by Hakan Günday
According to the recollections of people who lived behind the warehouse, it all started with a proclamation: “Now we’re blood brothers.” Then they worked together in their great struggle against poverty. As representatives of the oldest crime tradition—mugging—they’d hang low in the same shadowy spot then jump out at the pedestrians most likely to have fat wallets. Mugging means excessive violence for little money. Mugging means jumping out in front of guys who might be armed themselves, who might not even have fat wallets. Mugging means jumping out with your eyes closed and wishing for just a shred of luck. In the old days, in the oldest style of mugging, it was only children and idiots who would even try it.
One drunken night, at the end of a few years of filling the world’s quota of dim-witted muggers, Derda’s dad and Derda the Arab decided to hold up one last guy on the way back to their cemetery homes. But before they were deep in the deed, Derda’s dad remembered having kissed their victim’s hand a week before on a holiday visit. He was an old man. So he said, “It’s ok. Let him go.” But Derda the Arab wasn’t having it. He cursed the old man and beat him up, but then the soberer of the two men stabbed his partner in crime in the heart. Derda’s dad was left standing. He pulled out the bloody knife, looked around him, and saw the old man struggling desperately on the ground. Then he heard someone, a witness, running toward him. One from a knife wound, the other from a heart attack. There he was in the middle of corpses, calculating which way he should run. He didn’t realize he was surrounded by six sweaty young men fresh from a match on the astroturf pitch. They’d lost 8–1 and they worked out their revenge by pummeling Derda’s dad until the police came. Who could believe that Derda’s father killed his partner to save an elderly neighbor? And so he was damned by the law and damned by his neighbors in the cemetery houses. Derda’s curse had been that his father had gotten drunk enough to name him Derda. And it was only a matter of time before his wife was infected by the curse, too. A few days.
Derda looked at the house’s cemetery wall, thinking. Mostly he was thinking about how he’d be able to hide a bag behind the closet and then shit in it in a dark dormitory. That and exactly what Fevzi meant when he said, “They hold you in twenty places and fuck you in one.”
He needed a knife. A big one. Then he gave up on that idea. This isn’t a job for a knife, he thought to himself. I need a saw. Then he gave up on that, too. An axe. “That’s it,” he said. “I’ll chop up my mom up with an axe. Then I can bury her. Piece by piece.”
But it wasn’t that easy for Derda to find an axe. First he asked the neighbors. And he didn’t lie. “I need it for my mom.” No one had one. And even if they’d had one, they would have shut their doors and buried themselves inside one way or another just the same. “What are you going to do with an axe? Is your mother still sick? Is your bastard of a father still alive? Tell your mother, nothing before he pays his dues!” He always answered in the same way. He just nodded. There was only one person left to ask. The cemetery guard Yasin. Derda ran. He wiped the sweat on his forehead at the door to the wooden guardhouse near the cemetery gates. He didn’t know how to knock at the door so he just yelled, “Brother Yasin!” He waited at the door. Yasin stuck his head out of the window. He’d just woken up from his afternoon nap and whenever he just woke up he was in a foul mood. There was nothing in this world worth waking up for.
“What?”
“Brother, do you have an axe?”
“What’re you going to do with an axe, boy?”
It was like “yes” and “no” weren’t in the language.
Derda gave an exact copy of what he’d heard his mother say—that is, when she could still speak—countless times.
“To chop the branches off the trees near our house. We can barely walk through the garden …”
First Yasin tried to get what he was going on about. But he realized he hadn’t been listening to what the kid had been saying anyway, so with a “No axe!” he pulled his head back inside the guardhouse. Derda watched the empty window for a few seconds before he ran out of the cemetery. He ran to the end of the street and straight into the hardware store. But as soon as he went in he came right back out. There, in front of the display window, arranged in metal buckets in a row on the sidewalk, he saw them. Axes. He went inside again.
“How much are the axes?”
