More: A Novel (14 page)

The thirty-three-person group that included Rastin had come into my life at the exact time I had been having these thoughts. It had actually done so as a bit of an exception. It was the month of February. Judging by the fact that they hadn’t waited for the summer to flee their country, they must have been in quite a hurry. They could at least have waited for spring when the prices would have decreased somewhat. Contrary to the legal tourism industry, high season for illegal excursions was the months of fall and winter. After all, mountains waiting to be scaled would be made taller by the snow, and all the roads leading to death made shorter by the ice. It couldn’t be accidental that they disregarded all this and set off anyway. In fact, it must have been something so certain it had made them forget everything else they knew.

My father had gone to the city for four days. To meet with Aruz’s men. They were going to discuss the captains that had taken Dordor’s and Harmin’s places. The blokes were useless. They cooked up trouble constantly. It wasn’t that surprising. There wasn’t much of a chance that the fishbowl called the Aegean would carry on its back two water lilies of the likes of Dordor and Harmin ever again. Anyway …

So I was left alone with the reservoir dwellers for four days. They would also not be boarding the boats for at least two more weeks. I’d heard my father say it. That meant I had at least fifteen days’ worth of material to work with. I could start the world’s most scientific study right away! It needed a title. I opened up a file on the computer and named it
The Power of Power
.

My project was really quite simple. I would imagine the reservoir as a country. The group would be its people. I’d play on the living conditions, maybe grant some stipulations to a few among them, and measure the general reaction. There were hundreds of computer games along these lines, I knew. But the reason other kids continued to play those games was because none of them had a reservoir full of people at hand. That was what those kids didn’t know …

Firstly, they had to have a leader. In the life above the reservoir, the real one that is, there were various ways to determine this. For instance, the most physically strong person could be leader. And for that they’d need to spill one another’s blood, maybe even kill—which method my father would never condone, as it meant losing goods. I could forget about that …

Or whichever was richest could be the proprietor. Yet I also couldn’t take that road, since after all these years, I knew that the amount they carried on themselves was very little or more or less equal …

That left the method that was perhaps the most interesting: determining the leader by vote. Democracy! That was the most logical. In the end, the society-leader relationship wasn’t much different from the situation of a human and an animal trapped in the same cage. In dictatorship the door of the cage would abruptly open and a hungry lion would be shoved inside. But democracy entailed freedom for a person to choose what kind of animal they would rather be trapped with. A carnivore? An herbivore? An omnivore? One that roams by itself? One that hunts in packs? A endangered species? Can it be domesticated? Such were the questions that arose. The fact of the cage, the animal, and the locked door remained, but there was nothing to be done about that. The facts of life existed at this level for now. Also, while in a dictatorship the animal must remain in the cage until it died; in a democracy it would only remain so until the next election. One could count the fang marks on one’s body, consider how much flesh or how many digits one had lost, and thus decide whether or not cage life with the same animal could be continued …

Yes, the reservoir dwellers would have the right to choose their leader. In fact, maybe the people of the reservoir deserved democracy much more than the ones in real life. The reservoir was a real cage, after all, and those people were aware of the walls surrounding them as surely as they were able to lean their backs against them.

But the ones in real life had no idea. Especially not of the fact that they were living in a cage! When they looked at a map, they only saw lines. Red borderlines. As a matter of fact, they were so used to the borders of the cage they failed to recognize as a cage that they would die and be resurrected over and over in order to protect them. Preserving that cage was a matter of honor, and they used the ties of citizenship to lash themselves to its bars by the neck.

Perhaps they were right. After all, there wasn’t much left in the name of humankind worth making into a matter of honor. It was too late to make honesty into a matter of honor, for instance. If the facts of biology were to change overnight and lying were to kill one immediately by brain hemorrhaging, the world would empty so rapidly there’d be room anew for dinosaurs!

Or, for example, it also couldn’t make a concept such as fair allocation of resources into a matter of honor. It couldn’t presume to up and exclaim, “Either you see to it that there isn’t a single hungry person left on the planet or I’ll kill myself! I can’t stand to live such a wretched life!”

Children especially couldn’t be made into a matter of honor. Was there anyone on this Earth who had ever said, or could presume to say, “I saw him putting children to work so I shot him down, Your Honor! It’s a matter of integrity where I come from!” Or, any law that counted facilitating child labor as extreme provocation and would thus see a reduction in the murderer’s sentencing?

So, even matters of honor had to be somewhat grounded in reality. It made much more sense for them to concern women and their virtue, so to speak! That was a much more realistic matter of honor! Or a blood feud! Or the disputing of one’s religion of choice! Or the criticizing of one’s ethics! Or the tampering of the borders of one’s cage of residence! These were much more logical issues and wouldn’t pose an inkling of a threat to sustainable economy. So it seemed that the trash bin called human history, filled with methane gas ready to go up in the first explosion of the third world war, was now brimming with issues that couldn’t be made into matters of honor. No matter that the borderlines of the world map would appear extremely claustrophobic to any sane extraterrestrial, there was nothing to be done. Yes, those borders were as claustrophobic as a three-person elevator, but there were ways to forget one was in an elevator in the first place. Like endlessly taking it up and down. That was how the people trapped inside those borders passed the time. Going up and down and up in that elevator called
homeland
. And by peering into other elevators through the doors that opened at every floor … the reservoir dwellers had it worse, obviously. They were stuck at –1 and going nowhere.

I was watching through the screen. They just sat there without talking. Only Rastin remained standing, still as a statue. I was just trying to figure out what he was looking at when he raised his head and met my eyes. Out of the six cameras in the reservoir, he looked at the one closest to him and waved. Then he went to find an empty spot and sat down. He took a pen and paper out of pocket. He began to write.

