by Hakan Günday
Bezir smiled.
“Is that so?”
He pulled out his leg, stood up, slowly placed his hand on the back of Derdâ’s neck, and squeezed, but not too hard.
“Come with me,” he said.
He brought Derdâ to the window. The curtains were drawn. She had no idea what he was planning to do. She felt a sudden rush of fear.
Then she felt a heaviness on the back of her neck as Bezir forced her down to her knees. He knelt down beside her and forced Derdâ flat onto the floor, pressing her face into the carpet.
He asked her, “Then what the hell is this?”
Derdâ couldn’t see anything, only individual strands in the carpet. Bezir realized this and lifted her head up a little. But she still couldn’t see anything but the carpet, nothing more.
“What is it?” she finally managed to say. “What I am supposed to see?”
Bezir pointed to a small indent.
“You see this! This!” he screamed as he dragged the girl’s head over to the other indent thirty inches to the right.
“You see this, too!”
Then another indent.
“And this one here!”
Then the last one.
“And this!”
Still on her knees, he forced Derdâ to look at each indent the armchair had left in the carpet, rubbing her face in them.
“I don’t know,” Derdâ cried. “I really don’t know!”
She started to cry. Bezir hated it when she cried.
“Who then? Someone else? Was someone else in here? Did someone else move the armchair over here! Did someone else draw the curtains to look outside? Did you let someone in here? Is that what you’re telling me? Is that why you want to go shopping? You want to go see him?”
Bezir wasn’t shouting now. He spoke in a stiff, muffled voice, because Ubeydullah had told him before that he was making too much noise. He’d even asked if he was doing anything to the girl.
Then suddenly Bezir released his grip on her neck. Bezir didn’t have much time. He was late for work. He went to the front hall, slipped on his shoes, and left. Derdâ remained flat on the carpet for some time. When she finally raised her head, she saw Bezir’s lectern. Her eyes searched for the notebook she’d used for her pictures, but it wasn’t there. Did Bezir notice that, too? she thought as she stood up. She’d find out that evening when he came home.
She paced back and forth in the living room until noon and then left the apartment and knocked on her neighbor’s door. Stanley wasn’t working that day. Without even looking at his face, Derdâ stepped into the apartment and walked straight to Stanley’s bedroom. Stanley followed. Derdâ bent over his bed and took the bat out from under the pillow. Stanley raised his index finger to tell her to wait. He took a three-piece studded collar from one of the chains hanging from the ceiling and fastened it around Derdâ’s neck. He took a step back to look at the girl in black now wearing an S&M studded choke collar. He was in awe. Then he slowly undressed and assumed a new position. This time he remained standing with his hands together above his head. His eyes closed. As the hard plastic bat came down on his back and the back of his legs, his penis became more and more erect. He remained still until a translucent liquid spurted out from the tip of his erect member and as he opened his eyes he opened his palm to Derdâ, who stopped beating him. Stanley leaned over and picked up a bracelet lined with nails and slipped it inside-out over his cock slick with come. The nails ran over his flesh as he moved the bracelet up and down. He looked up at Derdâ and she understood right away what Stanley wanted her to do. Her black-gloved hand clutched the bracelet and moved it up and down exactly twelve times. This time the liquid was tinted with blood.
Derdâ threw the plastic bat down on the bed and started to search the house. She was looking for something—a book, any book. And soon enough she found what she was looking for—not a book but a magazine, a TV guide. She opened it to a random page and showed it to Stanley who followed her about the house eagerly as he got dressed. Enunciating loudly, she said, “English,” in an attempt to make herself totally clear. She always felt that her voice was barely audible beneath the cloth over her mouth. She pointed at the pictures in the magazine and said again, “English!”
“I don’t get it. What do you want?” Stanley asked.
Derdâ pretended to write something in the air and Stanley brought her a pen. On the back cover, there was an ad for handbags. In the ad, a naked woman bent over with both her hands on her calves, her breasts covered with the advertised bag and the brand name written exactly where her legs came together. Derdâ put the pen on the bag and scribbled. Then she circled the woman’s eyes and scribbled some more, all the while saying, “English!”
