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by Günday, Hakan; Beler, Zeynep;

  There’s no absolute way of knowing how people smuggling began. But if you take into account that it’s possible to undertake such a task with just three people, it’s possible to go way back in human history. The only rewarding line in an otherwise useless book I read years ago was: The first tool man used was another man. So I don’t suppose it was a very long time before somebody put a price on that earliest tool and sold it to others. Accordingly, the beginning of people smuggling on earth can be dated as: first possible chance! After all, since it also encompasses pimping, it’s the second oldest profession in the world. Of course I was unaware that we were upholding the traditions of such an ancient line of work. All I did was sweat all the time and do the best I could to follow my father’s orders. Yet transportation was really the backbone of human smuggling. Without transportation there was nothing. It was the riskiest and most exhausting step of the process. The later part where the immigrants were stuck in a den, worked eighteen hours a day making fake purses, were made to sleep on the ground, and even got fucked if they struck someone’s fancy, was child’s play compared to what we did. We were the true laborers of the people-smuggling industry, working under the heaviest conditions! First of all, we were under constant pressure. The ones making the delivery, the ones picking it up, the middlemen, they were all after us. Everyone held us accountable for the smallest setback. Time was never in our favor, and everything that could possibly go wrong at first always pretended not to and then went wrong sevenfold. It wasn’t that the operation was so complicated, but as it goes with illegal work, no one trusted anyone else and every step had to be taken as painstakingly as if we were in a field of glass.

  The goods came from the Iran border three times a month, were joined up with the ones from Iraq or Syria if there were any, and sent out to us. They usually came in an eighteen-wheeler. A different one every time, of course. Occasionally the goods were divided up and parceled out to vehicles such as trucks, pickup trucks, or minibuses. A man named Aruz organized the entry across the Iran border and the departure of the goods. He was probably President of the Administration Committee of the Executive Counsel of Coordination for Aiding Persons in Unrestricted International Roaming in Return for a Determined Fee in Compliance with the Tariff of the People’s Revolutionary Movement as Part of Covering the Free Living Expenses and Democratic War Expenditures of the Board of Directors’ Command Dedicated to the Perpetuity of Leadership and the Indivisible Totality of Kurdistan of the PKK, or something. The determined fee required for unrestricted roaming was whatever came from the heart. It included the heart. Or the kidneys, plus expenses, or whatever … all in all, if you were to ask Aruz, he would have said that he was one of the PKK’s ministers in charge of smuggling. But he was responsible only for people smuggling. Drugs, petrol, cigarettes, and guns were handled by other ministries. Which was the way it should be: duties that were different in objective should also be set apart managerially. Otherwise everything would get tangled up and poisoned. After Turkey’s exemplary Ministry of Culture and Tourism—which was as bizarre a title as Ministry of War and Peace—no one wanted to repeat the same mistake. When two opposite concerns, one completely occupied with moneymaking and the other with unconditional support and conservation, were brought together under the same ministry, culture was reduced to nothing more than a dried-up giveaway pen, and tourism the halfway erased logo of a five-star hotel on that same pen. But who cared? Not Aruz, that was for sure! Every bit as much an expert of commerce as of violence, Aruz’s approach to tourism was totally different. First of all, he ran his illegal travel agency empire by telephone only. By eating phones, I mean.

  That was the presumption, because I could never make out what he was saying with his drowned hippo’s voice, and would repeatedly say, “I kiss your hands, Uncle Aruz!” or sometimes, if I was in a bad mood and felt like pissing him off as well, ask, “How’s Felat?”

  When the name of his child, who was nothing like his dream son, came up, he might start grumbling like a beached whale, but would generally just make a sound that might have been laughter, and ask for my father. That, I’d deduce from his having stopped talking. Really, there was a love-hate relationship between my father and him. They could talk on the phone for hours. I think it was also out of obligation. After all, it was impossible for them to backstab each other over the phone.

