Land of the Blind

by Barbara Nadel

‘Kelime, my pumpkin!’

  At first Mary thought it was her employer. But it was only Semih, his brother. Mary felt her body slump.

  ‘Look what I’ve got for you!’

  The young man had a bar of chocolate behind his back.

  ‘Is it sweeties? Is it sweeties?’

  ‘Kelime needs to finish her lunch before she can have sweets, Mr Öden,’ Mary told him.

  ‘Oh Miss Mary, she doesn’t like her lunch,’Semih said.

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  Kelime jumped off her chair and barrelled into her uncle’s tight torso.

  ‘Please give me sweeties, Uncle Semih! Please, please, please!’

  Semih Öden looked at Mary in a way she interpreted as triumphalist and then gave the girl the chocolate. Kelime ran away into the TV room, giggling.

  ‘I suppose you think I shouldn’t have done that, Miss Mary,’ Semih said as he sat down at the table and began eating Kelime’s mantı.

  ‘What I may think is irrelevant,’ Mary said stiffly.

  He smiled. ‘But you think that my niece should be saved from her appetites, don’t you?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘What else does she have? Eh?’ He ate. ‘You know we say such damaged children are blessed by Allah? And you know why? Because they will always be children.’

  Mary also imagined that he believed they would be devoid of sexual desire. A common, patronising misconception.

  ‘Her father is diabetic,’ Mary said. ‘I fear that if Kelime goes on eating in the way she does, she too may develop the disease.’

  ‘Do you know where my brother is?’

  The question caught her unawares. When Semih Öden had come in, apart from being annoyed at how he had undermined her with Kelime, Mary had thought that at least she might now find out where Ahmet Öden was.

  ‘No, don’t you—’

  ‘We have a meeting here at midday,’ he said. ‘I’m a little late but . . .’ He took his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialled. Mary heard the call go straight to voicemail. Semih shrugged.

  ‘Mr Öden went out last night,’ Mary said. ‘Cook told me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He frowned. ‘The police didn’t take him, did they?’

  She hadn’t thought of that. Mary felt her heart jolt. ‘No. But he didn’t drive.’

  ‘That’s why I was surprised when I realised he was out,’ Semih said.

  ‘You have no idea where he might be, Mr Öden?’

  ‘No.’ He put Kelime’s fork down and stopped eating. ‘Maybe I’ll make some calls to his contacts. He might be at the site. We had some trouble there the other day.’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘Vandalism,’ he said and then he got up and left the table.

  Mary, alone, began to feel sick.

  When the old woman woke she noticed the change in the air almost immediately. Like the tiny ripple in the atmosphere that some say always precedes an earthquake, she caught it just as Yiannis entered her room with her lunch.

  ‘Mama . . .’

  She looked into his eyes and he stopped talking, stranded with her plate of börek in his hands.

  ‘What . . . is happening?’

  His eyes moved in that way that they did when people wanted to escape. She was a long-time student of human behaviour.

  He put her food down on her bedside table. ‘There are still protests in Gezi Park. The Prime Minister is still out of the country.’

  ‘In this house.’

  He took a step away. ‘Nothing.’

  Yiannis lied fluently and well. It was an everyday occurrence and she was used to it. But this was different. A unique lie. It interested her.

  ‘Eat your börek while it’s warm.’ He smiled and then he left.

  But Anastasia Negroponte wouldn’t eat her börek. What little appetite she had left had gone with his guilty eyes.

  İkmen could see the attraction. Gezi was like a festival. There was music, food and drink, people wearing colourful clothes, free talk about everything imaginable, dancing and even one man reciting poetry to the trees. It was very much like a festival his eldest son Selim had been to and told him about some years back, in England. Glastonbury.

  ‘Çetin, dear, of course I will help you get the boy out of here, but I’m not going anywhere,’ Samsun said.

  He’d found her, surrounded by trans women in evening wear listening to the tree poet, and had taken her to one side. Kemal had apparently gone off in search of food.