She realized something was missing—so she added a question mark at the end of all her lines and then Stanley finally understood. He took the magazine from Derdâ, and pointed at the naked woman and repeated the word in English several times.
“Woman,” Derdâ repeated after him.
That day Stanley came twice and Derdâ learned thirty-six new words.
“There’s the famous Big Ben,” Hıdır Arif said.
But Gido Agha wasn’t listening. He’d just bought into a heroin ring and he couldn’t think of anything else. Smuggling heroin was eight times as lucrative as smuggling diesel oil.
He’d come to London to negotiate with his fellow countrymen—Turks who’d lived in London for a long time. Although he’d negotiated with men from villages he’d never heard of before, he still considered them his people for they were weaned on the milk of their Kurdish mothers. But he never discussed business with women. He’d told his compatriots in London that he wouldn’t take the heroin over the Bulgarian border. He said they would have to take it from there; he couldn’t get involved with transportation after that. They agreed, but said because the costs would be higher his cut would be smaller. Gido Agha wasn’t pleased. And so Big Ben just drifted by unnoticed. He was only really interested in buildings that were his.
But then Hıdır Arif wasn’t happy there either, on the Thames in a none-too-small boat that they had rented for the day. But all the same, they couldn’t pretend they didn’t know each other just because they were thousands of kilometers away from their homeland. They had lots of things in common—around two hundred thousand things. That was the population on the expanse of land in southeastern Turkey that they each ruled separately. Hıdır Arif knew from his father that it was best not to get involved in the affairs of Gido Agha, and although he knew what he was up to, he didn’t say a word about it to him directly.
Likewise, Gido didn’t involve himself in Hikmet Tariqat affairs. They shared the people—their flesh and blood belonged to the Aleyzam tribe, and their souls to the Hikmet Tariqat. It was a fair deal that went back nearly a hundred years. Gido looked after the business affairs of the organization, and Hıdır Arif kept a list of those people who went to the mountains to join the rebel fighters.
Hıdır Arif didn’t give a damn about which flag flew over his land. He knew well that people became the living dead without faith. So Hikmet Tariqat rule would carry on even if China took over. “Kurdistan, the Turkish Republic, People’s Republic of China, what difference does it make?” he used to say to his father, Sheik Gazi—when he could still hear, that is. Hıdır Arif was a Princeton-educated citizen of the world. He knew no boundaries except those made by religion. If a Muslims without Borders was ever formed, he saw himself as its leader. But still, he preferred certain nationalities over others. For example, he admired the pretension of the Arabs. If they wanted to cover the Kaaba with gold, he’d be one of the first to support the project. He loved pretension; he’d once paid half a million dollars for a five-hundred-gram stone he hardly believed was a part of Hacer-ül-Esved, and he made sure every guest who came into his study saw it—a jet-black stone seemingly suspended in the center of a glass sphere etched with a map of the world, a stone in the center of the world instead of magma. The sphere
was mounted on a steel column and it was the first thing people saw when they entered the room, as if basked in an elaborate lighting system. Hıdır Arif could select his color of choice for the sphere with a remote control. His favorite was green, the color typical of Islamic mausoleums.
As they approached Waterloo Bridge, Gido Agha said, “There’s a man, maybe you know him.”
“Who?” Hıdır Arif asked.
“Bedir, or Bezir, something like that. He lives here. You know what he does?”
The other boats on the Thames and Waterloo Bridge were teeming with tourists. Many of them held cameras, snapping photos of everything around them—photos they would probably never look at again. Someone on the bridge saw the old bearded man in an Islamic robe and turban and snapped a photo of him before his luxury yacht sailed under the bridge. He figured he was the political leader of some country in the Middle East.
The man next to him on the bridge said, “Forget that guy, I know who he is. Get a photo of the one we’re after.”
