by Hakan Günday
“It was very nice to have met you!” the attorney yelled behind him. But Derda didn’t hear him. He was walking deeper into the cemetery where he knew the tombstones as well as the dead. His feet knew just where he was going but even so, Derda felt drunk. He touched the tombstones as he slowly made his way through the shade of the trees.
And then his feet stopped like they’d sunk into the earth. Because at the head of Oğuz Atay’s tomb was a woman, standing, with a white envelope in her hand. A white envelope.
Derda didn’t do what he’d done all those years before. He didn’t hide. He didn’t hide himself among the trees or hold his breath. He just walked. Straight to Oğuz Atay and the woman.
The woman turned around when Derda’s shadow fell over her, and she asked, like a dream wrapping around him, or like they were the only two people left on the face of the earth, “Derda, right?”
His squinted as he answered her. “Yes.” He looked at her with the same hope as the sailor, lost on the seas, looks at the sight of the mainland on the horizon. In two words, the woman’s voice already seemed so familiar to him, and the way she looked into his eyes … Derda had to tell himself it was impossible. He practically shouted it to himself.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I’ve exhausted you in bringing you all the way out here.”
Derda’s two ears and two eyes were so full that he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Maybe if time had stood still he would have been able to figure it out. Especially this strange similarity. But the minute hands and the hour hands didn’t pay any attention to Derda.
“I know what you’ve been through,” the woman continued. And she took Derda’s hand. The OĞUZ hand. Then she put the envelope into his hand. “If you will read this, you’ll understand everything. I wrote it to you. It’s a letter.”
Derda fell down onto his knees at the base of Oğuz Atay’s tomb like he was eleven years old. Entirely blind to the dust of death everywhere. He wasn’t in any state to stay on his feet. At that moment, Oğuz Atay’s tomb was the only reality he could trust. He felt better when he leaned his back against it. And taking a deep breath, he opened the envelope.
When he pulled out the sheet of paper inside, he looked up at the woman and patted the earth next to him. The woman sat down on the ground. At Derda’s side. And she leaned her back against Oğuz Atay, too. She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them. And she planted her eyes on a faraway tree. On a tree where, once upon a time, Derda had slept in the shade and dreamed.
DERD’S LETTER
Dear Derda,
I know how to start but I have no idea how this letter will end. But first of all, I will call you “you,” nothing formal. Maybe the first time I see you, I won’t be able to do that. But for me, you are you, someone I know. And anyway, the first time I see you I’ll be so excited that it’s highly probable I’ll even forget your name. But one of the things that gives me courage to write you this letter is that. My name. Our names. Because they are both the same. They’re both Derda. Anyway.
I was born in a small village called Yatırca. When I turned eleven I was forced to marry and I was taken to London. I stayed a prisoner for five years in an apartment there until I escaped one night. I started doing heroin, then I started doing everything to be able to keep doing heroin. To the point where once I even slept with fifty-two men. It was filmed and now I know there are millions of people out there who saw me like that. I’m telling you all this because I want you to know me. Know me completely, with nothing left out. Up until today, I haven’t been able to tell all this to anyone like this, openly and simply. But now, it’s like I’m telling it all to myself and I can write everything calmly. Actually, I’m probably calmer than if I had been telling it to myself. I’m writing to you with a strange peace of mind. Anyway …
When I was sixteen, I met a woman named Anne at a rehabilitation center where I went to get off heroin. She was a retired nurse. She treated me with a love that I’d never known until that day and she took me into her home. Then years passed and I became her daughter. Anne’s daughter. Her name was written like that, anne, like “mother” in Turkish. Was written, I say, because two years ago she died of a brain hemorrhage and I, in losing her, lost everything.
The first thing I did when I was able to feel alive again was to read her diaries. She hid her diaries like buried treasure. In her diaries I read that Anne had once worked in London at the Atkison Morley Hospital in Wimbledon.
In the year 1976 on the 22nd of December, Anne, at the time twenty-eight years old, was on night duty in the intensive care unit when a patient was brought in. It was a patient who’d just come out of surgery for a brain tumor. It was a Turk. And who was it, do you know? Maybe you already know. In any event, his name is written on your fingers. It was Oğuz Atay.
