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by Hakan Günday

  Putting the piece of paper in my pocket next to Cuma’s frog, I started to dig. As I dug I was wondering what I would find. There was no possibility of guessing what it was Ahad was hiding, however. He would’ve buried the world if he could find a hole big enough to bury it in. So I was prepared for anything. I just kept on digging. Breathlessly … all the breath I’d taken up till then was enough. I thought about every remorseful letter of those sentences and sweated. At the same time, I wondered if there was any way of kicking the shit out of the stroke of luck that brought me to that bottle! But then I’d think of the moat. I felt annoyed that I was wasting my energy when I should be working on that. What could it be that Ahad couldn’t forget, anyway? Could such a thing even exist? The Ahad I knew had absolutely no conscience whatsoever. If he had, I’d been spared it. I didn’t know what I felt or what my life would look like from now on. I just plunged the shovel into the earth. Then I heard a sound. The sound of metal against metal!

  I kneeled down to part the earth with my hands and saw it: a metal cabinet with two doors. It just lay in the earth on its back like that. It looked like an ordinary filing cabinet. It was a least a meter high. I lunged at its likewise metal handles and tried to open its doors, but it was locked. Standing up, I grabbed the shovel and swung it as hard as I could. Nothing happened. I swung again and this time one of the doors caved inward. That made a gap, admittedly small, between the two doors, and all I had to do was put the shovel in there and crank. There was a sound like bones breaking, and I tossed aside the shovel.

  Kneeling again, I reached into the hole and pulled the doors open. Then I started laughing. I’d never found any treasure before in my life! All the money Ahad had ever made from smuggling migrants was at the tips of my fingers. They were stacked inside clear bags just staring at me. I pulled out one of the bags and raised it into the air to peer at it. As I laughed I spoke to Ahad:

  “This is what you couldn’t forget? The money you made off all those poor souls? This is what you were begging God to forgive you for?”

  Then suddenly I felt my face changing. My lips came together first, and then my eyes filled with tears. I was no longer laughing. I was thinking of Ahad. Maybe he really had lived in remorse. He might even have been ashamed of the life he was leading. He hadn’t touched the money he made off those people’s desperation but instead hidden it away. He hadn’t wanted to spend it. He’d even felt so bad on a night of intoxication that he’d hoped someone might find the money and relieve him of his burden. Perhaps I’d never met the real Ahad. So, would I be touching the money? Absolutely yes, as I was just Gaza as usual!

  I started taking out the bags one by one. But there were so many that I thought it would be easier to just pull the cabinet out. Instead of walking back and forth a dozen times, I could just drag all the money to the shed inside the cabinet … I took the shovel and began digging around it again.

  Half an hour later I’d managed to make a short incline on one side of the hole. I’d latch on to and haul out the cabinet. I leaned over and pulled, gripping the gaping cabinet with both hands. Although with difficulty, I was able to budge it. Taking small steps backward, I maneuvered it from its spot and tried to move it up the incline. The only thing I saw was the inside of the cabinet. I kept my eyes on the bags of cash that moved slightly every time I pulled. Then my gaze slid to the hole the cabinet came out of. The space left over from the cabinet … I could see inside ever so slightly. And I suddenly stopped and looked up. I looked up at the sky. I saw clouds merging with one another. I still hadn’t let go of the cabinet. I could sense its weight throughout my entire body, but couldn’t move. I only looked at the clouds. I didn’t want to see anything else. But then I became unable to see them either, for tears were filling my eyes. The sky shook as I looked up at it.

  “Of course …” I said. “Of course … of course … could it be any other way?”

  No matter that I didn’t want to at all; I bent down my head again to look into that pit and the bones inside. Bones merging into one another like the clouds in the sky. I started to scream.

  “Aaahhhhhhh!”

  And started yanking on the cabinet.

  “Aaahhhhh!”

  And I tried to haul the cabinet up the incline.

  “Aaahhhhh!”