The two men in trench coats were MI5 officers, members of the British Security Service. They had been assigned to collect information on Gido Agha, currently residing in the Waldorf, one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Gido could have come to Britain like any other tourist and left the same way, but the fact was he visited people the MI5 had been watching for months and this made him a new suspect. So now he was being watched under tight surveillance, too.
A Scotsman with a bushy red beard and a kilt elbowed the MI5 officers out of his way, grumbling, “Out of my way. Can’t you see I’m working this part of the bridge?”
And as he resumed blowing vigorously on his bagpipe the officers had no choice but to move out of his way. A double-decker bus emblazoned with a full advertisement for the new James Bond film barreled past them as they stepped back toward the street. There was James Bond in a tuxedo, his hair blown like a motorcycle helmet, and bikini-clad girls draped over his shoulders. The two agents looked at the poster and then each other, at their dark coats and what remained of their hair—there was less and less of it every year—billowing in a gust of wind. Their eyes were bloodshot from so much overtime. They had bought their Chinese-made shoes on sale. They couldn’t help but sense that the Scottish bagpipe player—now comfortably blowing a Scottish air on his bagpipe—was shooting them an evil glare.
“Fuck James Bond,” one of them cursed, and they walked away.
Meanwhile, Hıdır Arif was trying to remember where he’d heard the name before. He needed more details.
“Which group is he associated with?”
He meant to ask whether he was from the tribe or the sect. More precisely, he was asking where his true allegiance lay.
“He’s one of yours,” said Gido.
“Praise God,” said Hıdır Arif, nodding his head. “I know the name but from where? Anyway, why are you interested in him?”
“Don’t ask …” Gido said, lowering his eyes to the muddy waters of the Thames. “We have some business together.”
Hıdır Arif didn’t ask any more. So he wouldn’t learn that Bezir had established a small organization of Muslim kickboxers in London and that he had managed to hook hundreds of non-Muslims on heroin, justifying himself by saying, “in the service of God any kind of jihad is permissible.” Hıdır Arif didn’t ask any more. And so he didn’t find out that Bezir had reinvested all the money he’d earned from drug dealing in heroin, as he couldn’t touch that dirty haram money, and that he’d developed a kickbox move that could break the knees of drug dealers who sold heroin to Muslims in one just blow. Even if Hıdır Arif had asked despite Gido’s countermand, he still wouldn’t have learned the truth about Bezir.
Gido himself knew nothing of all this. His men only told him that there was a man from the Hikmet Tariqat who’d gone gonzo. They told him to take care of him. They’d heard it from Dulluhan, one of the four brothers who were proud to control 75 percent of the heroin that came through the UK. The Daltons of London. Their problem with Bezir was that he bought heroin from the Russians. In other words, from the 25 percent that didn’t belong to them.
“We’ll look into it,” Gido told them. And that was when the MI5 got their first picture of him. The shot was taken from a window on the fourth floor of the apartment building right across the Dalton headquarters in Westminster.
They moved to the stern of the yacht and sat down to eat.
Hıdır Arif said, “Right! I remember the man. Bezir, he’s Ubeydullah’s son. He’s a good boy. He looks after his father’s furniture factory.”
He didn’t say that five years ago he’d acted as an intermediary for him, when he bought an eleven-year-old girl to be his wife.
He carried on carefully: “That’s right. He married a girl from Kurudere. Now I remember. In any case, what do you need him for?”
Gido was put out that rakı wasn’t served with the meal.
Lifting his head, he said, “Just give me his address. And tell me this. Is he useful?”
Hıdır Arif had expected this. That it might come to this. This son of a bitch Gido might hurt the guy. He made a quick calculation in his head. The outcome was to Bezir’s disadvantage. God forgive, he said to himself.
“No, he’s not.”
“Good,” said Gido. He felt much better after that. Then he looked up. “What were you saying, something big to see around here, where is it?”
Hıdır Arif swore under his breath and said, “We already passed it. That was the clock tower, Big Ben.”
