by Hakan Günday
Azim was highly impressed by my file that was forwarded to him by my school in Kandalı. As soon as Faik left, he’d said, “We’re going to do great things, you and I!”
I completely misunderstood him at the time. It was also out of habit. After all, most of the adults I’d known until then had been absolute frauds. I thought Azim was looking for a partner in crime, just like my father had once. What Azim really meant was university. I was to finish high school with a top average after all! There was no need to go into it. The real concern was which university to go to and what kind of academic education I was to receive. I was in complete agreement with Azim! Our meeting was that of a naturally born champion and the trainer who’d waited for that athlete his whole life. It was ambition at first sight!
Unfortunately I’d arrived midterm and wouldn’t be able to start school right away. It would be unacceptable, however, for me to do nothing. Azim immediately found a sponsor to help pay for language courses for me, saying, “You’re to learn English!”
Just when I started going to the classes, fourteen hours a week, he turned up with a retired high school teacher, this time saying, “You’re to study mathematics.” In the meantime he enrolled me in chess club and said, “I’m expecting you to place at worst third in the first tournament!”
And I did everything Azim said. It was all so soothing and kept me so occupied that I thought neither of the darkness I’d come out of or those bodies. It didn’t even enter my mind. It was forgotten. Actually, it had been wiped clean the moment I stepped in the dormitory. I never even dreamed of those faces. I dreamed of other things. Dreams about the future. Dreams about chess, about college, about books and the Gaza I would become …
There was just the one night when rather than all this, I dreamed of myself coughing. Then a key appeared in the palm of my hand. A small black key. I recognized the damp key in my hand.
“This is the key to a safe,” I said in the dream. “The key to the safe in my mind. Everything about my past is in that safe. It’s all locked up in there. That’s why I remember none of it. And since I don’t happen to have a sea inside to toss this key into, I threw it up … Nothing to worry about … go back to sleep …”
It was actually a dream of reason. It was an attempt at rationalizing my being able to avoid remembering a hundred times a day all the hells I’d traveled through. I didn’t remember because I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t remember because I was strong enough not to. It was the kind of strength that made my past and memories subordinate to only me. Most importantly, the horrendous ache that had assailed me several times in the hospital seemed to have left me for good. It, too, appeared to be subordinate to me. I’d banished the ache and it had fucked off. That was as it should be! Because in just the same way, I would bring my future to its knees before me and do whatever I asked of myself! With the support of Azim, naturally. I couldn’t do it without him. My only link with the external world was Azim. At the moment, he was the navigator of the gondola that would take me into the future.
He worked me so hard during the period until school started that my rebirth, which started the moment I found out my father was dead, continued prodigiously thanks to my ever-learning, ever-expanding mind. I no longer attacked the pages of every book I came across the way I used to. I only attended to the ones I needed to read, to preserve time. Azim made me the library attendant. Actually, since the other kids went to school, leaving me by myself in the building, I’d become responsible for everything.
My days passed in a flurry of cleaning, tidying up, going to English class, and following the study schedule Azim prepared for me. For instance, I washed the toilets and showers for an hour, then studied math for an hour. Or I sorted and labeled the books donated to the library, then read up on history or philosophy. Azim thought I ought to especially read Plato. I was reading the Dialogues he’d given me as a present. I also had to finish at least two novels per week and write summaries to leave on Azim’s desk. I had almost no free time at all. I worked all the time. I was either reading or writing or attending to the building.
One of the rare intervals I was able to give my mind was after lunch. I sat with Azim after I brought his coffee to his office and played chess with him. He wasn’t as good at it as I was. So I was able to think of other things or look around the room as I waited for his move. Photos of his kids and wife, awards in a glass cabinet, certificates on the wall, and more photos of his kids … He had two daughters. They were both students at the university. But Azim never talked about his family. He never brought it up, as though those were mock photos he’d bought along with the frames. Azim and I talked of other things. We conversed about the future, about knowledge, the books I read, life, and discipline. After all, Azim was a discipline counter. A discipline-o-meter … Sometimes I got the impression that he even knew the number of words that came out of his mouth. Discipline, rather than his spine, was what kept him upright. Discipline, a selection of words and most often silence … the distance between us was both far and close. We were intimate as father and son and complete strangers at the same time … Sometimes we didn’t talk at all … I’d merely enter and exit his room. Sometimes Azim called after me as I was leaving:
“Gaza?”
“Yes, sir,” I’d say.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine …”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Good …”
I started school nearly seven months after my arrival at the dormitory. It was a mediocre school with utterly incompetent teachers and a bunch of idiots for students. Even so it was perfect for me, since it was clear from day one that I’d be top of my class. Azim even said, “Just bear it for the year and then we can arrange a scholarship.” He was true to his word. The following year I was enrolled on scholarship in a private school with a tuition that could take at least eight illegal immigrants from Dushanbe to London.
