by Hakan Günday
“Really?” he said, and he nearly threw himself at Derdâ’s bag before he stopped himself. He looked at her, his face racked with curiosity.
“Could I have a look at it?”
Derdâ remained silent while Steven leaned over and pulled her black chador out of the bag. He wore an excessively courteous expression on his face, as if he were handling a sacred possession of the royal family. He held it up to the sunlight beaming through the window.
“Perfect!” he said in English. And then he continued in Turkish.
“How do you put it on?”
Four hours later, Steven and Derdâ were sitting at the table just behind the sofa eating pasta. He was wearing Derdâ’s black chador. Derdâ eagerly ate her food as she spoke. She was much more at ease than she had been before.
“Now your face is exposed. You’re eating. But soon it’ll be covered, too. Only your eyes will show.”
“Yes,” said Steven, almost whispering.
“You won’t speak permission,” Derdâ roared. This was her catchphrase from her latest film. Steven was about to agree, but he stopped himself and covered his mouth with his hand as he made coy circling gestures under his eyes and smiled coquettishly like an Ottoman madam.
“I’ll stay here tonight,” Derdâ said.
Steven nodded in assent, and he nodded again and again.
“Maybe I’ll stay tomorrow, too,” she went on.
Seeing Steven now entirely subservient, Derdâ became even bolder.
“Maybe I’ll never leave. And you will teach me English. Yes, we’ll start tomorrow.”
And then with a glance at Steven’s empty plate she erupted. “That’s enough already. You’ve had more than your share. Now get up and clear the table!”
As Steven hurried to clear the table, Derdâ had a look around the house. She stopped in front of a walnut china cabinet with crescent moon and star reliefs—clearly it was from Turkey. Tucked away among a set of crystal whisky glasses and souvenir plates from various countries, she saw a packet of Camel cigarettes. Steven had been struggling to quit and though he’d been clean for some time he still kept a single pack of Camels in the china cabinet as a kind of prisoner of war. Derdâ opened the cabinet door and pulled out the pack. She took out a cigarette and shouted, “Rahime!” Steven was now Rahime. He’d fallen in love with the name the moment he’d heard it. Derdâ had learned a lot from Mitch’s scripts. The first way to break down a person’s sense of self was to deny him his name—it was far more effective than just beating him with rods or bats. The slave was then renamed. The master was the one who named it. Like a child who names his pet, or like the Americans or Europeans who came and arbitrarily labeled a vast geography the “East”—only because the land lay east of their borders—and who forced the people of that geography to accept the name.
Holding up his chador so he wouldn’t trip over himself, Steven scurried over to Derdâ who told him to bring her a lighter. Steven raced to the kitchen and came back with a box of matches. Derdâ put the cigarette between her lips and watched Steven light her cigarette. Steven was so excited that his hands were trembling. He clumsily snapped the first two matches in half, but he finally managed to light his master’s cigarette. Derdâ began to smoke in perhaps the most unusual of circumstances.
She took her first drag and coughed twice, and after the next drag, only once. After that, she never coughed again. The inside of the china cabinet was lined with mirrors inside and Derdâ’s eyes were stuck on the image of her long hair like a fishhook stuck in seaweed. She couldn’t take her eyes off her hair. She stared and stared. And stared. She snuffed out the cigarette in a souvenir plate with windmills from Amsterdam and made for the kitchen.
She looked at Steven in the bathroom mirror. She stared at his hands, at the scissors in his hands. First her braid fell to the floor, and then he cut off the rest of her hair. Steven’s eyes found her eyes in the mirror. They asked her if he’d cut enough. But her hair still bothered her. As long as she had hair on her head she’d feel naked in public. “All of it!” she commanded. “Cut it all off. And then you’ll shave my head.”
