Copyright © 2013 by Hakan Günday / Kalem Agency
English-language translation copyright © 2016 by Zeynep Beler
First English-language edition
Originally published in Turkey as Daha in 2013 by Doğan Kitap
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Günday, Hakan, 1976- author. | Beler, Zeynep, translator.
Title: More : a novel / Hakan Gunday ; translated by Zeynep Beler.
Other titles: Daha. English
Description: First English-Language Edition. | New York : Arcade Publishing, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016025295 (print) | LCCN 2016033224 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628727074 (hardback) | ISBN 9781628727081 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Refugees--Fiction. | Human trafficking--Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Thrillers. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.
Classification: LCC PL248.G766 D3413 2016 (print) | LCC PL248.G766 (ebook) | DDC 894/.3534--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016025295
Jacket design by Laura Klynstra
Front cover photograph © AP Images
Printed in the United States of America
If my father weren’t a killer, I wouldn’t have been born …
“Two years before you were born … there was this boat named Swing Köpo, I’ve never forgotten … Belonged to a son of a bitch by the name of Rahim … Anyhow, we load the goods, there’s forty heads at least. And one of them is sick. You ought to have seen the way he was coughing! He’s done for! It’s anybody’s guess how old he is, could be seventy, could be eighty …”
If my father weren’t a killer, I wouldn’t have been one either …
“I even told him, what use are you anyway? Running, migrating somewhere? What would it matter if you got where you’re going? You want to go through this torture so you can die? Anyway … Then Rahim said to me, come along, we can shoot the breeze on the way back. Back then I had nothing to do, I hadn’t bought the truck yet …”
If my father weren’t a killer, my mother wouldn’t have died giving birth to me …
“Every once in a while I’d lend a hand smuggling migrants. I’d get to know the business and also make a bit of cash … I said all right, fine. So we board, we’re out in the open sea … short while before we make it to Khios, a storm breaks out! The Swing Köpo’s already a lost cause as it is! We went under before we even knew it …”
If my father hadn’t been a killer, I would never have turned nine and sat down at that table with him …
“I look around, everyone’s scattered everywhere, screaming and yelling … These guys are from the desert, what do they know of swimming! You see them once, and then they’re gone. Sinking like stones, all of them. Just drowning … at some point I saw Rahim, his forehead’s covered in blood … he’s knocked up his head somewhere on the boat … You should have seen those waves, like walls! Rolling up like they would swallow you! Then I saw that Rahim was gone as well …”
If my father hadn’t been a killer, he wouldn’t have told me this story, same as I wouldn’t have been listening …
“I would have started swimming except I’m thinking, which way? It’s the dead of night. I struggled quite a bit … But no, even keeping my head above the water is an issue. I keep bobbing up and down … I said, Ahad, my man, this is the end! You’re done, you’re a goner … then all of a sudden, between two waves, I saw this white thing … There’s this dark shadow on top of it …”
If my father hadn’t been a killer, I never would have had to learn that he was a killer …
“Turns out it was that sick guy … You know, the geezer I was telling you about … He’s got a buoy that he’s clinging to … I don’t even know how I swam, but I made it over to the guy … I grabbed the buoy and yanked it out of his hand … He just looked at me … reached over like so … so I shoved him … Grabbed him by the throat … Then a wave came and carried him off …”
But my father was a killer and all of it did happen …
That night, my father told his story so slowly his words dissolved into the air between us like those intermittent silences that slipped from his lips. In fact, it was for that reason they were not nailed, but as good as screwed into my memory. Round and around they spun as they lodged into my mind. Or into whatever was left of my mind … Now I wonder if my father hadn’t been a killer, whether I would have had no father at all. For only a killer could have been a father to me. The passage of time made this clear …
He never talked about his murder again. He didn’t need to. How many times do you confess the same sin to the same person? Hearing it once is enough. Enough to cause you to slowly rise from the table and lie down in your bed although your eyes remain open …
Why now, I remember thinking that night. Why tell it now? Was he telling it to me or to himself? Maybe that was the only life lesson he was able to pass on to his nine-year-old son. The only vital information he had. The only true lesson of life: survive! I remember, too, the moral I found in that story: Don’t tell anyone how you survived … No one should talk about where they’re from. I remember weeping. No one should talk about the breaths they’ve stolen from others. I was nine. I couldn’t have known … that you survived so that you could tell people about how you survived … Then at some point, I remember picturing the moment my father grabbed that old man by the throat and pushed him. Thinking, that old man must have had an Adam’s apple just like my father’s … asking myself, had my father felt that lump in his hand? Had that old man’s Adam’s apple left a mark in my father’s palm? When he stroked my cheek, would I catch it too? Next I remember sleeping. And then waking … then, the breakfast he had prepared me, and the slap, and the command.
A slice of bread …
“What did you make out of what I told you yesterday?”
