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by Günday, Hakan; Beler, Zeynep;

  We didn’t speak at all on the way back … Only I glanced at my father at some point. Since I didn’t know what else to think, all I thought was how much our faces looked alike. Maybe we didn’t look that alike, I’m not sure. But he looked as sleepless as I was. He’d been sweating too. Who knows what had happened while I was in that cell? How had he felt? Maybe they’d put him in another cell … Whatever trouble we had gotten into, it must have been too disastrous to talk about before we got home, I thought, and kept silent. Together we kept silent. Then once we were inside the house, I asked:

  “Dad … have we been caught?”

  He laughed. He was opening the fridge to get himself a beer.

  “What’re you talking about, ‘caught’ …”

  But I wasn’t laughing. For the first time in my life, I yelled at my father. Even then all I could manage was: “Dad!”

  He turned around like he’d been struck, and his smile slowly sank into his lips. He unscrewed the cap off the beer and tossed it onto the kitchen table. Then he poured the beer down his throat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spoke.

  “There’s nothing to worry about … It’s just that that son of a bitch Yadigar wants more money … understand?”

  I didn’t.

  “He wants money for what?”

  He turned his head to gaze into the distance, but since the walls prevented that, his gaze ended up on me, and he took a breath. He expelled the same breath with the words, “Have a seat then.” There was a chair on either side of the table. They sufficed for us since we didn’t have anyone else. I pulled out the one near me and sat. He sat across from me … He took another swig from his beer and stared at the bottle in his hand as he spoke.

  “So you’ve been to have meatballs at theirs.”

  “When? Where?”

  “To Yadigar’s …”

  “To Yadigar’s? I dunno … I might have … I guess it was like two years ago.”

  “Were they good?”

  “The meatballs? I wouldn’t remember …”

  “Salime’s a good-looking woman, she is … though it wouldn’t hurt if she were a bit thinner … What was their house like?”

  His eyes were still fixed on the bottle that he held with both hands. And it was obvious he wasn’t seeing the bottle. He was seeing something else. Something I couldn’t see. Like those lines Rimbaud wrote hundreds of years ago, that I was to read years later: And I’ve seen, sometimes, what men only dreamed they saw.

  “It was a house … just a regular house …”

  “Say … what was their furniture like? Their television … their sofas …”

  What was my father seeing in that bottle?

  “Nice, I guess … I remember the television … You know those large screen ones? We even hooked up Ender’s PlayStation to it …”

  “How did they seem? Were they happy?”

  Why did he want to know all this? Who cared?

  “I think so … yes.”

  “You see, I’m the one who pays for that happiness. Every last scrap of shit you see in that house comes out of my pocket!”

  Since my mind was still in the cell where I’d left it, I wasn’t comprehending. I was just a scared child and nothing more.

  “Why?”

  “Because we’ve already been caught long ago, Gaza … years ago. How do you think we stay out of trouble so easily? Ever wondered?”

  The door of the custodial cell in the lower floor of the gendarmerie station opened. My mind shot out of the cell and into my skull, and I understood both the mathematical reciprocity of the speed of thought and what my father had just said.

  “You bribe them?”

  “How the hell did you ever get that commendation?”

  Okay, fine … so Yadigar had taken me hostage so his inducement would get a raise. I could understand. On top of it, he’d done it in front of all those soldiers, using the custodial cell of the municipality’s command headquarters as his private dungeon. I could understand. So Uncle Yadigar, the heroic sergeant, was not only the station’s commanding officer but the warranty certificate for the crime machine built in cooperation in our quaint little town, and run by us. I could understand. Anyway, there were no heroes. I could understand. I just couldn’t understand why I had to stay in that cell for two nights.

  “Okay, so why didn’t you give him the money right away and get me out?”

  He raised his head and took his eyes off the bottle for the first time since we had sat down and looked at me.

  “The first rule of business …”

  “And that is?”

  “Negotiations … we were negotiating.”

  Obviously I hadn’t been expecting this! So I yelled at my father for the second time in my life:

  “I’ve been there for the past two days, in that place that’s like our reservoir, just sitting there without sleeping! And you’re telling me you were negotiating?”

  Frightened of the volume of my own voice and the possibility of what could happen, my tongue instantly swerved in the direction of a lie:

  “And all that time I was worrying about you! Wondered where you were! Thinking, what if they took my father too!”

  He laughed as if he were sighing. He took a swig of his beer and put the bottle on the table before he replied. “Why, Gaza? Why worry about me? You worry about yourself, son. Fuck me!”

  He must’ve been seeing that thing that I couldn’t see, again. But I was starting to get sick of this. Of all those things I couldn’t see and of constantly being left in the dark. I made one last effort. One last time.

  “How could I do that? How can you tell me not to worry! You’re my father!”

  He stared into my eyes, as still as a bust, which then cracked, and a smiling Ahad emerged from within. An Ahad that just kept on smiling without saying anything, and shaking his head as if he didn’t believe me … I hated my father. He’d let me stay in that cell for two days just so he could pay less to that jerk Yadigar. Two days of sheer hell! He didn’t care about me at all!