Steven put down the scissors and finished the job with a razor. He rubbed the remnants of the shaving cream off Derdâ’s bald scalp with a towel and tears welled up in the young girl’s eyes. But she was determined not to let Steven see her cry. She was, after all, his master. She could not cry in front of him. She slid her hands over her scalp. It seemed like an entirely different person was staring back at her from inside the mirror. For a moment, she wondered what her mother would say if she saw her like this, but she stopped herself, straightened, and lit another cigarette. She could stop herself from staring into the mirror, but she couldn’t stop feeling the top of her naked head.
That night she smoked the whole pack. And with each breath she felt a little better, as if she were born again, as if she bore the bald head of a newborn baby on her shoulders. She no longer had hair and so she no longer felt like she needed to cover her head. She wished she’d shaved her head years ago.
For the next few weeks Steven adopted Rahime’s role and Derdâ became Bezir—communicating mainly with her fists—and they rarely left the house. Deep down, both of them felt ashamed, though they never talked about it. Indirectly encouraging one another to be more independent in their new roles, they were able to reluctantly venture outside. They went to the local supermarket. Steven had become comfortable with his new identity much more easily than he’d thought he would. After all, only his blue eyes were visible. People only realized he was a man when he spoke. When he asked for an extra bag in the supermarket, or when he couldn’t make out the expiration date of a product and had to ask a supermarket employee for help.
But there was another reason why people were staring at Steven. It was something to do with planes. To be exact, planes that were flown into buildings on US soil and caused the death of several thousand people just in New York City alone. The September 11th attacks. That’s why he attracted attention, and the attention of his neighbors in particular. Ever since he moved into the neighborhood, Steven had had little contact with them. They despised Rahime from the beginning, but their principles didn’t allow them to express their feelings. After all, in Crouch End people didn’t have anything against homosexuals or transvestites. Their liberal views and tolerance toward all walks of life and lifestyles was a point of pride. They felt they were an example for all of humankind. They wouldn’t have ostracized Steven even if he had dressed up like a little girl. But, like every human being, they had to have someone to outcast. And those planes came at just the right time to satisfy this fundamental need, just at a time when there was nothing left that they could demonize, right at a time when respect and tolerance in society was becoming too overbearing for them, just at that very time in history when it was considered inappropriate to malign someone because of his or her appearance. They hated Rahime the moment they saw her. You could see their true feelings in their faces. Scorning Muslims had become a kind of sport in England, a sport more popular than cricket, even before 9/11. And everyone wanted a part of the game. What’s more, the winners were rewarded with a very special prize for initiating a struggle based on the basest urges and a bonus medal for their nationalism. They were both racist and progressive at the same time. Who wouldn’t want that?
So the time that Steven decided to don his black chador was at the least ideal point in history. But he quickly learned not to care. And Derdâ got used to her bald head and to smoking. In the daytime, she studied English, and at night, they watched Derdâ’s films or other films of the same genre. Apart from that, they remained strangers. Steven had long since given up on his steel balls. For years now his sexuality was only ever manifested when he lay alone in his bed, vacantly staring at the ceiling. So Derdâ had hit upon what might have been the best living situation in all of London, perhaps in all of Great Britain. She ate and she slept and she learned English and she managed her slave. She no longer so desperate
ly despised the commercial attaché who played such a pernicious part in her past. Before long her desire for revenge would vanish into thin air. In other words, everything seemed too good to be true. Then one day there was a knock on the door.
Derdâ opened the door and found Stanley standing there. Her eyes opened wide in utter shock. She felt paralyzed.
Confused at the appearance of a young girl at his house, Stanley asked her, “Who are you? Where’s dad?”
“He’s inside,” Derdâ whispered. She was hardly able to speak. Behind Stanley there was a man in blue overalls holding a stack of cardboard boxes waiting to come in.
“Everything’s going upstairs,” Stanley said. Then he took a closer look at Derdâ. He looked at her Cramps T-shirt. Narrowing his eyes, he thought for a moment, but then shaking his head he stepped inside.
“Dad! Dad, where are you?”