An old man lost in a drawer full of screws said, “Price is on them.” Derda went out again and grabbed an axe and looked at the price tag on the handle. He stared and he stared and he stared. And then he bolted, the axe still in his hand. He ran down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He didn’t have to go as far as the cemetery gates. Every ten meters or so the cemetery wall had collapsed, like a rolling wave. He jumped over a collapsed concrete wave and ran, skipping over the tombs.
By the time he got home he was gasping for air. Insects were crawling out of his mother’s open mouth and streaming into her nostrils. He felt nauseated but he didn’t puke. He forced himself to hold it in. It came all the way up to his throat. That’s as far as it’s going, but I’m not going to let it get any further. A few belches, but nothing else came out. He pulled the sheet off her floor mattress and covered the woman up so her blazing white eyes wouldn’t be able to see. Standing with his shoulders level, he grasped the axe in two hands and held it high above his head. He closed his eyes. “I’m not going to that orphanage, mom!” he yelled as he drove in the first blow. His eyes opened. He had tried to aim right for her neck but the axe had hit the woman’s chest. It was lodged deep in her chest. Soon the dirty white sheet changed color. Red. He put his foot on her chest, took the axe in two hands, and yanked it out of her flesh. He raised it again and dealt another blow. Then another. For hours he drove the axe into her, yelling “I’m not going!” with every blow.
Then there were ten gangrene-colored lumps sticking up from under the sheet. The sheet made bridges, sagging toward the floor between the ten pieces. He smashed those bridges again and again to break the lumps into ten separate pieces. But still some bits, some pieces held together. He took a deep breath and with a single swift movement pulled the sheet away. He opened his eyes slowly and looked over his mother-in-pieces. He couldn’t hold himself any longer and the puke that had only come up his throat before now spurted out. Whatever was on the floor, he puked all over it.
He poured three full tanks of water over his head. Both to wake himself up and to wash himself off. His blood went cold as ice when he got near those ten pieces spread out over the floor, what was left of his mother. His mothers, that is.
Pieces of his mother’s flesh were welded inside the şalvar and shirt she had worn for the last two months. He got a knife and started to cut the fabric. The pieces opened up like he was unwrapping presents. Inside each one, his mother’s nakedness was exposed, dripping with blood and bone. This was the way Derda saw his first naked woman. By first chopping up his mother, then by undressing her.
He ripped the sheet into pieces and wrapped all his mothers up, one by one. Then he piled them up one on top of another just inside the front door. He grabbed three empty water tanks and left the house.
Everything was bathed in darkness; the sun had gone to rise in other places. He stuck one of the empty tanks under the cemetery fountain and waited for it to fill up. Then he heard a voice:
“Derda!”
He looked all around him, but he didn’t see anyone. He thought he’d die from fear when a thin branch stretching out from the thicket bent revealing Isa behind it. He was carrying a full tank. Derda was so terrified that he felt like he was looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. Everything and everyone seemed so far away. Even those closest to him. Even Isa, one step away.
“It’s overflowing,” the kid said, pointing to Derda’s tank. If he had looked at Derda a little more closely and not at the tank, he would have seen the change in his eyes. Isa didn’t see the tears in his eyes. Whatever else there was, there was darkness. Derda wiped the tears fr
om his cheeks with the back of his hand, pretending he was wiping away sweat. Then he snapped back to life and nudged the full tank away with his foot and stuck an empty one under the fountain. Then he realized Isa was still there. He’d been watching him in silence for a while, but he didn’t think he could have seen anything.
“What’re you doing out here at this hour?”
“My dad kicked me out,” said Isa.
“Where to?”
“What do you mean, where to?”
“Where’d your dad kick you out to?”
“He didn’t say. Get the fuck out of here, he said. I’m just wandering around.”
“What’d you do?”
“Told him I was going to drop out of school.”
Derda felt water at his feet. He bent down and saw his second tank was overflowing. He put the third one into place.
“Why?”
“You don’t go to school either, you said so!” Isa said.
“That’s different,” Derda said. “I never went to begin with. What year were you up to?”
“Fourth.”
“Ok, then you only have one year left. It’s over then anyway, right?”
Isa laughed.
