by Hakan Günday
As much as it was referred to as daily, life was anything but, always finding ways to surprise me. Events always took turns that caused me to forget my lines, screwing up the communication guidelines I’d prepared. I didn’t matter to any of the people I had to talk to. My skits or I weren’t included in their interests. They had no qualms about complicating even the simplest of dialogues, always had new questions, and practically competed in taking me by surprise. Needless to say, such situations rendered my memorized sentences useless.
Since the basis of law lay in overlooking the identities of those one encountered, that is, taking every person, including me, as equals, I had been on quite amiable terms with the law in recent years. When the sentences I used were out of line with life, or I felt bad, I’d take the Turkish Criminal Law booklet out of my pocket to read. The juridical texts in that book carried no names, surnames, or personal information. Instead, there was some guy in a state of constant dismay that kept oscillating between winning and being sentenced, and he was referred to as one. One whose right to expression had no importance, mute or blind, one-legged or five-eared as one may be!
In reality the anonymity of law was, of course, just a fantasy. Nothing on this planet could be anonymous. No king was ever tried on the same terms as a pauper, nor would he ever be. Still, whenever I felt like my throat was being constricted by the identities of those around me, thinking in juridical terms gave me somewhat of a relief.
One of those terms was act of God12 … vis major! It was the lawful correspondent of an excuse that was acceptable in the event one didn’t come through with any number of one’s responsibilities. Act of God! It could be an earthquake, or it could be a heart attack. In my case, it was the sum of life. Life itself was an act of God! I was in a never-ending earthquake with a case of perpetual heart attack. So I tried to calm myself by pretending to be exempt from any kind of action. That, however, was also no longer working …
I was aware of being mercilessly judged by people even though they didn’t know me! I was worse off than a pauper caught in the web of the legal system. At least paupers could talk. In fact, their special beggar powers enabled them to instantaneously pick someone out in a crowded sidewalk that couldn’t resist their demands, that is to say, me, to materialize near me with their upturned palms. Their mercy-dars must also be receptive to weakness, since they could always find me, even in a crowd of thousands.
I had no such powers and could find no traces of game in my radar other than myself. So I could neither prove my innocence in the makeshift courts of the everyday nor escape the wrongful sentences.
No sooner would the police officer in the passport department ask, “Your job, what do you do?” while waving in my face the form on which I’d left the box for profession blank, before tending to the person in line behind me, than the security guards would see the sweat accumulating on my brow and search me like I was a live bomb, and the visa attendants, skeptical of everything I told them, would check all my information three times and keep me waiting two hours for procedures that should take five minutes.
Yet as one whose whole life was an act of God, reciting from memory was the best defense I could come up with for now. Every time I went back to the room, I patched up my tattered shield by writing alternative scripts and implored the people I would meet the next day to fall in line with the reality of life, though they didn’t know it. Naturally none of them heard me. Not when I implored them from my bed, not when I stood in front of them and asked when I could have my passport back …
During this period of doubting my personal recovery, I was roused by an unexpected incident. On my final visit to the consulate for the visa needed for my World Lynch Tour, I saw a crowd gathered in front of the building. Holding banners, shouting slogans, kicking the walls.
At first I hesitated, but then recalled the lynching in the square. The ease with which that crowd had accepted me … You didn’t need an invitation to a lynching because everyone was invited! Though timidly, I approached the intoxicated people, and one of them spoke to me even though he didn’t know me at all. In fact, he looked into my eyes and yelled:
“God is one!”
Though I enthusiastically opened my mouth, the same enthusiasm choked me up, but no one noticed. For right then the others roared in unison like a well-rehearsed choir. It made my innards tremble. It lifted me to a high only attainable by cocaine and at similar velocity. Inside the moment I was freed to be myself!
By the time the police showed up to personally define the limits of savagery, I’d torn up four pavement stones, two waste bins, and one banner stick and hurled them at the building, screaming incoherently. I felt like such a part of humanity in that brief interval that when I got in line in front of the building again the next day, I was much more at ease. More importantly, I wasn’t repeating my lines to myself over and over again. I didn’t feel the need any more. Sure enough, I didn’t suffer the slightest communication problem in any step of the visa procedures that day. What’s more, I improvised each one. After all, I’d had my lynching fix! Though rather inadequate, something resembling a lynching was running through my veins. A kind of methadone that could be substituted for a lynching. A situation the law might define as a social incident. A social substance that could take similar effect in the absence of lynching itself. Though of course I’d gotten my start on lynching, the most potent stimulant there was. So I knew lynching was the real medicine necessary for my treatment. Protests or similar demonstrations had no importance for me. That’s when I thought of football games.
I attended six games, three weekends in a row, at which I dissolved into tens of thousands of people, in bleachers where it didn’t matter a bit where anyone was from, this time as part of a Mexican wave instead of a tsunami. In these games, the effects of which were ephemeral but violent enough to enable me to be ordinary for a few days, I cursed at the top of my lungs with complete strangers, at complete strangers. Naturally each time I joined the larger group of supporters. I’d lived long enough as Don Quixote and it was time to become a windmill. And that was easy. All you had to do was buy a few accessories. A few uniforms and scarves that I alternated depending on the game sufficed to make me invisible. The crowd was such a magical thing that once part of it, neither name nor body remained. The masses swallowed them both and provided release from the responsibility of having an identity. The crowd was a spectacular suit of armor shielding one from oneself and everything else. It didn’t look anything like the piece of tinny shit Don Quixote wore. It was so sturdy that I could sling the worst curses at people I wouldn’t have dared even look at slantwise anywhere else.