  Maneuvering the cabinet onto the dirt road, I shut up. I took a single step toward the pit and saw everything. Then I immediately stepped back and closed my eyes. But unfortunately, being a chess player, everything I saw engraved on itself on my mind even if didn’t want it to. I thought, So it turns out this money is a prize for whoever finds what’s underneath.

  Two bodies broiled by the soil, stripped to the bones … two skeletons curled up lying side by side. They still had clothes on. They were covered in dust and disintegrating with time but they were there. Around what was left of their wrists and ankles were chains. Clearly they’d been tied up before being killed and buried. Ahad had been the one to do it. I felt nothing.

  Eyes shut, I simply nodded. “Of course!” I said. “Of course! What were you expecting? To see something pleasant? You looked at the sky a minute earlier, see anything pleasant there? Couldn’t forget the money he made off the poor fools, could he? You idiot. There, that’s what he wasn’t able to forget. Open your eyes, just open them!”

  I sank to my knees and opened my eyes. Dust covered me. Eyes on the cabinet and the hole, I listened to Ahad. I heard his voice saying there was no need to lay asphalt over Dust Street … I always nodded. “Yes, Dad, that’s right,” I said. “You’re right, who needs it?” Here I was, nodding again. Not much had changed since then.

  We had one olive tree. Only that one we called tree. Because I called it that. Because I’d planted it. That’s the spot the piece of shit had pointed out to me! “Plant it here!” he’d said. It was all floating past my eyes and around my ears. Everything! I sat there in the dirt road, watching us. Watching a boy plant an olive tree with his father’s hand on his shoulder. Back then, I’d loved Ahad! I had no one but him! That’s what he used to say: “We have no one but each other!” and I would nod.

  Now I was nodding again. I was also weeping a little, I think. But only a little! “Don’t cry!” he used to say. “You’re not to cry!” I’d immediately wipe away my tears. That must have been why the word freedom always made me think of crying as much as one liked.

  My hands shook. I was sure by now that it wasn’t due to the cold or fatigue! Had I frolicked over these corpses all those years? What about my mother? Had she known about these deaths? Maybe that was the reason she’d tried to run away from Ahad! She’d wanted to flee her husband whom she’d found out to be a murderer … yet she’d wanted to get rid of me too, hadn’t she? She was just as cruel as Ahad! In fact, maybe it was my mother who had killed these people! Why not? For someone who considered burying her own child alive, how hard could it be to kill a random stranger?

  “No!” I was hollering. “No! I’m not going to end up like them!” Whatever the truth, it had to surface! Who knew how long these people’s families had been searching for them? It all needed to come to light! “Enough!” I yelled. “I’ve had enough!”

  I would go to the police. To the gendarmerie! To a prosecutor! Find out who these people are and track down their families, I would tell them. I don’t need any more corpses in my life, I would say. I don’t need any more darkness! I’d even go to the governor!

  He’d said, “If there’s anything you need, we’ll be here.” Yes, there was something I needed! I did now! There were to be no more secrets on this plot of land! What I needed was the truth! I’d even touch people if I had to! I’d touch them and beg! “Help me!” I’d say. “There, these are the bodies! Now tell me what happened! What happened to me? What happened to my life?”

  I stood and walked to the pit. “Wait here! I’m coming! I’m going to get you out of there! It’ll be all over soon!” I was saying at the same time … but suddenly I was silent. For I’d glimpsed something
that choked me up. I stood rooted in my spot. It was something I perhaps should never have seen. But it was too late now. I’d come too close to the pit and seen the piece of fabric wrapped around one of the skeletons. It was green … with a purple flower print … it was the same dress as the one in the only photograph of my mother!

  “Why would you want to know that?” Ahad used to say. “So you find out where her grave is, what then?” When I insisted, he’d say, “At a village. Just some village … I wouldn’t know where to look now if I wanted to find it!”

  The night I was born, he’d caught my mother at the cemetery and scooped me up before running to the hospital. Then he’d told the first white coat he came across that his wife was at the cemetery, dying. An ambulance went and returned, and Ahad, had said, staring at the body of his wife, “Take care of my son!” Without even waiting for dawn, he took my mother away to bury her. Neither the mosque in Kandalı nor the cemetery occurred to him as he senselessly drove in the truck for hours. Then he’d gone into a village, had had the funereal prayers carried out, and buried her there. That was Ahad’s story!

