounds almost… relieved?
He slowly gets up, and I recoil against the closed door, fumbling behind me for the door handle.
When the stranger takes off his balaclava, I finally recognise him despite his unfamiliarly shaved head. I touch my chest, where my heart is beating way too fast, making fierce boom-boom-booms that I’m sure people can even hear down in the street. I lean against the door, glad to feel its solid, rigid wood that keeps me from sinking to the floor.
Before I can think of something else to say, I snarl, “For fuck’s sake! Kerem! I thought you were a… a burglar or something! What are you doing here? How did you get in? And what the fuck are you wearing?”
Because yes, the stranger is—Kerem.
Murat’s nephew and bodyguard. The man I’ve been fantasizing about for the last few days.
But not like this.
He looks like shit, too. As if he hadn’t slept for a week. He is wearing faded blue Adidas tracksuit trousers, a red T-shirt, and worn, muddy trainers. His handsome face has an unhealthy, sallow hue, there are bags under his eyes, and dark stubble shades his cheeks and chin. He has indeed shaved his head, for whatever silly reason, and it makes him look almost sickly.
Kerem stares at me, sheepish and weary at the same time. “I’m sorry, Marc. I didn’t mean to give you a fright. I’m just so glad you’re here.”
He is still pointing his gun at me.
My thoughts are racing through my head. Did he come here to kill me? Has he been playing a perverse game back in Turkey, making me believe I could trust him even though he planned to eliminate me all this time?
“Is that… that gun loaded?” I croak.
Kerem looks down at the gun as if he were wondering how it came to be in his hand. “Oh,” he says. “Sorry. Simple precaution.” He touches something, probably the safety catch, then lays the gun on the kitchen table. Only now do I notice the pile of shiny, round little things lying there. They look like a collection of round button cell batteries.
Kerem lifts his gaze. “Hi, Marc,” he breathes.
I still haven’t moved, leaning against the kitchen door, hand on the door handle. “You haven’t answered my questions,” I wheeze.
Suddenly all his energy seems to leave Kerem. He holds on to the table with one hand, sways, and wipes his face with the other hand.
That unfreezes me at last. If I know one thing, it’s that Kerem would never harm me. Not willingly. Maybe someone could force him to do it, for whatever reasons, but I don’t think he would do it. I shouldn’t be so sure, of course; I shouldn’t be sure of anything right now. Yet my intuition and my heart tell me that Kerem will always be on my side. Really. That’s what he said. He said, “Always.”
Maybe I’m being stupid, but a drowning man will clutch at any straw.
I walk over to Kerem, grab his elbow, and say, “Let’s go to the living room, okay? And pick up your shooter. And your… baubles.”
Kerem smells of sweat and unwashed clothes. He leans heavily on me as we stumble through the door, down the corridor, then into the living room, where I let him sink onto the sofa.
He wipes his eyes before asking, “Have you locked the front door?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Do it.”
“But…”
“Just do it. Please. All the three locks, not only the one in the middle. You should always lock them—all of them. And engage the safety latch, too. Then we can talk.”
His voice sounds so urgent that I swallow my questions, dash into the anteroom, and carry out his orders.
When I come back, I find Kerem slumped on the sofa, eyes closed. His breath is coming in a slow and regular rhythm. He’s fast asleep.
Despite my need to know what’s going on, I don’t have the heart to wake him up. I don’t even dare sit beside him on the sofa, so I settle on the white oak parquet, my back against the white wall, and gaze at him.
It’s unsettling to observe someone who is sleeping. It feels indiscreet, like a voyeuristic act. But I can’t help myself. I am surprised by this sudden urge to stare at Kerem, almost as if I needed to commit him to memory, as if I were afraid this might be the very last time I see him.
He looks peaceful now that his frown is gone. He even looks less sallow. His dark, long eyelashes are lightly fluttering on his stubble-darkened cheeks, his mouth is relaxed. His blank head gleams in the sun that streams in through the French windows.
For a long while I’m unable to avert my gaze from his face. How familiar it looks—that uncanny familiarity of a face so often glimpsed in dreams… And that mouth… I’ve kissed it, and it has explored every part of me, not in the usual way, not like a scavenger, but like a revivor, a conjurer of sensations and emotions I never allowed myself to experience.
I cross my hands over my stomach and keep staring at him, watching over him. Time tiptoes away like a thief, trickling noiselessly down the drain of our lives, while the apartment around us seems to slowly expand and contract with each of Kerem’s breaths.
—15—
I don’t know why, but suddenly, an old-fashioned French song starts to play in my mind. “Un premier amour, premier amour, premier amour… ne s’oublie jamais, s’oublie jamais, s’oublie jamais…” A first love, first love, first love can never be forgotten, never be forgotten, never be forgotten…
What on earth! Un premier amour was the song that won the Eurovision Song Contest back in 1962. I once watched a grainy video of it and was mesmerised by the singer, Isabelle Aubret, a cute blonde girl, who was standing on the stage, seemingly unfazed by the audience and the huge orchestra behind her, singing with all the innocence, earnestness, and candour of a twenty-year-old.