Yet once the game was over and it was time to queue up and leave the stadium, I noticed that the people I’d cursed in unison with just a while ago felt at least as uneasy as I did. Just like me, they were also dying to get onto a bus, a cab, or into their car and hightail it out of there. Alone, no one wanted to encounter the people they’d collectively hurled insults with up until a half hour ago. That was why we pushed against and cowered behind one another like a herd as we walked out of games. None of us wanted to wander away from the herd until we felt safe. Though some among them were deranged enough to have joined the lynch mob in the square, most resembled me. But I didn’t want a mob made up of ten thousand copies of me. I wanted a lynch mob. Not a mob pretending to be lynch mob!
So before I set out, I followed the news constantly and slept only four hours a day in the hopes of catching a lynching somewhere in the country. But not much loomed on the horizon. So I started to watch footage of old lynchings and fantasized. Some of them were extraordinary. Especially the Sivas massacre13 or the Rostock riots. True lynchings, each one! Torching buildings, vandalism, killings, the whole deal. Or: the social purification movement that surfaced in France as soon as WWII was over! Those black-and-white images of French women believed to be colluding with the Germans as their hair was shaved and they were dragged through the streets until they turned into pulp
! It was all so magnificent! But those kinds of things didn’t happen every day!
Still, in purblind hope, I did leave my room to go to the airport and board the first plane I could find. I boarded seven more planes in twelve days and covered more than four thousand kilometers within the country. Shoulders hunched in hotel rooms bruised by humidity, I waited for hate to dawn. But nothing happened.
There was just the once when, completely by chance, I ducked into a small crowd to rail and curse at two people I later found out were members of parliament. But that lasted for mere seconds because police surrounded us like tentacles and we were outnumbered three to one. All you had to do was to look at one of the people sprawled on the crowd. There were three cops per each one of us. I’d ended up being the lynchee instead of the lyncher and almost got arrested. Of course what I thought right then was that I should be a cop. I had to be on whichever side was bigger mob! I’d never stand by the weak and the few! I wished to be a thousand against one! Ten thousand! A hundred thousand! A million! I wanted a mob! I wanted a bigger mob! And to holler: “Which religion doesn’t have déjà vu? I’ll take that one!”
The second I entered the Ship, the receptionist handed me an envelope and said:
“Your passport arrived. You gave the shipping people my name. Don’t do that!”
“Don’t worry, it won’t happen again,” I should have said, but I’d memorized something else:
“Is there an envelope for me?”
Naturally I didn’t wait for an answer, leaving the man gaping at me and walking to the elevator. Then I went up to my room. Then I collected my things. Then I left the building known as the Ship. Then the building known as the Ship sank. Because I said so.
8 Spelled gat in Turkish.
9 The names of victims or alleged criminals are disclosed by the Turkish media in initials.
10 Quote by Rumi. “Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair.”
11 Referring to recruiters for military duty, mandatory for every male citizen of Turkey over the age of eighteen.
12 In Turkish law, closer in meaning to French law from which it’s derived, force majeure.
13 The attack on Madımak Hotel in Sivas, Turkey, on July 2, 1993, which resulted in the killing of thirty-five mostly Alawi intellectuals and journalists by an anti-Alawi, pro-sharia mob.
UNIONE
One of the four basic techniques of Renaissance painting. As in Sfumato, colors and tones dissolve into one another. However, unlike Sfumato, the colors and tones used are always saturated and vivid.
Bearded, at least 1.80 meters in height, the middle-aged man wore only a white piece of cloth over his loins. It was cold, but he didn’t care about that. His eyes were closed, feet just as bare as his torso and legs. Hands joined at his chest, he manipulated his breath in order to slow down his pulse. For that moment, out of everything the world offered him, he accepted into his mind only those he needed. He didn’t need to be cold, so he didn’t feel the cold. Right next to him was a large table. And on the table was a glass cube, the sides of which measured at most forty centimeters. One of its surfaces was removable, providing the cube with an entrance no bigger than itself.
