by Hakan Günday
“All right, Dad! I’m going!”
What or whoever it was I had prayed to must have heard me, because my father’s command was ordinary and quotidian. Not a command pertaining to departure. A command given for the sake of commanding. One of the commands that came to his mind when he saw me. A way of communicating with me because he had no way of saying, “Hi, son, how’s it going?”
As soon as my father and the stranger were out of sight behind the house, I doggedly dashed inside. I grabbed the bottle of Coke, a glass, a fork, and a knife within seconds. I left quickly and just as doggedly ran to the shed.
It was now time for the second phase of the plan: setting a table. The truck was parked in the middle of the shed and didn’t leave me much of a choice where to place the metal table that my father used for his carpentry. It was right next to the entrance of the reservoir. I collected the hammer, screwdriver, screws, and nails that were on it and put them on the floor. I wiped clean the tabletop with a dirt-blackened cloth. I knew there was a stool somewhere in the shed that took me at least ten minutes to locate. Just when I’d dragged it up to the table, I realized that it was wobbly. I considered finding a piece of cardboard to steady it, but abandoned the idea for the sake of time. I wouldn’t have minded sticking my foot under it so the world’s most beautiful girl wouldn’t wobble on it and be uncomfortable. Then I’d get to stand behind her as she ate and even put my hand on her shoulder. I took the food out of the bags and set it out on the table. I set out refreshment towels, packets of salt and pepper, napkins, fork, knife, glass, and Coke and took two steps back … Yes, it seems I had set a table. Or it seemed that way to me. All the stuff and I—we were ready. The T-shirts hidden under the truck I’d give her after the meal, in place of dessert.
I opened the lock on the lid with the key in my pocket and went down into the reservoir. I was so excited I could feel my heart pulsing in my forehead. As soon as they saw me, the ones who still had the energy to stand got up and surrounded me. As always, they thought it was time to take off.
Waving both my hands, I said, “No! No!” in English.
They sat down as if an avalanche had come down on their shoulders. Then I saw her. The world’s most beautiful girl. She’d pulled her knees to her chest to prop up her head, and her arms were wrapped around them. She didn’t look at me until I’d gone up to her. She lifted her head only when my shadow eclipsed her. I took a breath as large as my courage and held out my hand. She didn’t understand. I bent down slightly and took her right hand. She began to shake her head, left to right.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said.
With my free hand, my face, my gaze, and everything I had … But she didn’t understand. None of them did. The woman sitting next to her, whom I took to be her mother, began shouting. Shouting something at me … then a man joined her. Then another woman. Then all of the rest of them. But I didn’t listen. I thought that they would understand. I even smiled. Smiling, I looked them in the face and held on to her hand. Then suddenly the world’s most beautiful girl began to cry and pull herself back. Right then I felt hands on my shoulders. Hands trying to pull us apart. They were all over me. They wanted to wrench me away from her. And I was forced to let go of her hand. In turn the others let go of my shoulders.
“Fine!” I said. “Okay … no problem!”
