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  “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.

  “Then tell me!” I said to my father. “Tell me! What’d you do to my mother that was so bad she wanted to run away? What could you have done? Imagine, she hated you so much she’d even have done me in!”

  He was going to hit me, I knew. He was going to hold the steering wheel with his left hand and whack me across the face with the back of his right hand. I was expecting it. But he didn’t. He didn’t do anything. In fact, that’s what he said.

  “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything to your mother.”

  “Then why? Why’d she want to get rid of us? Why’d she try to go give birth to me in that graveyard? She could’ve gotten a divorce! Right? She could’ve divorced you and then left me to you? Or I don’t know, maybe taken me with her! But why’d she go and do a thing like that?”

  The wipers fell behind the rain now. The more the rain picked up, the more my father slowed, though he still kept going. And Ahad cried:

  “She did say that! She did! She said, let’s get a divorce! I asked what she’d do with the baby. She said she’d get an abortion! Why, I asked! Because I want to leave, she said! I want to leave and see other places, she said! I want to see it all, I want to know it all, she said! Just like you used to say, huh? That’s why you went and took that exam? Do you get it now?”

  My father was really talking to me for perhaps the first time ever. Or I was hallucinating and Ahad was actually talking to himself. The words poured from his mouth so fast they’d drown us before the drilling rain could. But I pushed my luck. In case he could hear me, too.

  “So what’d you do? You told her she wasn’t going anywhere, didn’t you! You said she had to stay! You forced her!”

  And I thought of the reservoir. And I thought of the separate cell in that reservoir. And I thought of the iron ring I’d hammered into that cell. And I thought of how I’d thought of chaining people to that ring! And lastly, I thought that what I’d thought of, my father might very well have thought of as well!

  “Isn’t that what you did? You kept her by force! You chained her somewhere and she had to stay there, didn’t she? Then one night she ran away! And you ran after her! You chained her, didn’t you! You chained your wife like she was an animal! You tied my mother up like a dog! Didn’t you?”

  He turned to look at me and said nothing. Only accelerated. Staring at me as he did it, too! I think he was smiling … like my mother in the photo …

  “Mind the road!” I yelled. “Mind the road!”

  But he just stared at me.

  Father and son, eye to eye, we fell into the void. A void as deep as an abyss … a void the size of Kandağ …

  I could never be sure. Never! Was it an accident, or suicide?

  CANGIANTE

  One of the four basic techniques of Renaissance painting. Signifies the transition to another color when grading into lighter or darker tones of a color is unattainable or unreasonable. Is a sudden change in color.

  My face came to first. I felt small drops hitting my cheeks, eyelids, temples, and forehead. Then my ears came to life. They too had awakened to the sound of rain and waited for my eyes to open. But my mouth opened before they did. To let out a scream in case there was one trapped inside. But all that came out from between my lips was hot silence. That heat most probably was blood. It must be warming the ground it fell on more than it was warming me, because I started shaking where I lay. And my eyes juddered open. They rolled in their sockets to find something to see. The first thing they saw was darkness and to this they adjusted first. Picking the visible out of the invisible, they gave meaning to the darkness, and a stone surface materialized in front of my eyes. A boulder. It hovered above me like the low wall of a cave. I could reach out and touch it if I still had a hand. I tried. I saw my right arm. At its end, a hand that still had five fingers. It slowly rose and stopped. This way I knew that the wet ceiling was at an arm’s length.

  I hadn’t moved my head yet, but it was time. I was left-handed. I first rested my left cheek on the earth and saw the night. Open air, trees, bushes, and raindrops that splashed off where they fell and onto my face … then I turned my head to the right and saw the same thing. This time I raised my left arm, extended it to the back, and my hand hit a stone wall at least as wet as the ceiling. I trailed my fingers over the wall, feeling its dents and protuberances. When my hand entered my field of vision once more, it was on the ceiling above me that was attached to the wall. I wasn’t in a cave. I was underneath an overhang open on either side. Underneath a tarp of stone …

  The palms of my hands could feel the mud I was lying on top of. I was stretched out on the soil, on my back. Clearly there’d been nowhere better to fall. I was at the bottom of the world and I had everything figured out. I could conjure up everything that had happened up until that instant the truck hovered over the void. My father looking at me and me yelling at him, “Mind the road!” But I couldn’t remember the rest. And I didn’t care. All I wanted to dwell on was myself. On myself and my situation. Who knows how many trees or rocks I’d hit on my way down until I arrived at that rock? Who knows how I’d been flun
g about to end up underneath that overhang?