  ‘But you know we’re all aware of the fact that the police won’t hold off for much longer,’ she said. ‘I think there are very few people here who are roaming around with stars in their eyes. We’re not about to storm the Bastille or take over the battleship Potemkin.’

  İkmen looked up into the night sky; a few fireworks joyfully illuminated the old Ataturk Centre.

  ‘I’m more worried you’ll all be cut down like rows of tulips,’ he said. ‘Which, Samsun, forces me to be blunt. I want to get Kemal home as soon as I can, but I also want you to go home too.’

  ‘Not a chance.’

  ‘I have to try,’ İkmen said. ‘You’re not as young as you were and with all the stress and the erratic eating . . .’

  ‘I’ve been feeding myself very well since I’ve been here, thank you, Çetin,’ she said. But then she frowned. ‘Not that I don’t appreciate your concern. I know I’m old and weaker these days but you know that if there is an attack I won’t hold back. I’ve still got balls, even if I haven’t got testicles.’

  İkmen smiled.

  ‘Dad!’

  Kemal was like a plastic bag packhorse. Some contained bottles of fizzy drinks while others were full of bread, hummus and other vegetable-based meze food. He’d been flirting with the idea of becoming a vegetarian for about a year which had panicked Fatma, who feared he might also be gay.

  The two men embraced. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  The young man put his bags down on the ground. ‘Mum.’

  ‘She’s worried,’ İkmen said. ‘She’s not happy and she’s nagging me into an early grave. What can I say?’

  Kemal sighed. ‘She’s so with this government, Dad. And I just can’t be. Because they say they’re religious, she thinks they can’t do anything wrong. But all this building and knocking stuff down they do is not something I can support. I can’t accept how they are with gay and trans people either.’ He looked at Samsun and smiled. ‘How can I not support my own auntie?’

  Samsun put an arthritic, heavily ringed hand on his arm and said, ‘Darling, you’re a good boy, but I can look after myself.’

  ‘I know!’

  ‘Kemal, my love, you should go home for a little while now,’ she said. ‘So your poor mother can sleep in peace.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Come back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We all know that you support what is happening here. You are a Gezi hooligan – one of the best!’

  He smiled.

  ‘But your mother, whatever you think about her politics, is a good woman and so you must be a good son too.’

  İkmen’s phone rang. He walked away from the group to answer it.

  ‘İkmen?’

  ‘Sir.’ It was Kerim.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sir, we’ve had a call from the brother of Ahmet Öden. Nobody knows where he is.’

  Chapter 22

  It wasn’t easy for Yiannis Negroponte to take his eyes off Hakkı. He was just peeling onions in the sink, but he was doing it in such a state of measured calm, Yiannis wondered about his sanity.

  His legs shaking, Yiannis sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette. He tried not to look at the entrance to that terrible room behind him, but he felt it. It made his back bend under the weight of its age, its purpose and what had been done in it. He hated it.

  ‘She knows,’ he said.

  Hakkı shrugged.
>
  ‘Her eyes looked right into my soul,’ Yiannis said. ‘I can’t go into her room again, you’ll have to.’

  ‘I will.’

  Yiannis pulled on his cigarette. ‘How can you be so calm?’

  Before Ahmet Öden had arrived Hakkı had calmly gathered bricks from the building site at the end of the road, prepared the cavity and its contents and brought a wardrobe down from one of the guest bedrooms on his back. Made from solid oak, it stood guard over Ahmet Öden’s death chamber, stopping the bricks and stone he’d mortared together in the cavity from collapsing. Until the mortar hardened it would have to stay.

  ‘He would never have stopped,’ Hakkı said.

  ‘Oh, so now we just wait for his company to take over where he left off! I shouldn’t have listened to you! Every time I listen to you—’

  ‘I sort things out.’ Hakkı walked over to the table and pointed at Yiannis with the vegetable knife. ‘I have saved your skin and, more importantly, Madam’s.’

  Yiannis looked down at the table. ‘But she knows. I can’t meet her eyes. She knows everything in the world.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t. And don’t meet her eyes. Stop being pathetic.’ Hakkı returned to the sink and began peeling again. ‘I will feed and take care of her. I always have.’