I spun around and took a step. But I didn’t get far. For the woman I’d thought to be her mother was standing in my way. She uttered two syllables and spat in my face. Then she got out of my way, and I just walked. I passed twenty-four pairs of murderous eyes, went up the stairs into the shed, and locked the door. I wiped the spit off my face with the back of my hand and stood still for a few seconds. I looked at the table. At the food … It was still steaming, albeit slightly. Or I was imagining it? I sank down on the stool and almost fell off because it wobbled. I got my balance back and put my elbows on the table. I rested my head between my hands, closed my eyes, and understood who I was …
Of course I knew before that day what kind of business I was mixed up in. I knew in the eyes of those people I was a freak they needed to stay away from. A freak they depended on in their desperation but would never dare to be alone with … Yes, it was true, I didn’t like them, either. Sometimes I could barely stand their presence. Because it wasn’t just them in that reservoir. They might not have been aware of it, but I was stuck in that reservoir with them. Plus my loathing was on the inside only. It was right behind my closed lips. I still did what I could. So they wouldn’t get sick, wouldn’t be hungry, wouldn’t have to live in filth … I did everything I was supposed to. Besides, I was just a kid. But it turned out that I wasn’t. What had just happened was blaring into both my ears: you aren’t a kid! You aren’t a kid… I couldn’t have known … I hadn’t known … I hadn’t known I was this loathsome in their eyes … I had had no idea I was so similar to the leading men in the rape stories they’d no doubt heard many times from others who had gone, or attempted to go, on the road. I hadn’t known they feared me so much. I hadn’t known I was so fearsome … It would never end, too … and now I was left with only two choices: Either I would run from this house, this life, and these people who thought I was a monster and go somewhere far away, or …
I stood. I took seven steps to the wall on my right. I knelt down. I opened the lid of a black knee-high box. With some difficulty, I turned the red valve inside all the way to the right. It was the first time that valve had been turned since its installation. The water from the main grid headed through the previously unused pipe toward the reservoir, its boisterous procession gurgling like a deep river. Then it was joined by a banging sound just as deep. The sound of flesh on iron. I looked at the padlock on the lid that was being beaten on. It hardly moved. Only the lid shook faintly with each slam. Or it was just my imagination. The screams rising behind the lid must have been who knows how loud, but I only heard a murmur as if from another planet. As if the reservoir had a gurgling stomach. Maybe that gurgling was coming from me. I went back to the table, sat on the stool, and began slowly to eat. I paid no attention to what I was eating because I didn’t taste any of it. I just chewed. And watched the reservoir lid and listened to the sound of the water filling it … I didn’t think of anything.
When I felt I was full, I opened the packet of one of the refreshment towels. I wiped my fingers and lips until I believed them to be completely clean. I folded up the greasy towel, stuck it back inside its small packet and put it in the bag at my feet. It was a perfectly right time to start smoking. I got up and went to the truck and opened the door on the driver’s side. The door had a large cubby full of stuff. I rooted around a bit and found what I was looking for. Father’s pack of cigarettes, with his lighter inside it at all times. I drew one out and lit up. Coughed and took another drag. I put the pack back and closed the door. I walked toward the lid of the reservoir lid and took another step. Standing on the lid, I smoked the cigarette until it was finished. Underneath my feet, I thought I felt the vibration from the increased hammering. I took a few steps to the wall and knelt down to open the lid of the black box. I thought of mother. Then of father. And I shut off the red valve. Neither the river nor the noise was left. They both dried up.
I went to the reservoir lid, opened the padlock, and removed it. The hammering stopped that second. Or that’s what I imagined. I took the lid by its handles and lifted it as I stood. A couple of screams leaked out and then it was silent. I took two steps back and slowly set the lid down. A meter away, the door to the shed was completely opened. I turned around, walked to the stool, and sat down. But I didn’t wobble this time. Because I was aware of all irregularities.
There was a monster in the imagination of the people down there. And I waited for that monster to fuck away with all the humanity that was in the reservoir. I heard a voice, then three, then ten separate ones. Talking. Voices that rode over one another and merged together and rose out of the entrance to the reservoir and rose to the ceiling of the shed
like smoke. Then I heard the sound of weeping. Actually two … a cry. Then it was silent …
I saw a head of hair. Jet black. Then a face. Then shoulders. I saw slender fingers in the sawdust. Then a knee. Then another and there, the world’s most beautiful girl was standing. In front of me … weeping. But there were no tears in sight. More than that, it appeared to be flowing inside her. Deep. Like the river a minute ago. Perhaps if I laid my head on her chest, I could hear her tears.
But I didn’t. I gestured to the table. “Eat!” I said. “It’s for you.”
