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by Hakan Günday

  I was quite sure no other kid besides me had had inappropriate relations with Azim, but did have my doubts about Derman. Derman did everything he could to avoid running into Azim inside that tiny building. When he did, he’d freeze like in that story of his. As if he hoped Azim would take him for dead … In fact, during Azim’s farewell speech, I thought that Derman must be the only one among us who was truly glad. Since Azim’s departure didn’t come as a surprise to me, being the author of the blackmailing letter, I felt nothing that day. So Derman’s eyes that were at least as blue as mine were the only bright things in that crowd. Or it was just my imagination …

  In the end those three boys left my life, and three strange voices filled our four-person room. The voices of others …

  If I hadn’t been too busy building a life for myself, I’d have paid more attention to the boys I’d shared a room with for three years, reciprocating the friendship they extended to me. But I couldn’t. I was never able to have real feelings toward those boys with their acceptance of me as I was. It was all due to my bleakness. Loud on the outside but feeble on the inside, unable to partake in any honest relationship or bond with anything, I used everyone in that dorm to their very dregs and threw them all in the trash just like I did with Azim. They spoke to me, but I never listened. The only reason I kept their secrets was because I forgot them as soon as they told me. They were fond of me but never knew what it was they were fond of. I never let them. All their fondness for me went into my chest and out my back, flowing into dross … Later, many times, they tried to get in touch. I never returned their calls. I never cared to receive any of their news. For they were each just one of the paving stones I’d laid underfoot. I didn’t do anything other than walk all over them …

  I hope that they’re all right … I hope that they met people with real feelings who loved them for real. I hope they’ve forgotten about me. I hope that I haven’t caused them to lose their faith in friendship. I hope that Azim hasn’t committed suicide. And I hope I never see any of them ever again! Although I’ve changed much in the many years that have passed, I’m not a better person. Whatever I was in those days, I’m that and more! More cruel, more murderous, more of a liar, more of a monster, and more and more of more of everything … Today, I’m a full-blooded corpse. Nothing more … or perhaps a bit of morphine sulfate.

  We got off the bus and Bedri asked:

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good …”

  We’d just finished an eight-hour trip, with only the streets of Ankara left to travel. We got in a cab, and Bedri recited the address of our destination as he put on his tie with the help of the mirror on the sunshade he pulled down. I was in the backseat. We left the bus station and entered streets that appeared identical. I was wearing my school uniform. That was Bedri’s preference, as I looked more studious in the suit …

  I watched the cars passing us by. Inside were bleary-eyed men and women. Ankara was long awake and already seemed sorry to be. At every red light, I watched the tens of people on opposite pavements walk toward one another to merge together. Their faces were pale and vacant. Ankara was an abdominal cavity and we were passing through it.

  We got out of the cab in front of the ministry building, and Bedri checked his watch. There was still an hour and a half until our appointment. Bedri glanced around and must have spotted what he was looking for as he said, “Come, let’s have a bite to eat here. I have business at the bank. We can take care of that after.”

  We had breakfast among people in uniforms like mine and suits like Bedri’s. Asking the waiter to refill his tea, Bedri turned to me and asked:

  “Are you excited?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  In reality I hadn’t slept for two days. For two days I’d been thinking about my meeting with the minister. It might take a few minutes or an hour, but by the time I left the building in front of which we’d just gotten out of the cab, my life would have changed completely. Every step I took afterward would bring me closer to England. I was in one of the most important phases of my rebirth. I should have been excited, but I wasn’t. Instead I felt something else. A restlessness, the cause of which I couldn’t identify … Maybe it was due to the night trip, I thought, and brushed it aside. After all, the darkness that the bus had slipped through for hours had evoked another kind of darkness for me. It had even rained intermittently throughout the night, and I’d watched as the raindrops hit and shattered on the windowpane my head rested against … but now wasn’t the time to remember. It really wasn’t.

  “All right then, come on,” said Bedri and we rose …

  We crossed a wide avenue and entered the bank he’d mentioned. “You sit,” said Bedri.

  It was crowded inside despite the fact that it was so early in the day. Maybe it was for the same reason that most of them were old. It was the hour of the elderly who’d lost sleep over work all their lives who, now that they had nothing to do, could no longer sleep. We were surrounded by people who knew the opening times for banks and all other buildings. The world of elderly butterflies who didn’t want to be late for anything because they didn’t have much time left, and fluttered off ahead of time to every destination … Gripping their queue tickets from the vendor in the entrance, they were sunk into the waiting seats, quietly observing their surroundings. From where I stood, I could see that the seats were brand new. Though the plastic coverings had been torn off them, transparent remnants straggled off the edges. No one had bothered to take them off completely. Maybe they hadn’t felt any need to. After all, the people sitting on them had lost their sight long ago.

  “No one cares about anything!” I muttered. Then I took a few steps and sat in the only empty seat in the waiting area. I stared first at my knees, and then the knees next to me. I raised and turned my head to glimpse the owner of those knees. I’d never have been able to guess his age, but everywhere I looked were wrinkles. On the old man’s face was a pair of glasses with a brown frame. Just like Rastin, he’d taped together the part of it that went over the bridge of his nose. I shook my head and murmured, “No one cares!”

