by Hakan Günday
Ubeydullah was crying like a child. He’d loved Rahime. He’d lost his first wife to breast cancer and Bezir was his only son. Though he was thirty-six years older than Rahime, he had loved her dearly all the same. In a way that he loved all human beings—with compassion. He loved her both as his wife and as a child. He might have been the reason she took her own life, but he had loved her. Ubeydullah didn’t know any other kind of life. He’d never known any other way to act toward a woman. Now he could only cry and strike Bezir with trembling hands. It was as if Bezir had thrown Rahime off the bridge himself and Ubeydullah was taking his revenge. But the truth was Ubeydullah’s violence was meant for no one else but himself.
“Never again!” he cried, gasping for breath. “If you ever touch this girl again, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me? With God as my witness, I’ll kill you! You might be my son but I will kill you!”
He continued to drive his fists into his son until he collapsed to the floor. Bezir sprang to his feet and grabbed his father. He raced out of the apartment. Derdâ ran after him. Bezir took the stairs—he’d forgotten all about the elevator. He held his father close to him; in a way that only a son could know, he knew that he was on the verge of death. The old man had never had such difficulty breathing before.
“God!” Bezir cried. “Oh, God!”
Tears filled his narrowed eyes and there was a thin trail of saliva from his lower lip to his chin. He didn’t notice Derdâ behind him. He didn’t see anything at all—only a door, a double door at the entrance to the building. He kicked it open and ran through the garden to the parking lot. Derdâ hardly had time to realize that this was the very door she’d come through five years ago. It was the first time she’d left the building in five years. She also had tears in her eyes. She didn’t know why, maybe for everything, for the past five years, for Ubeydullah, for Rahime, for herself.
For a moment, she couldn’t see Bezir. She was confused by her surroundings. The open sky made her head spin. But quickly adjusting to the light, she found her husband in the parking lot and ran over to him. Bezir was strapping his father in the back seat. Derdâ tried to open the front door but couldn’t. She didn’t know how. For a moment, their eyes met above the car. Bezir’s and Derdâ’s eyes. They saw each other crying. Derdâ’s vision came into focus: it was the first time she’d seen her husband cry.
Bezir shut the back door and walked around the car. Derdâ took two steps back and covered her eyes with her hands in self-defense.
“Get in,” said Bezir.
Opening her eyes, she saw that he’d opened the door. She got in the car. Bezir sat next to her in the driver’s seat and started the engine. They pulled out onto the street. Ubeydullah moaned in the back seat, regaining consciousness.
“Promise me, Bezir!”
“Dad!” Bezir said. “For God’s sake!”
He couldn’t bring himself to swear that he’d never hit Derdâ again. He pounded his calloused palms onto the steering wheel.
“Dad, for God’s sake …” he kept saying.
Ubeydullah was insistent.
“I can’t swear!” he whimpered, but Ubeydullah didn’t hear him and pushed him further.
“Swear! Swear that you’ll never hit her again! Swear …”
He stopped mid-sentence. His anger, his life, everything was suddenly cut short. Overcome by the labor of beating, his heart stopped like a bullet lodged into his flesh. It would have passed clear through him, but his son wouldn’t give in. He wouldn’t let the bullet pass through …
Ubeydullah died at the second intersection, just four intersections away from the hospital. Derdâ knew he was dead.
“He isn’t moving!” she cried, shaking the old man’s inert body. Bezir slammed on the brakes and a taxi crashed into the back of the car. Derdâ’s forehead slammed into the dashboard. Bezir jumped out of the car, opened the back door, and pulled his father out of the car. Ubeydullah crumpled on the ground like a blanket. Bezir knelt down by the car and took his father in his arms. His voice echoed off of the buildings at the intersection: “God!”
Bezir didn’t touch Derdâ for forty days after his father’s death. He didn’t even know she was there. He didn’t leave the house for forty days. He was hardly aware of his own body. He didn’t eat, he only drank water. When his kickboxer friends came over, he locked his wife in the bedroom and held meetings in the living room. At nights he sat in a corner of the room and cried with his hands over his face.
Meanwhile, Derdâ wrote a short letter using the English she’d recently learned, folded it seven times, and pushed it under Stanley’s door. She finished the letter with the words “do not come.”
