by Hakan Günday
He couldn’t have found a better victim than Derdâ, Derdâ who once soiled her black gloves as she stimulated the nerve endings in his asshole. Her gloves smelled like shit. So Stanley became the man to give Derdâ her first heroin injection. It made them even. It settled the score. Derdâ learned that people gave both pain and pleasure to each other. First Derdâ to Stanley, then Stanley to Derdâ. First the children to their parents, then parents to their children; first the past to the future, then the future to the past; first nature to humans, then humans … First the dead to the living, then the living … In turns, back and forth, both pain and pleasure, until eternity, happy, the dolce vita, fuck!
When she heard that Bezir had been murdered Derdâ didn’t feel a thing. But an hour later she started to cry when she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. And she couldn’t stop. The tears came from somewhere deep inside her, she was heaving tears. “Why?” she said to herself through her quivering lips. “Why, why, why …” Then slowly she pulled herself together. She composed her face and she dried the tears on her cheeks. She answered her own question in a whisper: “Why didn’t I kill him myself?”
Then she laughed at herself in the mirror. She wondered what Bezir would do if he could see her now. What would he say? Would he beat her? Would he kill her? Would he throw her out the window?
Derdâ shouted at the mirror: “You couldn’t do shit to me! Nothing! I’m right here! Come on you fucking son of a bitch! Here I am! You checked out, you bastard! You got the fuck out of here!”
She went through all the foul language she’d learned from Nazenin. She hadn’t had the chance to learn anything new. When Bezir’s image in the mirror faded, leaving only Derdâ’s own reflection, the bathroom was still and Steven quietly moved away from the door and tiptoed down the corridor.
Derdâ could’ve stayed for five more years in that bathroom saying to the mirror what she hadn’t said for the past five years. But instead she took one final look in the mirror and said, “Fuck!” And she left. It was her last conversation with Bezir: a conversation without Bezir.
Like all addicts, Stanley could crunch figures faster than a calculator. He was sure that Derdâ had close to three thousand pounds. She was still wearing the same T-shirt, which meant she probably hadn’t spent much of the money she’d saved up. Stanley wasn’t sure how to approach her about it. So he decided to wait as he slowly finished his last few grams of heroin.
One night Stanley got the lucky break he was waiting for—Derdâ came into his room to bum a cigarette.
“I’m all out,” said Stanley, “but I do have this.” and he took a bag of heroin out of a metal box by his bed and shook it in the air like a little bell. Taking a step toward the silent bell, Derdâ asked him what it was. The answer came to her in full force ten minutes later. And from then on Derdâ had no reservations whatsoever about spending her money to get the exact same answer over and over again. She went to Stanley’s room every day. She didn’t wince at the sight of the needle over her arm because she’d been convinced by the almost-two-hour-long speech Stanley had given her. He sounded like a salesman pitching a state-of-the-art vacuum cleaner. Derdâ had been locked up for five years, a total of sixty months, close to two thousand days, almost forty-five thousand hours. And this gave her forty-five thousand reasons! Forty-five thousand reasons why she watched with curious eyes as the needle punctured her skin. She had forty-five thousand reasons to do anything, except suicide. Not that. She wasn’t going to die. To compensate for those five years, she was going to live another fifty, no, another five hundred years. But if she kept on visiting Stanley’s room, she’d have to make do with only a couple of years before her eyes closed on this world.
Meanwhile, she continued with her English lessons. She had ordered Steven never to speak Turkish again. She remembered the grammar she’d learned from her books. Now she only needed practice. She was in the test-drive phase. But when it came to heroin, the test-drive phase was different. It wasn’t like any new car that you could test drive and then just walk away from without buying. A test-drive with heroin only ended in a crash. If the driver was still alive, he had to buy the wreck. He had to pay the price of surviving the accident. The price was a lifelong struggle to never crash again. But for now, Derdâ was still in the early days, just gazing out the window, enjoying the view. There were no obstacles on the horizon and so it never occurred to her that she’d eventually crash. But her money was running out. In a way, that wasn’t a problem because Black T at the Finsbury tube station always helped her out. He always gave Derdâ a discount when she and Stanley went up to see him for a fix. They were neighbors.
