More: A Novel (19 page)

“Okay,” said Rastin. “Okay … come evening. Open lid. Then go. We go truck. You come. Father not important. No one look …”

I could only push out two syllables from between my lips.

“Okay …”

I was just leaving when I heard Rastin again.

“Tell me something, Gaza!”

“What?”

He shot at me the three questions that had been brewing in his mouth. Even despite all the concrete separating us, he tried.

“Men do not want money, right? I keep kidney? I assume correct?”

I did open my mouth, but … I swear, it wasn’t me who spoke:

“No, Rastin. When you go to Greece, they’ll take your kidney! Sorry!”

“Liar!” he yelled. “Why then you are cry?”

This time it was me who spoke. It wasn’t exactly talking, but it was my voice.

“
Fear not, the crimson banner that proudly ripples in the dawn, shall not fade …”

And I was accompanied by another: the child in the reservoir! He clapped, laughed, and oscillated between mumbling and hollering. Then another joined our choir: a leader by the name of Rastin. Though only one word came out of his mouth over and over:

“Liar!”

Shouting hard enough to bust his vocal cords out of his nostrils, he proved that a single word can be strung into very long sentences indeed:

“Liar! Liar! Liar!”

In his fury he even swung a bucket he happened to get his hands on and broke one of the cameras. He was so far gone it hadn’t occurred to him that the bucket might be full. As it was, the only child in the reservoir had just gotten off it, but it was too late. A fountain of shit had hit the fan and splattered the walls and the people before giving anyone a chance to even scream. Stained hands came off faces, and still Rastin couldn’t figure out what he had just showered upon them. Breathlessly he turned this way and that, as if nailed into place, and was still unable to face the bucketful of facts. Even though it was all there in front of him. In the brown dots on his spectacles! He would have found what he was looking for if only he had taken a few deep breaths to steady himself, because it was everywhere he looked: shit.

Neither the child nor I paid any heed. And to the tune of the Independence March, we abolished the reservoirland I had erected to the tune of the Independence March.

The headlights of the truck lit up the narrow, tree-lined road as we moved through the night. The light we emanated swept the asphalt fanning out in front of us. The dark tree trunks melted into one another while others, whitewashed below the waist, danced in and out of sight like ghosts. Now and then those ghosts reached out as if to grab and stop us. I could hear it. The sounds of the branches swept over the truck in waves and abated. But none of those branches were strong enough to catch us and deter us from our path. Even the thickest of them were left broken like matchsticks in our wake, and we slipped through their leafless hands. Besides us, there was no life in the forest that had given its last breath back in March. Sure it would be resurrected by April, but until that day, the forest was just a big corpse. And every corpse had its worms. That would be the road we were traveling on. We rode on its back as it slithered through. We were inside a monster that spewed fire from its two eyes and scorched everything it beheld on its way. It roared so loudly every time we shifted gears that we couldn’t even hear the radio. So my father lit a cigarette and turned it off. Then he turned to me and asked:

“Do you smoke?”

Right then a thousand voices inside me shouted “Yes!” in unison, but I didn’t listen to any of them.

“
Smoke
, Dad? No.”

Just that morning, I had buried a body in our garden right in front of my father. Yet it was out of the question to smoke a cigarette in front of him. There wasn’t any logic to be found here. I’d buried logic along with that body. Not that it wasn’t already dead for years …

“Take one, go on!” he said, holding out the pack. I looked up at him. He was smiling. Was it a trick? Would he pull over as soon as I made for the pack and break my reaching fingers? Seeing my hesitation he spoke.

“I know you smoke. Go on, take one.”

He knew everything! He always knew! That was his job: knowing me. Watching me! Constantly stalking me! AHAD was the name of a secret service with the one occupation of gathering information about me. A secret organization! Absolutely! I would find out years later, in equal parts amusement and brooding, that my paranoid theory wasn’t all that far-fetched. In a history book I’d read, it was said that the Arab officers of the Ottoman army who were stationed in what is Iraq and Syria today united and created a secret organization to give name to their dreams of independence. The name of this intelligence organization—the goal of which was to spill the military secrets of the Ottoman army, the uniforms its members wore, etc., to the British in order to start the Arabic revolution—was
El-Ahad
! So I mustn’t have been that insane, on that night, to think that all my father ever did was spy on me. Not
that
insane.