Derdâ couldn’t decide whether she pitied Bezir or simply despised him. One morning she thought she felt something like pity and approached Bezir who was sitting on the bed silently sobbing. She put her hand on his shoulder. The sleeve of her chador was partially rolled up and she could see the dark brown skin over her wrist. Then she saw scars—the work of Bezir’s hands. She remembered everything he’d ever done to her and pulled back her hand. Bezir continued to sob and Derdâ returned to not caring.
On the forty-first day, Bezir got dressed and left the house. His mourning was done—now it was time for rage. With his profits from the heroin trade he would have the Afghans make him bombs. He’d set them off in underground stations during rush hour. He’d fuck England, home of infidels. This was the plan he’d worked out over the last forty days as he wept and grieved. A plan to fuck England! He was going to avenge his father. He wasn’t able to seek retribution in himself; he had to take it out on the rest of the world. But the fact was that he was the only person in the world truly responsible for his father’s death. Bezir was like his father in this way. He was just like Ubeydullah, a man who beat his own son because he couldn’t beat himself.
Stanley opened the door for Derdâ and smiled as he showed her in. She went straight into the living room, where she turned to Stanley and said, “Money!”
Stanley’s expression turned sour and he said, “I don’t have any.”
Derdâ shook her head, walked to the window, and pointed. She pointed at London, she pointed at all the people living there.
“I …” she said as she waved her hand as if batting away a ghost. Then she pointed out again and said, “They …” and pretended to pull something out of the air and said, “money.”
Stanley finally understood. And then he remembered the first gift he had given Derdâ, whom he now considered his master.
“Wait!” he said and ran to the bedroom. He came back holding an English- Turkish/Turkish-English dictionary. When Derdâ saw the small book, she understood what it was and leapt on it like a dolphin. She then summarized what she wanted to say in the following words:
“I … beat … man … then … money … take … because … I …” She couldn’t find the exact word she was looking for but found one just as good: “Queen.”
Stanley smiled and said, “Yes, you’re my queen.”
Derdâ’s intelligence belied her insular life. She slapped Stanley’s cheek just like Bezir used to slap her. Then she caressed it and placed her hand on Stanley’s shoulder, nearly a foot higher than her own, and she applied pressure. Half of his face was now bright red. Stanley didn’t resist and lowered himself to his knees and looked up at Derdâ. But this wasn’t enough. She pushed harder until his forehead was on the ground. There were no carpets in Stanley’s flat. She forced his nose down into the parquet floor. Then Derdâ lifted her left foot and stepped on the back of Stanley’s neck, forcing his entire body to grovel beneath her.
“I …” she said, unable to remember the verb she was looking for, and she rifled through the dictionary. “Take … money … and then … give … you …”
Stanley moved his head slightly. And Derdâ rubbed her foot up and down his neck. Stanley managed to pull down his pants, despite his awkward position. He brought his hands down to his crotch and rolled over onto his side exposing h
is gaping, completely hairless hole to Derdâ. First, Derdâ inserted one of her fingers, and then another. Good thing that she had three more pairs of black gloves at home, because this glove would soon be filthy.
Derdâ hadn’t had any contact with money for five years. Bezir never left money at home and he only kept credit cards and coins in his wallet. So, after English, what Derdâ needed most was money. And if there were more people like Stanley in London, she could definitely make money. She’d make them suffer as much as they wanted. She’d oppress them and humiliate them as much as they wanted. When it came to this kind of stuff she was better informed than anyone. She’d suffered all her life.
And she wouldn’t even have to take her chador off while she worked. Derdâ was right. After all, they were living in London. There were probably thousands of people like Stanley who went to work every day and came home at night imagining things that people beside them at the bus stop could never dream of. Among them were postmen and lords, all willing to empty their wallets only to be—if for just half an hour—the slave to a sixteen-year-old girl dressed all in black, only her eyes peeking out from behind the dark cloth.
Derdâ’s first customer was Mitch. He was nervous when he came over to Stanley’s house. But the fear turned him on. Derdâ stood with her hands behind her back in front of the living room window; in her single-piece black chador she looked like a dark club. She was even shorter than Mitch had imagined and her small size—almost that of a child—fired his fantasies as he imagined Gulliver being tortured by the Lilliputians. Mitch was as heavy as Bezir—he weighed over two hundred pounds—but he was nothing but a tub of lard.