  Totally unaware that I was watching him, the old man sat with his eyes fixed on the digital screen where the queue and teller numbers appeared. The small and crumpled piece of paper inside his palm read 82. For a second I took that for the guy’s age. He had on a worn coat. He watched the flashing numbers in the digital screen attentively and kept glancing back at the 82 in his hand. Then finally it was time. The bright red dots on the screen spelled out 82. I waited for the man to rise but he didn’t. He first looked right, then at me. Our eyes met, but he looked away, sticking his trembling hand, along with the ticket, in his coat pocket. He was sure no one knew it was his turn, including me. One of the tellers called “82!” twice. But the old man did nothing and just waited. When the screen finally went over into 83, he rose and crept toward the exit.

  As I was wondering what it was he wanted to do and why he changed his mind, I saw the old man get a new ticket from the automat. He crept back toward me and sat back down. Glancing at the ticket in his hand before turning to smile at me, he said, “Looks like I got a ticket for the wrong line.”

  I neither replied to his lie nor smiled. But he continued:

  “I have a grandson just like you … What grade are you in?”

  I might just be able to answer this one … I might say something that wouldn’t upset anybody. I have no idea why, but I was feeling restless. I wanted to infect everyone else, so I bent over and whispered:

  “You’re so lonely you make me sick!”

  The governmental office of the Minister of Education was almost the size of our shed. Entering it after a long wait, we saw that the minister was on the phone, sitting in a chair taller than him. His secretary gestured for us to sit, but we chose to remain standing until he finished the call. Finally getting off the phone,
the minister shook our hands and said, “Please sit.” So we did and right away began listening to Bedri.

  As a true government officer, Bedri managed to relay in the most carefully chosen words that as he’d mentioned in writing before, I’d been top of my class in the final year of high school and in the current semester, and that I’d scored full points in both the TOEFL and the IELTS.

  As he went through all this in bullet points, the minister watched me, several times exclaiming, “Bless him!” and I watched the cut-glass ashtray on the coffee table in front of me. This was during one of those glorious years when you could still smoke inside …

  As Bedri began to say, “Honorable Minister, we would like to ask your excellency for—” The minister cut him off with a single, “Let’s make a doctor out of you!” He stared fixedly at me and smiled. I think he resembled Yadigar slightly.

  Not knowing what to say, I smiled meekly. Seeing that I wasn’t replying, Bedri completed his own sentence and wrapped up by saying that I’d need a yearly bursary of about twenty-five thousand pounds to be able to study in the social anthropology department of Cambridge. Then he interrupted the temporary silence once more to mention that my high school was willing to cover half of said expenses.

  During all this I’d once again fixed my gaze on the ashtray. I watched a ray of daylight coming in through the large windows to shatter into pieces inside the cut glass. The light traveled all the way from the sun to get crushed inside the ashtray like a butt. I myself had considered studying to be a doctor. It had occurred to me. That way I’d be able to do research on the Korsakoff Syndrome, manifesting in people during prolonged periods of hunger. But then I’d thought, “Human health isn’t worth the effort!” Then, “Maybe I should be a biologist,” I’d said. I’d get a degree in biology and then specialize in entomology. This way I’d be able to pinpoint a body’s time of death by examining the bacteria or insects on it. But a while later I also changed my mind about that, thinking, “Who gives a flying fuck who kicked the bucket and when!” I was still interested in biology, however. It was the appropriate branch to gather information about the buildup of fluid, colostrum, in women’s breasts during pregnancy. As a matter of fact, the taste of that milk remained on my tongue years later. It never went away no matter how much I swallowed.

  “You’ll come back later though, right, Gaza effendi? Let’s settle on that first!”

  Was this being said to me? I raised my head to look at Bedri.

  “Don’t you decide to settle down over there! The motherland needs men like you, son!”

  Since Bedri’s lips remained unmoving, it must be the minister talking. I turned to look at him and once again meekly smiled. At this, Bedri said, “He’s a little flustered, sir, if you’ll excuse him …”

  But there was no change in my pulse. I was sure of that because I could see my heart. I beat inside it and listened to its deep, rhythmic sound. Maybe that’s why I could no longer hear what was being said. I listened to my heartbeat surrounding me on all sides as though it were coming from four enormous speakers in all four corners of the enormous government office and watched the mouths moving in the faces staring at me. And as one of those mouths opened slightly wider, the voice coming out drowned out my heartbeat.

  “Son, are you all right?”

  It was the minister talking. I think I could talk as well. At least I could last I checked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine. How are you?”

  The minister laughed. Bedri didn’t.

  “Gaza is a little overworked, is he now?” the minister asked Bedri. But his eyes were still on me.

  “Sir,” Bedri said, “as you can surmise …”

  “Okay!” The minister cut him off again. “We’ll take care of it … but now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting … I’ll have a word with the counsellorship, they’ll get in touch … and, Gaza bey, as for you, I wish you the best of luck, son. Go, attend your studies, and return. Deal?”