  “No one heard!” he’d say. “No one found out about your mother trying to kill you. Don’t you tell anyone, either! This is our secret. Do you understand me? It’s enough that you know!”

  It was enough that I knew! It was enough that I knew that my mother tried to kill me, was that so? I was yelling:

  “Is that so, Ahad! No one can know except me, is that it? Then who is this woman? Isn’t she my mother?”

  My voice bounced off trees, jarring their trunks and causing the last leaves on their dry branches to fall off. They crumbled as they drifted about and landed on the woman in the green dress.

  “Ahad’s story!” I was shouting. “How did I ever believe it? How could I?”

  My tears trickled into my mouth, and I gulped each one down like a morphine sulfate capsule. I didn’t want to know or see anything any more. Going down on my knees, I began to drive forward the dirt on the edge of the pit. To push it in by the handful! Hollering and weeping as I did!

  “We’re burying holes here, not the dead!” I said. “Mother!” I said. “Ahad!” I said. I shook my head. I turned to the skeleton lying beside my mother and asked, “Who’re you?”

  I saw the trousers it was wearing. Its shirt … I could tell it was a male but tried to avoid thinking. I shook my head so I wouldn’t understand. I pulled my mother’s photograph from my pocket and tossed it into the pit as well, covering it. All I wanted was to bury and forget it all. To pull an earthen quilt over it all and end the matter. I wasn’t seeing them anymore. Neither the chains around their wrists, nor the clothes, nor my mother’s photograph, nor the bones nor the skulls! I piled the clumps of dirt over them so fast I’d lose my balance and fall over onto my face. I’d get dirt all over. Under my nails, in the roots of my hair, between my teeth, everywhere!

  I kept it up until Dust Street was restored to its previous state and closed the hole. There was one last thing I had to do. Pulling Ahad’s note out of my pocket, I stuck it into my mouth, weeping, and ground it up as much as I could between my teeth before swallowing. I was breathless …

  I wiped the sweat off my brow with the back of my hand and looked up at the sky. But I saw nothing that was beautiful … truthfully … I saw nothing that was ugly either.

  I sat in a bank, peering at the number on the small slip in my hand, waiting for my turn. I had two large bags with me. They were filled with Ahad’s money. I’d thought the most reasonable thing to do would be to open an account to deposit all the money.

  In reality I was constantly dwelling on something so I could forget what I’d seen in that hole on Dust Street. On other things … at least, I was trying. I had no intention of facing the fact that my father had killed my mother and some other person I didn’t know. If I were to go down that kind of acceptance lane, I might find myself at the dead-end possibility that the man with my mother had been her lover. I might even hit a wall built of the likelihood that he was my real father.

  For this likelihood would have been perfect explanation for the mercurial way Ahad had treated me for as long as he was alive. After all, the way Ahad looked at me had forever been loaded with the question, “Do I love you or kill you?” With those pale blue eyes of his! Just like mine! But what if my mother had found another pair of blue eyes to fall in love with? There, once again, I’d been unable to stop myself from dwelling. When there was enough morphine sulfate in my bloodstream I wouldn’t have to think about any of it. But clearly there wasn’t enough.

  I’d first carried the bags of money to the shed before going down to Kandalı at rabid-dog speed to return with the biggest bags I was able to buy. Then I’d dragged the two bags over Dust Street to the main road where I’d waited. After a half-hour wait, I’d flagged down a cab passing by and, when the driver asked where to, said the word that caused his eyes spring wide open: “Izmir!”

  After a two-and-a-half hour trip, I paid the driver for the most lucrative run of his life and got out of the car. The spot I got off was in front of the biggest hotel of the city, which up until now I’d only heard of. The man at the entrance, dressed like the general of a nonexistent army, declined to let me in due to my appearance, but the bills I handed him had a pacifying effect. The real issue wasn’t how I looked. I stank so badly the cab driver had had the windows down for the whole ride.

