Red, Yellow and Green

by Alejandro Saravia

  “Hey, would you like to dance?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, “and I’ll also tell you how you’re going to die.”

  “You and your morbid jokes!”

  “You know me, Alfredo, so take it however you like while we can be together. You know? My existence on paper, this madness for life I was unable to feel or touch, and that’s now taking me over, it’s all possible only because of you. I am right here in front of you. I didn’t have to go to the station to find you when you thought you’d never see me again. I’ve seen that we, the dead, love life with such eagerness that even underground we’ll seek anything that’s filled with its own life energy. We flower above ground, become moss on rocks from so much tenderness, turn into a leaf just to feel the wind, disguise ourselves as dust so we can travel, hide in people’s minds, embed ourselves in the bones, the imagination, the memories of the living, and we only really die when people stop knocking on our door to ask us out on a walk, when no one utters our name anymore. That’s why I want to tell you when you’re going to die. That way I’ll be able guide you, show you how things are, show you ways of living even after death, show you that darkness is just another form of light. That way you won’t be alone, Alfredo…you won’t be alone. Alfredo, you will die after thirty-three years of love.”

  Alfredo stood up while she kept whispering in his ear. He started spinning around, unaware he was alone in the early morning hours, dancing with an invisible someone in his arms. In the intimate darkness inside his right eye he could see Amelia’s face, her long hair, her bright eyes, her glistening lips. His left eye was closed to the world outside. Music was playing and Alfredo was dancing to a waltz that with a little luck would never end. But fatigue and time finally won, and he went back to sleep next to Bolivia’s warm body. She felt him get in bed and, asleep, reached for his hand and brought it to her sleeping sex.

  The grey March sky has gotten under your nails and chilled your blood. It snowed last night and today you have to watch your step, jump over huge puddles of ice and snow that have begun to melt. Your feet are cold. The month of May will never come. You see one of the city’s small red snowplows along the sidewalk removing the last of the snow. Dirty, stubborn, sticky snow stuck between freezing and melting. You walk into a café for shelter. You eat something that vaguely tastes like cooked vegetables. Probably the soupe du jour. You avoid the ice cubes in your glass as you drink your water. It’s cold. Thick winter coats, faces wrapped in scarves, hands in gloves, tall boots splashing slush as they walk by. Hurried steps, focused eyebrows. March is a long waiting room. Then, as if the light had descended upon you, a woman turns onto this street—a sudden heavenly deity, a messenger sent by the warm sun in late June. Something about her doesn’t quite match the month or the snow or the grey sky. She’s wearing a short skirt that reveals the cadence of her forms warming the air as she walks by. Graceful and strong, she fills the street with the sweetness of warmer days to come. The skin awakens to touch, touch awakens to warmth. Life’s drum beats loud and strong. A solar flare of skin and a lunar knee suffice to lull cold to sleep until the end of the world as your chest blooms with the buzz of other seasons—leaves, lips, songs. A woman you don’t know and will never know, whose slow steps you’ll never see again leaving a trail of overwhelming beauty, and these long winter months of forced cold and Mediterranean nostalgia simply vanish. As she disappeared around the corner, Alfredo thought his endless admiration of the feminine words, gestures and forms was a sign of an early decline, a foreshadowing of the dirty old man he would one day become. Besides, it wasn’t politically correct to find in a woman’s body an absolute and valid reason to keep loving life, or was it? Alfredo examined his sausage-like fingers—a sign of sedentary comfort?—with his empty eye, which had become his own personal movie theatre, covered while in public with a black leather patch that made him look more street-smart. He was glad his left eye still worked and could revel in shapes, light, skin and clouds, as well as the silence and darkness that dwelt in his right eye socket like a blind, tender spider. He started scribbling down in his notebook the first thing that came to mind, without stopping to think twice, and felt like the only thing missing right then was learning how to smoke properly.

