by Hakan Günday
When they woke her from her daydreams they were in Finsbury Park, the headquarters of the Hikmet Tariqat in London. The English version of Çemendağ. Finsbury Park, where property prices plummeted with the rise of Muslim immigrants, where the English became poorer and increasingly racist every day and Muslims got richer and richer, slowly taking over the neighborhood.
The minivan pulled away with Regaip inside. The others entered a twelve-story apartment building, half occupied by members of the Hikmet Tariqat. By the time they reached his flat on the eleventh floor, countless people had come out to kiss Ubeydullah’s hand. Then he placed his hand on Bezir’s shoulder.
“You go up to your flat. They’ll send the girl.”
Ubeydullah’s wife Rahime and several other women brought Derdâ into the bathroom. “Do you know how to perform ablutions?” she asked.
“Yes.”
The women weren’t convinced. They wanted her to show them. Right then and there. Derdâ undressed and performed her ablutions in the exact way Mübarek had taught her to do them. In the Hikmet Tariqat style. The women were satisfied. One smiled and said, “Look, I’m Sister Rahime, I was your age when I came here, so don’t be afraid.” She took Derdâ’s hand and led her to one of the two apartments on the twelfth floor. She rang the doorbell to the flat closest to the stairwell and then left, going back down the stairs. She heard the door open and turned to look at Derdâ, who remained motionless for a few seconds before passing through the door.
Bezir’s apartment had three rooms with wall-to-wall carpeting. Carpets with lions. In the living room there was only a couch, two armchairs, a lectern that could have well been a hundred years old, and a poster of the Kaaba in a black frame. One of the rooms was completely empty, and in the other room there was only a large wardrobe. The only mirror in the house was in the bathroom. One bedroom was significantly larger than the others. In it there was a double bed pushed up against the wall, accessible only from one side—from the marks in the carpet it was apparent it had just been moved into the room.
Bezir walked over to the poster of the Kaaba. There were two prayer rugs on the floor, one beside the other. He stood over one and signaled for Derdâ to come. The little girl stood over the other rug and with their bodies facing the picture of Kaaba on the wall, set in the direction of Mecca, they began to pray together. Thick curtains covered the windows. It was midnight in London. Derdâ watched Bezir out of the corner of her eye and prayed he didn’t know that she wasn’t really praying.
Bezir slowly rolled up the rugs and set them on the couch. Then he took Derda by the hand and led her to the bedroom. Never taking his eyes off the little girl he pulled his gown over his shoulders and, pointing at her chador, he told Derdâ to take it off. She did and then he told her to lie down. Then he pointed to the wall.
“Come here.”
He remained standing, watching Derdâ, now only in her underwear. She was trembling. They both were trembling. Bezir spoke for the last time that night: “Bismillahirrahmanirrahim.”
And he fucked Derdâ until the morning dawned in London.
It was the longest night in the history of London. Even the sun was too embarrassed to rise; morning came late that day.
Bezir got in the elevator, examining the teeth marks on his hands, and left. Derdâ was lying in the bathtub covered in blood, hardly able to breathe. “Clean yourself up,” Bezir had told her. He’d carried her to the bathtub and left her there, as if laying her in a grave. Derdâ was naked. She was too scared to find out where the blood was coming from. In any case, she couldn’t even move her head. All her strength was gone. She’d resisted all night long. Pulling, pushing, and biting the hands covering her mouth to muffle her screams. But to no avail. There was dried blood under her fingernails. Her arms and legs were covered in bruises. The bruises covering her arms and legs made her look like a leopard—and after just one single night of being battered. Battered and shriveled up. She couldn’t even cry.
She heard someone at the front door. Someone was trying different keys in the lock. Finally, a key turned in the lock, the door opened, and a woman called out: “Derdâ! Derdâ!”