Then time sped up and it seemed fragmented. Days, sometimes weeks, passed without either of them realizing it, and soon there were obstacles all over the horizon.
Everyone had sat down for dinner. With a smile on his face, Steven looked at his son and Derdâ. He no longer had any idea who Derdâ really was. Both their faces were pale, as pale as northern Europeans. The purple eyes that were once on the young girl’s back were now on her nostrils, which had trouble taking in air. Steven was serving pasta.
Sitting down, he said triumphantly, “I have a new idea.”
Worried by the enthusiasm in his voice, Stanley and Derdâ exchanged glances.
“What if we gave chadors a local brand name and produced them ourselves. Of course, they’d be the standard black, just like the one I have on now, but we could have a brand somewhere here on the chest, like ‘Stevens’ … Or …”
Steven went on thinking with his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Stanley and Derdâ realized that he really wasn’t interested in their thoughts on the subject and they both looked down at their food. They absently twirled pasta on their forks. Neither of them was hungry.
“There could be a logo, don’t you think? If only Lacoste sold chadors … Wouldn’t it be nice, with a crocodile just here? Or maybe ‘Fred Perry’ chadors!”
He went silent for a minute and then continued, “Now I have something important to tell you both. Could you both please look at me?”
They reluctantly raised their heads.
“I’m going to have an operation.”
“Are you sick?” Derdâ asked.
“No!” Steven cried and then chuckled. “Of course not. But in a way, yes, I am. I am sick. I am man. And I want to get rid of this … So I’ve decided to become a woman!”
Stanley interjected, “But you don’t have that kind of money.”
“Of course I do,” Steven said. “Who do you think I am? I’ve worked all my life. I didn’t just loaf around like you, waiting to die! More pasta?”
Their plates were already full of his pasta. But that didn’t matter. The important thing was whether Steven was telling the truth or not. Did he really have money?
Stanley sprang to his feet and waved his fist in the air. “You’re going to give that money to me!” he shouted.
Steven laughed again.
“No, sir, I’m not giving you a penny.”
Stanley put his hands around his father’s neck and then knocked him and his chair to the floor. Steven crashed into the floor and his feet flung out and kicked up the table, sending two plates of pasta flying across the room. Derdâ was shocked by the sudden commotion, and jumped up when the plates crashed to the floor. Steven might have died from a heart attack or cerebral hemorrhaging. His head had taken quite a knock against the floor. But he went on roaring with laughter before he was seized by a terrible coughing fit.
His son knelt down by his father and put his hands around his throat and screamed, “I’ll kill you! You’re going to give me that money. I’ll kill you, I’m telling you … Look Dad, I’m begging you! Please, just give that money!”
As she stood on the other side of the open green wooden door, Derdâ looked at Steven and gave Steven her last order: “Stop crying, Rahime!”
The old man’s eyes were full of tears. His master was leaving him. His threats and entreaties couldn’t conv
ince her to stay. Knocking down Steven in his chair hadn’t changed a thing. His son’s momentary hysterical fit resulted in Steven kicking Stanley out of the house. Steven threatened him in a way that was much more severe than Stanley had expected. “How would you like it if I called the police and had you arrested?” Steven asked him. Stanley couldn’t handle even one night in police custody so he packed up his things and asked Derdâ if she was coming. Derdâ took her prized possession—her dictionary—and followed him out the door.
Steven grabbed Derdâ’s arm the same way he’d done when he first met her on the bench. But she pulled her arm away, quickly turned, and gave him the order not to cry.
When she got to the garden gate, Derdâ turned around one more time and looked at Steven.
“Will you ever come back?” implored the man behind the chador. His words reminded Derdâ of Nazenin. This time she wasn’t afraid to wave good-bye.