  Rising up on my elbows, I unstuck my back from the earth, raised my head, and for the first time in my life felt glad to see my feet. I even moved them in my gladness, not stopping to think that they might hurt. The piece of rock half a meter above me stopped at my knees and everything below was getting doused in rain. Night and shadow surrounded me on three sides and stared. My face and everything else hurt like my skin had been grated, but I didn’t feel severe pain. I could get up. At the very least I could sit up.

  I pressed my palms against the ground and pulled my knees toward myself. I bent my head so I wouldn’t bump it against the stone ceiling and rested my back against the wall behind me. The sharp bumps on its surface surely poked into my back, but I didn’t feel it. The gloom made the colors of my hands, shirt, and trousers so dark that I couldn’t tell the blood from the mud. I just brought my hands to my face, stomach, shoulders and assumed that whatever damage had been done to my body, I could feel it out. Clutching at myself I searched for breaks. A broken bone or a severed piece … but it seemed that everything was in its place. Same as the day my mother gave birth to me… elbows, ears, and eyes, in the total that they should be. I wasn’t sure about my teeth, though. I thought I could tell by my voice. In any case it was as good a time as any to start talking to myself. As good a time as any to see if I still had a voice …

  I said, “You’re alive,” and something spilled onto my chest. It must be a thread of saliva and blood that stretched from my jaw to my chest. I broke the wet thread like I was swatting a fly.

  Then I glanced around. Thinking maybe I’d see my father. He might have taken the same route and been lying somewhere near me. But there was no one to be seen. I had to get up as soon as possible and find him, wherever he was. For if I was to kill him for putting my mother in chains, perhaps for her entire pregnancy, I had to do it now and immediately. There are some nights … nights like sawdust … that suck in all kinds of crime and redeem all kinds of criminals in the morning … That was the kind of night I was in. A night one could get away with killing his father!

  I could stand beside him with a large stone in my hand as he lay expiring underneath a tree and let gravity do the rest. I’d crush that skull of his, inside which I was now sure once circulated the thought of imprisoning the woman who wanted to leave him, and end it at that. This way he’d even have a gravestone. If someone asked how he’d died, I could reply, “By a gravestone falling on his head!” But first I needed to gather myself. To get it together a bit more …

  I raised both arms and stretched them out to my sides. I collected some rainwater in my hands that reached past the piece of rock above me. Then I tried to use the water in my palms to wash the blood and mud off my face. I don’t know if I managed, but at least I felt better. I was ready now. I could crawl out from underneath the piece of rock and stand. Just as I’d bent my head and leaned forward, something struck the ground at my feet. Something large. Something the size of a person! It had happened so quickly that I was frozen. I hadn’t yet let out the breath I was holding in when another person fell! Onto the same spot, right in front of me. On top of the other one. All I’d been able to do was pull my feet back. I pulled them back underneath the overhang and froze. Seconds later another person fell. Not right in front of me, where I’d been expecting it to, but to my left, so I started and reflexively raised my head, bumping it against the rock. As I stared in horror at that person’s outstretched hand, near enough to almost touch me, another one fell. To my right this time! And another! Then another! It was raining people! I couldn’t make sense of it all. I wanted to dash out of there immediately but couldn’t muster up the courage. I had no idea where they were falling from. But wherever it was, must be very high up. Because they struck the mud like meteors. It was like they were being fired out of a giant pistol in the sky! In fact, it was as if that pistol were trying to shoot me. It riddled the ground around me with holes as it sent those human-bullets flying at me.

  They made such a sound when they hit the ground that I felt punched in the heart each time! My bones broke and my ears filled with blood with each one that fell. They didn’t cry out or contort or try to get up. They were already dead and simply raining on me. At times I heard a deep thud but didn’t see anyone fall. Those must be the ones falling onto my stone ceiling. And the others, to my right, my left, and right in front of me! I recoiled in the opposite direction of wherever they fell but, being unable to get out from under the rock, couldn’t move more than a few centimeters.

  Knees to my chest, arms pressed to my sides, I tried to shrink as much as I could. I saw hands, feet, and faces. Some touched me, others lay like rag dolls at most a meter away from me. Their legs bent from the knee not backward but to the sides and their arms vanished underneath their torsos. They crumpled shapelessly like puppets with severed strings. I knew who they were. They were the Afghanis in the vault. It was like they’d all climbed to the top of a building to jump off one by one.