  After the mandatory chat at reception, and a down payment sufficient to convince them I could stay there, I was able to go up to my room. The only thing that enabled me to struggle through all this was the dream of the morphine sulfate I would unite with soon. Such a dream it was that it had given me the strength to endure being in the cramped space of a cab with another person …

  Up in the room I took as quick a shower as was possible and left with the bags once more. To the driver of the cab I caught, I said, “I need to find a pharmacy,” adding, “I’m kind of in a hurry!” I really was because I couldn’t take it anymore. Thinking about the incident on Dust Street while also being alone with another person was obliterating me. I was trembling. I was aching all over. Even in my eyes …

  I kept telling the driver, “They don’t have the medicine I need here either!” as I went through seven pharmacies. None of them would sell me the morphine sulfate without a prescription. But finally, the eighth pharmacist said, “We don’t have M-Eslon but we do have Skenan LP, which is the same. We ordered it online for a customer, but he never came to pick it up. Of course it is rather expensive …”

  I laughed angrily. Glaring at the pharmacist who had to talk in such run-on sentences just to do illegal business … I bought a total of eight boxes of Skenan LP. One for each pharmacy I’d asked! For three times the market price of M-Eslon …

  I’d clawed through one of the boxes by the first step I took on the narrow stretch of pavement between the pharmacy and the cab, torn through the plastic casing to pull out the capsule by the second, gulped down the capsule dry on the third, and on the fourth step, got into the car as a brand-new person.

  But now I was thinking that that single capsule hadn’t been enough. Just as I was reaching for the packet in my pocket for another, I heard someone call out the number written on the slip in my hand. I was being called from the cash desk. Right then I thought of the old man at that bank I’d gone to with Bedri. And I did the same thing as he had. I waited quietly. I wasn’t ready to talk to anyone. When my number on the digital screen was replaced by the next, I got up and went to the ticket vendor to get a new queue number. Then I returned to my seat and sat down.

  That old man had gotten a new number and continued to wait so he could stay in the crowd. His only concern was to stall his return to the home where he was slowly dying of loneliness, even if for a little while. To talk to someone as he waited at that bank, if he could … when he asked me what grade I was in, that was maybe the first he’d spoken all day. He was so alone that the entire day had passed in silence and he’d wa
nted to hear the voice of a person speaking to him. But I was so sick that I didn’t want anyone speaking to me. Unlike that old man, I didn’t want to hear anyone’s voice. For I knew I’d have plenty of conversation in a bit when I would stick two bags of money in the cashier’s face! Perhaps if I shut myself up in the reservoir again, I could avoid talking to anyone and await death in silence. But that was also out of the question now! I couldn’t go back to Dust Street as long as those human remains were there. That plot of land in Kandalı was finished for me. Its soil was so tainted that even I couldn’t live on it. Or maybe only I couldn’t live on it. In the whole world, only I …

  I was unable to escape this time when a security guard, having glimpsed the number in my hand, said, “They’re calling you. Your number’s come up.”

  What happened next was a spectacle that enveloped me. Once he heard the figure I wanted to deposit at the account I would open, the officer immediately took me to the office of the branch director. Thinking he’d stumbled upon a goldmine, the branch director gave an impromptu speech on ways to invest the money but, seeing that I wasn’t interested, he’d said, “We’ll take care of it, don’t you worry,” before shutting up. I signed dozens of documents, and every signature was different than the rest. The branch director even noticed and said, “Just sign your initials, that might be easier.” I felt good about living in times in which people weren’t interrogated over the hefty quantities of money they deposited in banks. I gave silent thanks to all past and present politicians who’d done their best to carve a niche for dirty money, as well as money of dubious origin, in the national economy.

  When I left the bank I had nothing more to do. I had to return to my room right away and lock the door. The life on the streets was too personal. You had to face and talk to people for even the most minor things. The world could keep turning without me. So I flagged down a cab and got in …