Oğuz Atay stayed in intensive care until the 31st of December with Anne always at his side.
The first thing Oğuz Atay said to her was this: “Your name is written the same as the word ‘mother’ in Turkish.”
Oğuz Atay couldn’t sleep because of the horrible pain in his head. Apparently he even called his head “Ağrı Dağ,” a joke of course about it being a “mountain of pain,” and also the Turkish name for Mount Ararat. Of course Anne couldn’t have deciphered the meaning of that but she did Oğuz Atay the favor of writing it down on a piece of paper. Then she copied out the sentence in a language she didn’t understand, letter by letter, into her diary.
They talked until morning every night for eight nights. At first, Anne just listened. Because in those days the only thing in Anne’s head was death. Suicide. Not for any particular reason. The reason was everything, her whole life. From everything she had lived. Some people are like that. They’re just much more sensitive than other people. They carry death around on their back like a bag and when they get too tired they’re the first ones to tire of the weight and open it up. Anyway …
For whatever reason, Oğuz Atay sensed what Anne was thinking about. Maybe he could just feel it and so he told her only about life. About his desire to stay alive. Those eight nights were so affecting that Anne was convinced to let herself live. Because across from her was a man struggling with life like Don Quixote, and he was telling her how to live with all the words he had felt in his heart until that day.
Anne talked about his English.
“It was like Shakespeare was across from me, and I listened to him speak like I was reading from a book. I can’t write his words here. The moment I write them the meanings of all the beautiful things he made me believe would be ruined. He didn’t give me any chance. There was nothing I could do but believe in him and what he was saying.”
After Oğuz Atay was released from the hospital they never saw each other again, but Anne never forgot him. If you ask me, I think she fell in love with Oğuz Atay. But she never mentions anything like that in her diaries. There’s only this one sentence: “He was the only man I met in all my life that I might have been going to fall in love with.”
Then years passed and Anne came to Turkey. And she came, if you are reading this letter, exactly to the spot where you are standing right now. The Edirnekapı Şehitliği Sakızağacı Cemetery. To the head of Oğuz Atay’s tomb. She mentions a letter in her diary. A letter she wrote to Oğuz Atay. Who knows what she wrote? Anyway …
And so, Anne came to bury the letter in Oğuz Atay’s tomb. This is what she wrote in her diary:
“I buried the letter above him today. Maybe years will pass and it will only mix in with the soil. Or maybe as soon as I leave, his soul will read it. Then a boy came up to me. He looked so poor, so terribly downtrodden. I suppose he was working in the cemetery washing tombs. He said something to me. But of course I couldn’t understand what he said. I gestured that he should clean the tomb. If only I had given him a bit of money. But I was so sad that I started to cry and I left running. I didn’t even look behind me.”
I found out that you worked in the cemetery. Could that boy hav
e been you? I doubt it. But who knows, maybe it was.
After I had read Anne’s diaries, I understood that it wasn’t just her that had saved my life. Maybe Oğuz Atay counts, too. Maybe he also saved me from that hell. Because Oğuz Atay saved Anne’s life. And if there hadn’t been any Anne, I would have been destroyed.
So I figured that much out but I didn’t even know then that a man called Oğuz Atay had even existed. And here I am at the University of Edinburgh, a professor of literature, did you know that? How embarrassing it was not to know who he was! And I should say here, I apologize for my Turkish. It’s the first time in my life that I’m writing a letter in Turkish. And this will be the first time in twenty-nine years that I return to Turkey, to ask you to read this letter.
As soon as I finished Anne’s diaries, I started to read everything that Oğuz Atay had written and do all the research I could to find about him. And then you jumped out in front of me. And all the news to do about you. Your photographs, what you’d said during the court case. I couldn’t believe it. Especially when I read your name.
Now I’ve read the letter over again from the beginning and I can see how badly I’ve written it. There’s an “anyway” at the end of every paragraph. Anyway, not anyway! If I kept going beyond every “anyway” there’d be thousands of stories I couldn’t possibly write now.
