by Hakan Günday
“Now,” I said, “that’s how you take revenge!”
For now I understood. They were the ones who’d presented me with those breasts, knowing I’d go after them, making my coffin even narrower and causing me to forget what I should never forget. They’d done this so they could have their revenge on me!
“See?” they said. “You wanted to touch us. And we accepted either out of fear or because we were dead. But in the end it’s you, not us, who’s gone mad! You!”
And I said, “Not enough! This much suffering is not enough! Give me some more! More, more!”
But now there was no reply. Whoever it was that had said, “More!” was no longer speaking to me.
Perhaps that was because, through a gap the size of a keyhole, it had seen all I’d done and me for the monster I was. It wouldn’t even say that one word anymore. Or it had already croaked! It had drowned in its own blood inside its confinement to become another brick in the flesh building over me. I wasn’t interested. Whether it was dead or alive, I didn’t care one bit. After all, I could yell enough for us both. I could stare at those dead faces flickering to life in the lighter flame and say, “More!” As many times as I wished! “More!” Until my throat cracked! “More! Come on! Isn’t there any more? Is this all there is? More, come on! Whatever it is you have to give, give me more! Whatever will happen, let there be more of it! More! More! More!”
Gaza! Calm down and flick off that lighter. Then close your eyes and hold your breath. The numbers you’re looking for are three and fifteen. When you came here, it was a quarter past three and that was twelve hours ago. This is the last time I help you. It looks like you won’t be hearing my voice again. Because you don’t deserve it. Now, let go of your breath. Good-bye.
Really? You’re going to leave me here alone? Fine. Go. Do what you want! So I don’t deserve to hear your voice! All right. Leave me here! Fuck off! I don’t need anything! I can very well survive without you! I might go mad, but I’ll live! I won’t just check out like you! I’ll live a long time yet, Cuma … Cuma! Was it you? Was it you all along who said, “More”? Cuma … Cuma!
I kept thinking of Dordor and Harmin trapped below the earth, unable to step onto it. Or I was hallucinating. Or I was sleeping and watching dreams revolve around my head, holding one another by the tail. I couldn’t tell if I was awake or not. I burned a mark into a leg, owner unknown, every twelve hours, keeping track of the passing time that way. On another’s back, again with the lighter, I’d written 03:15 in a burned shade. So I had no problem concerning the time and date.
I even hollered at the top of my lungs once every hour for at least five minutes, just in case someone heard me. I’d found an unopened pack of biscuits in the pocket of one of the bodies. Every four hours I put one in my mouth and let it melt on my tongue in a five-minute long ritual, believing myself to be full. I also continued to drink the rainwater distilled by human flesh …
Though I wasn’t sure how much of this I did awake and how much asleep, I was leading a more or less orderly life. The slave merchant, finally stranded on his deserted island, was already accustomed to it! Moreover, aside from all that, when I lit the lighter, I was able to witness something no one could get accustomed to! True, at times I’d been able to assist myself by picturing autopsy specialists, but this time it wasn’t working. After all, no autopsy specialist had ever had to climb into the refrigerator in the morgue to sleep with the cadavers. But I did! And this way I could closely observe the way they swelled up. Their faces and especially their bellies inflated, their skin distended, and tiny flies buzzed around me. Slightly disappointed that I wasn’t dead like the others, they soon vanished back into the darkness they’d emerged from. I lived there, too, really. I hid in the dark because I had nowhere to escape.
Everything, everywhere, and everyone stank so badly that I sat there with two pieces of fabric I tried to keep wet shoved as far as possible into my nostrils. My lips dried because I breathed through my mouth. Though that wasn’t an issue. The issue was that the flies, exercised in flying into gaping mouths, could also visit me and my tonsils. So I lived with a shawl wrapped around my face, covering my mouth and nose. I’m not sure that it stopped the awful stink, but I felt that it did. Finding fabric wasn’t a problem. Clothes were all around me. Shoes, shirts … there was even a coat. It was all a matter of fabric! Whenever I wanted to, I could grab some and tear it all off. But the three sweaters I was wearing were sufficient. I’d spread a coat and a thick woolen vest underneath me. All in all, it was clear I wouldn’t freeze to death.