And just as they were about to eat, a woman came crashing down into the long wooden table between them. Looking up, they saw that they’d just passed under Tower Bridge. The woman had jumped off the bridge, falling directly onto their boat. And, presumably according to plan, she was dead. The table had been split in two, and Rahime was splayed out on the floor covered in blood, holding a small radio. It was still on. It was stronger than human flesh. “If It Be Your Will” was still playing. Rahime wasn’t wearing her black chador. She’d uncovered herself on the last day of her life. Perhaps she’d had nothing left to hide.
The following day one of the MI5 officers was reading the headline news. “Fuck James Bond!” he grumbled. Pictures of Gido’s bewildered face taken from every angle on a boat covered with the blood of a suicide were all over the front pages. Another paper had an interview with Hıdır Arif:
“We’re not safe in this country! What if this woman had fallen directly onto us? Can’t they at least put a safety net under these bridges! They bleed us for taxes! I have every intention to sue those responsible for this. But God has saved us and we are alive today. I would just like to say to my Muslim brothers that I am fine and there’s no need to worry.”
Kaşıkatlı Seyit Muharrem’s poem, dated 1842 and titled “Hikmet-ül Arz,” was the foundational text of the Hikmet Tariqat:
Your trial will end with your appointed death
Dismiss your feeble state and disdain finality
You may take lives in self-defense
But you must never take your own
As long as you exist you will stay
In life and in peace of mind
Not cruelty nor blasphemy nor adultery
But suicide is the greatest sin in this world
Do you not know to whom your breath belongs?
Do you not prostrate yourself until you are underground?
Not lies nor hypocrisy nor lust
But suicide is the only betrayal of God
As you have come when you were called
So you will go upon being called
If you rebel and cast your own rope
You will vanish in a void blacker than coal
So the first victory in your trial, do not forget,
It is to be patient till your appointed death …
Like all organizations that derive their power from the masses and then create a functional set of rules to command them, the Hikmet Tariqat held that committing suicide meant e
ternal damnation. The existence and preservation of the Tariqat depended on the existence of its members. And those who died not in the name of the cause but in their own name were good for nothing. That’s why the Tariqat members rejected Rahime’s corpse. She had committed suicide and in her final breath her face was unveiled for the world to see. But even more damning than that was the fact that in her selfish act she almost killed a superior being—Hıdır Arif—and the sect could not forgive that.
It didn’t take long to think the matter through before rejecting Rahime in every way. But Ubeydullah honored his late wife. “There will be a funerary prayer. If necessary, I’ll do it myself!” he said to himself, because all his supporters had left him. As a result of the general opinion on Rahime’s suicide, his otherwise busy, social world suddenly went cold.
Bezir went with Ubeydullah to collect Rahime’s body from the hospital morgue. She was buried in a Muslim cemetery in North London. Bezir arranged everything to please his father. He arranged everything according to Muslim tradition, from the funeral shroud to the washing of the body. After the funeral, Ubeydullah was no longer at peace in his apartment. His heart ached and he felt a new shortness of breath.
Derdâ begged Bezir to take her to the funeral. In a rage, Bezir slapped her across the face so hard that she fell to the floor. She cried; she cried like she never cried before. She screamed and pounded the carpet with the palms of her hands. She had no strength left to bear such oppression. She stood up and ran to the window. She opened it and screamed, “I’ll jump! I swear, I’ll jump!”
Bezir stared at her, silent. Then he turned to leave, but at the door he paused and then walked back into the living room and stood in the doorway staring at Derdâ, her one leg suspended outside the building. Silence. It was as if he was waiting for her to jump and die. Suddenly his massive frame buckled and Ubeydullah appeared behind him. The old man had punched his son’s back with untold violence. Bezir turned and fell to the floor, not because of the power or pain of the sudden blow, but because he had been hit by his father. He hunched his shoulders and lowered his head, and though well over two hundred pounds, Bezir looked like a little ball crumpled up on the floor.