I feel like a young girl. It would have to be an eleven-year-old girl who would write all this to you like this. Anyway!!
Like I explained at the beginning of this letter, we’ve arrived at the section where I don’t know where its thread is going. We’ve arrived at the end. Because I’m not sure what I want from you. But it’s like, there’s you and me. I don’t know what I’m going to say.
If you’re still reading this you’re still beside me. But if you believe all this is just some coincidence, you can go right away. Let’s go on with our lives and forget everything.
No, I can’t lie. I can’t go on with my life and I can’t forget anything.
Because I also read Oğuz Atay, and I’ve met you.
Maybe you’ll say, how much can you know someone through photographs and news clips? You’re right. Maybe very little. In that case, let me say this: I know you az, just a little.
Do you see it, too? Az, it’s such a tiny word when you say it. Just A and Z, just two letters. But between them there’s an entire alphabet. There are tens of thousands of words and hundreds of thousands of sentences you can write with that alphabet. The thing I wanted to say to you and all the things I couldn’t write are between those two letters. One is the beginning, the other is the end. But it’s like they were made for each other. So that they’d be brought together and read as one. It’s like they climbed over all the letters between them, one by one so they could meet. Just like me and you.
And so maybe there’s a lot more than just “a little.” Maybe life and death are like az. And maybe, I know you just “a little” means I know you better than I know myself. And maybe “I don’t know” means maybe I’d do anything to learn. Maybe a little means everything. And maybe it’s the one and only thing I can say to you.
I couldn’t think of a better place to meet you than at the head of Oğuz Atay’s grave. Because if you read it and leave without even looking back, I’ll bury this letter in the soil.
Derdâ
DERD AND DERDA
They woke up at the same time. They turned and looked at each other. Derda stretched his neck out to reach her lips and he stayed there where he kissed her.
That day they wandered the streets of Edinburgh. Night fell fast and they returned home.
Derdâ went to the living room. Derda went to the bathroom.
He shook the can of spray paint in his hand and he drew a big, red O on the big bathroom’s big wall. Derda looked at it for a few minutes, smiling. A blood-red letter on a snow-white wall. Then he added an A inside the O. He looked at it like it was the first time he was seeing it. Or like he’d spent his whole life looking at it.
He went into the bedroom and slowly began to peel the clothes away from his body. He undressed and then he was naked. Music floated in from the living room. He closed his undulating lips. It was the most loved album in the house: Altre Follie, 1500–1750.
Derda stood in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom and raised his fists, posing like a boxer. He looked at himself above OĞUZ and ATAY. Until Derdâ came in and broke his pose. She was also naked. She was also smiling.
Derda offered Derdâ his hand like he was a gentleman of another age and he showed her into the bathroom. With a bow. Derdâ walked in and stood near the bathtub. She bent her knees and put two fingers into the water to test it. Then she straightened up and with one movement she took out her hair clip and shook out her hair. Her hair fell over her shoulders like a river. She put first one foot, than another, into the hot water. Her naked body losing itself in the hot water.
Derda brought two champagne glasses to the side of the bathtub and set them on the checkered tile floor. Then he lowered himself slowly into the hot water.
They looked at each other, smiling at each other from behind clouds of steam and then, closing their eyes, they listened to the music.
The notes got slower and slower and their eyelids opened and they looked at each other. They both stretched down and picked up glasses of champagne. Without taking their eyes off their love, they took a sip. Like taking a breath. A breath of poison.
“I love you a little bit,” said Derdâ.
“I love you a little bit less,” said Derda.
They spoke no more.
But just once they looked at the symbol on the wall and together they thought: It began with Oğuz Atay and it will end with Oğuz Atay.
And accompanied with the endless melody called La Folia.
They looked at each other for the last time before they fell asleep.
Fell into death.
They were eighty years old.
For both of them.
Forty years to be together.
And forty years to die together.
For another forty years, they could not have survived.
(music)
Forever La Folia XVI