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by Hakan Günday

  “Hello, uncle Aruz?”

  I’d gone deaf with anxiety.

  “It’s me, Felat!”

  “What?”

  Aruz’s son, Felat. He was my age but for some reason older than me.

  “Gaza, it’s Felat!”

  “Felat? Are you all right?”

  “Fine, fine. What are you up to?”

  “Never mind that, talk to me! Where’ve you been. What’s happened?”

  “What can I say, father beat me up and all that, and then sent me to my uncle’s. They stuck me in a room. I just sat there …”

  Upon finding out that the village they had vacated years ago on the state’s orders was now, again by instruction of the state, habitable again, Aruz and the elders of his 260-person following had gotten together for a family meeting, during which Felat, who wanted nothing to do with this reverse migration and didn’t want to leave the city, and a few nutjobs in his leadership, had gone out to the fields and torched the houses of their great-grandfathers.

  Since these fanciful arsonists whose ages ranged from nine to fourteen hadn’t been as meticulous as those who, in their time, had burned similar villages with so much precision they could have been following a “Village Burning Directive,” the fire grew and they were collared before nightfall. The gendarmerie even prepared a report stating that the incident was in no way connected to any state institution, official or unofficial, and had Aruz sign it, and the fire took its exceptional place in the smoky history of the region. I hadn’t heard Felat’s voice in four months. Now he was talking about running away.

  I remembered so clearly. It was the holy night of Berat. Father was at me again, nagging, “Get up and call your uncle Aruz, wish him a blessed night!”

  “I’m running away, man! I’m going to get the fuck out of here!”

  “Hey, you ran away just last year! Where’re you going now?”

  So I had been forced to call him. When the phone rang a few times and I was about to say, “No luck, Dad, he’s not picking up,” a child’s voice came from the other end:

  “Brother?” he was saying. “Is that you?”

  “I’m Gaza,” I said. “Who’re you?” I asked, and he hung up on me.

  “That should be Felat … Aruz’s little boy,” said my father. “Whatever then, you can call him tomorrow,” he said and left. For the mosque.

  “How should I know, man, should I maybe come over to yours?”

  “What’re you going to do over here, kid?”

  Half an hour later in the same evening, Felat had called us back and his first question had been:

  “Is my brother there?”

  “No,” I had said. “Who’s your brother anyway?”

  “Ahlat …”

  “There’s no such person here …”

  Then we were silent …

  “You’re Felat, right? Uncle Aruz’s son.”

  “Yeah … who’re you?”

  “I told you, I’m Gaza … My dad works with your dad. That’s why I called him, for the holy night …”

  “Or should I go to Istanbul? The nephews live there. But they’re even bigger dopes!”

  “Is your dad there?”

  “No, he’s out.”

  He had begun to cry. Abruptly. As if he’d collapsed to the ground …

  “Felat? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve run away from home …”

  I didn’t catch this because the words were tangling up in his sobs.

  “What?”

  “I’ve run away from home!”

  If I’d been an adult, I’d have asked him where he was right then, but I wasn’t.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, I just did …”

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going to sell the phone … then I’m going to go someplace …”

  That’s how I knew how Felat happened to have his father’s phone. It was looking for its new owner so it could sponsor a voyage to God knows where.

  These were the words of a thirteen-year-old …

  “Your dad’ll kill you for sure this time, kid!”

  “I’m already fucking dead!”

  After that phone conversation a year ago, in full knowledge that he wouldn’t make it far in the darkness of night, Felat had dried his wet face on walls on his way back home, called me again two days later using their house phone this time, and we had resumed talking.

  “Don’t be stupid, man, you’re not dead!”

  “Let’s run away, Gaza! Come on, let’s go together!”

  “Go where?”

  “How should I know, man, let’s just go someplace …”

  Even though we didn’t really take in what the other was saying, being two kids who’d never kept diaries; we’d begun to tell. Things we couldn’t tell others … It was in our second conversation I found out that Aruz had saved my father in his phonebook as Ahlat. A brief inquest by Felat revealed that Aruz’s unlawful business associates were saved in his phonebook under the names of dead relatives. It was his security precaution. But the situation was different with Ahlat, his eldest son. There’d neither been funeral prayers for him, nor a grave. In these times and regions where people you saw in the morning disappeared by noon, he’d vanished as if he’d never been. So he’d turned into statistical data and taken his place in the missing persons quota of the nation’s history of counterterrorism.

  “Forget it, kid … Maybe later … Like, in a few years … Let’s finish school first, at least …”

  Clearly Ahlat was dead, but Felat had never been able to accept that. That was why, on that night he ran away, seeing his long-lost brother’s name on the screen of the ringing phone had made him freeze. In those few seconds, the only person who’d never stopped believing Ahlat was alive even had a dream: to protect the older brother who’d been taken into custody and tortured time and time again, Aruz sends him away and tells the family, “He’s dead!” But of course father and son maintain contact, even if only over the phone. Here’s proof: he calls … That was why Felat had answered that phone almost expecting to hear a sacred voice. When he hadn’t, he hadn’t given up that poisonous hope and tried again half an hour later. Unfortunately, he had only been able to talk to me … I hate that natural disaster called hope, that makes the world’s most desperate children dream the biggest dreams!