Derdâ was also turned on. She was used to Stanley’s body and she wondered how she would deal with this redhead fatso squeezed in a leather jacket. Mitch’s forehead was dripping with sweat and his eyes darted nervously about the room. Derdâ knew that her face was covered and that no matter how stimulated she felt, no one would be able to tell. Then she thought of Kurudere; she thought of the chain in Kurudere.
Mitch stood beside Stanley at the door to the living room. He gave a light nod to Derdâ. These guys were the perfect Laurel and Hardy combination, but Derdâ had never heard of them anyway. Calmly, she stepped between them without even glancing at their faces. Stanley and Mitch looked at each other in surprise. They followed Derdâ down the corridor and into the bedroom. They found her gripping one of the chains hanging from the ceiling; she was waiting for them. She’d attached an unbuckled leather belt to the end of the chain. She pointed at Mitch. He trundled up to her, as bumbling as Oliver Hardy.
Derdâ tightly wrapped the whip around her hand and whipped Mitch with a long leather whip for a full hour. Mitch’s feet were bound in chains, Stanley’s dirty Cramps T-shirt covered his head, and a studded choke collar was around his neck. Derdâ noticed Mitch’s hands were still free and so she chained them, too. She was becoming quite the professional.
Derdâ lucked out by having a blubbery seal like Mitch as her first customer; he was turned on by even the slightest smell in the air, and she quickly learned the patterns of his reactions and desires. In the game of S&M no one is drawn to an indecisive master. Nothing turns a slave on more than an unbendable, iron will. In fact, it was just like what happened in real life. This was pure improvisation based on everyday scenarios. It was no different than a town’s eventual liberation from an enemy occupation. In this kind of play, the master embodied life in all its cruelty and the slave was a solitary human being. After all, every human being is beaten down by life, and rarely rewarded. It was that simple.
The walls of Stanley’s bedroom echoed with cries of pain and pleasure, but the leather and steel accessories there were mere details, details to help victims get in the mood. In the real world there were telephone cards, briefcases, neckties, handbags that came with free perfume samples, glasses you wore just because they looked cool, color contacts, hair dyes, brochures for epilation at discount prices, and sports equipment bought to lose weight in the privacy of your own home but kept stashed away in the bedroom. The ears of bad children that get used to being yanked as they’re yanked more and more, the steady rise in radiation levels, two-bedroom ground floor apartments bought on thirty-year payment plans; doing all the shopping on installment plans, the rule of law, police batons, food that gives you cancer, cigarettes that do the same—not to mention all the secondhand smoke—and the porcelain caps on the divinely radiant smiles of political and religious leaders. Words like “please” and “thank you” and the entreaties and apologies that always follow the very real violence of the real world. So it wasn’t unhealthy for a person to accept his or her relationship with life for what it was—mostly painful, rarely pleasurable—and play the game according to its rules.
As some psychologists vapidly say to patients who participate in nights of S&M—it’s only about understanding what’s what. These tendencies aren’t only the traumatic consequences of molestation or violation experienced in childhood. It was life itself that was traumatic, all of it, the whole damn thing. And especially all those things which on the surface don’t really seem traumatic—like being born. In other words, postpartum depression isn’t a psychological illness particular to new mothers; a state of depression was life itself, the compulsion to go on living, in spite of life.
Stanley watched Mitch and Derdâ until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He got up, took off his clothes, and then bent over Mitch’s greasy, tattooed back and pushed himself inside him. Derdâ began beating both of them at the same time. She’d beaten Mitch so badly that he probably wouldn’t be able to walk after it was all done. He put his clothes on and pulled out a twenty-pound note from his leather jacket and tossed it onto Stanley’s bed. Derdâ wasn’t amused. Despite the dark and ugly decor in the room, she found the gesture distasteful. Maybe she just didn’t think it was respectful to toss money like that at the queen. From now on, it’ll be different, she thought, and she turned to Stanley who had finally come to his senses.
“Your name?”
“Stanley.”