“Over? Then there’s middle school, high school, university.”
He stopped laughing.
“Why didn’t you go? Didn’t your parents make you?”
“No,” said Derda. “I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
“University. I’m going to start from there.”
Isa couldn’t tell whether Derda was serious or not. He could understand as well as he could see in the darkness. Then at once both started to laugh. Like when they carried water tanks together. Then their laughs tapered off and they both fell silent. Like when the fountain was turned off.
“Come on, help me out here,” said Derda. He hauled the tanks up by the handles and started to walk. Isa took the third and followed him. It was no easy task to get the tanks over the wall. At one point Derda said, “I’m going to break open a hole in the wall so I can go in and out. I’m tired of jumping over.”
“We have an axe,” said Isa. “It’s my dad’s. Maybe we can smash the hole open with that.”
They were on the other side of the wall. Their hands on their knees, catching their breath. Between gasps for air, Derda asked:
“You have an axe?”
After Isa left the cemetery, Derda went home and tried to scrub the blood off the concrete floor with pieces he ripped off the foam rubber mattress. When he saw a piece of mattress wasn’t absorbing any more, he tossed it into a trash bag at his side and ripped off another. He used the entire foam rubber mattress to erase all trace of the blood. Its stench had seeped into the sheets wrapped around the rotting flesh, and it was in every corner of the house, never to be removed, although the blood itself was no longer there. Derda was exhausted. A kid of ten and one years old. All the strength in his body and all the innocence inside him had been used up. He took off his T-shirt, balled it up, put it under his head, and lay down on the concrete. He rolled onto his side and pulled his knees up to his stomach. A while later, because there was no mother’s womb to curl up into, he stretched his legs out, and stretching for the last time, he fell asleep.
He knew the first lump he picked up was his mother’s left foot. It was the last piece he’d wrapped up so it was at the top of the flesh pile. As much as he could see of the world through the house’s two small windows, the world was light blue. Those hours when the sun’s color mixes into the night. He left the house and jumped over the wall and landed in the cemetery with the lump of flesh and the lid of a pan in his hand. Twenty meters ahead, twelve tombs were all lined up in a row. It was the row of tombs closest to the cemetery wall. No doubt one day those twenty empty meters of space would be filled in, but for now the dead didn’t quite reach Derda’s house. From where he stood, Derda saw nothing but marble tombstones. Marble slabs inscribed with the names of the dead. Marble signs showing where their owners lay on the other side.
The morning ezan from the cemetery mosque was thrown into the winds by the loudspeakers hung in tree branches. Derda was scared. He knew he had hardly any time left. He thought he should put some sort of marker to remember where he’d buried the pieces. But he had no time to figure out what and now the light blue world was starting to wrap around him. Then it came to him. The idea to use the tombstones as markers. Marble slabs. On one side of the tombstones lay the buried coffin with the owner of the tomb. And behind it on the other side he could mix his mother’s pieces into the earth. He went to the foot of the tomb farthest to the left facing the wall and started to dig like his life depended on it. Holding the pan lid with both hands, he dug out the earth until he had made a hole an arm’s length deep. He dropped his mother’s left foot in and pushed the dirt back in with the pan lid. It was covered up. He got to his feet and took two steps back. He was trying to see if you could tell someone had been messing with the dirt. Then he looked up and stared at the tombstone’s inscription. Letters and numbers. A few seconds. He didn’t bother staring at it any longer. Whatever he did know, Derda did not know how to read or write. He turned around and ran and reached the wall in one bound, leaping over it like a creature of the night. Like nothing had happened. Like an insect scurrying into his home.
That morning he went over the wall eight more times. Four times out, four times back. When it was really morning, he knew the cemetery kids would start coming. He couldn’t risk digging any more holes so he stopped for the day. Half of his mother was at the foot of the first five tombstones from the left. The other half was in a pile behind the front door. Derda took two steps and collapsed. Letting the dirty pan lid fall to the ground, he curled his arm into a pillow under his head. He didn’t sleep; he passed out. He hadn’t eaten for two days.