Rahime came into the bathroom and saw the girl. Without registering any surprise, she turned on the tap and tested the water temperature. Derdâ watched as if her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, as if she were looking at the world from somewhere deep inside the depths of her body. She couldn’t speak, she couldn’t give sound to the words on the tip of her tongue. She could only look. She looked at Rahime’s hand under the running water as if she was looking through the wrong end of binoculars. After making sure the water was warm, Rahime pulled her hand away and flicked the drops off her finger tips. Then she turned on the shower and Derdâ felt water falling on her legs. She moaned. It was all she could do. Warm water poured down over her body like rain, over her feet, her arms, her hands, her neck.
“Close your eyes,” Rahime said, smiling.
Derdâ didn’t hear her. She didn’t understand. There was a humming in her ears. She involuntarily closed her eyes as rain drops fell into her mouth. Water struck her face, lashes of water, like a hundred fishing lines, streaming out of holes in the shower head. It looked like she was crying. But she wasn’t.
As the water washed away the blood, her wounds became apparent. Blood had flown from between her thin legs, something between those legs had been dismembered, something had been torn, something was dead. Though the water cleaned away the blood stains, purple tattoos remained all over Derdâ’s body. Parts of her were damaged, parts of her were broken, but certain things were newly born. She had purple eyes. Now Derdâ had an eye on her back, though she couldn’t use it yet. In time, she would learn how to open that eye.
She wanted to eat the soup set before her but she just couldn’t. Rahime took the spoon from her hand, blew on it to cool the soup, and poured it through Derdâ’s lips. After a few spoonfuls, an “ah” passed through Derdâ’s lips. It then became a capital “A.” And she multiplied them: “AAAA!”
Eventually only intermittent breathing interrupted the wail: “AAAAAAAA … AAAAAAAA … AAAAAAA …”
Her lips didn’t close until Ulviye from the fourth-floor apartment came up to give her an injection of diazepam. She couldn’t close her lips. She wasn’t aware of her screaming, her eleven years compressed into a wail. And then she fell asleep.
When she woke up she was sixteen. Lying on the couch, she looked up at the ceiling in the silence of a warm afternoon. She was startled by a noise from behind the door. She stood up and covered herself in her black chador. She couldn’t see through the peephole because the lens had fallen off balance, so she opened the door a little and peeked out.
First, she saw a leaf. A big leaf on a big house plant in a big pot. Then she saw an armchair, a black leather armchair. Then she saw Stanley, a tall, thin man. He was pushing a glass coffee table to the side of the corridor to open a passageway for a man in blue overalls carrying two boxes to get into Stanley’s new apartment. Pushing the low table aside, he stood up and looked at the other furniture around him. Then he saw the head and shoulder of his neighbor, Derdâ, peering at him from behind the door. He didn’t smile or say hello. He just stared at her jet-black eyes framed in pitch-black cloth. Derdâ disappeared immediately as if something had pulled her back. She shut the door as if taking refuge behind it.
Evidently, they had found a tenant for the flat opposite, which had been empty for five years. This meant that from then on Derdâ would have to cover herself when she swept the threshold or when she saw Bezir off at the elevator in the morning. This was the first thing that came to mind. To cover herself so that she’d be invisible to a stranger. She knelt down and put her ear against the door to listen for signs of life. She heard noises. Soft, loud, and sudden noises. She tried to match the sounds to different pieces of furniture. If she knew that none of her assumptions were true, who knows if she would’ve stayed there with her body pressed up against the door until th
e door outside was shut and the corridor was silent. Maybe she wouldn’t have cared at all, but Derdâ had nothing else to do. She’d lived in this flat on the twelfth floor for five years. The only difference between this apartment and her room in Kurudere was that there was no longer an iron ring around her ankle. Now the ring encircled her whole body.
She only left the flat on Fridays. It was exactly sixteen steps to the eleventh floor where Rahime held open the door. All the women there were members of the Hikmet Tariqat and they came there to listen to a speech called sohbet, a kind of religious conversation. At first Derdâ couldn’t understand why it was called a conversation. As far as she knew, a conversation was two-way. But after some time, she stopped caring. She only made sure not to sit beside the old man, Vezir, who whined out the Hadith with saliva sputtering out from his mouth. Whenever the old man spoke he made a terrible noise accompanied by ample spit. He could go on and on for three hours, his eyes closed over the final hour.
