by Hakan Günday
But Judas was in no state to utter a thing. Whenever he opened his mouth, he was overcome by guilt. Even if he were to tell, who would believe him? Eleven against one! He didn’t stand a chance. He could endure neither the lies that were starting to be spread about him nor the truth he had witnessed. He stopped in front of the first wishing tree he came upon and buried the grail he was carrying underneath it. Then he hanged himself from the thickest branch of the tree … and a dog came upon the tree. It began digging and became rabid as soon as it reached the bones. Then another dog and yet another became rabid. Upon seeing this, the peasants dug a deeper hole, tossed the grail into it, and covered it with rocks.
But since they were unable to keep their mouths shut, they told of the cursed grail that turned rabid anyone who came near and brought about the crucifixion of Christ, even if only in whispers. The story was shaved into shape like a sculpture as it moved through the ages and from ear to ear. Who would want their village to be remembered by a cursed grail? Thus the first thing to be forgotten was the spot where the grail was buried. Then Judas was eradicated from the story. After all, it was a sin to even mention his name. All that remained was a grail that had belonged to Christ. And it came time for the bones and skull in the grail to evaporate. Due to technicality, it was easier to start the tale, “There was once a grail.” instead of, “There was once a skull and three bones inside a grail.” The story’s reach depended on it being easy to remember.
Lastly, the word “curse” from the story became sacred because it scared children. In fact, with time that grail took on the form of bowl, or chalice. After all, those that had buried it were long gone and there was no one around to belie what was told. And so in order to recover what one generation had thrown into a hole and covered with rocks to get rid of, other generations started wars and called them the Crusades. Everyone’s after it still. Even if they don’t know it, they’re all after gnawing on whatever is left of Christ and hearing the voice of God … but what could He say even if He did speak again? Would the answers to the questions be any different after all this time? Weren’t dogs the only believers in man? Was there any point in chasing after the Holy Grail just to hear the tone of God’s voice? After a skull and three bones!
As I left the Government Office, that was about as much as was left of me, you see! A skull, three bones, and empty space, that was all. A Gaza filled with nothingness or nothingness encased in Gaza …
Certainly with such doors open in front of me and the population of an entire town behind me ready to push me forward, it would have been only right for me to cross that threshold and receive the education I deserved. But I didn’t and so remained rooted in Kandalı, that wormhole, like a thousand-year-old tree. Even despite the fact that my situation had been taken over by the town the minute the school principal disclosed my score and things had immediately progressed outside Ahad’s control.
So I could have escaped … but I couldn’t. Simply because my father had said he loved me … pressing down on the blister on my wrist all the while! If Ahad loved me, it didn’t matter that I didn’t love myself. I couldn’t leave Ahad … perhaps I hadn’t wanted to leave in the first place. To leave and get away from that reservoir … I had merely distracted myself with the possibility of leaving. For actually my father, me, and the reservoir, we were the Trinity itself! We were the real Trinity! My father and I were an eight-legged insect. We scrambled over the wet walls of the reservoir. We had been speaking the same tongue from birth. No one could understand this tongue, that served only to speak of the reservoir, except for us. Other people may have been created or spewed into the sky out of some white hole in the solar system but we were different. We were the only living things on Earth that had come to life through evolution. Whereas other people were different probabilities of one soul, we were the beginning, middle, and end of one probability! We lived in a place only accessible by holding your breath. Outside the universe. In the reservoir … our mothers had shot us at the world. We had been born as bullets and whizzed around in the reservoir to pierce the stomach of whoever happened to cross our path. Our range was our lives. Our name was the Story. We were about two men and a reservoir.
But the paper From Kandalı to the World didn’t care enough to cover the renunciation chapter of the story. More accurately, it specifically didn’t care. Because at the head of those who had promised to aid my education came the owner of the paper. Therefore some foray into the matter might have cost him! Also, the memory of Kandalı was known not for its capacity for forgetting but for misremembering! Before long they started believing that I’d gone to Istanbul and always remembered it that way. And when they saw me on the street, they remarked that I looked like that boy who had gone to Istanbul … and I went back to my reservoir and hung on one wall a large clock with a white face, of which the second hand ticked every 150 milliseconds because I’d messed with the mechanism. A clock that slowed down time by one and a half.