  “You know what, Gaza?”

  “What?”

  “My dad is sending me to the mountains.”

  “To the mountains, what?”

  There was nothing I could say. Nothing at all!

  “You know what I’m talking about! To join the guerillas! He said they’d man me up over there.”

  “No kidding!”

  “I really don’t want to go, man … What the hell am I going to do there, man!”

  “Gaza?”

  “What?”

  “Look, kid, if I become a guerilla … what if I run into you?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Look, don’t go to the army, man!”

  “The army, what’re you talking about? That’s years away …”

  “Don’t go anyway …”

  In those years cell phones were only good for talking and maybe texting. It wasn’t yet clear why anyone would pay hourly rates for the Internet, and cameras were still too large to be affixed to computers. Felat and I had never seen each other’s faces.

  “Are you crazy, kid, what are the odds of us both ending up in the same place in this country?”

  “Don’t be so sure … at least send me a photo.”

  “I don’t have a photo of myself, kid.”

  I really didn’t. The only photograph at home was of my mother.

  “You don’t say? I have a whole bunch but they’re all at the gas station …”

  Aruz’s only legitimate business: selling gas …

  “Felat, calm the hell down! Maybe your dad’s only saying it to scare you. Maybe he won’t send you away …”
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br />   Even I didn’t believe what I was saying. Felat also ignored it and kept trying to come up with a solution to the problem.

  He’d really got it! He was always good at finding things. He was an inventor. Even at the most desperate of times, even if really stupid like that village-burning plan, he always managed to find an escape hole and float through it. Or at least tried to … I had no choice but to accept … I actually felt pretty good for having a friend who was this frightened of the possibility that in the future he might kill me without realizing it.

  “Damn, how am I supposed to recognize you up there then? How can I tell… I’ve got it! A password! Let’s find a password!”

  “All right. What’ll it be?”

  “How should I know. You tell me.”

  “Remember how I told you about this girl? The one who liked me … her name was Çiçek …”

  He’d never talked about this girl. I’d never heard of her. But this wasn’t the time to call him out on it.

  “And?”

  To this day I don’t know why I said it:

  “I’ll call you Çiçek. And you …”

  I really don’t.

  “I can call you Cuma.”

  Could this be the reason?

  “Cuma? What d’you mean, Cuma?”

  I don’t think so!

  “It’s Friday today!”

  “That’s good, but don’t you forget … I’ll call you Çiçek, you’ll call me Cuma. We’ll know right away who it is, and we won’t shoot each other … all right?”

  “All right!”

  “It’s Father. I’m hanging up!”

  He said and vanished from my world. When that phone call was over, the rotting teeth of life completely severed the delicate thread holding us together. I neither talked to Felat again, nor joined the military … I did, on a few occasions, call “Cuma!” into a crowd. In hopes someone would call, “Çiçek!” in return … but no one ever did. No one replied to my password. Except, one day I did come across an article in the paper:

  A young Kurdish man of Swedish citizenship murdered by relatives in Stockholm, on grounds that he was gay …

  Although a rarity, some parts of the world still treasured persons more than the events surrounding them; so the details of the victim’s love life or even his identity weren’t disclosed. Plus up until this part, the news was pretty commonplace. The killing of homosexual relatives was basically an ancestral sport to some families. What was not commonplace, though, was this:

  The victim’s will included, right under his wish to be cremated, a request to be wedded with his lover, identified by name, in the likelihood that he was killed by his relatives or parties solicited by his relatives.

  In Sweden it was legal for gay people to marry, but in no country of the world was marriage a right available to the dead. The lover who was named in the will took the matter to court immediately to make this marriage happen. With its main themes of death, humanity, romance, and the meaning and tragedy of life, so began one of the most Shakespearean lawsuits in history.