“Un premier amour, on le cherche toujours, dans d’autres amours, toute sa vie, on court après…”
A first love, you will forever look for it, in other loves, and all your life, you will chase after it…
Is that true? Do I even remember my first love?
Well, I do. She must have been the only girl I ever fell in love with, so it’s not that difficult to remember her.
Her name was Olga, and she was Russian, or at least Eastern European. Not that I would know precisely—I never met her, not in a direct way. We never kissed, never held hands, never even talked with each other.
I only ever saw her from afar. As “afar” as you can be when sitting in a café with other teenaged boys and stealing glimpses of a girl sitting with her friends at a table across the room.
It happened in Gstaad, back when I attended that obscenely posh boarding school from which I would ultimately be expelled. What a dark period that was! My utter loneliness barely veiled by a veneer of boredom and half-assed friendships with other blokes who paid me to be allowed to have me. The suffocating mountain peaks leering over me all the time. That constant feeling of not belonging there, of everything being so horribly wrong I always wanted to yell and smash things.
Of course, I didn’t. What good would it have done me?
On Saturdays, we were allowed to go into town in small groups. Of course, during the long, harsh winter months, it was too cold to do anything outside, so we went to Charly’s for hot
chocolates and cakes. I still remember the generous, wooden interior, the smell of iced-over clothes people brought in with them, the scents of coffee and sugar.
It was the only time we saw girls, too. They were from another boarding school situated on the other side of town. When they came to Charly’s, they were always heavily chaperoned, of course.
But for us boys, it was an event. “Look, the chicks are there,” one of us would invariably hiss, and most of the blokes would sit up straighter at once, talk louder, behave more conspicuously, like cocks prancing before a flock of hens.
Not I. If possible, I withdrew even further into that cool aloofness that made me so irresistible to my schoolmates.
But I watched the girls all the same.
And Olga simply stood out.
She wasn’t the prettiest, she wasn’t the shrillest, but she had something about her, an air of… lazy melancholy maybe, that appealed to me. When she entered the café, I immediately knew she had arrived because she would always bang her thickly gloved hands together to warm them up.
Her hair was half-long and curly, standing like a fluffy helmet around her thin, expressive face with the big, brown eyes. She was always wearing Doc Martens, jeans, and big, baggy pullovers that would slip down one shoulder and bare a prominent clavicle as soon as she unrolled her thick, woollen scarf.
Whenever I saw that clavicle, I thought I could sense her vulnerability all across the room, and I wanted to take her in my arms to warm her and keep her safe from harm.
The world was a cold and pitiless place, after all.
Of course, we were just reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann back then, and I was immediately thinking of Madame Chauchat and drawing a parallel with my situation when I first noticed Olga. Which was rather stupid. We were not in a sanatorium, and this was not pre-war Switzerland.
The boredom might have been similar, though.
Olga…
Strange that I should think of her now. I’m not sure Olga was really her name, by the way. It’s what I called her in my head, but for all I knew she could have been called Clawdia, too. Or anything else, in fact.
I used to fantasise not exactly about her, but about us. Not in any sexual way, mind you. It was rather a dream of her and me fighting the sadness of reality together. Just another figment of my imagination.
“Un premier amour, premier amour, premier amour…”
I couldn’t have Olga. Probably I’ll never have Kerem either. Why would I, anyway? Why would I even want to?
A strange feeling washes over me. I try to probe it, try to understand my emotions, but it’s as if something was broken inside; my sensors, my brain seem to be incapable of coming up with intelligible results.
“Un premier amour…”
Jesus Christ.
I’m not in love, I’m not in love, I’m not in love…
—14—
It feels like a precious eternity that keeps me suspended in the endless tape loop of Aubret and Olga and I’m not in love. Yet the blinking clock on my DVD player tells me it has only been two hours when Kerem wakes up with a start.
He catches me still staring at him.
He stares back almost quizzically.
Goodness me! He still looks as sad as I remember. Oh, those melancholic eyes. I think I recognised something in their expression; I think I recognised a part of myself in them. That part that resembles a little boy who only wants to be held.
That frightens me.
Because I always thought being an adult meant you didn’t need to be held anymore.
I clear my throat. “You owe me some explanations,” I say, my voice quivering. “But you should take a shower first. I’ll prepare a meal in the meantime. Does that sound all right?”
He simply nods, continuing to stare.
—13—
I hear the shower running while I prepare a light repast. I’m no gourmet chef, and there’s not much food in my refrigerator, so we’ll have to make do with something very simple. Luckily, I always keep some bread in my freezer. I microwave half a loaf, open a bottle of red wine, scramble eight eggs in a bowl, throw lettuce into another bowl, and mix up a sauce vinaigrette.
I set the kitchen table, realising I’m feeling peckish, too.