The immigrants didn’t have blisters on their wrists that you could press. Their wrists had watches. And I collected those watches the moment they got off the truck. They never had phones. For fear of getting robbed, they swathed themselves in fabrics with a thousand secret pockets and carried only meager amounts of money on them. I wasn’t interested in money. My preoccupation was with time. I was interested in the immigrants’ gradual decline into head-bashing as they looked at that clock and the minutes that just wouldn’t pass. Only then would they know the pain Ahad inflicted on me with one finger. If I couldn’t put myself in their place … we would just have to try the opposite. Not just the opposite, we would try everything … They would teach me about humanity. I in turn would share my pain with them. If my father had said he loved me … then this was our only salvation. Then of course we could all commit suicide and end the matter. All those immigrants and myself. But out of all the religions, they had to believe in the ones that forbid suicide! I was aware of all their minute calculations. I wasn’t that dumb. Not all that dumb! Perhaps because I didn’t put on the watch that the governor gave me and jump on the first bus to Istanbul … I was that dumb, dumber, and dumbest! Because what I always kept on my person, rather than the watch, was Cuma’s paper frog. It didn’t even leap anymore when I pressed onto its back. The only thing it did was talk to me in an imitation of Cuma’s voice. Or I was simply hallucinating and what was talking was the picture on the paper Cuma had folded over and over into a frog. A picture he’d drawn himself. The picture of a mountain. Or a hill. Or a reef. Two cavities in its slope that was like a straight wall. And a statue inside each cavity. Around them, other reefs and other dark cavities. Black dots resembling cave entrances. In his Turkish comprised of three words he had said, “Me, home!” It didn’t make a bit of sense to me. I’d thought he was crazy. Huge statues carved into a reef and a Cuma that lived in one of the tens of holes in yet another reef!
Seeing that I didn’t believe a single word, he had laughed and begun folding the paper … how could I have known? That there was a valley called Bamiyan in an area called Hazarajat in a country called Afghanistan and that people there lived in caves carved into the reefs by Buddhist monks 1500 years ago? How could I have known that every morning, since the sixth century, they woke up to two statues of Buddha, one fifty-three and the other thirty-five meters tall, also carved into the reefs? How could I have known that the larger one, Buddha, was the Vairocana that represented the embodiment of the void, and that this could be derived from looking at the posture, or the mudra, of the statue? How could I also have known that Buddha came from the Shakya Dynasty, and that was why the smaller statue was named Shakyamuni? And who could know who it was that spoke to me? The frog, or one of the two Buddhas? Who knew? That every time I looked at the two giants in that picture, Dordor and Harmin came to mind … in truth even I didn’t know. I didn’t know why I thought of them when I looked at that picture. Maybe it was because they had been two colons that rose up on either side of me and held up my childhood
. Because once upon a time they had stood on either side of me and prevented life from crashing down on me … maybe there was yet another reason that I thought of them …
“You know what?” Harmin had said. We were sitting on deck. The sun seemed about to come up, and the sky changed colors as it rose and fell.
“A vicious cycle never disappears. It just expands and makes itself forgotten. Why? Because what you call a cycle is just your basic circle. It takes so long to make a full tour that you don’t even notice you passed the same spot twice. Sometimes the vicious cycle grows so much you don’t live long enough to get back to where you started. One keeps galloping on it like a blind horse. Thinks he’s going in a straight line. That he’s making progress. Even thinks he died while making progress and breathes his last in peace! Blindness is imperative, of course! Otherwise you’d know you’re running around in circles. That’s why old people lose their eyesight, you see? So they won’t know they’re passing over the same spot twice. Blindness is a natural defense against the vicious cycle. A mechanical response! Like life itself … In fact, that’s why life is so boring! Because life is also just a response. Now, take a look around you! Everything antagonizes life! What you eat, drink, say, the breaths you take, everything! So that’s life, only a response against that! Against death first and foremost, of course! They must have taught you at school. What’s the basis of science? Cause and effect, right? You know what that means? It means nature’s tenacity! Everything’s a matter of tenacity. Especially life. And that’s the very reason life is as boring as watching a team of tenacious parasites that think just getting to be in a game is as good as a consolation goal. So you don’t need hope or a purpose to survive. It’s enough to know you’re going to die. You’re alive because you’re in danger. You’re alive because you’re dying by every second. That’s all. That’s the meaning of life: fear of death! Are you following me?”
I didn’t. How could I have understood what Harmin was trying to say? I was thirteen. Maybe twelve.
“So, if you really want to live, you really want to have a purpose, you first have to shake off that fear of death! Fear of death, you know, the meaning that comes for free when you receive life, that they push into your hand the minute you’re born, you’ve got to toss it away! Only then can you be free! Only then can you go and find the true meaning of your life! Now make me a promise.”
“Okay,” I’d said.
“You’re not to ever fear death. Because that fear, that’s the one thing in this world that can blind you!”
“Promise,” I’d said. “I won’t.”
He had laughed. Then he’d rolled himself another cigarette.
“Well, do you know how not to fear?”
“No,” I’d said.
He’d shown me the tattoo on his wrist: Dead to be free. But I didn’t know English. Yet.
“Death includes life, Gaza. You know what they say, starting something is half of finishing it. So is being born. Half of dying. It’s enough that you accept that. I’m not asking you to believe. Because there’s nothing about that to believe. That’s nature for you. It’s enough that you see … see that you’re dead already and accept it. The rest will come.”
“What about you?” I’d asked. “Aren’t you afraid of dying?”
“Me? I’m a fool that’s afraid of even treading on the ground. All I do is sit around like this, on this boat! You know the lotus flower? It looks like the lily. I’m sitting on the water just like one of those. So is Dordor … he’s also sitting … other than that we don’t do a damn thing.”