  They lay side by side under the covers. “You know what we did with your socks, Alfredo?” Bolivia said with her head on his arm as. “First I hid them in my handbag and took them from your apartment that morning. Then I brought them to Ankara with me. People in the party there thought my idea was interesting, though they made fun of it at first. They realized right away we wouldn’t need a big investment and besides, everybody needs socks. They’re not expensive to make or to buy. We could use what we made from selling the socks and other symbols to finance our publications and presentations. That way we’d have money to rent theatres and show films, cultural exhibits and dances in Madrid, Marseille, Montreal. We could pay for our posters and ­communiqués, buy computers and fax machines, make long-­distance calls. But soon we realized we couldn’t open our small factory in Turkey. It would have been suicidal. In those days the government had stepped up their efforts to persecute our movement. To this day it’s illegal to be Kurdish in Turkey, you see? You can’t be who you are. It’s against the law. You can’t be yourself, you have to be something else. I thought about you so much, I thought of writing you, asking how things were in Côte-des-Neiges, ask you to have a ceebu jen on Avenue du Mont-Royal for me, Vietnamese phô at Jean-Talon. I had never felt so free, so alive in any other city before Montreal. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see and get to know one another longer. Ah, these times! Anyway, first we took the small factory to Nuremberg, that old German city where Hitler held his gigantic Nazi military gatherings. But our project didn’t take off there either. There was too much hate, too many bombs against immigrants. There was a wave of setting fires at immigrant shelters. They were attacked even where they worked. For the first time I was seeing Turkish people crying for their dead, for the first time they felt and reacted like we did when they persecuted and killed us on Turkey’s streets, near the border with Iraq. I understood then why they practise against us what they endure themselves. It’s so absurd. It’s a simple matter of historical memory. A bit like what the Israeli state does against Palestinians—the Jewish people have forgotten what it’s like to live once you’ve been ousted from your land, to be murdered for resisting occupation, to be accused of your own ethnic origin. In Nuremberg and all over Germany, the Turks and all immigrants felt cornered, against the wall, not knowing which night they’d be getting a Molotov attack through the window, or which one of their children they’d grab first to escape a fire. I couldn’t tell anyone in the organization, but for the first time I felt pity for Turkish people. They’d been living in Germany for generations, but they would never be seen as equals. So I washed your socks with a little bleach and put some cornstarch on them so they’d look cleaner and newer than they were. I took a few photos and sent them to our people in the United States to see if we could open a small factory there, a co-op of some kind. And they said yes, that the PKK people could take care of sock production, but they’d do it south of the border, in Mexico. And that’s when I told myself you’d definitely had some part in the course of history. So your socks went to New York first, then to Frankfurt, from there to Ankara, then southern Turkey, to Nuremberg, again to the United States, and finally Mexico to die a business death. I remembered that night we danced together, and I asked you to teach me how to dance, to speak to me in Spanish. I had never made love in Spanish. Did you think I was an immigrant hunter? Silly, if I’m an immigrant myself, and from a country that doesn’t exist. You never said if you enjoyed sleeping with me. Did you?...Yes? Really? Since I didn’t speak Spanish, I didn’t go to New York or to the factory on the Mexican border. I stayed in Germany a few more months working on translations, participating in presentations, organizing soirées and lectures. Then I went back to Marseille to see some friends.
Why didn’t I go back to Kurdistan? First because it doesn’t exist, and because they killed all my people there. I have no one left there. No one is waiting for me aside from people in the organization, and probably Turkish intelligence agents. That’s why I thought I’d come back to Montreal, because I liked the idea you might be waiting for me. Were you waiting for me? No?... Yes?... Tell me the truth. The factory south of the US border started operating. Things started going better within six months. That’s when we started getting more resources. We had more funds, and other parts of the organization were able to buy more weapons, supplies and ammunition smuggled from Czechoslovakia. Are you comfortable? is your arm asleep? hand me that pillow, am I really that heavy?...no, no, don’t get up yet, we’ll grab coffee later, it’s my treat, but let’s stay in bed a little longer now…of course I know Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist anymore. Yes, yes, I’ll explain the Colemerik bomb in a bit. After a while we noticed the remittances from the Mexican factory were arriving less and less frequently, even though we received reports that the factory had grown, that they’d started making other products. That’s when bickering erupted among different factions of the organization. People in Europe wanted to expand the political-military campaign beyond the continent. Militants wanted to take actions to the United States because they’re the main weapon and equipment supplier for the Turkish army, but people on the other side, in the United States, were fiercely opposed. They said the plan could risk the future of the factories, which were three now, and that the best thing was to drive our fight through more moderate means, make representations before the European Parliament, plead our case at the United Nations, file a lawsuit before the International Court of Justice, mount human rights campaigns in Turkey. It wasn’t going to work—it had never worked. In discussions and debates we studied the Palestinian case, analyzed dozens of international resolutions and rulings that failed to advance Palestinian rights even a millimetre. We looked at the Nicaraguan case, too, and the International Court of Justice ruling. Am I boring you with all this? You want to me to go on or should we get something to eat? All right, go to the bathroom…I’ll wait, but don’t take too long, eh?”