“It was either you who would die, or that man …”
Two slices of cheese …
“Good … so tell me … what would you have done?”
“Maybe that buoy could’ve helped us both …”
A slap …
“Eat, don’t stare at me like that! Wipe those eyes!”
“OK, Dad.”
An egg …
“If I wasn’t around, you wouldn’t be either, do you understand?”
“Yes, Dad.”
Three olives …
“Good … don’t ever forget this! Now tell me, what would you have done?”
“I would’ve done the same as you, Dad.”
A sliver of butter …
“Everything I do in this life, I do for you.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
A command …
“Now you know that this business is about survival of the fittest, you’re coming with me today!”
“OK, Dad.”
It turns out Father had been looking for a novice. One who would belong to him to the flesh, bones, and marrow. It seems he would
rather become accomplices with his own son than split his profit with a stranger.
“You’re coming!” he said, so I went. That summer, as soon as I got my report card, I became a people smuggler. At the age of nine … it wasn’t really that much different than being the son of a people smuggler …
Now I wonder if maybe he was drunk when he told that story. Recounted his way to lucidity, then realized it was too late … Maybe my father simply had a crippled sense of remorse and a mean streak, that was all. Maybe he was that way because of his own father. And he was that way because of his father … and he was that way because of his … and he was that way because of his … Weren’t we all children of survivors after all? Children of the survivors of war, earthquake, famine, massacre, epidemic, invasion, conflict, and disaster … Children of swindlers, thieves, murderers, liars, informers, traitors, of those first to leave a sinking ship, who yank buoys out of the hands of others … those who knew well enough to stay alive … those who would do anything, anything at all, to stay alive … If we were alive today, did we not owe it to that someone in our family tree who’d declared, “It’s either me or him!” Maybe this wasn’t even the reign of wickedness. It was only natural … It only seemed unwholesome to us. But there was no concept of ugliness in nature, or of beauty. Rainbows were rainbows and no science textbook had ever disclosed any information about how to get to the end of one.
Ultimately, it was two corpses that carried me into this life: the wish to live and the wish to let live … The former was my father’s wish, the latter my mother’s … And so I did live … Did I have any other choice? Surely … but who knows, maybe this is just how the physics of living goes, and somewhere it’s written:
The Physics of Living 101
Every birth equals at least two deaths. One to do with the wish to live, one to do with the wish to let live; two deaths.
For the newly born, however, those deaths must ensure that he lives his life unaware that he is even breathing.
Otherwise, said person will be made up of war and ends every day as a corpse.
Yes, maybe my name is Gaza …
And I never thought about committing suicide.
Except, at one point … I felt it.
Now I’m going to tell myself a story and believe only that. For every time I turn and look to the past, I see it’s changed again. Either the terrain is diminished, or its history compounded. In this life nothing stays in its place. Nothing is content with where it is. Maybe nothing has a place really. That’s the reason they won’t fit into the holes you leave them in. All the while you’re measuring away and digging holes in just the right size, but it doesn’t work a damn bit. They all wait for you to blink. So they can run off. Or switch places and drive you insane. Especially your past …
And now it’s time … time to tell every single recollection once and for all, seal it off. Because this is the end! I’m never going to turn and look back again. Not even in the mirror, I’ll look it in the eyes. With every word I’ll nibble at it until I’ve eaten it up. Then I’m going to scrape it off my teeth with a toothpick and grind it under my soles. That’s the only way to comprise only the present … otherwise the body I live inside will do anything to stop time! Because it knows everything: that it will die, that it will decay… who was the piece of shit that told it this? The body knows it’ll croak and disappear! In fact, that’s why … clamping its jaws on to life like a rabid dog, it makes me repeat the same mistakes time and time again. Time and time again! To buy some time through those déjà vus that take me back to the past, even if for an instant … but it’s over.
When I finish my story and am silent, I’ll only make new mistakes from then on! Mistakes so foreign they’ll kick time into full gallop! Mistakes so unknowable, they’ll turn wall clocks into magnetized compasses! Mistakes no one’s heard of, let alone made before! Mistakes as great and recondite as the discovery of a lost continent or extraterrestrial life! Mistakes as extraordinary as men who make machines that make men who make machines that make machines! Mistakes as tremendous as the invention of God! Mistakes as unanticipated as the second-biggest invention following God, that of character! As magical as the first mistake of a newborn! A mistake as deadly as being born! That’s all I want … and maybe some morphine sulfate.
Turkey is only the difference between the East and the West. I don’t know which one you’d have to subtract from the other to leave Turkey, but I do know for sure that the distance between them is equal to Turkey. And that was where we lived.