Thus, she finally learned the name of the blue-eyed man she’d dreamed would save her from Bezir. Stanley would save her, although not quite in the way she initially imagined. Stanley will collect the money from now on, she thought. I won’t touch it. Like most people with powerful imaginations, Derdâ had no understanding of money.
After the redheaded walrus left the apartment, she gave Stanley—as she’d promised—one of the two ten-pound notes. Derdâ went home and examined the bank note; she was curious about the woman wearing the crown. She’d seen her somewhere before. Once upon a time she’d thrown up on that face.
Six days later, Mitch came back—this time with a camera. They’d told Derdâ about the plan in advance. They had her kneel before Bezir’s lectern, intently focused on the open Koran, the heavy-framed photograph of the Kaaba featured prominently before her. Then Stanley came into the living room in a full latex suit. That’s when they’d start rolling film. They had it all planned out.
Derdâ remained motionless for a few minutes on her knees before the lectern. Then she began to slowly sway from side to side as she moved her lips, pretending to recite from the Koran, although her words were unintelligible. Then Stanley entered the room. His hands were handcuffed behind his back. He stopped two paces away from the lectern. Derdâ’s eyes rose slowly to meet his. She shut the Koran and stood up. As she rose she picked up a forty-centimeter-long rubber horse whip she had beside the Koran. She approached Stanley, then unzipped one of the many zippers slashed across his latex suit. A piece of uncircumcised flesh rolled out. Stanley did everything in his power to remain flaccid. Derdâ lifted lightly the tip of the lifeless flesh with her whip and Mitch zoomed in on Derdâ’s eyes for a close-up. Derdâ shook her head and coolly said, “No, no, no.” Then she snipped the air with her fingers as scissors. She opened and closed them three times.
Stanley’s flesh was quickly swelling with blood and Derdâ snapped it with the
end of her whip. Then she squinted at the sign on the armchair behind Mitch. She’d written her line on a large piece of paper and practiced it over and over with Stanley. It was barely intelligible through her thick Turkish accent.
“I will circumcise you,” she said. In Derdâ’s thick foreign accent the words were all the more sexy.
From then on, neither Derdâ of Yatırca nor Stanley of London spoke. They only groaned. One threatened and the other groaned in fear. What happens between East and West, happened then between Derdâ and Stanley. Threat and supplication. Punishment and reward. Apathy and violence. Sadism and masochism.
Mitch knew he was holding a masterpiece when he burned the CD in his cramped flat. He was right. Within a week the forty-four-minute film of a man’s circumcision by a covered Muslim woman would be the rage through all the dark clubs and the dark houses of London. They would be awestruck by Derdâ. Remembering what he’d once said to Stanley, Mitch wrote on the CD: “A Muslim Woman Is a Nuclear Bomb.”
Derdâ’s take from her first film—admittedly the title was a little long—was only five hundred pounds, although the film had earned Mitch and Stanley 4,300 pound sterling. It was the first time she was ripped off in the performance world. In the real world, she was deceived all the time but she never knew. Five hundred pounds made her feel like the richest woman in the world. But cheating his master to buy more meth made him feel guilty, and he needed something stronger to silence his pangs of conscience—he needed heroin.
In three weeks Derdâ appeared in four more of Mitch’s films and had sixteen new customers arranged by Stanley. She gave them the most unforgettable thirty minutes of their lives. She had no inkling she’d become a star lighting up the dark face of London, whose eyes searched everywhere for her. She was a woman of mystery. They paced behind all the covered women on the streets hoping they might find her. And they laid plans to track her down. But Derdâ didn’t care. All she wanted was to disappear into London with the 3,600 pounds she had stashed in the hood above the stove and her English vocabulary—now close to four hundred words—that she kept locked in her memory. She had to escape from the apartment building. She was ready. The time had come. She’d just go. She wasn’t scared. What could happen out there that was any more dangerous than what happened in her own apartment? But she had to plan carefully. First, she had to finish her association with Stanley. Bezir might go see his neighbor and make him talk, and if Stanley knew where she was, it would all be in over. It wouldn’t be hard to make Stanley talk. So she wouldn’t say anything to Stanley or Mitch. She’d asked their help for just one thing. Two weeks ago, she asked them to buy her clothes and a pair of shoes. That was all.