  The backstabbing in question meant of course a part of the goods being missing or being shown as missing. I knew that my father didn’t smuggle out some of the immigrants he received and sent them instead to Istanbul. These were sold as slaves to some form of textile production or other, or some form of consumption like prostitution. Then my father would revert his tone from almighty judge to almighty accused and moan to Aruz about the fake disasters that had befallen us and resulted in the loss of the goods. And since every single calculation was made per head, Aruz would bellow like a rhino at least half an hour, then mumble a threat and hang up on my father because he knew he’d never find a more reliable trucker.

  In fact, at some point, as a precaution against all this, he’d begun having numbers tattooed on the right heel of each immigrant and keeping a photo archive of these. When one vanished, he’d ask, “Tell me the number, which one was it?” He liked this photo business so much, one day he called my father to say, “Find number twelve!” and when rolling up number twelve’s pant leg, revealed the words “Up yours,” Aruz laughed like a baby elephant.

  What was up my father’s was, of course, the recent victory of the football team Aruz supported over his. The papyrus scroll used to deliver the message was an Uzbek in his twenties. I don’t know why, but he also laughed. Maybe he was a lunatic. Actually, I think they were all lunatics. All those Uzbeks, Afghanis, Turkmenians, Malians, Kyrgyzes, Indonesians, Burmans, Pakistanis, Iranians, Malaysians, Syrians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Kurds, Kazakhs, Turks, all of them … because only a lunatic would put up with all this. All this meaning, in a sense, us: Aruz, my father, the brothers Harmin and Dordor, who were captains of the ship that took the immigrants to Greece, the men with guns that increased or decreased in number depending on the tide of crime rates, and all the other basket cases I didn’t yet know by name, lined up on a road tens of thousands of kilometers long to carry tons of people hand over hand into the world …

  Especially the brothers Harmin and Dordor. They were the strangest people I could ever hope to meet in this life, and I really loved them. Because with them, it was like life didn’t exist. When it had no rules, life slowly dissolved into the air. Time, morals, my father, fear: it was all gone. They were barbaric enough to turn any modicum of civilization they encountered into a desert, make a gigantic mirror out of its sand, and write farewell messages onto it with lipstick-colored blood. They both took me by the hand and brought me many times to the end of humanity and back, but regrettably, on our last trip, forgot about me and left me there …

  Yes, my father was a merciless man and of course Aruz, being an orangutan, had an inner world as big as a plastic model of the earth. But the brothers Harmin and Dordor were something else. A pair of Arthur Cravans! Their grand total was four meters and two hundred fifty kilos. Yet despite all that meat, their voices were tiny. They always whispered so I had to rise up on my toes to hear what they were saying. They were constantly tattooing each other, and I’d strain to see what they were drawing. After a while I realized that, naturally, it was the same sentences every time:

  Born to be wild

  Raised to be civilized

  Dead to be free

  It was written all over them. On their legs, arms, the backs of their necks, their feet, hands …

  “What does it mean?” I’d ask.

  “It’s all names of broads!” Harmin would say.

  Dordor, who could tell I didn’t buy it, would say, “It’s in old Turkish, pal, Ottoman!” and laugh.

  Three years would have to pass for me to learn what those words meant. Harmin told me the morning after the night Dordor
was killed, stabbed sixty-six times by four of Aruz’s men. In his usual whisper:

  “We must have been around your age … We went and stowed away on a ship. Wanted to travel the world. Anyway … One day we dropped anchor, we’re in Australia! Let’s go ashore, we said. But no! We just couldn’t. Man, we said, what the hell is this? We don’t feel well, we’re dizzy, feeling sick to our stomachs … The mere mention, going ashore, and we go white as a sheet … You know how people have fear of the sea? You get seasick … turns out we’d begun to get landsick. We asked if there was such a sickness. No, they said. They didn’t have it but we fucking well did! After that we always stayed at sea. Years passed this way. So you see, we never did travel the world! We traveled the sea… Remember how you used to ask? ‘What do these tattoos mean?’ That’s what they mean … This entire story … This is the Turkish version. One day you can go and learn the English one too …”

  “Where’d you learn English, then?” I asked.

