by Hakan Günday
Derda left the security of the trees like a falsely condemned man going to his execution, who, despite his innocence, holds his head high as he walks toward his legally sanctioned death. With each step, his fear diffused a bit more. Approaching the woman from behind, he took a deep breath and spoke.
“Excuse me.”
The woman had just covered over the buried envelope in the hole and she turned and looked at the kid as if she’d been awoken from a dream.
“It was me who took those papers. And some of the money. But I gave the papers back. But the thing is, I don’t have any money. Please, forgive me! I’ll do anything you want.”
The woman looked him over from head to toe as he spoke. His shoes, hair, his tanks and brush, his eyes, and his teeth. She seemed both lost in thought and intent to size up the boy. It didn’t seem like she was going to say anything, so Derda continued.
“Please, for the love of God!”
The woman shook her head and gestured at the tombstone with her hand. Derda didn’t understand. He asked her the first thing that came to mind.
“You want me to clean the tomb?”
The woman pointed toward the tomb and nodded again. Derda didn’t ask again.
“Ok,” he said. “Just a minute, I have to get water.”
He ran as fast as he could. He was ecstatic that the whole thing could be resolved so easily. He’d wash a tomb, and his debt would be cleared. He ran to the fountain in the square and caught his breath while the tanks filled with water. Then he ran back without stopping, taking the shortcut paths instead of the main road going down to the cemetery gates. But when he got to the trees between the tombs where he’d hid before, he stopped dead in his tracks. The woman was gone. He spun around looking for her. Nothing. He took off toward the cemetery gates. If she was on her way out he’d catch up with her for sure. He had to catch up to her and talk to her. He had to be sure that they’d agreed, that everything was okay. He wasn’t scared anymore. He dropped his tanks as he passed the fountain. They were weighing him down. He ran as fast as his legs could carry him and stopped at the cemetery gates. But there was no one there. No woman, no one at all. He stepped out of cemetery gates and looked both ways down the main street. It was like she’d vanished into thin air. Maybe she got in a car and drove away? he thought. But then he didn’t know what to think. He was totally confused. There was only one thing he could be sure of, and that was that he wasn’t going to touch that envelope buried at the foot of that tomb. But he really didn’t know anything anymore. He didn’t know what they expected him to do; he didn’t even know if he and the woman had come to an understanding or not.
“She pointed at the tomb,” Derda said aloud. He tried to remember what she’d looked like as he imitated her gestures.
“This is what she did. She pointed to it like this. Then I said, should I wash it? And she nodded … That’s how it went, right?”
That was as far as he could extend his monologue with her. It was easy to understand. And fairly certain. They’d clear his debt. But on one condition: Derda had to clean the tomb. He laughed. He broke into a run, only slowing down to grab a tank when he passed the fountain. He didn’t stop until he was in front of the tomb. He looked around. He was sure someone was watching. They must be watching to make sure he fulfilled his part of the agreement. He started pouring the water little by little over the tombstone. And he looked up and into the distance.
“Look, here I am, doing what you wanted me to do!” he wanted to cry out, and he wasn’t doing a shabby job at that. One by one he collected the leaves that had fallen over the tomb from the surrounding trees. With his brush he scrubbed the dirt and dust off the tombstone after he’d poured the water over it, and he tried to work as respectfully as he could. Respectfully and painstakingly. It must be the tomb of someone important, he thought. If it wasn’t, how could just cleaning it clear his debt?
Derda felt a growing sense of independence as he cleaned the tomb. He was conquering his fear. One by one the knots in his throat were untied, the permanent tension in his face mellowed into a smile, and for the first time in a long time, he felt good. Even happy.
The morning sun seeped into his eyes and he woke smiling. He had dreamed of his father. In real life, he didn’t even remember what his face looked like, but in his dream he knew it was him. He was out of prison and they were having breakfast together. Derda got up and got dressed. He ate some bread and a bit of cheese left over from the day before. He got his tanks and his brush and walked out the front door. He turned left and followed the house’s wall until he came to the cemetery wall. He bent over and went through the hole he’d smashed open years before and stepped into the cemetery. The dead had multiplied and now the tombs were ever closer to the wall. He weaved his way between them and went to the new fountain. He filled his tanks and walked to the front of the tomb and stopped. He washed the tomb as if he were performing a sacred devotion. He had no idea if the envelope was still in the grave bed or not. Because he didn’t want to know. He only did what they wanted him to do, and kept the tomb sparkling clean.
When he saw that there wasn’t a speck of dust remaining he ran his hand over the tomb and smiled. Then he looked down at the stone path under his feet. Under the path beneath his feet lay his mother’s left rib cage and heart. The path ran between all the tombs, covering all the buried pieces of his mother. He leaned over the tomb and caressed it, whispering, “See you tomorrow.”
Derda was sixteen years old.
“Hey, what’s up?” said Remzi.
“I’m good. You been waiting long?” asked Derda.
“No, no, come on, let’s go.”