When the sound of the shower stops, I heat the pan and start cooking the four slices of ham I found in the fridge. They looked and smelled all right. I don’t cook often, but messing around in the kitchen calms me down.
Two minutes later, Kerem steps into the room, a towel wrapped around his narrow hips. He has shaved and looks less sick and tired. “I didn’t want to put my own clothes back on… they were too smelly,” he says.
I glance at him but immediately look away. His body is still too stunning for his own good. Or mine. I don’t want to be distracted; there are a whole lot of questions I want answers to. “Um, I laid out some clothes for you on my bed. They should be your size. Second door to the right.”
Kerem has noticed my quick glance. He blushes before mumbling, “Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. Hurry up, otherwise our meal will be burnt.”
He disappears. His bare feet make a soft sound on the corridor parquet.
I empty the bowl with the scrambled eggs into the pan.
Barely five minutes later, Kerem is back, looking almost himself again in my black clothes. He stops behind me, looks into the pan, and sniffs conspicuously. “That smells great.”
All of a sudden, I remember. “Oops. I’m sorry. I forgot about your… religion.”
“What?”
“I made scrambled eggs with ham…”
He shrugs, a wry smile appears on his face. “Don’t worry about that. If there’s a God, do you think He really is so petty that He cares about what people are eating?”
“All right, then. Sit down.” I put the meal on our plates, making sure his portion is bigger than mine. Something tells me he is famished. Then I warily settle on the chair across from him. I notice that he has filled both our glasses—so much for worrying about alcohol, too. “Dig in, Kerem,” I say.
We eat in silence. Once in a while, I look at him out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t mistaken. He is wolfing down his food as if he hadn’t eaten for a couple of days.
When our plates as well as the salad bowl are empty, I lean back on my chair. “Well… Would you care telling me now what you’re doing here? And how you got in?”
He takes his wine glass and turns it around in his hands. Without looking at me, he asks back, “Where have you been?”
I didn’t expect that. “What?”
“Where have you been, Marc? I hope you didn’t go abroad!”
I can only shrug. “As a matter of fact, I did. Briefly. Anyway, I don’t understand how that is any of your business. I also think I have every right to have you answer my questions first.”
“What do you want to know?”
I try to get my priorities straight, but what I blurt out is not what is foremost in my mind. “Did you plan to shoot me in my own kitchen?”
My question catches him unprepared. He stares at me, incredulous. Then he shakes his head and studies his fingernails. “Not at all. I’d never do you any harm, Marc. You must believe me.”
“Must I? Then tell me what you’re doing here.”
He states matter-of-factly, “I came to Paris the day after you left Cyprus. And I’ve been watching over you ever since.”
Right. As if that made sense.
“Go on,” I prompt. “I want to understand.”
He lifts his gaze and looks at me. His eyes are still so sad that it nearly chokes me up. If only I could, I would love to take that sadness away from him… Despite everything.
“The apartment on the other side of the corridor he says. “The guy who lives there…”
“
What of it?”
“He’s a photographer. Off on a job in Bulgaria. I’ve been staying there.”
I take this in. After a longish pause, I grow impatient. “Did you break into that apartment, too?”
Kerem’s eyes look even sadder. “Yes. But I didn’t break into yours.”
Hell, I imagined that I would get to the bottom of his presence much faster than that. But it seems I’ll have to squeeze the facts out of him one by one.
I hiss, “Kerem, I’m not in the mood for your games right now. Just tell me what’s going on, okay? In detail, if you please. And no more dodging and twisting, understood? Why did you break into my apartment? Or if you didn’t break in as you claim, how did you get in? What the fuck are you doing here? Why are you watching over me?”
He winces at the sound of my angry voice. “I didn’t break into your apartment,” he repats in a whisper. “I didn’t have to. The men who were here yesterday left it open…”
I come full circle again. Two hours ago, when I stepped into my anteroom and checked out everything, I wasn’t being paranoid. I somehow felt that intruders had been here.
I lay my hands on the table. As calmly as I can, I say, “Tell me the whole story. From the beginning.”
—12—
I’m not sure I really wanted to know it all even if I had already guessed what Kerem was going to tell me. All he could do was fill in the blanks in a narrative I didn’t like but felt I had to accept as the truth.
When he has finished, we stare into space in silence.
“Do you know who those men are?” I finally ask.
“No idea. All I know is that they’ve been here several times, trying to creep into the building. Each time, your janitor got rid of them. But as I told you, yesterday someone must have forgotten to close the entrance door downstairs, and for once your janitor wasn’t there. I heard stealthy steps in the corridor, then they forced your lock open. They barely made any noise, so I guess they’re professionals. Luckily, they didn’t know I was watching them through the peephole across the corridor.”
“What did they look like?”
Kerem shrugs. “I told you, they didn’t switch on the corridor lights, so I couldn’t make out much. Medium height, muscular, and they were wearing casual clothes. Jeans, sweaters, trainers.”
Ordinary Whore Page 22