In his dream, he was in the orphanage. He’d never seen it. He didn’t know where it was or what an orphanage looked like. All he knew was what Fevzi had told him. Beds, closets, toilets, and the bigger kids who beat you up. And the hands that would grab you by the neck or ankles at any moment. He didn’t stop for even a second, the whole dream long. He ran between bed and closet and closet and bed but the threat of getting beaten up was always there, following right behind him. Just once, just to see how far away the fingertips clawing at his back were, he looked over his shoulder. And at just that second, he smashed into something with the whole weight of his body. He collapsed, then looked up to see what he’d run into. He saw his mother looming over him. Her eyes were red and swollen, like they’d been the weeks before she died. She was standing and looking down at her son at her feet. Then the woman’s mouth opened and two insects slipped out between her two lips. Derda tried to get up but it was like the palms of his hands were stuck to the ground. He was forced to watch the insects fall from her face. Then his body straightened like a switchblade springing open and he woke up.
He tried to stand up. But his head was spinning and he couldn’t get up. Blinded by hunger, slowly he planted himself over his feet and stumbled to the door. He took the key and stepped outside. Three meters away, eight-year-old Süreyya sat on a rock. She had a candy bar. It was like Derda was transfixed. Süreyya was small for her age and couldn’t do anything but cry, but Derda didn’t even notice. He tossed the thick, rich candy bar into his mouth and watched the little girl as he chewed. And then he started to hear again. First Süreyya’s tears, then Süreyya’s mother’s screams.
“You trying to be like your dad, you dog?”
The woman could have reached him in four steps, but she took the fifth to get more momentum to slap Derda. The slap jolted Derda awake.
“Where’s your mother?” the woman yelled.
Then she turned, looked straight at the house, and yelled, “Havva! Get out here and look what your shit of a son did!”
She held Süreyya’s elbow while she kicked at Derda on the ground. But she was wearing slippers so her kicks weren’t too fast or too hard.
“She’s not there!” Derda managed to say. “My mom’s not home!”
“What do you mean, she’s not there?”
The woman stopped kicking and pulled Süreyya onto her lap.
“She went to the hospital,” Derda said. He hadn’t even considered what he’d say if anyone asked about his mother. “They put her in the hospital.”
All at once the woman pitied Derda. It must have been a record of going from crying to smiling. Like a seed flittering through the air, the journey from hate to pity in under a second.
“What are you going to do?”
Derda got up and, like all the kids did, brushed off the dust that kicked up and fell all around the cemetery houses. Whatever there was in the earth there; there was death. The dust of death was in the air. He didn’t want to infect anyone with it.
“I’m going back and forth. She’s Ok now. They say she’ll be out soon.”
“Do you have food and everything?” the woman asked. She was still rocking the whimpering Süreyya on her side. Then she got fed up and gave the girl’s cheek a light slap and chided her with a “quiet, you!”
“There’s some, but it won’t last long,” said Derda.
“Come over tonight. I’ll give you something.”
Derda said “Ok” out loud to her, but “tonight?” inside to himself. Tonight wasn’t soon enough. There were hours still before the sun would set. Derda watched Süreyya and her mother walk away and slip inside their house and decided he needed to find a job. He had to earn some money. With money, he could buy bread. Maybe even a little cheese. Whatever he could. He realized he’d forgotten his work kit, his tanks and brush, and he went back home. He felt so faint he swayed as he walked. The candy bar hadn’t been enough. His head was still spinning.
The cemetery kids gathered in the shade of the trees around the central fountain, laughing. The boys joked with each other, sitting on the marble borders around the graves. The girls picked the blooms off the stems of flowers that relatives of the dead had left and were sticking them in their hair. Some still weren’t old enough to go to school. Some had never been to school. Others came to the cemetery after school. There was no time for homework. Everyone had some reason why they had to work. But there wasn’t any industrial park, nor any busy main street where they could sell packs of tissues anywhere near there. All they had was the cemetery. Their world was the cemetery, thousands of square kilometers of cemetery.