  “At the Belconnen Remand!” he said. Seeing I didn’t understand, he added, “Prison … in Australia.”

  “But you said you never made it on land!” I began to say, and he snapped, “We didn’t! We went under it.”

  I hadn’t understood a word of that. I thought he was messing with me as usual. I couldn’t comprehend. Turns out whatever sickness it was that he had, he was contaminating me too. On the front steps of the morgue where Dordor lay, no less … Then he went off to shoot Aruz, of course. But he couldn’t kill him and died … As for myself, I learned English. So … now I know that they’re both free. Not on, perhaps, but beneath the land they’d been trapped under …

  I was twelve, and the regular presence of Near-Middle-Far Asians in my life meant I now had the ample geographic knowledge of a Gypsy. The teacher pointed me out in class and said, “That’s it! Look, your friend Gaza examines the world map in his free time. It wouldn’t hurt if you did the same as well. There’s more to the world than just where you live, kids!”

  Then all the kids, with the exception of Ender, with whom I shared my seat, gave me predatory looks and emitted a smell furious enough to necessitate opening a window. They really hated me. That I was sure of. They wanted to beat me up. They weren’t quite sure if they could, though. For they’d heard some small, nauseating tidbits. About me and my life and my close and far circles. In any case, the fluctuating bouts of violence, during which I, as the target, would just sit there cross-legged, didn’t take long to abate. For one day Harmin and Dordor came to pick me up from school and showed off their four-meter height, and the juvenile hate I was besieged by folded in on itself and sank into definite silence.

  The only one talking now was Ender. Only he told me things and asked questions he wouldn’t be able to get replies to, and kept chortling to himself. His father was a gendarme. A sergeant. I knew him. Uncle Yadigar. Every time he showed up when school let out, he’d take a chocolate bar out of his pocket and give it to Ender, saying, “Break it in half, son, give some to Gaza.” Then as I munched away, he would bide me, “Why don’t you come to our place, look, your aunt Salime made meatballs,” to which I’d shake my head and walk away.

  He knew I was Ahad’s son, obviously, but I was sure he couldn’t figure out what the hell Ahad was. Maybe that’s why he kept inviting me to his home. To get words out of me in exchange for meatballs. But I had no mother and I could make meatballs on my own. For the past two years, no less …

  Uncle Yadigar the Heroic Sergeant! He really was. He’d grabbed up and saved two children from the midst of a forest fire two years earlier, and his right cheek had been completely burned; he’d been awarded a medal. Ender had even worn that medal to school one day, and all the kids whose fathers were olive growers, grocers, tailors, picklers, stationery sellers, butchers, patrol policemen, guardians, restaurateurs, furnishers, or dead gnawed off the jealousy coating their lips, collected it at the edge of their tongues, and spat it onto the ground. Ender, who was already an outcast because he talked to me, was ostracized even more—and this meant out as out could be—leaving the son of the smuggler and the son of the gendarme to their own in a class of forty-seven. But Ender was so stunted he failed to register all this and continued to chortle to himself. As for me, I was sure it was my insides, rather than my face, that were breaking out in spots. For slowly but surely the immigrants were beginning to make me nauseated.

  Whenever I saw those people; who clung to one another and made microscopic squeals at the smallest noise, or whose pupils quivered as if they had some mysterious strain of Parkinson’s, or who kept trying to smell the forthcoming moment with their broken, sunken-pen noses, who emitted nothing other than the word “More!” even though they never stopped talking, who were buried in seventeen layers of sweat- and then soot-stained fabric and stuck their heads out of their textile tombs only to ask for something; I would say: “Fuck off already!” To their faces, in fact. It wasn’t like they understood. Even if they did, they’d just sit and thrust their chins into their chests.

  When Ender asked me, “What are you doing this weekend?” I couldn’t very well say, “I’m going to smuggle people, is what I’m going to fucking do!”