Though staring at the bodies changing colors as they became more and more naked with every piece of clothing I pulled off, now that could be deadly! So my eyes were mostly shut. Despite the fact that life had scribbled over us in its inability to undo us, and left us in such pitch darkness …
I’d been there for 107 hours. My legs were a pair of logs. The blood coursing through them was no longer a river but merely sludge. It’d sat for so long it’d turned into muck. My legs were pulled into the quicksand, making my flesh heavier. No matter how much I rubbed or struck them, my blood wouldn’t move. If the world’s ugliest lake was a river cut off on both ends, the deadest legs of that hole were my own. My last resort was to lean my weight against the body behind me, raise my feet into the air and stretch my legs as much as I could to pedal an invisible bicycle. This exercise proved to be somewhat useful, and my legs belonged to me again if only for a few minutes.
Even in that tiny space, all that I possessed was so ready to leave me that I had to fight great battles to keep them intact and with me. For my mind, legs, life, and all that I had were just poised to leave me there at any moment! I knew they were! They were waiting for me to become too weak to fight. As if we hadn’t spent all those years together, shared all we had! They were looking for a chance to betray me and were practically yelling, “We were never loyal to you!”
What was there to trust in this world if even your mind was after the chance to betray you? The minds of others? Never! That was how the body behind me had spent his life in the reservoir. By putting his trust in the mind of another … I’d wrapped him up in clothes and turned him into a mummy. While doing that, I’d seen his face, recognizing him as the old man’s son. He’d first put his trust in his father’s mind and then Rastin’s. He’d become a dog! I’d seen with my own eyes how easily a man like that, making decisions based on the minds of others, could switch sides and captivities. And how well had that fared him, trusting others? What benefit could come from that? Had he made fewer mistakes? Absolutely not! Perhaps he’d only had to own up to fewer mistakes, had never really felt any responsibility during those days he’d spent at the reservoir.
The bizarre tranquility of his face, as I wrapped it up in a thin vest, really said it all. He had the expression of one who’d never had to make a decision based on his own mind in his entire life. A face untouched by responsibility and facial muscles unstrained by free will … there! Putting his trust in the minds of others had worked for this man! A weight the size of all decisions to be made during a lifetime had been lifted, in a sense even liberating him, on the day he’d decided to stop making his own decisions and let others make them for him. Like all people, he’d been born under siege by the obligation to make decisions but had shown the courage to give up his will, even at the cost of becoming a machine, to break through that siege. Where he’d emerged was beyond responsibility! In trusting the minds of others rather than his own, he’d kept his mind unsoiled by life, and through constant obedience he’d kept himself from being questioned by anyone. Especially by his own conscience! His exemption from all questioning was thanks to this exact obedience.
For one who’d given up his will, obedience was the freedom to make all the mistakes in the world! Obedience was an awesome way of committing all the crimes one would never dare commit on one’s own! Obedience was a dream you woke up to as a different person each day! Such a dream it was that one constantly dreame
d doing things that one knew in reality one hadn’t done. Obedience was a miracle! It would make an ordinary person launch the atom bomb and then convince the whole world that that person was innocent. Obedience was the antidote to guilt and consciousness! Everyone should obey! We should all find someone to obey and blame them! Whether we were the leader of a country or the leader of a children’s gang, we should find someone to obey.
Above all, it was essential to keeping one’s sanity. Even if we were an utterly lonely emperor, with no one around to command, we would do well to find someone to obey. That was what God was for! So all the kings, emperors, dictators, and presidents of the world could obey! So they could wash their consciousnesses with the bleach of obedience and say, “He who giveth!” to have a peaceful night’s sleep!