  Having said his last word, the minister stood and extended his hand to me. Bedri also rose, but I remained sitting. Bedri grabbed the minister’s hovering hand and said, “Sir, thank you so much, believe me when I say that our boy Gaza will not let you down,” and glared at me.

  I only stood up then. Bedri had withdrawn his hand, and it was my turn to shake. But there was a problem. A big problem … I didn’t want to touch the minister. Not just the minister, anyone. If I just lifted my right hand and shook the minister’s hand, I would walk out of there with a bursary that would be the culmination of my rebirth. I knew that. But neither my body would hear me, nor my mind obey. On the outside someone resembling Gaza was clearly there, but that wasn’t me. I was lost inside myself.

  Leaving the minister’s hand hanging in midair, I turned around and walked. Bedri and the minister were surely saying something, maybe shouting. But I could only hear my heartbeat. And walking in step with that rhythm gave me much pleasure. I’d regrettably gone mad at the wrong time. Though not necessarily the wrong place, for that government office was definitely the same size as our shed.

  “My mother brought me a cake last week. For my birthday. But I didn’t eat it. You know what I did? I ate the candles!”

  Şeref, who constantly spoke to me just like Ender had once done even though I never replied, was in the neighboring bed. In the thirty-four-person ward, I was between a wall and Şeref. No matter how hard I buried my head in my pillow, I couldn’t avoid hearing that cracked voice of his.

  After the small scandal in the minister’s office, my unresponsiveness and ghostlike gait had made Bedri decide not to kill me, and flag down a cab for the hospital instead. Since I screamed every time he touched me, however, he’d been at a loss for what to do, and finally got me into the cab by force.

  The doctor in the ER, unable to get a reply out of me and observing that I screamed whenever I was touched, scratched his head and said I should be transferred three floors up to the psychiatry clinic. But there was a problem. The first time the elevator arrived, it was vacant and that meant I’d have to be alone with Bedri in there, which I couldn’t do. After several tries we were able to get into another elevator with two people already inside.

  I could actually see and hear everything. I was actually aware of everything, but my body and my reactions weren’t mine. They would absolutely not listen to me. For instance, I knew Bedri and I could ride that vacant elevator together, but I couldn’t bring myself to step inside. The part of my mind that was self-aware was trapped in the dark somewhere, observing events from there. It was like it sat in a box in a theater, watching a show it couldn’t participate in. Meanwhile it learned. One of the things it learned was that I could only ride in an elevator if I was alone or if there were at least three people in it besides me. This didn’t surprise the part of my mind that was still aware. It merely accepted it as a newly discovered law of physics and said, “That’s the right way!”

  When we got to the third floor, the less I wanted to be touched, the more people tried to touch me. As a result my screams rang all through the hallways and they decided to put me to sleep. I had to be grabbed from all four sides by four aides and wrestled facedown onto a bed so my pants could be pulled down.

  When I came back around, Bedri was beside me. I could see him, but I couldn’t talk, because my mouth was full … and anyway, Bedri didn’t appear to want to talk. He stared at me like a poor fool whose house had fallen down around his ears. After all, there was nothing more the little genius he’d invested so much in could do for him. I was a machine he’d never figured out the mechanics of and I’d gone bust when he needed me the most. So I was pretty sure he wanted to stay with me a while longer so he could distance himself from his fury, or at least the urge to break one of my arms. Considering the humiliation I’d caused him in the minister’s presence, you could even say he was being overly generous. He could have just abandoned me in the ministry’s lawn and no one would have been the wiser. He could’ve said, for instance
, “He assaulted me and then ran!” But he’d done nothing of the sort. Maybe he still had hope. All of this might just be a minor breakdown. I might revert back to the Gaza he knew any moment, and we could go back to the minister’s to try our luck at an apology. We could start all over again and race hand in hand toward success. However, that meant I’d first have to take my hands out of my mouth. I’d shoved all ten fingers in there as soon as I’d woken up. So they wouldn’t touch anything. “That’s the right way,” said a voice inside me, “that’s the way it should be!”

  So neither Bedri nor I could avoid the situation we were in. We were brought to this point by circumstance and stuck there. I was like a taxidermy animal, stuffed up by life before I was even dead. He, in turn, like the owner of a racehorse he knew he’d have to shoot because it was crippled …

  There wasn’t much we could do. Bedri stood slowly and started to put his hand on my shoulder. Then he recalled how I’d reacted to anyone who tried to lay a hand on me all day, withdrew his hand, and walked out of the room.

  From what I could see from where I lay, he talked to a doctor in the hallway, sneaking glances at me, and then undid his tie and put it in his pocket. He took a step to return to my side, but the doctor stopped him with a hand on his arm. He looked at me a final time before turning around and disappearing down the hallway. There were other children he needed to bring up and a dorm he had to run.

  That was the last I saw of Bedri. Our partnership was over. After this, the only thing he could do was keep an eye on my condition from a distance and make sure that I at least received treatment.