So I pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit it. My hand shook a bit at first, but then I got it together. As I put the lighter in the pack the way my father did and was about to hand it back, he said, “Keep it.”

Goes without saying that I didn’t reply, “I already have a pack on me.” I took it and put it in my pocket. I waited for my father every time before raising the cigarette to my lips. We drew in the smoke and let it out in unison. Rolled down the windows in unison and tossed the butts out in unison. Then I watched the ghosts fly past on the road. Thinking about the ghosts in the back …

Things hadn’t turned out like I’d feared. In the evening at exactly ten, I’d gone to the warehouse and opened first the doors of the vault and then the reservoir. I’d left the six wristwatches by the lid of the reservoir and, like Rastin had said to, left the warehouse and hidden behind the door I’d left ajar. In this way, without being glimpsed by any of them, I’d been able to watch them leave the reservoir one by one, and the owners unite once again with their watches, before they climbed into the back of the truck in pairs. I’d even counted them so there wouldn’t be some kind of screw-up! The thirty-one illegal immigrants got into the vault and then Rastin, who was last, paused and glanced around. I was sure that it was me those eyes sought, but I was in no mood for confrontation.

In any case I’d had to hear Rastin. Because he yelled, “Liar!” Although this time the word sounded hesitant leaving his lips. As much as he didn’t believe he’d have to give up his kidney, he just couldn’t be sure. Because he, just like me, knew that all you never wanted to believe was real.

For example, he hadn’t wanted to believe that the people for whom he’d once fought would abandon him, but that was what happened. I hadn’t wanted to believe that my mother would bury me alive, but that had happened too. We were aware how much bigger the possibility of hell was compared to the possibility of heaven. So Rastin didn’t wait long before looking down and spitting into the sawdust beneath his feet, adjusting his glasses, and hopping into the vault, pulling its doors shut behind him.

But there was something he didn’t know. For perhaps the first time in his life, his worries wouldn’t come to fruition and his kidney would stay in its place. And that was the only gift I’d be able to give Rastin. Rastin himself had given the others a similar gift. For days he’d convinced those people that they were imprisoned in that reservoir and then falsely proclaimed their emancipation. In the end, our circumstances were so shitty that the only thing we could do was point at hell and beg for purgatory. For ourselves and for those around us …

Now the only thing left to do was get to the shore where the boat would moor and take the thirty-two people out of the back and onboard that boat. I was thinking of stopping my father before he could get out of the truck and saying, “I’ll take care of it.” How I’d say it exactly was: “Now don’t come out in the cold. I’ll go take care of it!”

At first he’d say, “Absolutely not,” and then, thinking that I felt guilty over losing the goods, give me a chance to atone for my mistake.

At least that’s what I hoped. Actually I think I didn’t care all that much. Even if one of them happened to see and recognize my father on their way from the vault to the boat, in the heat of the moment they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. I’d watched the changeovers onto the boat dozens of times. They’d get so excited it was like they thought the boat they were getting on was taking them to Mars. Perhaps in a way, the journey about to be taken was really tantamount to going to space for those people. Still, in my eyes, they seemed more like the monkeys sent into space than people. Yes, perhaps they would breach the atmosphere and make it into space, but they’d forever remain monkeys!

For whatever reason, ultimately, in those few moments that their blood pressure was a roller coaster, that is, one of the most important instants in their lives, I doubted any one of them would pounce on my father and cry, “I thought you were supposed to be dead!”

Later Rastin could very well find a way and tell them that he’d been duped by me. I’d had the opportunity to quite closely examine how well he lied to people. He was cool as a corpse when it came to that. In fact he was such a competent liar that he could have convinced anyone who remembered my father, in a few words, that they’d seen a ghost.