  Yiannis looked at the old man’s back and was glad he wasn’t the one wielding the vegetable knife. Why had he lived so long? Was it just to punish him?

  ‘She won’t know what has been done,’ Hakkı said. ‘She lost her ability to distinguish between what was really happening and what was not in 1955.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  But Yiannis knew. Hakkı turned and looked at him without speaking. It was Yiannis who dropped his gaze first.

  He looked at his fingernails. ‘What are you cooking?’

  ‘Moussaka.’

  Yiannis didn’t care. His stomach had tied itself into a confused washing bundle and he felt certain that he’d never eat again.

  Eventually when he could speak, all he could talk about was the man in the room at his back. The one they had both bricked up like a nun who had broken her vows or like a cruel Byzantine princess who had tried to take power by killing her own brother. ‘Do you think he can hear us?’ Yiannis whispered.

  ‘I don’t know where my brother was yesterday,’ Semih Öden told Çetin İkmen. ‘He went out in the morning.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know.’

  İkmen and Süleyman looked at each other. They knew that Ahmet Öden had been at the Negroponte House, which he had left at around lunchtime in a very agitated mood.

  ‘But he came home from that appointment?’

  ‘His child’s nanny and the cook say he did.’

  ‘Can we speak to Miss Mary Cox, the nanny?’ Süleyman asked.

  ‘No. She’s sick.’

  ‘Oh, yes of course, measles.’

  Semih Öden glared at him. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to her when I came here yesterday,’ Süleyman said. ‘But your brother denied me and my sergeant access.’

  ‘Oh. Did he?’ He looked away.

  ‘Yes, and then he went to the Negroponte House in Sultanahmet. You know, I assume, that he’s interested in purchasing a house in Sultanahmet?’

  But Semih Öden was lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘My sergeant and I followed him there,’ Süleyman continued. ‘He went inside.’

  Semih Öden looked shocked. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘But he came home?’ İkmen said. ‘Afterwards?’

  ‘He must’ve done. The cook and Miss Mary saw him and spoke to him. You can speak to the cook if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘Ahmet didn’t say where he was going to anyone,’ Semih said. ‘And there’s nothing in his diary.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why he didn’t take a car?’ İkmen asked.

  ‘No. But sometimes we all take taxis, Ahmet included. The traffic is so stressful and you can usually just hail a cab outside the front gates.’

  What he didn’t add was that for people like them cost was immaterial. Last time İkmen had had to hire a cab he’d feared he might have to sell his apartment to pay the fare.

  ‘My brother would have called by now, whatever he was doing,’ Semih said. ‘My niece, his daughter, she has er . . . she . . .’

  ‘The young lady has Down’s syndrome, yes,’ İkmen said.

  ‘If he doesn’t call her, Kelime becomes agitated,’ Semih said. ‘And I’ve tried contacting him on his mobile and it just goes straight to voicemail. Something has happened to him.’

  ‘What do you imagine that might be?’ Süleyman asked.

  Semih flung his arms in the air. ‘I don’t know! We’re property developers, people don’t always like us.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘What, apart from that weird man in the Negroponte House?’ He shrugged. ‘The site over at Gizlitepe has been repeatedly vandalised ever since we started work there. But if he’d been over there, Ahmet would definitely have taken his car. It’s not safe there at night.’

  ‘So where could he have gone?’ İkmen asked. ‘I believe your parents are both dead. But what about other relatives, friends, business associates . . .’ he paused for a moment and then he added, ‘mistresses?’

  Semih Öden looked at him with disgust. ‘My brother is a moral man, he doesn’t have mistresses.’

  ‘Any more,’ Süleyman said.

  The young man ignored him.

  ‘Anyone I know of would have got in touch if Ahmet had been with them and unable to communicate for any reason,’ he said. ‘He’s Type One diabetic and so he has to inject himself with insulin. If he doesn’t he gets sick. My brother is missing. Someone has taken him or harmed him and I want him found.’

