by Hakan Günday
When I opened my eyes again, Ender was sitting next to me. Or someone whom I thought was Ender. I reached over to grab his arm and yelled:
“Ender! Is that you? You’re Ender, right?”
He laughed. “Are you nuts, man, it’s me!”
“But the governor?”
“What about the governor?”
I told him. The things I’d seen and heard. When I got to the part about his father with the “let the gendarmerie handle it,” I skipped it.
But the more I told, the more Ender laughed. Then he said, “What’s not to get?” and this time the more he told me, the more I laughed.
Indeed, the more assured I was that I hadn’t gone crazy, the more I laughed! It was actually all very simple. Yadigar had told his son and that’s how he knew. The governor and the errand boy belonged to the same cult. A cult formed by former members of the cult we all knew as Hakeem. It was called Tanzim. The old man was Tanzim’s Kandalı chapter. That is, the cult’s regional executive. Be it a town or a city, Tanzim had a chapter in every region it was able to reach. As it was, it was perfectly natural that the young governor, a regular disciple, would show deference to the Kandalı chapter. He was at the service of that old man before the governor or anyone else. I could see now. Especially why the old man hadn’t moved a muscle during the watch ceremony in the government office. It wasn’t as if Tanzim’s Kandalı chapter was going to go around dusting furniture or serving tea. He was a general in a private’s uniform. It had all come to light.
More importantly, I definitely wasn’t crazy. More accurately, I wasn’t the one who was! Hearing that Kandalı was run not by the civil administrator in chief but his janitor had an elating effect on me. I almost got up to hug Ender.
Right then a nurse checked my IV and asked, “How are you feeling?”
I almost blurted out, “Perfect!” I said instead, “I don’t know … OK, I guess.”
The nurse smiled and left the room. It seemed as though she had other patients to check on right away. Was there another survivor? Was I just confused, as I was wont to be? Right then I thought of Ahad. Or more precisely, it was as if one of those bodies fell right onto my forehead and crushed everything underneath. Could it be that he wasn’t dead? I had to find out as soon as I could. I had to be sure I’d never see his face again for as long as I lived.
“Ender … my father?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “They found him in the truck …”
I closed my eyes, and my temples moistened. Two enormous teardrops rolled through my hair and behind my ears into the pillow my head was resting on. For the first time in my life, I was weeping with joy. In fact, right then, I pictured myself walking into a courtroom the day I turned eighteen and changing my year of birth. With this piece of news, I knew I was born again. Meanwhile Ender, cheating off similar scenes in the movies he’d seen, grimly gripped my arm.
When I opened my eyes once more, so many questions crowded my mind that I didn’t know how to begin. Above all else, what was to become of me? Would I be thrown in jail for smuggling? How was it that those bodies had rained on me and how was I rescued? I opened my mouth to start with whichever one, and the governor came into the room with the mayor. Yadigar followed them. The former smiled, while Yadigar showed his clenched teeth in the pretense of smiling.
The governor put his hand on my shoulder and said, “May you have a swift recovery! Allah has bestowed you to us.”
Though I was sure I hadn’t been bestowed to them, I thanked him anyway.
Right then I noticed Ender and Yadigar looking at each other and appearing to try to communicate with their eyes. Perhaps Yadigar had told his son everything and hoped to pry the facts out of me through Ender. After all, Ender was the closest likeness to a friend out of everyone I knew. That was the title by which he’d been able to come into my room and wait by my bedside so he could find out everything I knew as soon as I woke. I was Ahad’s son, after all, and what I knew could have dangerous repercussions for Yadigar in particular. Still, none of this held any importance for me at that stage. It wouldn’t be very smart to bring up prison, though. No one was looking at me as if I was going to jail anyway. Quite the contrary, it seemed more like they were looking at an earthquake survivor rescued from rubble weeks later. For the moment I could make do with just hearing about my rescue. And so the governor recounted.
A shepherd had been the first to see the truck and the pile of bodies on the slope. He’d gone to the gendarmerie as soon as he’d seen it. I could imagine the rest. Yadigar, who had called us for days in vain after finding out through Aruz that the goods were never delivered, must have rushed to the site of the accident. Seeing that we were too much of a scandal to sweep under the rug, he’d had to inform everybody. In a short period of time, all of Kandalı, from public prosecutors to the mayor, were gathered around the bodies. So how was it that I’d been pelted by them?
The governor glanced at Yadigar and reluctantly took over. There wasn’t actually much he could say. Judging by the tracks on the slope, he and the prosecutor had worked on an analogous chain of events for the report. According to that, the truck had veered off the road over the edge and turned over almost completely when it crashed into a large crag to its right. That was when my door sprang open, flinging me out. As the truck tumbled down the hillside, I’d tumbled down similarly to end up underneath the rock. Where they’d found me, in the end, was about fifty meters below the road. It had been due to sheer luck that I hadn’t hit any rocks on my way down, just trees and patches of mud. I’d come away from a fall that should have broken all my bones with only the hundreds of scratches all over me.