She took one step, then six more. She hesitated, then hastily collected the food and began dole it into the entrance of the reservoir. Within a minute, every single thing on the table had disappeared into the entrance. Then she stopped and looked at me. Her eyes met mine. She was trembling.
She took two steps toward me and began to unbutton her dress. This time I could see her tears. They had overflowed at last and were pouring down her cheeks. I looked at the entrance of the reservoir. At its wide-open entrance … the bulb must have blown out again. There was no light, nor a sound, nor anyone in sight … only, at one point, something that sounded like a sob. From underground … a monosyllabic sound reminiscent of the scream of that woman long ago whose baby had died, before it was blocked by the hands of the others.
That day, on top of twenty-three people, a few pieces of Styrofoam, and a few pages of newspaper, I touched a woman for the first time in my life. As I was about to come like my jugular had been cut, staring over her shoulders at the mouth of the reservoir, she shoved me back. She knew better than me what men were. I poured everything that had been pooling up in me on the floor of the shed …
She dressed, I dressed. She went into the reservoir, I locked the door. Then I began to sweep the sawdust and its contents off the floor … not a trace was left … The day after, as they got on the boat, I looked them in the eye. Every one of them. One after the other. No trace there, either. So we were in agreement. They thought I was a monster, and I was turning into one. To top it off, it took them no longer than ten minutes to sacrifice one of their own in my name …
On the way back, Father said, “The reservoir was flooded!”
“The men told you,” I said. “It should have been nearer the house.”
I wasn’t in love anymore. I just followed the path. The path those people had shown me. One way. No return … I saved the red T-shirts with the angels to buy the most beautiful girls of other worlds. Then I figured out that I didn’t need those, either. I realized that the index finger of my left hand was the barrel of a gun. It was enough to point it at someone. If she was someone’s wife, they’d find someone else to send me. That was how my knighthood was taken from me at fourteen, piece by piece. But this was never made known, since no one knew in the first place that I’d lived as a knight among dragons and dungeons up until that age. Perhaps only Cuma, but he didn’t count. Because he, architect of paper frogs, wouldn’t have known even if he had lived: why I hadn’t run that day from that house, that life, and those people who thought I was a monster … Perhaps because I wasn’t named Felat. Because I was a coward … So, could a coward be a monster? Of course! In fact, I think only cowards could be monsters. I was the living proof. That was why sawdust made me nauseated. For I was sawdust. Sawdust and splinters. If I’d been spread over the earth, there wouldn’t be a single trace left behind … I tried. Many times I scattered myself over those women and eradicated them all.
My transformation into a dreadful monster took only five years. I was the sum of my father, Aruz, Dordor, and Harmin. In fact I was more than their sum. I was still a kid, after all. I was fourteen. So the pain of others was just a game to me, and none of the things I experienced seemed real. This made me even more dreadful. I wouldn’t have been as affected if I’d been a child worker in another sector, of course. In my line of work, there were no strange chemicals to riddle my lungs or vaporous materials such as thinner that I’d become addicted to. I was in the service industry. The manhole industry! Down in the sewers of the service industry. I was responsible for the facilitation and sanitation of a sewer that transported people. That might be why the capacity for empathy, which I was born with like everyone else, wasn’t worth a damn under the circumstances. I couldn’t possibly put myself in the shoes of those human-shits. Anyway, I’d already wasted all of that innate capacity to fathom the motives of my father, Aruz, Dordor, and Harmin. There was nothing left behind except my eyes that apprehended their surroundings like a pair of bullets. It was absolutely of no concern to me that the immigrants had names, lives, or blood and nervous systems inside them. I just got angry. Their most minute reaction or smile tore at my eyeballs like poisonous claws. Especially those surreptitious dreams of theirs! Because I could hear them! I could hear those edifices of dream perfectly well! Dreams of happiness in faraway places! Disgusting dreams I inadvertently had a role in realizing!