  When they left the ugly, expensive house in Bebek, İkmen and Süleyman both lit up. İkmen started his car. ‘So where’s he gone then, do you think?’

  ‘Well, the last place he was seen alive, apart from his home, was the Negroponte House. But I saw him leave there,’ Süleyman said. ‘We need to appeal for information from taxi drivers.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I think, if I’m honest, that he’s done a disappearing act. I don’t know whether his brother, Mary Cox or anyone else is in on it too, but I think that it’s all got a bit too hot for him lately. What with the dead mistress, and the dead academic who opposed him.’

  ‘Could be,’ İkmen said. ‘Although I had him pegged as more of a fighter than that. These conservative types are quite aggressive these days. They’ve got a lot of money and power now.’

  ‘Ah, but maybe the events in Gezi Park have spooked him. I mean, we don’t know what’s going to happen there, do we? What if the protests spread still further and this government falls? What will happen to people like Ahmet Öden then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘But then I don’t think we’ll find out, because I don’t believe that the government will fall.’

  ‘Don’t you think there’s enough public support for the protests?’

  ‘I think it’s extensive,’ İkmen said. ‘But it’s almost exclusively in the cities. Think how big Anatolia is by contrast and how many people live in villages where a conservative lifestyle that was derided for decades is now held up as something virtuous by this government. Whatever the reason for Öden’s disappearance might be, I don’t believe it has anything to do with Gezi Park.’

  ‘He’s back.’

  Peri Mungun frowned.

  ‘The Prime Minister,’ Iris said. ‘From his north African visit. Just read it on Twitter. He’s at Ataturk airport. Met by a huge crowd.’ She looked back down at her iPad. ‘Oh my God, they’re chanting “Give us the way, we’ll crush Taksim”.’

  ‘Who are?’

  ‘His supporters.’ Iris shook her dreadlocks. ‘Bastards!’

  Iris had built a fire when dar
kness fell which had attracted a group of very diverse people, including an elderly communist, a covered woman, a boy dressed as a clown and a tiny woman Peri had discovered was the wife of one of her brother’s colleagues, Kerim Gürsel. Unable to walk or stand, Sinem Gürsel was being cared for by a transsexual called Pembe who was roasting marshmallows over Iris’s fire.

  ‘Let them come,’ the clown boy said. ‘We can deal with them.’

  The old communist shook his head. ‘Have you seen any hard-line government supporters lately, Murad Bey?’ he said. ‘I fought in Cyprus in ’seventy-four and I’d rather take on the Greek army than tangle with that lot. What are you going to do? Fire your water pistol at them? Hope that when your trousers fall down it frightens them away?’

  The covered woman laughed. It was deep, dirty and unexpected and it made Peri smile.

  ‘They’ll hide behind the police,’ the old man said. ‘Those bastards’ll get stuck in first and only then will the brainwashed masses come along to mop up what’s left of us.’

  Peri saw Sinem Gürsel look away. Like her, she found it hard to hear about possible police brutality. She’d never been able to square the image of her gentle brother with stories about torture in police cells and miscarriages of justice.

  ‘But if they’re all fired up to come now . . .’ Pembe said.

  Iris looked at her iPad. The sound was muted, but Peri could hear a sort of general hubbub.

  ‘Who knows?’ Iris said. ‘I expect we’ll see some of them. The total crazies.’

  The old man shook his head, ‘It’ll be like 1905 all over again.’

  ‘1905?’

  ‘When the ordinary people of St Petersburg were massacred on the Tsar’s orders outside the Winter Palace.’

  They all looked at each other. That was too much even for Iris. ‘Rauf Bey,’ she said, ‘we’re not underfed Russian peasants whose lives can just be snuffed out. We have social media . . .’

  ‘Much good that did the Persians who tried to assert their rights last year,’ Rauf Bey said.

  ‘This is not Iran.’

  They all turned to look at Sinem. ‘Whatever we may think about what’s going on here, this isn’t Iran,’ she said. ‘Women don’t have to cover and we do still have Gay Pride . . .’

  ‘For the moment,’ the old man said. ‘For the moment.’