Meanwhile the truck had been sliding along like a turtle on its back, coming to a stop about twenty meters from where I’d fallen, suspended over the trees and crags. According to Yadigar, the cab was pointing in the direction of the road its tires had just parted from, that is to say, the summit of Kandağ. My father, his chest crushed by the wheel he was wedged behind, died on the spot. It wasn’t hard to guess the rest. In the back, suspended at almost forty-five degrees inside the truck anchored parallel to the slope, the immigrants, dead from crashing into the steel walls and one another, slipped out through the slide below them and piled up against the doors. The lock holding the two wings together was unable to withstand the pressure, setting forth the hail of people that pelted me. They rained on me from twenty meters up and trapped me in them. A final particular was that there’d been no skid marks on the road.
“The rain must have washed them away,” said Yadigar.
I added inwardly, “If he actually stepped on the brakes …”
Right then the prosecutor came in and told the governor that he’d like to get my statement. The governor, however, replied, “Not now. Let the child rest. You can take care of it later. We should be going too …” As he herded everyone out and pulled the door shut, he winked at me.
Did he mean to tell me something? Quite possibly. Did I know what he meant to tell me? No. But how bad could the implications of a wink be? This is it, I said to myself. This is it! It’s all over. No one is holding me responsible. Ahad is the only criminal here. And perhaps also Yadigar. None of this has anything to do with me. I’m the wretched fifteen-year-old son of a villainous, criminal father. The subtext of my defense hadn’t really changed much since that holding cell Yadigar had shut me up in. I was a victim, and no one could say otherwise. In fact, I was so much a victim that I could get away with murdering anyone that dared say otherwise!
Everything was fine … I even had a TV! I must be in the most luxurious room of the hospital. I turned the TV on with the remote I took off the bedside table. Everything was fantastic … I flipped through the channels. That was when I saw an explosion. A huge explosion! I saw two gigantic statues carved into the almost yellow, wall-like side of an enormous crag, crumble into a cloud of dust. I knew those statues. I knew them well. As soon as I saw it, I knew! I’d carried them around in my pocket for
years. Carried on the back of my paper frog … I turned up the volume and listened.
“A week has passed since the Taliban forces gained control of the Hazarajat region of Afghanistan and dynamited the giant statues known as the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The United Nations …”
I can’t say why, but I thought I might drown in what I’d seen and heard. My thumb sought the button on the remote. When I couldn’t find it, I grabbed it with both hands and pressed all the buttons at once, turning off the TV. Everything stopped. Even the drops coming through my IV stopped! First I thought of Cuma. Before all else, him … then I thought of how unfair I’d been when he’d shown me the picture he’d made and I hadn’t believed him, thinking he was just making fun of me. Maybe that was why I turned the TV off. Because I didn’t want to have to look the truth in the eye any longer … because I was ashamed of myself … but there they were! Just like Cuma had drawn them! Those two gigantic statues had really existed and that meant Cuma’s home had been there too. But I’d missed out on the statues. They’d been blown up and become property of the past via a cloud of dust. I hadn’t made it there in time! Could they have torn down Cuma’s home as well? I thought of myself and the bodies that had fastened me onto the earth’s surface. Those two statues had been demolished during the very days I’d been crushed underneath them. Me and those two Buddhas, we’d crumbled into the earth together. So far apart, yet simultaneously … If it was still standing, that was where Cuma’s home was! Somewhere there!
“I’m sorry,” I said. Thinking he might be able to hear. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you!”
But Cuma wouldn’t speak to me. Instead, in the place where I should have been hearing his voice, inside my very head, an ache rose like a black sun. It suddenly rose over all my horizons! It filled my head in a deluge and swept down my neck to spread over my shoulders first, then my chest. I was having the first of the many pain spells I would never stop having. I screamed and screamed! Instead of Cuma’s voice, my own came out.
The nurse came and saw me shaking. The bulb she broke to draw into the syringe in her hand read Diazem. But I needed something else! The only thing that could stop the downpour of pain suffocating me. The only thing that could fill the void left by Cuma’s absent voice and help me take enough of a breath to be able to pass out. Just as those two statues had been dynamited, so it was the only thing that could destroy the pain inside me. We hadn’t met yet, but the day would come … first letter morphine, last letter sulfate. We had the same birthplace: pain. For I was born not of my mother, but of labor pains. I’d been born not because I was wanted, but because I was in pain. I’d moved past spasms and aches to take my first breath. It had all left its mark on me. All those pangs and aches … I was covered in birthmarks all over. My insides, my outside, all over. As soon as I felt the morphine sulfate through my veins, I’d comprehend it all. I wasn’t the son of a woman who birthed me by way of her own pain, no! I’d see that my real mother was the morphine sulfate that drew into itself all the pain I had. It wasn’t long before I was adopted by an angel that came with a red prescription! When she came, I’d finally have a family too! And what a family:
The two Buddha statues that no longer existed,
Their shadows Dordor and Harmin, long dead before the statues,
An opiate known as morphine sulfate,
Cuma’s voice, which I didn’t know if I would hear again,
The void left by Felat, forever gone from my life, which he’d entered like a fifth season,
And me!