We were on a street. A crowded street. On the pedestrian walkway of a district where people jostled one another to shop harder and faster. They talked. They haggled and burst out laughing. The sound of motor vehicles from the surrounding avenues pervaded the air. Engines were gunned, brakes slammed on, and windows rolled down to dump out music like butts from an ashtray. All the sounds merged and vied with one another to bore into our ears. The noise of the city was crushing us all. But the man stood up straight and heard nothing else but his heartbeat. I was sure of this because the unhearing expression on his face was somehow familiar. Only the face of a man who had started to beat along with his heart would bear those lines, I knew …
He opened his eyes and gazed at life. To be more accurate, he opened the gates of his eyes and we gazed into his life … He spun on his heel to face the table next to him. Slowly he lifted his right knee and placed his foot on the table. His legs were as long and flexible as a frog’s. He leaned against the table with his fingertips and hoisted himself onto the table in a single move. Now he looked much taller. Focusing on his breathing once more, he inserted his right foot into the cube and set it on the bottom. Bending down, he placed his right knee against the far corner of the cube. Meanwhile he had one hand on the cube and the other on the table for balance. He remained like that for a few seconds before putting his hips inside the cube and seating them on the bottom. He lifted his right hand he had been gripping the cube with up till then and touched his face with his fingers as he drew it toward himself. First his elbow, then his right shoulder, went into the cube. He stopped … So did we. Then slowly he bent his head down and into the cube. Moving his right leg inch by inch, he was able to make some room for himself, however small. With the fingers of his right hand, he gripped the tip of his left foot and started to pull it toward himself. This way his left foot went over his right shin and his legs, from the knees down, formed an X, pressing against the glass surface of the cube. Raising himself slightly on his right hand against the narrow base, he brought his hip slightly farther away from the door of the cube. Only his left arm and left knee remained outside. He raised his arm and thrust his knee in the cube first. Then he slowly lowered his left hand. With his entire body inside a tiny cube, the man’s left hand hovered over the table, palm exposed, as though it weren’t real. Then the hand fluttered down like a piece of cloth to gracefully fold over his right foot.
A young man whom I’d taken to be one of the spectators up till then immediately approached the table, picked up the glass lid of the cube, and paused. After a few beats, he sealed the cube with the glass surface. The only things we could see now were fragments of a pair of legs, crossed, and the hairless head bent forward between them. He was wedged inside a cube as high as his knee. We were observing a man become so small so as to cease existing. Or maybe so as to come into being …
I wept. And not just because the man in front of me, folded into himself, reminded me of being under the corpses. I had another reason: an incident I’d played a part in three months ago … I just couldn’t forget. Because it had changed everything. Everything!
I was nearing the end of the second year of my lynch tour. I’d been veering from one country to the next for the past two years. I honestly hadn’t expected this much. On the first plane I’d boarded to start off the tour, trying to imagine what awaited me, I hadn’t really had high expectations. The world, however, was very quick to verify the savagery of the hate it was loaded with. In the space of two years, I attended more lynchings than I could ever begin to count. It was like everyone had been waiting for me to show up before they could start chewing one another out. They’d waited for me to join them all this time and would tear apart one of their own only when I did. Or I was just imagining things and the world had always been this way. It was a cradle of lynchings before I came along, and would be after I passed. It was rooted not in soil but in hate. And all I did was walk over it.
The Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, mainland Europe, Britain … there was sure to be a lynching going on in every one. You didn’t even have to be at the right place at the right time. Lynching was ubiquitous and constant. It sufficed to read a few newspapers in various languages and smell the air. The creature called man thrived on lynching, this much I could see …
I saw hundreds flock to a single child like a school of piranhas to tear its flesh apart, and likewise drag a woman around by her hair and rape her for hours … I saw it all, because I was there and one of them. I watched dozens of bodies burying people instantaneously. I even willingly became part of these flesh structures frenziedly crushing them. The more I saw of those we buried, the more I saw of myself. Our mere presence covered and suffocated them every time in the form of a heap of
bodies. I really had been able to change sides. I was no longer the one under the rubble. I was one of the bodies forming the rubble.
I saw kids … lynching one another in front of school buildings … kids who, not content with only that, documented everything with cell phones and dispensed them online like flyers to ensure lifelong humiliation for the lynchee. I saw the happy slappers too. Kids who sneaked up on random, unsuspecting people on the street, struck them, and ran. Whose friends in turn documented the deed to publish online … I saw the suicide bombers of the Middle East. People who exploded. Who lynched in reverse! I saw the lone bombs who, rather than being lynched by the mob, lynched the mob. Then I fantasized about a British kid who was killed when he chanced upon a suicide bomber on his happy slapping spree, which made me laugh. I saw that there were countries where some games were impossible.
I witnessed the constant effusiveness of the mob. The perpetual cries and bellows … Every word was a piece of coal. To spur on the fire. It distracted me. So I listened to Nasenbluten to block it out. Ears hidden behind my turned-up collar, I heard only the music. For two years it was all I saw and heard.
And I tried to get better. I tried to make peace with people through my lynching of them. If in a rare, lynch-free locale, I used cash to provoke them. I assaulted derelicts with people I coaxed off the street. That’s how I came to realize that being a foreign power wasn’t that much of a challenge. Cash solved everything, period …
When all was said and done, however, I didn’t improve a bit! I was every bit as gravely sick as I had been in my days at the Ship. Aside from lynch-related negotiations or relations, I couldn’t communicate with people. That wall between us never came down. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. The effects of the lynchings I’d attended eventually wore off and disappeared. Like morphine sulfate, lynching turned into a burden I couldn’t relinquish. It became no different than the births Emre made me watch. Lynch mobs killed or maimed people with the same ease with which those babies were born, as though it were the world’s most mundane feat.