  I couldn’t make sense of it! From where and why were they falling? How was it that they rained down on me like birds afflicted by death in flight? As all these questions faded my mind and eyes into darkness, they kept on falling. Their limbs tangled together as they piled up on top of and underneath and next to one another. The big mud pile they accumulated into kept growing larger. Two rains fell simultaneously and merged together. Human flesh collided with water and turned into muck. In that brief duration during which I breathed at most four times, a wall of flesh rose up around me. A wall that enveloped my entire field of vision! In front of my very eyes, those dozens of corpses came between me and the night and trapped me underneath that piece of rock. Now I was inside a cell made of three human walls, a dirt floor, and stone. At the very bottom of a mass grave …

  I was fifteen at the time I got trapped underneath all that human debris. Sooner or later my mother had gotten her way. I was buried alive.

  I sat there shaking. And as I did, I felt fine hairs touching my ears. Who knows whose hair or beard or eyelashes or eyebrows they were? It was dark. I could see nothing. But they were all there. All over me! I was so terrified of touching them that I couldn’t even flinch. They touched me, however. I just sat there, shoulders stuck between two walls of flesh. My hands rested on my knees that were pressed together. I could feel my palms sweating where I pressed them fast against my knees so I wouldn’t touch anything.

  I began moving my feet forward inch by inch. My knees had to unbend only slightly before I touched them. Those people. There wasn’t even enough space in front of me to extend my legs completely. My hands still on my knees, I did the only thing I could. I screamed.

  “Dad!” I hollered. “Rastin!” I howled. But my voice didn’t go anywhere. It circled round and round inside my cave. As it did it went in one of my ears and out the other. I’d either go deaf or hoarse. My vocal cords were the first to give up.

  I didn’t have a phone. Even if I did, I don’t know if it could clear human flesh. All I had on me were a paper frog, two packs of cigarettes, and two lighters. The latter were the most likely to help. I was so scared of seeing the bodies, however, that I could never have lit one of the lighters. Yet I couldn’t keep on sitting there like that any longer, either. I had no choice but to touch those enmeshed bodies. At the very least I could try pushing them with my feet. I thought I might have a chance if I could create even the tiniest gap. Without taking my hands off my knees, I started kicking out with both feet. I couldn’t even tell what exactly I was hitting, but I pumped my knees and tried to shove whatever the soles of my feet happened to land on. But it wasn’t working. I just kept on striking a soft wall that wouldn’t budge, over and over.

  Perhaps if I leaned forward slightly and also used my hands I could do other things. But there was such pressure on both my shoulders that I was sure I would lose what space I had if I were to lean forward. The many kilos of flesh on either side of me would immediately fill the space I left be
hind and I’d be even more stuck. Still, I decided to use my hands.

  Trying to square my shoulders, I leaned my hands against the walls on either side. My right hand touched some fabric. My left hand bounced right off, as four fingers had hit a brow, while the thumb coincided with an eye socket. I needed some fabric for my left hand as well. But all my palm kept landing on was someone’s nose or mouth. The mouth had been the worst because my fingers pushed past the lips and touched a pair of teeth and part of their gums.

  Hopelessly I went back to where I started, which was the brow. Trying to keep my thumb as far as possible from the eye socket, I put my hand against that brow and pushed as hard as I could. But nothing happened. The head that I grasped by the brow didn’t even budge.

  So I gave up on my left hand and banked on the right. I could feel each individual rib underneath the fabric. I pushed as hard as I could, but the wall on my right was at least as sturdy as the one on my left. I didn’t give up, however. I tried over and over. The more I tried, the more panic replaced my fear. In my panic I started not caring what I touched. Whatever I could grab with both hands, I shoved. My left hand even went in the mouth and out again. In the meantime I also kept on hitting the wall across from me with my feet. I was like a thrashing worm. I continued to kick and shove from where I sat until I was short of breath. But it was no use! No use at all …

  That’s when I started to cry. I shed tears and sobbed loudly, breathlessly. I hadn’t cried much in my life, but had burst into sobs for the second time this week. Of course the situation I was in was multiple times more horrifying than Rastin seeing through my lie. As was my crying. Multiple times louder! I opened my mouth as if I’d tear it right open and in my voice that had long gone hoarse, howled like some strange animal. After all, there was no one to see. There were dozens of people around me but none of them could see my unsightly weeping. I cried so hard my eyes hurt from squeezing them shut. I was like a baby who’d started crying in his mother’s womb. A baby who cried because he knew he wouldn’t get to leave his mother’s womb. A baby who cried not to take his first breath, but to release his last …