When Steven appeared at the top of the stairs, Stanley turned and looked at Derdâ in pure shock. He didn’t know what to say or think. Which one had been his next-door neighbor until just a month ago? The bald girl who had the same eyes and the right body, or the one in the black chador? Steven spoke and then he knew.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Stanley took a few steps forward and said, “Dad? Is that really you?” He turned to Derdâ. “And you? Are you …”
Steven came downstairs and stood between, like a carbon copy of his idol.
“She’s the mysterious mistress of us all!”
The words “Mysterious Mistress” flashed on the screen when Derdâ made her first appearance in her first film. It was Stanley’s idea. It had been his idea. Now he lowered his head and stared at the girl standing before him. Life is such an infernal web of coincidences, he thought.
Derdâ was in no position to deny it. She accepted the nickname with a nod of her head. And Stanley started to laugh. Soon he was roaring with laughter.
Stanley had moved back home. He moved into his old room on the second floor of his father’s house and became another one of the sullen kids in Crouch End who never grow up.
After he got over the initial shock of his father in effect becoming Derdâ—all it had taken was for Stanley to find the transformation entirely absurd and then just laugh it out—he told them about Bezir’s murder in Finsbury Park and everything that had happened after that. But he didn’t mention that he’d been fired from Stick and that he had to leave the apartment because he’d blown all his money on heroin.
“I was scared, Dad,” he said. “The place had turned into a living hell. Think of it, they shot my neighbor!”
Steven shook his head and said, “Then you’ll just have to stay here, there’s nothing else we can do about it.”
Then, pointing out Derdâ to his son, he went on, “You two have met, right?”
“That’s right,” said Stanley, smiling. And turning to Derdâ, he said, “So we’ve met before then.” All his admiration and respect for his former master was gone. She was no longer covered. Those feelings blew away like a handful of dust in the wind. She looked like any other girl from London to him now. She looked like any one of those idiots killing time out on the streets. He listened to his father’s romantic story. How he’d first met Derdâ in the Istanbul consulate and then their dramatic reunion on a sidewalk bench in Crouch End. He was convinced it was all fated to be. Stanley could understand why Derdâ liked staying in the house. In the kitchen, he told Derdâ the police were looking for her. He made a point of letting his father know, too. He hoped this would encourage him to get rid of her. But his father was now Rahime, and he didn’t give a damn about Scotland Yard.
Stanley didn’t mind that his father now wore a chador, or that Derdâ ordered him around as her slave. Still somehow it reminded him—if only rarely—of happy days in the past and of his mother. But were those really happy days? First of all, his mother hadn’t really been around. She’d left home when Stanley was eight. After opening a ninth anniversary gift Steven had given her she just up and left, just half an hour after thanking Steven for the steel balls chained together, thinking that it was some sort of necklace. Only twenty-five minutes after Steven told her, “But they’re for me, not for you.” Twenty-four minutes after she heard him say, “I want you to push both those balls into me one by one.” In the years that followed, she’d done everything she could to gain custody of Stanley. But the judge in charge of their divorce proceedings was Steven’s friend. They knew each other from the London dungeons where Steven had himself whipped on the weekends. In the end, the verdict came quickly enough and it was in Steven’s favor. Then the judge pushed those steel balls into Steven as eight-year-old Stanley watched them through the keyhole of his office door.
After that, something happened to Stanley, some kind of strange chemical reaction occurred, and he stopped growing and felt tremendous pain. Like all people who suffer such a life, Stanley lived in his own fantasies. But when he stepped into the pit and came in contact with reality, he really began to suffer. He got older without really growing and he felt the pain more and more. So he began to fill those voids with the heroin he bought off a fourteen-year-old boy called Black T, whose real name was Timur. He’d used to hang out at the entrance of the Finsbury tube station. Stanley did it so he wouldn’t have to deal with reality and break some part of his body, like his heart.