  The cowards who squirmed to make sure that the rest of the world could also be crushed under the reign of the moral code they themselves couldn’t stop hauling around were quick to build their opposition. Their mouths and tongues became loudspeakers blaring that living homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to marry, let alone dead ones. Especially the nameless relatives of the deceased, scattered over three continents … They who had assumed that murder could put an end to any love affair were so infuriated by their victim’s parting gesture that Swedish flags were already catching on fire on various sidewalks of the world. During this time of foaming saliva and soaring affronts, the expected decision was announced on an unexpected morning:

  No case had been made against the marriage of the gay lovers, one of whom was dead and the other alive … At least half a kilo in ethical weight and wrapped in a very long rationale, the decision could be summed up as:

  As long as it wasn’t with a legally impermissible entity—an animal, a child, etc.—as long as no third party was hurt—in cases where there was an ongoing marriage prior to death, for instance—and with the certified consent of both parties, everyone could marry whom they wanted. Dead or alive …

  The unprecedented decision of the Stockholm District Court was an inspiration to all homosexuals, mostly immigrants, who were being threatened by families or acquaintances, leading them to write single-clause wills immediately. The practice surged out of the borders of Sweden with the velocity of a vaccination against a lethal disease. Future prospects arose in Sweden for homosexuals who’d tried to bury themselves in every desert charted on the map, as deep down as possible, so they wouldn’t be seen. For the event that someone anywhere in the world was killed due to their homosexuality, volunteer lists were made in Sweden of people who were ready to marry them. Homosexual people from all over the world who felt themselves under threat picked the name of a Swede from the list, wrote it in the form titled Posthumous Marriage Request, and sent it to the foundation in Sweden. This newly established foundation was named One More! That by itself summed it all up. In capital letters, too:

  “You killed your relative because he was gay, but see, now you have one more gay relative! Will you kill him, too? Then you’ll suddenly have one more gay relative. Then more and more and more …”

  It was a symbolic reaction, of course. Yet weren’t all hate crimes of the world grounded in symbolism? Weren’t the victims attacked because of whatever it was they symbolized for their murderers? A hate crime wasn’t a personal matter. It was an objective kind of violence. Hating the victims didn’t necessitate taking the time to know them in person. Taking a few hits of the pandemic hate floating in the air would suffice. In this way it wasn’t so different from the past, current, and future wars that would be waged over symbols. Yet if those symbols were to be swept out of the picture, all that would be left would be a territorial dispute concerning the distribution of resources. All the wars of the world were basically civil wars. But democracy and liberty and religion and sect and the flag and every symbolic ideal imaginable rippled so alluringly in the wind that it was almost impossible not to be swayed by them. On the streets, in the trenches, anywhere the darkness of the night and systemic violence could reach, all was symbolic. Except the blood that was spilled. Although even that might have been symbolic … It did inspire the color of many flags … the whole symbol-laden world was a shitty alliance dipped in gold paint. When all those symbols fell off, it would reveal the conspiracy underneath. Because there always was one. Just like the one in Sweden …

  A few months later, all of this international movement was abruptly cut off by a piece of razor-edged news. A rusty razor at that … The Velvet Mafia, an invisible organization composed of homosexuals with political and economic power of the caliber of mythical gods, were exposed as having blackmailed and bribed the board of the Stockholm District Court into running the famed decision through. That power-hungry arrogance, fearful of deadly consumption unless it reigned over every single thing, had shown up once again and in trying to save the applecart, shit on it instead. Soon after that day, all dead-living marriages were annulled. Only one of them remained still valid: symbolically, that is …

  In the end, the one who had made it all possible, the owner of that initial will, inside his urn of Roosendaal china, was wedded to his lover in a magnificent ceremony for all the cameras to see, and had his revenge on the murderer who was now in prison and all those who had hated him in life. It was only then that his name was made public. Or rather, his moniker: Blomma … it meant flower in Swedish. Çiçek … was Felat?

  Or was he just one of the bodies unearthed every spring by wild animals from the bottoms of hills following one of the PKK’s interorganizational execution festivals? If so, had he mentioned me in the self-criticism he’d given in a last hope of survival, which would now be filed away in the organization’s archive of Pre-State Bureaucracy persuasion? Perhaps he’d made
it to counselor status in the expertise of confession and was busy chasing debentures in Istanbul … Or had he committed suicide? Or had he already run off to a quaint corner of the earth and sat gazing at sky-tinged seas … I doubt it … If I’ve learned anything from this disease called life, then he was sitting in Daddy’s chair, holding Aruz’s phone in his hand. It’s that simple … The new Aruz wouldn’t remember Felat any more than he remembered me or our password … I was the only one living in the past, no one else. I was alone in that mausoleum of horrors that no other living thing would set foot in. Horrified … because I’d turned into my father, too! I was Ahad! I was worse than Ahad, in fact …

  Yet on the other hand, blomma … did that not mean çiçek? Çiçek … Cuma, then! Felat! Cuma! Against chance, Cuma! Against the predictable flow of time! Against all odds, Cuma! It’s Gaza, Felat! Cuma! Don’t kill me! Cuma!

  Sawdust makes me nauseated. Whenever I see sawdust on the ground, I know a life of filth has been lived there. The shed where cock fights were held three days and two nights a week, the broken-down tavern one slipped into by ducking under the shutters during Ramadan, and where I learned to knock back a couple shots and screw up my face, the police station that was open 24–7 and where I stayed for two nights, though I didn’t sleep: they all had sawdust.