  “Dad, I took the exam. And I’ll probably get into a school in Istanbul. I’ll be leaving at the end of this summer …”

  My voice had shaken so much the last syllables hadn’t quite made it out of my mouth, but fallen onto the table and shattered. In truth I was counting on that table as well. I could pull back and run if he as much as made a move. But he didn’t do anything. He just continued to look at me and smile.

  “I know. Your school’s principal called the other day. He’s the one who told me. Your boy is very smart, he said. Very intelligent. As the school administration, we’ll do the best we can, he said. If I’d only pay attention to his education … a bright future is ahead of Gaza, he said. He’ll grow up to be a great man!”

  I must have blinked twice at the most as I listened to this. It had taken that long for all I knew to be replaced by the unknown. I was in a new world now. A new planet. And this one also had gravity. That much I knew, because I wasn’t rising from my chair. But did it have oxygen as well? Could I breathe? I tried.

  “So you knew?”

  “Yes.”

  I tried again.

  “May I go then? Are you letting me?”

  “Sure, you may go … Help me just till the end of the summer, and then you can go off to your school, get a proper education.”

  I could definitely breathe. In fact, there was so much oxygen it was making me lightheaded. What was more, on this new planet, I think I loved my father.

  “So why didn’t you want me to take the exam?”

  “To see.”

  “See what?”

  “If you’re anything like me … Because if it was me, I’d never have listened to my father. He could say whatever he liked, I couldn’t have cared less … and neither could you. Isn’t that right?”

  Maybe it had all happened during my stay in the cell. As I burned myself with a quarter pack of cigarettes the earth I had been living on had been pulled out from u
nder me and replaced with a new one. Maybe they’d affixed a new tablecloth to the end of the enormous tablecloth that was the earth and yanked it away. Or the earth, for an instant, had spun too fast. That was how it had been possible to replace the tablecloth with a new one without breaking anything. Perhaps we were all standing on the new tablecloth of the earth and vowing that we wouldn’t stain it this time around …

  I could have searched for ten years right then and still wouldn’t have known what to think. I just looked at my father. His hair, brow, eyebrows, and eyes … but we couldn’t look each other in the eye. For he was looking at my wrist. My right wrist that was resting on the tabletop. He was looking at one of my blisters, one that was left uncovered by the long sleeve of my shirt. An engorged blister. It didn’t look good. I knew. For the past day and half, I’d been watching every moment of my skin’s struggle for regeneration after I’d turned it into a battlefield …

  I had to think of something to say in case he asked. For that I needed to push aside what he had just said and clear some space in my head. Then of course there was an arm that must be removed from the tabletop. A right arm. I had just started to withdraw it when my father placed his hand on mine. Now we met each other’s eyes. He was smiling. I smiled back … I couldn’t remember the last time he had held my hand. Maybe when crossing the town’s only main street. Years ago … that he was holding my hand again after so long might well be for the same purpose. To take me across. Into another life …

  Just as I was looking into his eyes and smiling, picturing the life across that road we would cross together, a volcano erupted in my wrist. Its lava seared everywhere it spilled and an armor of pain encased my body in seconds. I could neither draw a breath nor part my lips to scream. My father was pressing his left thumb down on the blister so hard that it was my eyes’ turn to be engorged. Two blisters with blurred vision. They burst immediately, and tears made way down my cheeks. I tried the only thing I could and grabbed my father’s wrist with my left hand to pull it off. But I couldn’t budge it. I sprang backward out of the chair but that was also no good, as Ahad ended the discussion by placing his other hand on my left one. And so we presented a new picture to observing eyes. A father-son tableau built of senses. A father and son in the kitchen of a house, facing each other, looking at each other, their hands joined on a tabletop. A father and son holding on to the love between them with all four hands so it wouldn’t escape … and I’d seen the earth from afar many times. In documentaries. A bright blue, bright green, bright white sphere suspended in the pitch-black void of space! There was absolutely no way of telling that on it, children were getting fucked! From that distance you could see neither the wars where heels were blown off, nor the peaces where tongues were ripped out. You could hear neither the screams nor the lies. A slowly revolving sphere, silent, peaceful. They say that what really matters is your perspective. Bullshit! I, for one, was looking at life and all else under a microscope and it all looked terrifying. A swarm of viruses! Microscopic serpents and dragons! An army of bacteria that writhed and twisted as it searched for flesh to latch on to! If I’d been able to open my mouth, I might have let out a burly scream. I might have opened a scream-sized hole in the pain coating my pores and mouth in order to draw in somewhat of a breath. But I was more like a child whose jaws were locked on the brink of freezing to death. All I could do was let out a snarl as thin as a single hair. It was all that could squeeze out between my teeth. Right then there was thunder:

  “I’ll kill you! Who the hell are you to think you’re going! Who the hell do you think I am that I’ll let you leave so easily! Do you have any idea what I went through for your sake? To raise you! The things I’ve done to look after you! Do you know why there’s no woman in this house? Why I never married? Your mother was about to bury your ass! She would have buried you alive! I never allowed a woman into this house so no one would ever hurt you again, or touch you! Now you up and tell me, I’m leaving! I’ll break your jaw! As long as you have your father, who loves you to death, you’re not going anywhere!”