I’d asked father once. “Can we go as well?” I’d begged him actually. “Dad, let them take us along!” We could have gotten on one of Dordor and Harmin’s boats and set foot on distant shores to be born again. “Please, Dad, let’s go with them!”
He’d stared. “Our job,” he’d said, “is to send the passengers on their way—not go with them!” As if to say that our job was to kill, not die …
Upon this, encumbered with the pain of having to stay in Kandalı, I dreamed my own dreams. Sometimes they even became reality. As a matter of fact, they did so many times and it was always exactly as I’d dreamed: I watched them being busted by the coast guard just as they believed their months-long torture of a journey to be over, a step or two short of whatever land they’d been promised. Or on TV or the photos in newspapers.
Many late nights I was so uplifted by the sight of their faces riddled with coast guards’ searchlights, I broke out laughing! As I watched them huddle together and freeze like a rabbit with a thousand eyes captured by a thousand hunters, I said, “See?” It was all for nothing! Now off to where you came from, on the first flight! The first time in your lives you’ll fly, and to be deported at that! Why don’t you fuck off and start all over again! But then my mouth would abruptly shut. Because it would occur to me that they’d just go by us again. Fuck this shit, I’d say! No getting rid of them for good! Why wouldn’t these people just stay at their homes? Why wouldn’t they stay in their cities? Why …Then I’d randomly plant myself in front of one and start hollering.
“Is there a war on your street, huh? Are people killing each other on your front stoop? Go, get outside then, and fight! Get killed or mauled, become a cripple! Is there hunger back where you live? Why don’t you have a kid and eat it! Eat yourself! Don’t presume to fuck up my life just because you want to up and go to the other side of the world! What do you think will happen when you get there anyhow? They’ll fuck the very marrow in your bones! What else do you expect? Because people are waiting for you with open arms, right? Idiot! You aren’t worth a damn where you’re going, don’t you get it? Of course you don’t! You’ll see! No one will want to sit next to you on the bus! No one will want to be left alone with you on an elevator! No one will return the greetings in that stupid accent of yours you’ll never get rid of! No one will want to be your neighbor! No one will let their child associate with your child! No one will want the slightest thing to do with your religion! No one will want to have to smell the reek of your cooking! No one will want you to earn money! No one will wish you more happiness or a longer life than themselves! No one will want to be behind you in a queue! No one will want you to be voting where you’re going! No one will want to sleep with you! No one will look you in the eye! No one will treat you like a human being! No one will want to know your name! If they do, believe me, they’re just insane or pretending! They’re going to hate you so much estate prices will go down wherever you move! Wake up already! Yet you’re still giving up your life to get there! You’re still working like a dog for years to save up money so you can han
d it over to our kind! That goes to show … that goes to show that you deserve all your suffering. And that’s where I come in! I’m going to show you such a good time that you’re going to go and tell it to your piece of shit friends! That illegal immigration realm of yours! That realm with all your whispering among yourselves, ‘Who, where, for how much?’ That realm you cheer each other on with constant bullshit! And they’ll all be talking about you! They’ll hear about what’s happened to you! Because you’ll go tell them! You’ll be crying when you tell them! Maybe you won’t even be able to tell some parts of it! You’ll be too ashamed! They’ll gnaw on your wits! When we’re through our time together, anyone else that’s considering immigrating won’t even dare set foot outside their house! Or else, wherever they want to go, they’ll have to travel to do it over the North Pole … and I …”
And I what? My speech would end somewhere around here. I didn’t really have an idea what would become of me in the event that my crazy plan to put a stop to all this somehow happened. All I knew was that my situation couldn’t get much worse. To be fair, all these lines were part of a text I was working on. It was just a while ago, for instance, that I’d added the part about religion and the reeking food. In order to obtain knowledge about those countries they’d give up anything to get inside the borders of, I was reading anything I could get my hands on. I needed to know what those fucking countries were like, that they were willing to die to get to or slave away ten years when they did! And everything I learned I put into my speech.