And so at seventeen I found myself in a place the children of the wealthiest families of my country of birth were schooled. The kids here were even stupider. I had no difficulty surpassing them all to become the pride of the school, the crest of which I carried on my uniform. To boot, I had neither mother nor father. This made me an even more touching spectacle in the eyes of my teachers. Moreover, I had nothing more in my pockets than a meager allowance from Azim and a paper frog. I could neither go skiing in Kitzbühel in the winter, like the other kids, nor be grudgingly dragged into the New York Metropolitan Museum by my parents in the summer. The indisputable reality was that my existence in the school raised the average intelligence and perception curve. We, myself and everyone else, expected much from Gaza! Azim most of all …
I saw less of him now that I was in my second year in the dorm. Our chess sessions had waned to once per week. On Friday evenings, right before Azim departed from the dorm to go home, we’d meet in his room and make up for all that was left unfinished in that one hour. Most of the kids in the dormitory were deathly jealous of me, but there was nothing they could do about it. There was nothing I could do for them, either. I just helped them out twice a week in study hall with the classes they struggled with, hoping that would atone me for the discrepancy in privilege between us. They were all worrying about what they would do once they turned eighteen and had to leave the dorm to face real life. Actually they could submit a plea to the administration and stay in the dorm until the age of twenty-five, given that they got into university. However, none of them had such plans. All they wanted was that their current lives freeze into a chunk of ice and stay that way forever. Some of them even lost sleep over this and secretly cried at night.
I’d been staying in a four-person room since I’d arrived in the dorm. I’d been with the same boys for the past two years: Rauf, Derman, and Ömer. Like their peers, the three of them had common interests: girls. Before bedtime they always wove shared fantasies concerning sexuality before they could close their eyes. None of them had ever touched
a woman and eagerly waited for that day to arrive while at the same time hoping they would never grow up. For them, becoming adults meant a full sack of loneliness and disaster. Of course I never told them anything about my past. I definitely didn’t mention my various sexual encounters with the dead and the living. For them I was nothing more than a roommate they could trust because I didn’t steal their money or blab their secrets. I didn’t wish to be anything more anyway.
All my relationships with the people I knew from the dorm or school consisted of temporary engagements much like the wheels of a clockwork with one another. Everything about my life was merely functional. All those people I greeted, who knew me by name, were no more significant to me than my shoelaces. Everything had a function, that was all. And mostly the same function at that. I made small talk with them and they left me alone. I knew that not communicating at all would raise question marks and only make my life more difficult. I was fixated on the future. Unlike my roommates, the things I feared were behind me, not ahead. My relations with my schoolmates weren’t much different.
Although up to a point the vague devilishness and pair of pale blue eyes I inherited from Ahad made me piquant for the girls in my grade, I knew they mostly thought I was just an irritating asshole. I was pretty sure their families compared them to me with each low grade they brought home. “You have everything, and look at Gaza! The boy is all alone in the world! Yet look how successful he is!” They must be hearing this all the time.
In turn, as they nodded at their parents, they were surely imploring inwardly, “I wish you would just die so I could be an orphan like Gaza!”
Actually, I thought they were assholes too. At least technically. Although every once in a while, I did see their mothers. And their fathers. They would come by the school. What could it be that enabled the ugliest animal of the forest to mate with the most beautiful, except for money? Many other things aside, money also helped make every generation more beautiful. So it appeared that the mothers of most of the students had sold themselves at least once. Beauty was a contagious stock. I could see it. I wasn’t that dumb. Not all that dumb …
Thanks to the scholarship Azim had got me through his efforts as almost a one-man Ministry of Education, everything was coming along the way it should. But now Azim was also changing. He thought I wasn’t spending enough time with him, insisting I go to university in Istanbul. But I’d already done my research. This was during the years when the Internet was actually useful. I’d looked at all the universities in the world that seemed interesting and made my decision. I wanted to go to England. To Cambridge University, to be exact. Despite the fact that Azim thought I should study international relations in Boğaziçi University, I really wanted to study social anthropology. A department devoted to indoctrinating the rules of interpersonal exploitation held no interest for me. I would rather be where those rules were unearthed and recorded.
After all, I’d spent my whole life thoroughly studying the individual-society relationship. Neither Cambridge nor any other school could hope for a student that knew humanity as well as I did. What other student enrolled in or about to enroll in social anthropology in Cambridge had conducted social experiments on people at fifteen, as I had? If there was to be a user manual on the creature known as man, then I was the person to write it. Azim’s little dreams, trapped inside the walls of the dorm he ran, didn’t matter to me. I couldn’t conceivably limit myself to them. If Azim wouldn’t help me get into Cambridge, then I had no more use for him. His function in my life went out like the light of a dying sun. He himself was unaware of this, however. He thought that he still lit up my world as though he were Socrates. In reality he was just a cooling rock that had no more use. In fact, I could sense that he would do everything in his power to keep me from going to Cambridge. It was time for me to recover the freedom I’d traded in in the name of my interests …
Toward the end of the year, on a Friday evening, we sat playing chess in Azim’s room as usual. Azim’s eyes would ordinarily be fixed on the checkered board and its sixty-four squares, calculating his next move. Now, however, like me, he was glancing around and not really paying attention to the game. Our gazes met as they roamed around the room. He took a breath and said:
“Have I ever told you that I’m proud of you?”