  I really did make the top hundred. I came in forty-third place in all of Turkey, in fact. While they knew very well that my success was no thanks to them, all my teachers smugly congratulated me. All the notable people of our town, so far behind the times that they were unaware the race of humanity was long finished, raised money among themselves so I’d be able to uphold my academic life in the best way possible and made promises they’d each give the most they could. And the governor gave me a wristwatch with four dials, two of which were broken. That moment took place in the main room of the Government Office, was photographed and published on the first page of From Kandalı to the World, the local biweekly, inside a red-and-white border. The space it took up was only slightly smaller than the space where they published Atatürk’s only photograph, taken at Kandalı at every anniversary of Kandalı’s emancipation from enemy invasion. I knew where the photograph, in which Atatürk was captured in conversation with Kandalı locals, was taken. It was the entrance of the village of Nazkur, thirty km away from the center. The very site of the news that, due to the news about me—Kandalı on a Blessed Crusade2—was allocated a matchbox-size space on the page. On that village road where Atatürk had once stood, a trailer carrying the season’s laborers had tipped over, leaving five dead and six injured. And certainly the same season every year in Kandalı saw workers blooming in every color. Therefore the discrepancy in value between these two pieces of news was due to no one knowing the people who had died. These workers with a life expectancy of three months, whose seeds had been planted very far away although they bloomed in Kandalı and dried up in a trailer, had lived elsewhere and never read the paper called From Kandalı to the World. In that sense it was perfectly natural that these casualties, who piqued the interest of no Kandalı resident save for the few farmers whose fields they had worked on, be left outside the red-and-white border. Only the doctors, nurses, and assistants at the public hospital of Kandalı were, naturally, rather distressed by the matter. After all it was highly tiresome to have to stare blankly at people who tried to tell them things in a language called Kurdish that they didn’t understand. To make it worse, unlike the flowers that bloomed in the same season as them, the workers stank. As if they’d begun decaying as soon as they were born. In reality we were also the same, but since they only lived three months, their decay was visible, and it reeked.

  Ultimately the focal point of the paper and Kandalı was the photograph that also featured me. Standing behind the governor and smiling was Yadigar. You couldn’t really tell from the photograph, but I was actually looking at him. He in turn was looking at the district police chief. The district police chief was looking at the district gendarmerie commander. The district gendarmerie commander was looking at the mayor to his right. He in turn was looking at my father, who definitely didn’t want to be there. And my father was looking at the governor as if he would have slit his throat, because in his eyes the governor was a child thief. No one in that photo was looking at me. For the governor in his turn was looking at the watch he was handing to me. The face of the watch showed quarter past three and both the hour and minute hands were pointing and looking at the elderly janitor standing in the corner. The man, whom my father had informed me was the janitor, had been caught with his eyes closed. And so the entire chain of gazes ended at his wrinkled eyelids. It was an unbelievable photograph! An unbelievable scene! Of course I was unaware at that time of its likeness to the scene in that fresco of Da Vinci’s that I was to see in a book years later …

  The Last Supper … the last! Not because Christ had the last meal of his life at that table. The last because Christ was the main dish at that table. The first and last really! Because Christ’s first and last bite was consumed that evening. So with no Christ left, God, in his desperation, would reveal himself … but throughout the meal God was neither seen nor heard. The twelve apostles, their bellies full but their souls empty, placed the bones in
front of them into grails to leave them at the mercy of dogs but still God would not appear. Just when they thought they’d killed the goose that laid golden eggs, they heard a voice. God spoke:

  “Is there man?”

  The apostles were so excited they first exchanged glances and then cried in unison, “Yes!”

  “Are there then any believers of man?”

  They were at a loss for words, and their gazes slid to the animals that were crunching the bones of Christ.

  “Dogs!” they hollered.

  Upon this there was a pause and God spoke again:

  “If the only believers left of man are dogs … then there are bound to be ones among them who catch rabies and become enlightened.”

  And as soon as He was finished, the dogs ran off, foaming at the mouth, and all that was left inside a small grail were Christ’s skull and three bones … Those who had dined at that table and watched it all to death said, so that no one would know the truth, “We’ll tell another truth!”

  Judas was the only one who said, “No, I can have no part in such a lie.”

  And he took the grail, with the last remainders of Christ, and left the table. As Judas sank into the quicksand of regret with each step, the remaining eleven apostles instantly thought up a story. This story would contain neither the contents of Christ’s meal nor what they had heard God tell them. On the contrary, this story would have Christ make the highly inviting suggestion to “eat my flesh, drink my blood,” but no one would eat or drink of him. Most importantly, Judas would be the traitor of the story. A traitor who’d left the table and gone to turn in Christ to the Sanhedrin Council.

  So Christ would be crucified and no one would know that he’d been chewed up and consumed by his apostles that night. Essential details would further be added to the story for plausibility. Such as the number of the pieces of silver Judas received in return for his betrayal: thirty! Fearful that Judas might tell the truth, the apostles came to agreement on the story they had built and told the lie, which they referred to among themselves as another truth, to everyone who crossed their path.