  “Should I go on?…yes? but don’t fall asleep, eh? Well, we finally made a decision after analyzing the Palestinian experience and a really heated debate about the Bosnians, who were being destroyed by the Serbs. Some Bosnian contacts approached our organization, desperately asking for any weapons and ammunition surplus we had. You see, the Turkish government’s propaganda had made them believe we had giant arsenals. The truth was we paid for every bullet and every rifle literally by taking food out of our mouths. We took advantage of those contacts and asked them to share their experience with international organizations. I’ve never seen so much bitterness, so much frustration and impotence together. The Bosnians were literally being exterminated in the name of world peace and welfare, basically because they are Muslims. So we decided to take our military campaign to the United States because the only language they understand is full body bags. That discussion we’d had made us realize that focusing our efforts only on negotiations would lead us to disaster and demise. There was terrible anger in the United States once we started our military campaign. We took over Turkish embassies in several European countries, bombed Turkish travel agencies in Germany, and then one day some members of our organization in New York were arrested and deported to Turkey. Someone on the inside had betrayed us. A few months later, the authorities sent some of the bodies to their relatives—fingers smashed, charred heads, lungs full of industrial oil, missing thumbs. We thought it was just a terrible coincidence. We didn’t know it then, but the French police had arrested several Kurdish leaders in Paris. They had their address, phone numbers, even bank account numbers. The same thing had happened in Germany, Spain, Italy. I’d gone back to Turkey. I’d gone to Colemerik to take photos and write new accounts of Turkish repression. And then my cell received the order to pick up a vehicle already loaded with explosives and park it at the entrance to the Mustafa Kemal Hotel, two blocks from Colemerik’s central square. We had exactly ten minutes to carry out the operation. The car bomb was meant to destroy the location where several members of Turkey’s military intelligence in charge of operations in the area were. We were supposed to sneak back to Ankara to receive further instructions. We parked the car right outside the hotel and walked away quickly, as we’d been instructed, but not too fast so we wouldn’t look suspicious. The bomb went off when we were only a couple of blocks away, after only three minutes instead of the ten we’d been told it would take for our own safety. The explosion was massive, Alfredo. We’d never been able to assemble a bomb with such power, so we thought it was really odd. There’s no way we could have armed that bomb. We were a good distance away from the car, but we could see the thick cloud of smoke, phosphorus, nitrate darkening the sky. And then we started seeing fingers, hands, joints, pieces of metal and brick falling from the sky. You could even see tiny drops of blood like mist suspended in the air. Once we were back in Ankara we learned exactly what had happened: seventy-­six people had been killed, and about a hundred injured. We had killed the members of our own leadership. Who’d given the order? Who’d prepared the vehicle? We learned later that our financial wing had informed on our New York comrades. They kept the factories, put the organization’s assets in their names, and eliminated the few loyal contacts we had on the East Coast. The business sector of the PKK had intensified their efforts with a blind, murderous zeal. We should have known sooner, when they refused to abandon the sweat shops in Mexico. We’d proposed leaving the area because our movement was aimed at Kurdistan’s independence, driven by the abstract and absurd but necessary ideas of freedom and justice. And there was freedom in those factories, yes, but it was such a bullshit freedom—people couldn’t even go to the bathroom in peace. They argued that moving our production area would affect our income too much because the cost of labour would be so much higher. They wouldn’t even consider it. Now it’s too late for anything. The organization is bankrupt. We’ve been torn apart. We’re wanted everywhere. That’s why I came here. It was really hard to find a passport and even more to find you, Alfredo. It wasn’t that easy, you know? But I knew they wouldn’t find me if I was here with you. At least that’s what I thought until they beat you up and sent you to the hospital. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen. But I know they’ll hold me accountable for what happened in Colemerik. And they’ll find me guilty no matter what I say. They’ve already made their decision. They have to shoot me, take me out, eat a cold, disgusting plate of revenge, even if they die of an ulcer and regret. I had to cut off my hair. Leaving Turkey cost me a huge amount of money. I lied and said I was Spanish until I got out of Europe.”

  Alfredo thought whoever was watching him work on his little novel was still mad at him, standing in the dark, hovering over the island of light on the papers on top of his work table. In the past few days, Alfredo had learned how to get startled less easily every time Boxeador showed up. Sometimes his head appeared in the refrigerator next to the yoghurt. Others his mangled face would stare at him in the mirror with his one good eye while Alfredo was shaving. The first few times their encounters would turn into serious outbursts, but gradually they became quiet dialogues between one-eyed men. He thanked the gods and whoever had invented disposable blades for not having to use a straight razor to shave—he would have easily sliced his jugular in one of his terrors. In those moments of revelation, Alfredo felt he could almost breathe the sense of contained rage in his old comrade’s look. “What do you want me to do, Boxeador? You want me to stop writing and abandon everything?” He just stared back, unmoved. “Are you ever going to stop coming here? Are you ever going to leave me alone? You could at least help me write this novel instead of trying to frighten me to death.” He asked himself if it was even worth trying to communicate with the ghost. “I want to understand what happened that night in August, too, Boxeador.” Pacing around his apa
rtment, Alfredo continued his long, unanswered monologue, and started feeling more nervous—he was an amoeba under the microscope of Boxeador’s gaze. He sat down in front of his papers again and started writing more quickly until he fell asleep on the table, head resting on his arms, overcome by fatigue.