So none of this was a problem. There was something that resembled a problem, although small: we’d never before gone to the meeting place described to my father by the captain. It was in an area we’d never delivered goods to before. As far as I’d been able to tell, it was a small cove. A small cove where the forest ended and the trees tapered off until the reef plunged into the sea. At least that’s what it looked like on my father’s drawing. After every bend in the road, he peered at the piece of paper he held against the steering wheel and tried to make sure he was driving the truck on the right itinerary.

It was two in the morning and I was about to close my eyes so I didn’t have to stare out into the darkness any longer when rain started falling. For the following few minutes, I watched the drops. Drops hitting the windshield like flies and shattering. And I lowered my eyelids. The roaring of the truck faded out first, then real life … All that was left was a dream, and my mother.

For the first time in my life I dreamed of my mother. Wearing a green dress with a print of purple flowers, she was on a beach I didn’t recognize, and pregnant. Behind her was the enormous sea and small clouds. Her shoes in her right hand, she stood straight and stared at me. Her legs were together and her bare feet were buried in the sand to the ankles. She was like a tree with purple flowers that only grew in the sand. With her left hand she was trying to gather up her long black hair tousled by the wind and, I think, smiling. That’s how I was seeing my mother in the dream. Because that’s how she’d looked in that one photo at home. I looked into her eyes to see if I could tell whether or not she was happy. Only her eyes. But it didn’t work at all. Whatever she’d been feeling in that second the photo was taken, none of it had overflowed physically. All she’d been doing was standing, being pregnant and looking into the lens. My father must have taken the photo. In an early hour of the morning, he’d stood with the sun behind him and, probably without intending to, gotten his own shadow in the frame as well. My father was a shadow reaching all the way to my mother. She appeared to rise out of the sand, from the point the shadow ended. I was in a dream. Maybe if I asked her, she’d tell me. She’d stir to life inside that photo and talk to me.

“Why, Mother? Why’d you want to kill me? Please tell me …”

I waited … but neither did her lips move, nor any sound come out between them. Then my eyes slid over to the shadow, and I thought of my father. I tried to understand why he would keep this photo. Why’d he have a photo of the woman who tried to kill his son in the drawer of his bedside table? I have to wake up, I said. I have to wake up right away and ask him that. And my eyes opened …

The rain had picked up, and we’d cleared the forest. To one side was an abyss, to the other were crags. We were ascending Kandağ. Slowly … I saw the telltale lights of a distant village and turned my head to ask.

“Why do you keep that photo of my mother?”

The windshield wipers bent and straightened like two doped-up marathon runners doing sit-ups, while my father didn’t take his eyes off the road.

“Why, Dad?”

He turned to look at me for a second and then turned his face back to road, saying, “As a memory!”

“A memory? Memory of what? My mother was going to kill me! Then she was going to leave you! A woman like that, and you’re keeping her photo as a memory?”

He didn’t speak until we were over a bend so narrow that the rear wheels practically swung over into space. When the road again became a long rise that stretched out in front of us, I heard my father’s voice.

“Where’d this come from, you twat? Why would you think about this now?”

I could have said, “My dream!” but I didn’t. Instead, I started rattling off the things I was starting to see as the fog dissipated in my now alert mind.

“Why would a person keep a photo of someone? Because he still thinks about her, I’d say. Right? In fact, because he still loves her … and that’s why you keep that photo. In fact you love my mother so much you never fell in love with anyone else. That’s why you never married. Right?”

And Ahad laughed! He looked like a fool that laughed because he couldn’t think of anything to say. Like he would laugh himself to death so he wouldn’t have to speak! But how long could a person keep on grinning to himself? He couldn’t hold it out very long, naturally.

“Don’t be stupid!”

Yes … I had Ahad figured. I had everything figured … My mother may not have spoken to me in the dream, but really she’d told me everything I needed to know. With that stance and those eyes and her feet plunged into the sand. She’d told me the whole story by not telling me anything. When that photo was taken and when she was pregnant with me, my mother hadn’t felt anything. That was why there wasn’t a shred of emotion on her face. Or on her hands … In that photo, my mother was a tree. Or a grain of sand. She was the sun behind my father. She was an entire sea … My mother was nature, who felt nothing. She couldn’t have loved my father even if she wanted to. She couldn’t have held me in her lap and called me her son even if she wanted to.