They headed for Stick. As they passed the Camdenhead pub, the skinheads hanging out by the door thought Derdâ—with her shaved head and Dr. Martens—was one of them.
They called out to her: “What the hell are you doing with that goth fag? Get over here!”
Derdâ hesitated for a moment, but Stanley took her by the arm and angrily pulled her along. He had no patience for those fascist leftovers from the eighties. He didn’t even lift his head to look at them. Soon enough they arrived at Stick. A giant green-haired Russian stood at the entrance. They went in and went straight to the bathroom to inject the heroin they’d got from Black T. They’d spent a good half of Derdâ’s money. Stanley finished first and when he came out he found Mitch.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do,” Stanley said, after he’d given him a three-sentence rundown of what had happened.
Derdâ joined them. Mitch didn’t recognize her. Stanley introduced them.
“So here’s your film star! Ask her if she likes the current hell we’re living in.”
Mitch bent down and looked at Derdâ’s face under the dim pub lights. He couldn’t believe his eyes.
“No way!” he said. “Impossible!”
He looked at Stanley.
“Oh, yes,” he said, calmly nodding his head.
He pointed at Derdâ. “She still doesn’t understand us, right?”
Derdâ could now speak English pretty well, and with a commercial attaché’s accent.
“I beg your pardon, but I’ve always understood you perfectly!”
Mitch roared with laughter and held out a glass of beer for Derdâ. She pushed the glass away and looked around the pub. That night Stick was a perfect madhouse. Transvestites, goths, punks who didn’t care what year it was, seventy-year-old rockabillies who had draped their jackets over their shoulders in the same way for the last fifty years, the Teddy boys who adjusted their hair every five minutes with not one but two different combs, the mods with their heavy jackets, and a lone drunk Japanese girl dancing on the bar. The DJ was playing “Girl Anachronism” by the Dresden Dolls and as Amanda Palmer’s voice poured into people’s ears, it temporarily blinded them, which was probably why almost everybody was just swaying back and forth in one spot with their eyes closed. Or maybe this was just because Stick was jammed that night and nobody could really move.
It was hard to say what all these people did during the day. But Stick was a place where they could take refuge in one another at night. In the past, they used to chase each other down with knives but this was a place where all dreamers of totally different styles came together because they’d become extinct. Now there was nowhere else for them to go. In a world where everything was changing so fast, they were stuck in the ruts like invariable coefficients. They were there because they felt like strangers on the streets that were once a second home to them. Now their only home was Stick, which was only one-tenth the size of a narrow street.
Mitch looked at Derdâ. “Incredible! So this is what you look like. What do you say? You want to get back in the film business?”
“No way,” Derdâ snarled.
Stanley was intrigued.
“Do you really think we could bring her back? I mean, we could make some money if you shot a few new films, right?”
Mitch took a sip from his beer and thought for a moment.
“That’s all over probably. We’ve already sold to every possible person interested. But if she wants to, there are a few guys I know … They’re doing some stuff for a website. She could star in one of their films. I hear they pay well.”
He pointed at two young men at the bar laughing at the Japanese girl. They looked like university kids, two fresh young faces, too clean for Stick.
“What kind of film?” Stanley asked.
“I don’t know,” Mitch said.
Derdâ broke up their conversation.
“No! Never again! It won’t happen again!”
Stanley wasn’t listening. He walked over to the men at the bar and started talking. He came back a few minutes later.
“They’ll pay three thousand,” he said. “Think about it, three thousand pounds!”
Mitch asked, “What are they shooting?”
“Straight porno, a man and a woman, something classic, about half an hour long.”
By morning Derdâ came to understand total deprivation and agreed to do what she’d so adamantly rejected only a few hours before. They called the two guys shooting the porno. They’d told Stanley they were students at Cambridge. One of them answered the phone and told them to come over that afternoon. He gave them his address in Covent Garden.