An extraordinary family! A perfect family! We even had a pet. It was a paper frog, but there it was!
The next day the prosecutor came into the room to collect my statement. Pulling up a chair to sit next to me, he eased into the conversation by saying, “My condolences. We’ve buried your father,” then adding, “Those dead immigrants … We’re working on identification … Is there anything you’d be able to tell us? I mean … maybe there was some list your father kept …”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything. My father never told me anything. I wasn’t allowed to go into a lot of parts of the house. Like I couldn’t go into the shed. If there’s anything, that’s where it would be.”
“We already looked there,” he said. “We checked it out. We found the reservoir too … He was clearly keeping the people in there … We also found his computer.”
A knot looped in my throat.
“Computer?”
“Yes … your father apparently monitored everything on it. He had cameras installed in the reservoir. Took a whole bunch of notes …”
Another knot looped over the other one. I swallowed but it didn’t go away. In fact, it got even bigger. Right then the prosecutor asked, suddenly as though he’d just thought of it:
“You’re that whatsit, aren’t you? The kid who made top scores in the high school entrance exams? That was you, right?”
He wasn’t a Kandalı local, after all. So he could remember facts correctly!
“Yes, but my father didn’t send me anywhere,” I said. “Anyway, he asked me to drop out of school as well. So I did. So my father had a computer, huh …”
Smiling, the prosecutor leaned in close and whispered.
“You’re a very clever boy … but it’s a nasty habit you’ve got. Underestimating other people’s intelligence!”
The second he saw me draw a breath to reply, he touched my forehead with his index finger and continued, still whispering.
“You were found in a truck filled to the gills with illegal immigrants, do you realize that? So don’t you dare tell me you don’t know anything! I know that that prick Yadigar is in on this … Now a man is going to come in here. He’s going to write down everything you say, and you know what you say? You say that your father was conspiring with Yadigar. You say that you saw the mayor coming to the house. You say that your father bribed them. Do you understand me?”
All the knots in my throat had come undone, and I was ready to rat everyone out.
“I’ll say whatever you want me to!”
The prosecutor smiled again. “That you will. I’ve no doubt about it. What I’m actually interested in is what else you want to say!”
Could he have figured out that the files on the computer belonged to me and was just egging me on? The files were brimming with the evidence of the torture I’d inflicted on the reservoir dwellers! I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. Would it to any good if I told the lie about my father putting out cigarettes on me? Or should I talk about Aruz?
“Well?” said the prosecutor. “Is there anything you want to say to me? Something I don’t know?”
I couldn’t hold it back any longer. I had to cry. I did cry.
“My father killed someone … Actually, he killed two people. One he buried in our backyard. The other, in the forest over near Derçisu. He said if I told, he would kill me too! So I couldn’t tell anyone! I couldn’t say a thing to anyone!”
Now that wasn’t what the prosecutor expected! As a matter of fact, I existed to underestimate people’s intelligence! Because I didn’t care about anything and I was the secret champion of the fast chess tournament. And I had just returned from hell, too! No prosecutor on the face of the earth stood a chance against me. I wasn’t the devil’s advocate, I was the devil himself!
The prosecutor was only able to say, “Calm down,” while at the same time shouting, “Nurse!”
Because I was shaking and crying and, with my remaining breaths, hollering, “Dad!” I was a local hero having a meltdown. I was sure my voice carried out the window of the room to the reporters on the lawn. I was the most interesting story to come out of Kandalı since the day it was established. In fact, even the largest news agencies of the world would take my story at face value. A boy emerging alive out of a pile of bodies! What prosecutor could presume to whisper me into a corner? I’d come from a place even worse than the Auschwitz I’d read about in books. Who cared if I was guilty or no
t? Even if I were guilty, a thirteen-day inferno had washed me clean of my sins. Nobody could touch me. Like that old man had said, I was a miracle! They’d covered up my mother with my father, but they wouldn’t do the same to me. I’d have the last word in everything for as long as I lived!
They dug up the weakling first. I didn’t feel anything. I only thought of Rastin and what he’d done. Then we went to Derçisu, and they dug up the spot I pointed to through my tears. It had been on my mind so often that I found the spot my father had dug years ago in one guess. How was I supposed to feel about remembering the site of a grave so accurately without a gravestone? Was there an emotion reserved for this type of situation? Or did one have to invent one? I could neither smell lavender nor see the trees around me. I merely waited as though it was my grave being dug and my body that would emerge shortly. I was a type of non-matter. And I had no intention of becoming matter … The remains of Cuma were take out piece by piece and put in a body bag. The sound of the zipper plunged into my stomach like a knife …
The next phase was the autopsies. They would be carried out on both the bodies. The Ankara embassy of Afghanistan, ailing from a form of cancer known as civil war, was in no state to deal with the problems of its dead citizens. It therefore looked like they would be buried in the cemetery at Kandalı after everything was over. That would mean that Cuma was to be buried in the place I was born. So what did that mean? Was there meaning to be found in these types of situations? Or did one have to invent one?