  And when I said, “I’m helping my dad,” he’d rattle off all the places I always wanted to visit, saying, “I wish you could come too”: the movie theater in the city, the amusement park in the neighboring town, the game hall in the shopping mall of the city, one of the two Internet cafés in our own town …

  Ender had nothing he had to do! All he had to do was homework, and eat his mother’s meatballs, and maybe go to Koran class! I worked like a dog! I collected the plastic bags immigrants shit into and buried the shit behind the warehouse, bought bottles of water in twos and loaves of bread in threes from all the stores in town so that our shopping wouldn’t attract attention, emptied bins of immigrant piss, ran from pharmacy to pharmacy since they kept getting sick, never even stopped for a minute. I was worked into the ground just because someone felt like going to another country! I even had to give back the copy of Robinson Crusoe I’d borrowed from Ender because I hadn’t had time to read it.

  As a matter of fact, I’d only been curious about the book because he’d summed it up as, “There’s this slave merchant, he gets washed up on a deserted island …” The second I heard that, I’d wished I could get washed up on a deserted island too. After all, I could be considered a slave merchant, and I was sick of both: of slaves and of mercantile! All I wanted was for my father to scold me over my report card like a normal kid, and not because I forgot to activate the air conditioner we’d just had installed in the back of the truck!

  This wasn’t like forgetting to turn off the lights when you left the house. I’d caused the death of an Afghani by not turning on the conditioner. He was twenty-six, and he’d made me a paper frog. A frog that leaped when I pressed down on it with my finger. His name was Cuma, which meant “Friday.” The Afghani’s, not the frog’s. I found out years later that Robinson had a Cuma of his own. But since Friday was a book protagonist, how could he possibly be anything like Cuma! For he would never be found asphyxiated in the back of a truck nor give a paper frog as a gift to the child who’d turn on him like a snake. Of course, had Robinson and Friday existed, our lives would have seemed like a novel to them. That was the problem. Everyone’s life seemed like a novel to someone else. But they were all just lives. They didn’t turn into novels through mere divulgence. An autopsy report perhaps, at most … a feature one. Libraries were full of them: feature autopsy reports. Bound or unbound, they all told the story of paling skins. A man was made of skin and bones, after all. He would either eventually wrinkle or break on the way. Or be an Afghani named Cuma to die like that pondering rock of Rodin’s. Cuma who died on a Sunday …

  And I felt so bad I finally caved and went to Ender’s for meatballs. But it didn’t help shit. In fact, sitting at that table and watching that family made me feel even worse. The meatballs were delicious, though. If I had had a mother,
I’m sure she would have made them that way too. “Would you like more?” she too would have asked. “Some more?” Maybe then I wouldn’t have hated the word “more” as much. When I got up to turn the meatballs in the pans, due to habit I suppose, my mother would say, “That’s not for kids, leave it,” just like Salime. Like a kid I would sit and the sizzling oil wouldn’t burn my hands and blister the spaces between my fingers. The way it did every time …

  They said there was ice cream, but I didn’t stay. I got out of there. Yadigar didn’t ask me anything. Not my father’s health or how his business was holding up. All he said was, “Eat. You need it,” like he knew everything. Really he was right. We were all growing. No matter what their age, everybody. The entire world. We were spinning our way into growth. Our heads spinning … That was why we ate and should eat. Each other and everything. We needed it. So we could grow as quickly as possible. Grow as quickly as possible and croak and leave space for others. So a new epoch could begin. One that was preferably not like this one … because we could tell we wouldn’t amount to shit. We weren’t that dumb … not all that dumb …

  I was home. Father had gone to the industrial area in the city to get the brake linings of the truck replaced and wouldn’t be home till the evening. Just as I was contemplating how terrific it was to be alone and that I should definitely be alone when I grew up, the phone rang. I could tell it was Aruz by the digits on the small blue screen. I’d memorized his number. I didn’t want to take it. He would ring three times at most, then get bored and hang up anyway. But the ringing didn’t stop. Four, five, six … We weren’t home, damn it! Why didn’t he just give up and call father’s cell? Was it that he’d already called father, wasn’t able to reach him, and was now trying the house? But father would always have his phone at hand. Had something happened to him? Had the police caught my father? The gendarmerie?