Fourteen years old. That period in human life known by the science of psychiatry as adolescence, that branch of science taught from behind rickety desks with wobbly legs, that period of human life in which symptoms are described by professors as irregular intermittent bouts of rage, inappropriate reactions, exaggerated behavior. All those books on adolescence talk about getting accustomed to oneself and one’s environment, and about the difficulties in adapting to society. And the authors of those scientific articles, well, they never knew Black T and they couldn’t even remember what the hell they were doing when they were fourteen. But the fact is that it’s all pretty straightforward.
You’re born and before fifteen years are up you realize just what kind of a place the world is and you know that you’re just stuck somewhere between birth and death. It’s a feeling more than it’s actual knowledge. Then there’s the first revolt. You scream as loud as you can. But it’s no different than the desperate cries of someone in a crowd who realizes his wallet’s been stolen. At first, people in the crowd look at him with contempt or indifference, then they get tired of listening to the noise and they appoint someone to speak to him. The representative comes and says: “So what if your wallet’s been stolen? Our wallets have been stolen, too. But we’re not making such a fuss.” For a real scientific intervention, it’s better to send someone with a diploma. So, faced with the indifference of the crowd, the rabble-rouser gradually makes less and less noise. He begins to accept reality and starts filling the void around himself with people. It’s called growing up or becoming an adult. But to be more exact, it’s about adult compliance or docility. It’s an artificial mode of being. It’s fabricated. Calculations have been made on its proposed function and it’s shaped and designed accordingly.
The founding principle of adult compliance is the belief that each and every individual in a society should be useful in some way so that the existence of society is somehow guaranteed. And, more importantly, in a totally chaotic world, adult compliance is measured with deadly accuracy. It’s all about the young tree bending down and kissing its own roots. But a fourteen-year-old kid’s outrageous behavior is natural, even though it’s frowned upon and classified as adolescent rage. His eyes have opened to the horrors of the world and he’s come to understand that all the nasty business in the world is on him. He locks himself in his room. He tries to lock himself away from the outside world. Or he tries to break down all the doors and walls and barriers by screaming as loud as he can. It’s the same kind of reaction you’d have to a fire-breathing dragon. It follows that these reactions won’t disappear as long as you’re alive—that’s to say as long as the dr
agon exists.
But of course, as allowing a band of adolescents to remain in their natural state would lead straight to the disintegration of any societal structure, the transition to adult compliance is seen as a necessity for humanity. A social requirement. But some people are dense and they go on screaming till their dying breath. Because life is a violent process and the world is a violent place and what both life and the world deserve are extremely violent punches dead square in the face. It’s why an adolescent revolt is thrusting a knife through someone sixty times to kill him. A fourteen-year-old kid who truly opens his eyes understands that every human is surrounded by at least sixty dragons with smoke bellowing out of their mouths. Adolescence, in spite of all its stupidity, is the period in which a human being is most free.
When their lives and the world they live in become docile you can expect adolescents to calm down, but not until then. Stanley was one of those kids stuck at fourteen. And he might’ve seemed like an idiot coming home to his old room with The Cramps posters up on the walls, but at least he was doing his best to pay the world back in full for what it had given him. Not that he knew anything about life on earth. He didn’t watch the news and he wasn’t a political activist following his conscience. Stanley was doing everything he did without knowing anything about the world, like any other fourteen-year-old would.
Why did you need to know that somewhere in the world there were people bombing schools? This world reeked of burning flesh no matter how you looked at it. And why did you need to know that other kids in the world were dying of starvation? This world has halitosis because it’s always hungry. Children’s noses pick up the smell and give it back to the world as adolescent rage, till the time their noses are blocked with adult compliance. Would that day ever come for Stanley? It’s hard to say. But for the time being he was having himself whipped and taking heroin because of a desperation he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t pinpoint its origin. Like any other fourteen-year-old, he couldn’t express his pain. He felt something, but didn’t know anything, so he was unable to see the shit all around him. But it always reeked. So, like most adolescents, he thought he was insane and he was constantly looking for someone he could infect with his madness.