That I thought of Dordor and Harmin every time I looked at the statues in that picture of Cuma’s didn’t merely have to do with their being two giants. There were also the lotus flowers … I learned about it years later. Why lotus flowers rested on the water and Buddha’s palm … I found out that their implications, as various as their colors, started out in wisdom, passed through enlightenment and rested in mental clarity before ascending to peace. I learned how they held their breath to dive into life’s depths and that, naturally, frogs lived among them. Frogs that looked as if they’d been folded out of wet paper … it took a while for me to find all this out. After all, I was finding out as I went along. Finding out as you went along made the journey longer, of course. But I wasn’t in any hurry. No one was running late to where I was going. They couldn’t have if they tried. There was no running late for those that knew where they were headed. If the destination at hand was somewhere you could be late or early to, it wasn’t even worth setting out. If Harmin had been with me now, he would have said, “Those that fear death are the only ones that make appointments. They’re the only ones with purposes that require making appointments. They’re bound to graduate in four years, go insane if they don’t have a job in six years, buy a house some way or another in ten years, and walk out of life in fifty years via one of at most ten varieties of death!” And since Harmin being on one side of me meant that Dordor was on the other, he would then noisily add:
“You’d think they made a fucking appointment to be born! What’s all this about appointments and being late and being early! If you can find a way, walk! Or sit down and stay sat! You know the lotus flower?”
If I were to say, “Harmin already told me, Dordor,” he would first give me a look and then take a drag from his joint before he spoke:
“Just wait till you hear it from me! Say, now I’m curious! How am I going to tell it, I wonder?”
I watched the group of thirty-three scatter to different points of the reservoir where they let themselves sink to the ground. Dragging their backs down over the wall, they squatted and sat. Only one remained standing. A young man, the frame of his glasses broken passing through God knows which hole and taped in the middle. He caught my eye. He raised his index finger the way I once had in school to ask permission to speak and said:
“I knows Turkish.”
“So do I,” I said.
He laughed.
I didn’t. I asked: “What?”
“When are we go?”
At least he could put together something resembling a sentence.
“What’s your name?”
“Rastin.”
“Are you all from Afghanistan?”
“Yes. But different different. There is Tajik, there is Pashtun …”
“You can understand them all, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re going to be my translator.”
“Okay … tell.”
“Not now. That’s all for now. I’ll come back later.”
“When go?”
“I don’t know, Rastin.”
“Your name?”
“Gaza.”
He laughed and spoke. “Gaza? You are mujahideen?”
He extended his hand. I assume we were supposed to shake hands. Below ground! I could try. I extended my hand as well, and we shook, as though we’d been introduced on an ordinary day for an ordinary reason. I even said, most likely out of habit, “Pleased to meet you.”
He laughed again. “No death, no pleased.”
“What?”
“When mujahideen die, then pleased.”
I would have left, but he wouldn’t let go of my hand. I didn’t get people who shook hands for so long. They’d cling on to the accosted hand as if they’d waited to hold it their whole lives. Also, instead of practically dying of exhaustion like he should have been, he was still peering into my eyes and laughing as if to convince me that what he’d said was amusing. Just as I was about to withdraw my hand and leave he asked:
“You, student?”
“Yes.”
I was lying.
“Me also student. Kabul University. Law.”
I pulled my hand away as soon as he loosened his scrawny fingers, every bone of which I could feel. I pulled back a little too fast. His hand was left hanging in the air. But I didn’t care. After all, we weren’t about to be friends.
“I’m going to give you some
buckets now. You can hand them out.”
“Bucket?”
“No toilet, only buckets, you understand?”
The smile covering his entire face vanished in an instant. That the topic had suddenly come to his bowels, and the shittiness of the situation he was in, right when he had believed himself to be in an everyday social interaction, had punched a bucket-sized hole in his pride. I was able to tell things like that now. I could feel how stung those still capable of shame were. I hadn’t been able to set foot outside Kandalı in fifteen years, but people from at least three continents had come to my doorstep. Some had not only come to my doorstep but walked all over my feet too, but by now I knew them all. There wasn’t a variety of immigrant I was unaffiliated with. This Rastin, most probably, was one of those that left his country on political grounds. Because they were the most likely to wear broken glasses. Since every policeman that crossed their path would find a way to break them! To make sure they wouldn’t read any more books. But Rastin got himself back together.
“I see, bucket! You collect sample, for test!” he said, and laughed again.
I didn’t reply. I just shook my head and left … I locked the door to the reservoir and went to sit at my desk. The metal table in the shed was my office now. My father’s carpentry was in the past. There was a monitor on it where I watched the reservoir and took notes on the groups. I even had a computer next to it along with a printer. In its memory were hundreds of files. In those files, information about the hundreds of people that had passed through the reservoir … First of all, I’d divided up the groups by the duration they stayed in the reservoir: there were four main sections, 2, 7, 14, and Over 14 Days. Because the greatest variable of their behavior was the duration of their stay in the reservoir. So, their reservoir lifespan … They displayed a distinct change between day two and five. But when they finished out seven days and started to think they might have to stay another seven, their reactions quickly changed too.