They shivered violently until morning in Mitch’s room. Then they took a few Valiums to ease the pain and hopped on the earliest train to Finsbury Park. They started the day by paying Black T everything that Derdâ had left in her pocket. Then they went into the cafe at the Arsenal football shop near the tube station and shot up in the bathroom.
When they came out, they asked Black T for change to buy train tickets. He gave them a few coins from the money they’d just given him, and they went to Covent Garden.
They made it to the address and looked for a place to sit down to rest for a while. They sat for a whole three hours on a street bench without saying a word. Only once Derdâ looked over at Stanley and said, “I’ll kill you.”
Stanley said, “You better pull yourself together.”
With his ear up against the intercom, Stanley stared vacantly at Derdâ. Finally, a voice came through.
“Third floor, the door on the right. The elevator doesn’t work.”
The front door clicked open. They entered the building and walked up three flights. A man with short hair and glasses was peering out from behind a door. He was naked. Stanley stepped in, but Derdâ stood motionless on the last step.
“Come on,” Stanley said. “Come in.”
Derdâ took a step and then one more. She heard voices. Then she went in and saw them. Fifty-one naked men. To Derdâ, it looked like a thousand. They all went silent when she came in. Derdâ took a step back and heard the door close behind her. Then she heard Stanley.
“Come on, you have to do this, you know. Don’t think about anything, nothing at all. Just let yourself go. None of this means anything. You understand? It doesn’t mean a thing. Just go and open your legs and then we collect our money and leave.”
Derdâ was silent. The one behind the door with glasses, assuming that she was ready, slowly pushed her forward. He led her through the men to the living room. The floor was covered with a transparent linoleum mat. Derdâ looked into the faces of all the men, including the one who opened the door, as best she could, turning around. Then she flung off her jacket and the men screamed. They were nervous but they began laughing. Soon enough they were clapping and grunting and making all kinds of absurd noises.
Each one was in their first year in economics at Cambridge. They were all there because they’d made a bet with the law students. A week ago they’d all watched a video of thirty-seven law students gangbanging a black girl. They’
d watched it twice to be sure about the number and then a plan to break the record was born. Prostitutes walking the streets had turned them down. They’d gone to Stick as a last resort, hoping to find a woman insane enough to go along with their plan. Someone desperate for money. A heroin addict seemed like a pretty sure bet. After all, it hadn’t been more than a year since the movie Requiem for a Dream had come out. Some of the scenes from the film were still fresh in their minds. They imagined them vividly as they masturbated in the dorm bathrooms.
Derdâ was completely naked. The one with the glasses put both his hands on her shoulders and pushed her down. Her knees hit the linoleum mat on the floor. Then he pushed her down further until she was flat on her back. A blond man stood over her. He looked down at Derdâ like someone on a bridge contemplating suicide, staring down at the water with fear in his eyes. Then somebody pushed him down onto his knees. The crowd started clapping, like one united pair of hands, then two, then twenty. The blond, adjusting his heartbeats to the claps, separated Derdâ’s knees like a hunter prying open a trap. The clapping ceased.
Overwhelmed by the weight of the silence and the sight of nothing but naked bodies, the blond man fixed his eyes on Derdâ’s breasts. Then he placed his palms somewhere near her shoulders. Everybody in the room held their breath. And the boy lowered himself over her. But it was no good. He couldn’t get himself into her. Everyone in the room huddled closer to get a better look at Derdâ, the flower choosing death over blooming, and the boy whose face had gone pale. First there was heated discussion, and then a box was handed down to the blond. A little bit of Vaseline went a long way and convinced Derdâ despite her resistance. The blond replaced his palms back near her shoulders, held his breath, and pushed himself into her. And lost himself. It took four minutes for the harsh lines on his face to dissipate. For Derdâ, it felt like a little less than four years. He took off the filled condom and raised it triumphantly in the air like a champagne glass, making sure everyone could see it. Twenty thunderous claps and thirty screams.