In fact, only leaders were allowed to obey God. All the other people carried out the orders of both the leader and God. The whole issue lay in deciding whom to obey. A single choice, and then you were exempt from all ensuing choices! Kind of like a horse race, all this business was! You had to place your will in the right person. It should be the kind of leader that would, in a time of crisis, never tell his people, “All this is your fault!” He should take and spend all the willpower entrusted him and entrust his own will in a god that would never question him. That way, he could send into space the responsibility for all the crimes committed in that nation like some industrial waste. The condition for not going insane from remorse and staying pure as a community was chain obedience.
I myself had obeyed my father. I’d trusted in his mind and given up my own. But later, by bits, the pest of free will had reared its head and led me to make some decisions. So what good had it done me, trusting my own mind? Had I made fewer mistakes? Absolutely not! In fact, I was in such a state I was even responsible for the breath I took! I’d taken over steering my own world and sunk it so deep that it was crushed underneath other people. I was drowned by all the minds I hadn’t put my trust in. My free will imprisoned me inside a cell made of flesh.
The son of the old man was probably laughing at me beneath the vest covering his face! I was sure he was taunting me! Though maybe he felt sorry for me. That was why he didn’t mind me leaning my back against him. I didn’t mind him, either. I wasn’t angry.
Actually, I wasn’t anything. I didn’t feel anything. I was in a fantasy world. Something like a world of memories … I tried to think of the good ones. The good memories. They were few, but they made an appearance anyhow. Mostly they drifted into my mind like leaves from my times with Dordor and Harmin. In fact, right then, I was thinking of Maxime. I recalled how much I’d laughed …
One day, Harmin had found a spy camera on one of the immigrants he’d taken onboard his boat. At first he suspected that it was a spy astronaut sent from a rival crime planet but, figuring out that the man was a journalist, soon calmed down.
He was a French journalist named Maxime researching illegal immigration routes and trying to figure out how you could go in one hole in the East and come out another in the West. He’d landed in Baghdad in a passenger plane from Paris, mailed his passport back to Paris, and then introduced himself to the first illegal immigrant he’d come across as a Georgian hoping to get to Paris.
Seeing the sheaf of cash waving in front of his face, that idiot in his turn didn’t suspect a thing and said, “Okay!”
That was how Maxime’s journey, which he embarked on under the delusion that he would unlock the world’s biggest secret, had started. He’d been included in a group of five and sent directly on the boat without coming by us. Harmin’s attentive eyes, however, had sensed that there was something off about Maxime and found the minute offness hidden in the strap of his backpack as if he’d put it there himself.
Maxine had been so terrified at being discovered that he’d somehow gotten away from Harmin to leap off the boat adrift in the middle of the sea and begun swimming without knowing where to. Harmin had then rolled and lit a joint to watch the Frenchman’s hopeless strokes through the open sea. A while later, when the journalist was almost depleted with exhaustion, Harmin grabbed and pulled him aboard, effectively saving his life.
Despite thinking he’d be killed on the spot, Maxine got away with a perfectly tolerable beating that gave him a pair of identically black eyes before being presented with a completely unexpected proposal.
“It’s okay!” Harmin said. “I understand, it’s no problem. Naturally you want to know how this thing works … but that’s not something you do with a spy camera or whatnot! Here’s what we do: you pay us, and then you shoot a documentary about us. You can ask anything you want and we’ll answer. Then at least you won’t have to think about where to insert that stupid camera!”
At first Maxine was unable to believe his ears, but then said that he needed a cameraman and a sound guy and asked to call a TV channel in France that he thought he could sell the documentary to.
At that, Harmin replied, “There’s no need. We’ll take care of that. You find the money,” and locked Maxine in the bow locker.
A few days later, all the technical gear including a professional camera and a mike that resembled a dead cat on the end of a spear had been delivered to Harmin, as per the order placed with his burglar friends in the city. In the meantime Maxine had gone into town accompanied by Dordor to withdraw the desired cash, and so the preparations were complete.