He’s like me, isn’t he?

I don’t know.

I think he is … Look, he’s constantly scribbling something down like I used to do. So I guess a Cuma passes through this reservoir every five years.

Could be … Cuma?

Yes?

Why were you running?

Never mind.

They were going to kill you, weren’t they?

I said, never mind.

Was the government going to kill you?

The government is a word, Gaza. People kill.

But you would’ve been killed, wouldn’t you?

You’d like to think that I died on the very road I took to evade death. So you can make yourself feel even worse. So you can feel even guiltier. You were ten, Gaza! You were just a small child. Stop thinking about it.

I’m not thinking, I’m feeling …

I don’t like the games you play with these people.

I know.

Then don’t do it. Look how tired they are. God knows how scared they are …

No one is more tired and scared than me, Cuma! No one!

Really? You should think about your mother! Have you ever been scared enough to kill your own child?

Remind me of that one more time and I go open that valve and dispatch those people by drowning!

I remember the days when you used to tie pieces of
simit
to the tail of your kites to try and feed the birds in the sky … You’ve come a long way, haven’t you?

You can’t remember that, Cuma. That was before I killed you. Now shut up and watch! Watch and maybe you’ll learn how the government you said was just a word can be used in a sentence!

“Gaza! We are go?”

“No, Rastin, we’re still waiting to get word. But there’s another issue at hand. You need to choose a spokesman.”

“Spokesman?”

“Yes, you need to have a leader.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going to have to make some decisions for the road that’s ahead. You’re a crowded group. No one will ask you individually what you want. So, among yourselves, you need to choose someone you trust so he can speak for you. So he can do the negotiating, you see?”

“But we came Turkey. No problem.”

“I know, it’s what’s from here on that’s the problem! The real journey starts once you get on those boats. Whatever, it’s up to you … I’m just saying. The people you’ll come across on the way to where you’re going won’t be like us, Rastin. Do you know what danger means?”

“Yes.”

“Then let me put it this way: a lot of danger!”

With that I left Rastin, whose eyes had become the points of two questions marks, and exited the reservoir. He’d begun talking with the others by the time I took my place at my desk. Using the word danger had been a good choice. The best way to stir people into action with the minimum of information was to convince them that an obscure threat lay ahead for them. Rastin most probably hadn’t made anything of what I’d said but thought it was serious business anyway.

There was an old man in the group. He appeared to be the eldest of the thirty-three. Most of the faces were turned in his direction. After all, they came from a territory of earth turbid with clans and believed that the best way to measure a man’s wisdom was by the lines on his face. Yet I knew kids younger than me, the napes of their necks were like alligator hide from working in the fields all day. Having a lot of wrinkles meant nothing. Getting old was more like the last phase of the living disease. A phase where mental health was lost and replaced with the disagreeable certainty that one would never find what one had been searching for in life. Elderly people were those who had become fully aware that they’d been duped and it was too late for everything. A society run by one of them could only be one that died with them, complaining and in agony.

The old Afghani spoke laboriously from where he sat and everyone listened to him. Then suddenly Rastin looked at one of the cameras and began waving his hands to call me. I would have heard him if he had spoken. Of course, he couldn’t have known that the cameras also transmitted sound. Likewise he couldn’t have known that when I turned on and spoke into the microphone in front of me, my voice would come out of the speaker in the reservoir. That was why Rastin and the others were so startled that they jumped. Because I might have been a bit loud asking, “What is it?”

Rastin immediately figured out the contraption and gave it a try. “Gaza? You are hear me?”

“Yes, Rastin … have you picked someone?”

“Group not understand. Why is danger?”

“I can only say that to whomever it is you pick. You’ll also know, of course. Because you’ll be translating. We shouldn’t scare the others unnecessarily, right?”

As soon as Rastin related this to those around him, there was a rippling in the reservoir. Everyone started to talk at once. They could neither hear nor understand one another. I could see it. I didn’t have to know Pashto to recognize desperation and fear. Especially with a dark secret in question that concerned all their futures, it had taken panic only a few seconds to fill up the reservoir like poisonous gas. This was because of the circumstances they were in, of course. They were in such an illegal and illogical situation that they reacted much more rashly than a people passing their lives between home, work, and school. They were after all on a journey that trapped them between the place they came from and the place they were heading to. They’d left everything behind that they could afford to lose and the only thing they had left was their bodies. Their only valuable was themselves. And in that situation neither conventional ethical norms nor logical decision-making devices were valid. When a person’s only wish was to make it from one point to another, no matter what, every psychological and social theory caved.

For example, their fears were thousands of times that of the apprehensions of the regular people of a regular country. That enabled me to reap the reaction of every one of my moves instantly. Last year, when I was yet a student, I’d been sent to the fast chess tournament in the city because I was school champion. We had only three seconds for every move. I’d made it to the finals. A private schooler had sat across from me and kept turning around to look at his father throughout the whole game. The man was at least as excited as his son. I don’t know why, but I let the kid win. Then the man came up and embraced his son. Maybe it was only for the sake of seeing that … whatever. So due to the fast reactions of the reservoir dwellers, I was once again chasing three-second moves.

And a woman in her forties with a child of seven or eight in her lap, that I hadn’t noticed up till then, shouted at the top of her lungs and shut everybody up. Then she pointed to Rastin and said something. Most probably she wanted him to speak. That was what Rastin did and he did so for about five minutes. Then he stopped and gestured at the old man. At this, from different spots in the reservoir, ten hands that I could count went up. The election had begun!