The women huddled together on the floor to make enough space for everyone else. Derdâ liked the spot between the big yellow armchair and the wall. She always went down a few minutes before the sohbet began. She liked to feel hidden. For the last two years she wore her two-piece black chador when she went down to the sohbet (normally she preferred the single-piece chador with an elastic band at its waist) and secretly kept her left hand in her baggy şalvar pants, her middle finger inside her. As the women in the room listened intently, weeping and often bursting into flights of hysteria, Derdâ came at least three times during the three-hour sohbet, moaning every time.
She was like everyone else in the crowd, her voice part of the general hum. Moving her curled finger to caress the walls of her vagina, she fantasized about being held down and fucked by a dozen anonymous men. But she never rushed into the final episode of her fantasy, the summit of her pleasure. In the final fantasy, a miracle had rendered Bezir motionless. He seethed with anger as he was forced to watch his wife’s face contort with pleasure. At every sohbet she imagined another way Bezir would be unable to move. Sometimes he was paralyzed by an illness, sometimes his hands and feet were bound, sometimes he was held down by three men. Derdâ stared at Bezir’s suffering face while she moaned. Then the sohbet ended and everyone returned to their own apartments. Bezir arrived two hours later and sat down with Derdâ on the floor around a low wooden table. He ate his dinner without chewing, saving his teeth for Derdâ.
Any other teenage girl would have picked at her eyebrows, peeled the dry skin off her lips, or gnawed the insides of her cheeks during the sohbet sessions. But Derdâ’s personal protest would not be through pain. She had enough of that from others. So many only wanted to cause her harm. She wouldn’t be one of them. So she found pleasure in her silent scream. It was her only revenge. She pleasured herself in a world of suffering. This was the only way to deny she was a victim. At least to herself.
Ubeydullah never knew that Bezir beat Derdâ; Rahime never told him what she had seen in the bathtub. In fact, Ubeydullah took a liking to Derdâ. He felt compassion for her. On those rare occasions when he came over, he’d call her his daughter. But he couldn’t see what was under her chador. He couldn’t see the welts on her knees (the work of belt buckles) or the bruises on her shoulders (the marks of fists).
Bezir beat her because speaking was too difficult. He beat her because kickboxing still couldn’t control his anger. A teacher in the school he’d attended briefly encouraged him to try kickboxing, but sixteen years of practicing the art hadn’t managed to tame the beast. He beat her because years had gone by and Derdâ still hadn’t gotten pregnant.
Derdâ heard the door open across the hall and she jumped up and pressed her ear to the door, closing her eyes. A thin, tall man with short-cropped hair appeared in her mind’s eye. His eyes, she thought, were they blue? She couldn’t say. But she knew that one of her fantasy men would have a face at the next sohbet. At least that she was sure of.
Bezir had to go to Istanbul for four days. Derdâ was overjoyed at the thought of being alone, if only for a few days. But her joy was cut short when she was told she would pass all waking hours with Rahime.
Rahime was always smiling. It was like her face had been fixed with glue. She always smiled. She smiled when she ate, she smiled when she prayed. She smiled when she looked at Derdâ. A smile was a permanent fixture on her face. She had something she wanted to tell Derdâ.
“Do you know why Bezir went to Istanbul?”
“For business.”
Rahime narrowed her smile.
“Is that what he told you?”
“Yes,” Derdâ answered.
Rahime’s smile grew larger.
“Ah, my girl, if only you knew. Don’t tell anyone you heard this from me, but he went to find a girl.”
Derdâ’s response was too sudden.
“Will he leave me then?”
“Do you want him to?”
She knew her answer to this question was important, and could result in a terrible beating four days later.
“No, no,” said Derdâ.
This time Rahime laughed, her smile broadening.
“Stupid girl! Why wouldn’t he be looking for another girl? When he has a wife like you. You’re an idiot, a moron!”