A country whose geopolitical significance was discussed daily by politicians on TV. Before, I couldn’t figure out what that meant. Turns out geopolitical meant a decrepit building, pitch dark on the inside, that buses with glaring headlights used as a rest stop in the middle of the night just because it was on the way. It meant the huge Bosphorus Bridge, 1,565 km long. An enormous bridge passing through the lives of the country’s inhabitants. An old bridge, one bare foot on the Eastern end, the other shoe-wearing foot on the Western; all kinds of lawlessness passing over it. It all went straight through our bellies. Especially those referred to as the immigrants … We did what we could … to make sure they wouldn’t get stuck in our throats. We swallowed and sent them on their way. Wherever it was they were going … commerce from border to border … from wall to wall …
Needless to say, the rest of the world also did its part and provided them with the desperation necessary to start running from the place they were born to the place they were to die. Every variety of desperation. Desperation of every length, width and age … As for us, we simply carried out the demands of our country’s latitudes and longitudes. We carried to paradise those who’d escaped from hell. I believed in neither. But those people believed in everything. From birth, practically! After all, they assumed: if there is famine-afflicted, war-wracked hell on earth, there must surely be a heaven as well. But they were wrong. They’d all been played for fools. The existence of hell wasn’t necessarily proof of heaven. Yet I could sympathize with them. This was what they’d been taught. And not just them, everybody … a dazzling tinsel-framed painting was being sold to the entire world population. And in that painting, good sparred with evil; heaven with hell. Yet there was no such war and never had been. The vitally crucial war between good and evil, expected to endure until the apocalypse, was the biggest ruse known to mankind. A ruse necessary to ensure the absolute effectiveness of authority and social order by the shortest route possible. For if the simultaneous existence of good and evil within every person were not generally accepted, the identities of everyone in whose name people had died, meaning every leader who ever lived, would start showing stains. There would be confusion, clashing thoughts, and no one would ever give their life for anyone else again. But that’s not how it worked out and so it became that the simplest way to get people to fight one another to the death was the war between absolute good and absolute evil.
Those who said, “You’re the good ones!” actually meant to say, “Go and die in my name!” while those who said, “You’re the ones who’ll go to heaven!” meant, “Those that you do in are going to hell!”
Hence heaven and hell, good and evil, split the creature called man down the middle and created a vendetta between the two halves, turning him into a total dolt. So it was that the formidable salesmen of the past were able to wrap lifetime-guaranteed servility in the sacred theory of conflict and sell it to free people. Getting submissive dogs to fight and kill other submissive dogs was the whole point! It wasn’t that darkness was against light, nor was it vice versa. There was one true conflict, relevant only to biology: death or life …
In the illegal transportation of people, that was really the only thing to be mindful of: that the number of living persons delivered be the same as the number picked up. Other than that, it didn’t matter how many of them had run from hell expecting to get to heaven. We were carrying meat. Just meat. Dreams, thoughts, or feelings, these weren’t included in the pay w
e were receiving. Perhaps if they’d paid enough, we would have carried those with caution too. I, in fact, could have willingly adopted this mission and made sure the dreams they’d dreamed up back in their homes—or in whatever hole they were born—didn’t break during the ride. A few Hollywood movies would have done the trick. It would have secured their faith in heaven. Or, to implement the classic, time-honored method, handing them a holy book. To only one of them, though, as it goes in history. So he could tell the others. He could tell it any way he liked … In fact, I would have done it all for free, but I wasn’t old enough and didn’t have the time. Because there was always work to be done.
“Gaza!”
“Yes, Dad?”
“Go, get the chains from the storage.”
“OK, Dad.”
“Get the locks too.”
“I will, Dad.”
“Don’t forget the keys!”
“They’re in my pocket, Dad.”
I was lying. I’d lost them all. But I hadn’t imagined that I’d get caught. I got two slaps and a kick for it, as a matter of fact. How was I to know that father sometimes had to chain them up?
“Gaza!”
“Yes, Dad?”
“Go get the water, pass it out!”
“OK, Dad.”
“Not one per head like you did last time! You give two people one bottle, got it?”
“But, Dad, they always say …”
“What?”
“More!”
I was lying. Yes, they always said, “More!” because that was the only Turkish word they knew, but the issue at stake here wasn’t the water being in demand, but my diminished profit. I’d begun selling the water we normally gave out for free. Without my father knowing, of course … I was ten now, after all.
“Gaza.”
“Yes, Dad?”
“Did you hear that? Did somebody just yell?”
“No, Dad.”
“Guess I must’ve imagined it …”
“Guess so …”
I was lying again. Of course I’d heard that scream. But it was barely two days since my discovery that a certain appendage I possessed wasn’t only for pissing. Therefore my only wish was that we’d get the job done as soon as possible so I could go back behind the locked door of my room. There were twenty-two adults and a baby in the back of our moving truck. How could I have known that that cut-off scream belonged to a mother when she realized the baby in her arms was dead, before the others clapped panicked hands over her mouth? Would it have mattered if I did? I seriously doubt it because I was now eleven.