Of course, familiarizing himself with the subtleties of the trade of trafficking wasn’t Maxine’s sole objective. More than that, he wanted human drama! A hefty news report of human drama! A piece of news about humanity that would fill his hands with a few awards and, if possible, his pockets with a few stacks of money, at the same time clear some European consciences! This documentary was a dream come true for Maxime! He’d come to the right place. We had it all. Humanity, drama, all of it! The children denied nourishment on the way, the women raped, the elderly people deposited into the sea because they’d died of heart attacks … We were a gigantic human circus!
Yes, the Frenchman was definitely in the right place. At the wrong time, though. Because it was my birthday and although he hadn’t an inkling, Maxime was part of my present. Naturally I didn’t have an inkling about any of this, either. I didn’t find out about it until much later. All Dordor and Harmin told me was: “Come to Fox Cove tomorrow and don’t you laugh!”
When I went to the cove in question the next morning, I was greeted with this sight: Dordor and Harmin sat on the rocks wearing ski masks while a blond man with a camera on his shoulder, whom I later found out was Maxime, stood in front of them. With them were two dark men whom I also later found out were the procurers of the stolen goods. One wore headphones and had a gigantic mic in his hands while the other examined the reflector he was holding.
As soon as Dordor and Harmin saw me, they quickly stood and ran to me, bowing and kissing my hands, hulking bodies and all. At the same time they cried, “Don’t laugh! Look really tough! Yell at us even!”
I did so even as I had no idea why. Watching all this with his eyebrows raised so high they almost merged with his hair, Maxime ran toward us at Harmin’s command. They spoke in English. Whatever it was Harmin said, Maxime was also soon bowing down in front of me and kissing my hands. When they later explained, I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my seat.
It was really very simple. Nothing to be confused about. I, twelve years old at the time, was a child shaman who was the spiritual guide to every trafficker in the Aegean! That entire criminal network saw me as a demigod and never set sail without receiving my blessings.
When Maxime asked, “Fine, but how’d he know we would be at this cove?” Harmin went as far as to reply, “He knows everything! His eyes see all.”
At that, thinking he’d fallen into a paradise of deranged criminals just like the one he’d imagined, Maxine bowed down with great reverence and kissed my hands … but there was a problem. The child shaman wasn’t going to allow filming. Nothing could be done if he didn’t all
ow it. Maxine desperately asked if there was anything that could be done to persuade me. Dordor turned to me and asked:
“Do you remember that story you wrote?”
I could, since I’d only ever written one in my life!
“Yeah?”
“There, that’s what we’re gonna shoot now!”
“How?”
“We’re making a movie! We’ll adapt your story! And you’ll be in it!”
Dordor’s voice was all around me in that pitch-black hole. My eyes filled with tears as I heard it and I kept on remembering.
“It’s your birthday, kiddo!” Harmin was saying. “This is your present! You’re gonna have a movie! Now how do you like that?”
I liked it a lot, of course! I was ecstatic!
“Don’t let on, now, stop grinning!” said Harmin.
I frowned, but I couldn’t keep still. The only way to convince the child shaman to allow filming was to shoot a film for him! When Maxime heard this, he was momentarily at a loss for words, but then must have pictured himself on stage at a large hall being applauded because he said, “Okay!”
Actually, this whole thing about a present, that is, making a film for me, had occurred to Harmin as he’d watched Maxime … the exact instant he’d puffed on his weed, watching Maxime thrashing around in the sea in hopes of being able to swim away … this is what Harmin had thought: “So if Gaza likes stories so much, why not give him one? In fact, why not film it and let this guy do it? If he’s as well acquainted with cameras as he appears to be, that is!” Then he’d made up that lie about the documentary to find out if Maxime really could use all the equipment needed for shooting, and then said, “All right! Fantastic!” In the time it takes to smoke one joint, he’d come up with both the idea for the film as a present and decided who would direct it. The sea air really did clear one’s mind!