They walked out of the cemetery gates. The bus was pulling up to the bus stop and they ran to catch it. They leapt up the two steps onto the bus then stood facing each other, hanging from the leather straps. The first one to speak was the would-be genius of his age, Remzi.
“They pay good money, but the work’s kind of tough.”
“That’s Ok,” said Derda.
“They’re a bit, well, you know, so don’t try to push it or be stubborn or anything.”
“No way, man. What am I going do? Act like an ass? As long as they give me my money, I don’t care. I don’t care about anything else.”
“And,” said Remzi, “if you get on their good side, they’ll give you a sales point, too. And then you’ll earn more.”
“What do you do?”
“I work the machines. In the depot.”
The employers quickly learned the value of Remzi’s talents when they saw him comfortably working with all the complicated machines and mechanisms.
“For now, I’ll just be doing loading, right?” asked Derda.
“Yeah. You get the stuff from the depot and load up the van. Then you deliver the stuff to the sales points. Come on, this is where we get off.”
They got off the bus and started walking down a dismal street off the main road and stopped in front of a three-story building. Remzi grabbed Derda, who was rushing up to the front door.
“Not there, down here,” said Remzi, pointing to a flight of stairs at the side of the building leading down to the basement.
They went down the stairwell. Remzi banged on the iron door at the bottom. A voice answered them from inside. A gruff, muffled voice.
“Who is it?”
“Remzi.”
The door opened and the strong smell of a printing press hit their noses. As the odors rushed out, Remzi and Derda went in. A man with glasses stood beside the open door. A man who’d aged when he was still young. Like age had just fallen on him all of a sudden one day.
“Is this your friend?” His words seeped out from the spaces of his missing teeth. It was like they’d all escaped from his mouth one night.
“Yes,” said Remzi. Then he turned to Derda. “This is Brother Süleyman,” he said. “My boss. He looks over everything.”
He made a sweeping gesture indicating all the machines of the printing
press: everything. The building’s basement was bigger than it looked from outside. It was probably twice the width of the building itself. Or maybe all the books piled on top of each other gave it that impression. Thousands of books and enormous printing machinery.
“No one else’s here yet?” asked Remzi.
“Nope,” said Süleyman. “I just got up myself. Get the tea on, let’s have some. What’s your name?”
“Derda.”
“Look, son, do you know what kind of work we do here?”
“Remzi told me a little about it,” said Derda.
Remzi was in front of two waist-high cupboards against the only wall in the warehouse not covered by piles of books. On top of one was a stove. On top of the other was a kitchen sink with a faucet that never stopped dripping. There was a refrigerator next to the cupboards. Remzi put the water on to boil in the makeshift kitchen of the depot that doubled as Süleyman’s home. The smoke curling out of his cigarette mixed with the steam from the teapot. Süleyman cleared his throat with a hearty round of morning coughs and then spoke.
“I don’t want to hear about you doing anything stupid, not even once, you understand?”
“I understand,” said Derda.
“Israfil will be here soon. He’ll explain the job better than I can. But let me tell you loud and clear. Now, you might wind up in trouble sometime but if you tip the police off to what’s going on here, they’ll get you. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Don’t worry,” said Derda.
“Wrong! I can’t even worry about worrying. You have to think about it. If you do your job like a man, if you keep your mouth shut, then you’ll get your money.”
“Fine,” said Derda.
He didn’t care about the depot or about anything Süleyman said. The only thing he wanted was to make a bit of money. Because he was way too old for the cemetery now. His pained expressions didn’t fool anyone. And after all, the hand reaching out for money didn’t reach up anymore. Now more often than not the hand came down to the customer. Derda was taller than most cemetery visitors, who were, after all, bent over in mourning. And besides, the cemetery walls had almost entirely fallen down, and they were being rebuilt. They were saying that Yasin was going to be let go and private security guards would be brought in. And they weren’t going to let the kids inside anymore.
It wouldn’t be long before the cemetery children would be history. The dirt roads had been covered in paving stones; the widest ones had been paved with asphalt. The times were changing. The children were going to be left outside, on the other side of the walls rising around the cemetery. There was no bread to be won from the dead anymore. Soon there’d be no children left there. Within a month at most. So the pursuit of gainful employment had come to each and every one. Isa had gone to the marble engraver as an apprentice, Fevzi had disappeared into the city, and Remzi, through connections from relatives, had found work in a depot that printed pirated books.
When he’d told him about it—“book work”—Derda shouted at him, “Man, are you making fun of me? You know I can’t read.” But Remzi had told him, “Man, you’re not going to be reading the books, you going to be hauling them around.”
They were eating a breakfast of the simit Remzi ran out and bought and tea, all laid out on top of a box spread with the uncut pages of one of the day’s bestselling novels. They ate in silence.
Then the iron door swung open and a monster of a man came in. Süleyman picked up the pages loaded with sesame seeds from the simits by their corners and crumpled them in his fist. He looked up.
“Look, Israfil’s here.”
When Israfil took off his coat, the butt of his pistol flashed at his waist. Remzi stood up and Derda followed his lead.