Derdâ turned her head and narrowed her eyes. She looked at Rahime, who was covering her mouth with her hands trying to control her laughter. Then it dawned on her—something was not right about Rahime. She was insane. Thirty-two-year-old Rahime was out of her mind, and Derdâ was the first person to notice. Her only daughter to Ubeydullah was only fourteen when she was married off as the third wife to Azamet, the eldest man in the neighboring apartment block. Rahime knew she’d never see her daughter again, and that she wouldn’t recognize her even if she did. She gave up trying to understand anything about the world.
Derdâ listened to Rahime natter on about her private conversations with God until the evening prayer. Always smiling, she whispered to Derdâ, “Nobody else can hear. He only speaks with me. He says that he’ll take me to his paradise.”
Every once in a while, she stopped speaking as if she just remembered something, her smile frozen on her face, then several absent seconds later she started up again.
“‘Rahime,’ he says to me. ‘You’re my favorite servant. I believe only in the sincerity of your prayers. The others are all liars …’”
She made Derdâ swear again and again not to tell anyone about her conversations. Almost every two hours.
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?”
She brought out her Koran.
“Put your hand on it,” she said. “And swear!”
They had dinner and Derdâ returned to her apartment to sleep. She began to slowly climb the stairs, the key to her prison on a rope around her neck. As she was unlocking the door, the elevator arrived at the fourteenth floor and Derdâ froze, the key still unturned in the lock. The elevator doors slid open and Derdâ couldn’t help but look over her shoulder. Stanley stepped out of the elevator in a leather overcoat with black kohl around his eyes. He looked at her, looming over her in his giant, steel-tipped, knee-high Dr. Martens. His blue eyes were like the sky behind black clouds.
Like a black ghost, Derdâ slowly turned around, leaving the key in the lock, to look at Stanley. The yellow ceiling lamp suddenly went out, enveloping them in darkness. They were both invisible. Derdâ thought of running to him and throwing her arms around him. Stanley would return her embrace and they would rush into the elevator and travel to eternity. But there was something Derdâ had forgotten: it was impossible for them to escape in the dark. When Stanley stepped forward the motion-sensor triggered the hall light. They were still staring at each other, less than six feet between them. The light went off again and this time Derdâ stepped forward, moving so quickly that Stanley surely heard the rustle of her chador. Years older than Derdâ, Stanley acknowledged her with a curt nod and turned toward his door. Though drunk, he managed to insert his key and in one
swift movement he opened the door and disappeared inside. The corridor light went off and when it came back on his door was already closed.
That night Derdâ slept on the floor by the door, hoping she might hear a sound from the corridor. When she woke up she stepped outside, glancing at Stanley’s door. It seemed more like a wall with nothing beyond it. Bowing her head, she went downstairs. Rahime opened the door before the doorbell’s singsong melody had finished.
“You know Ulviye, right?” Rahime asked her.
Derdâ nodded.
“She says she speaks to God, too, you know? She told me the other day, the lying bitch!”
Derdâ didn’t want to miss the chance to swear and so she too used the word, fully stressing each letter’s sound.
“Bitch!”
Rahime was delighted to hear her repeat the word and she smiled so broadly that her lips nearly reached her cheek bones.
Derdâ spent twelve hours performing her ablutions and prayers, cooking, eating, and pretending to listen to Rahime before she left for her apartment. On every step up to her floor she stopped and listened for the elevator. Silence. She walked up three steps and then down two, then up one more before counting to fifty—but not a sound from the elevator. After the first eight steps, she gave up on waiting and hurried into her apartment without even looking at Stanley’s door.
For the first few hours that night in the apartment she sat in an armchair she had moved to the window and watched London in the dark. Then she stood up and slowly undressed. Naked, she took a step forward and pressed the tips of her fingers and her nipples onto the window overlooking the city. A naked Derdâ stood at the window of a dark flat on the twelfth floor with her arms spread wide open. Her brow was also up against the glass as she stared at the lights in the distance. At first, she was worried that someone might see her, but soon she was wishing someone would. That night Derdâ stood against her bedroom window like a white flag. That night Derdâ was naked like a cry in the dark. But nobody heard her. The window was soundproof. Nobody could see how crudely her body had been beaten. No one saw all the bruises. No one informed the police, and no one even noticed her display of exhibitionism. Derdâ fell asleep naked.