He hadn’t. Now he didn’t have to.
“Thank you.”
“Really!” he said. “Excelling at your studies after all the things you went through … helping me out around here so much …”
I gave another thanks …
“Well, how do you do it?”
“Excuse me?”
“How do you manage to do it?”
“I don’t know …”
“Because I can’t …”
We were no longer playing chess. We’d moved over into a different game. That’s why I stayed silent. But Aziz went on.
“I’m fifty-one years old. I’ve spent my whole life with children like you. Of course none of them were quite like you, that has to be said! But … I’ve always been surrounded by children, do you understand? I did everything I could for them … and what came of it? What good did it do? It’s really all in vain, you know? All in vain!”
“How could it be?” I said. “Who knows how many children’s lives you’ve changed?”
“That’s right,” he said. “I did …”
He leaned back in his chair and took an envelope out of the inside pocket of his jacket.
“I found this on my desk this morning. Someone wrote me a letter. Look … it even has a stamp. How odd … it must have been years since I’ve received a letter … You know what it says? That I’ve been molesting you. In fact, that I have some sort of relation with you … and that I’ll be reported to the institution if I don’t resign …”
I laughed. “Who’d write that sort of nonsense?”
“I don’t know … It isn’t signed.”
“It must surely be someone from here. I know all of their handwritings. If you’ll allow me …” I said, extending my hand.
Azim, however, put the envelope back in his pocket, saying, “It’s typed.” Then he shook his head and continued. “I’m so sorry, Gaza … so sorry …”
“Don’t be,” I said. “Don’t you be sorry … you and I know what went on. We know the truth. You never molested me, and we never had any relationship of that sort … We fell in love as two men, that’s all!”
“But you weren’t the way I am … I pressured you.”
“No! No one in this life can ever pressure me into doing anything! Now, don’t think about it anymore … Also, it’s your turn … If you don’t figure something out, it’s checkmate for you in four moves.”
All my relationships had a function, and I wasn’t really that different from my classmates’ mothers. Azim had done all he could for me, and now all he was good for was playing chess. He was hopeless at it too, and worse than that, he couldn’t imagine a life without me. I left Azim alone in his room with the walls closing in on him and headed to the stairs. I leafed through the pages of a newly purchased book of poems as I slowly ascended. They were written by some guy named Rimbaud. I don’t know why, but every line I read felt familiar. Although I’d never written any poetry, I somehow recognized the stories in his words … Does reincarnation, I wondered, only happen for the Dalai Lama? Or does Rimbaud keep dropping by because he has unfinished business in the world? I was dwelling on these things and chuckling as I went into my room.
I cared neither for Azim nor for that guy called Verlaine whose poems I’d read a few months ago. It was so awful I couldn’t enjoy a single word. His only contribution had been to introduce me to Rimbaud. Or should I say, to myself?
Azim left and was replaced by one Bedri, every bit a clerk as Faik the governor’s driver had been. He’d also been raised in a dormitory. Every time he opened his mouth, he’d begin with, “I was just like you.”
I laughed inwardly every time I looked at this man who claimed to
be just like me. The moment he arrived, he picked up on the fact that I was a meticulously operated goldmine. After all, for a government worker, an accomplishment that he hadn’t had to waste office hours on falling into his lap was a stroke of great luck. He could flaunt me all he wanted, even take me with him on visits to ministries and parade me around like a circus animal. For I looked so good I could be the logo for the Foundation of Social Services and Children’s Welfare! I was living proof of how well the system worked!
He kept saying, “Absolutely!” as he listened to my plans about Cambridge! “We must absolutely make this happen! You have to become a man of science! Don’t worry, I’ll do everything in my power!”
I no longer had any need for the little games I had resorted to with Azim to secure myself. In Bedri’s book, it was enough that I be a star who could dazzle the minister responsible for social policy. On his path to counsellorship, I had the capacity to catapult Bedri into the kind of position he ordinarily could never have attained. For that I needed to finish high school as top of my grade and be patient. Although I was to turn eighteen in the final year of high school, Bedri would assure me, “Of course you’re going to stay with us, I’ll see to it.” And it was as he said …
In the meantime I parted with my roommates one by one and waved them all off to their new lives. Rauf left first, then Ömer … Derman was the last one to go … Who knows where they are now? Who knows what they’re up to? Those people who never did me a wrong turn and who accepted me as their oldest friend from the first day, who knows where in the world they exist as the finished sentences they are?
Rauf had never known his parents. Ömer, on the other hand, was in the dorm due to his mother having killed his father. Derman’s situation was completely different, being Bosnian … As a very young child, he’d miraculously survived as his parents were murdered right in front of his eyes. From what he told, the Serbians had come into their home, shooting at everything that moved and then left, taking the horror-struck Derman for dead. With his grandmother who had found him frozen like that, he’d gone on a long journey all the way to Istanbul. He was placed in the dormitory when his grandmother died and so came to live in Azim’s building.