“Brother Israfil, this is Derda. The friend I told you about. To do the loading work …”
Israfil looked over Derda and his guilty eyes and asked, “What’s your father do?”
“He’s in prison,” said Derda.
“Fine.”
It was the first time Derda had seen someone register absolutely no surprise at his answer. Israfil nodded like being in prison was a totally ordinary existence, but Derda waited for him to ask more. But he didn’t. Because for Israfil, prison was a just another reality. He drank the tea Remzi brought him in one gulp and spoke.
“The van comes around nine. They’ll tell you what to load. Then you’ll go with the van and deliver the goods to the sales points. Depending on the situation, you’ll do the rounds three or four times. In the evening, you’ll pick up the stuff from the sales points and bring it all back here. That’s the job. And you’ll work fast. There’ll be no lingering around in front of the sales points, understand?”
“Ok,” said Derda.
Israfil lit a cigarette and gave his empty glass to Remzi, adding, “Look, you are here because your friend here vouched for you. Work hard and earn your keep.”
“I understand, brother,” said Derda.
Then Israfil stared at Derda with a crushing glare and took three long, deep breaths. There was no need for him to speak. Because the threat came out of Israfil’s body like a cloud and fell over everything in the depot. When Israfil felt that Derda had been sufficiently impressed by the cold damp of the cloud, he turned around and was lost in the labyrinth of books.
Half an hour later, Derda was carrying two boxes loaded with forty books each. He passed through the iron door, climbed up the twelve steps, and loaded the boxes into the back of a windowless van pulled up to the top of the stairs. It took him seven trips to learn that it took fourteen boxes to fill the van. He turned the jug next to the refrigerator upside down, filled up his glass, and drank the water in great gulps. He wiped off his sweat, yelled “Coming!” then ran up the stairs and jumped into the passenger’s seat where he was greeted with a cigarette thrust right up under his nose.
“Light this.”
He took the cigarette and lit it with a lighter on the dashboard. Then he and Abdullah, a man he’d met an hour before, pulled out of the side street and onto the main road. As soon as they were on the main road, it became all too apparent that Abdullah was a closet blabbermouth. Like all secret talkaholics, it was only when there was just one person stuck by his side that he really started up. He’d sit in deep silence at a crowded table in the coffeehouse, but when everyone else had left, he’d bore a hole in the ear of the only man left. He’d tell any story that happened to cross his mind. Or he’d talk about whatever he’d held bottled up inside until that moment. He’d gossip about the people who’d just gotten up and left, he’d even answer questions that people who weren’t even there anymore had asked earlier. All this was only more evidence about why no one wanted to be stuck alone with Abdullah. But Derda didn’t have the benefit of choice. Every day in the van, for hours on end, he was alone with Abdullah. Starting from his very first “light this” he was doomed to listen to Abdullah’s unending jabber all day long.
One of their first stops was a sales point set up on a pedestrian overpass near a university. This was when Derda understood why Remzi said the work was a bit tough, and he hated that sales point with every single step of the sixty-four steps he had to climb to get to the top of the overpass. He didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he tripled up the boxes. When he dropped off the last box clutched between his fingers, his legs smarted with pain. A young man with a beard named Saruhan was standing in front of the sales point. He was a student at the university you could see from the overpass. According to what he said, he was studying math. It took Derda two weeks, and countless trips up and down sixty-four steps, to find out that much.
Their deliveries brought them to spots in all boroughs of the city, in all the shopping areas and neighborhood centers. The salesmen were usually about the same age as Saruhan. As soon as they saw Derda come up, they peeled themselves off the walls they were leaning against and opened the boxes Derda set down on the tarps they’d spread on the ground, working quickly to take
the books out. They rarely looked at Derda’s face. But when the work was finished they always gave him a “Thanks, man.” The only one of them who said any more was Saruhan. Sometimes he’d ask, “What’s up?” Sometimes he’d say something like, “It’s freezing cold out here!” Depending on the weather, the boxes would either be left at the sales points or, if it was raining, they’d ride around in the van until nightfall.
At the end of the day, Derda, sometimes with Remzi, sometimes alone, returned to the neighborhood where his cemetery house stood. He had to wake up even earlier now to carry out his five-year-old duty of washing and tidying around the tomb. For the first two years he’d been genuinely afraid that the man in the long robe would come back. But in later years the man’s face began to fade from his memory. Eventually all that was left was the tomb. The fear that had made him start washing the tomb had long since crumbled and disappeared. Now Derda didn’t see it any differently than breathing. It had become a sort of habit. A type of dependence that didn’t do anyone any harm. Maybe if his case had been brought to the attention of some committee of professors, he’d have been able to identify with their explanation of his behavior. A short series of words starting with “obsessive” and ending with “compulsive.” But Derda wasn’t brought into the presence of anyone, besides the tomb, that is. And to tell the truth, he never felt anything remotely like presence or peace of mind except for when he was cleaning that tomb. Maybe he really did see it as compensation. Compensation for stealing someone else’s money while burying the pieces of his chopped-up mother.