The Few

  They weren’t too concerned with the Jamaican angle. All the same, Derdâ was tireless in her account of everything she could remember. She even told them about the spittle that would fly out of Vezir’s mouth during his religious lectures on the eleventh floor of her apartment. But she didn’t mention Steven, Stanley, or Mitch. It was strange, but somehow she felt that they had played a part in saving her life. The truth was she despised Stanley, but there was no need for him to go to prison. He already led a life confined by the walls of his heroin addiction, or so she thought.

  And she was right, for the next six years he lived within such walls and the harsh reality on the street. After his father died, Stanley returned to his family home—it was finally his—but soon died of a heroin overdose. The walls had come crashing down around him. As for Steven, he was buried in his chador, as specified in his will. Only Mitch managed to turn his life around. He returned to his native California where he married a man then quickly divorced him. Then he married a woman and they started shooting documentary films together. Most of them traced the plight of Muslims in the various countries where he had lived. In a speech he gave after receiving an award, Mitch said, “I’m not sure where she is right now, but I owe so much to a particular Muslim girl who was always a source of inspiration.”

  Unaware of such future notoriety, Derdâ mistakenly mentioned one of Mitch’s films during her testimony, but the content was so grotesque that the judge didn’t believe her and put it all down to delusions formed during Derdâ’s days of heavy drug use. So she changed the subject. When it came to the story of the fifty-two Cambridge students, he only said, “there’s no need for this, no need.” It was almost time for lunch. Derdâ understood those types would never believe her story.

  When they asked her if there was anything else she’d like to add, Derdâ asked about her dad.

  “I’m afraid he’s passed away. He took his own life.”

  “My mother would always say, ‘God willing they will kill that man one day.’ Now I can tell her she doesn’t need to wish anymore,” she said with a faint smile.

  The Brighton rehabilitation center was ten stops from the city center. The main building stood in the middle of a lush green lawn as big as the campus of Derdâ’s old boarding school. It was called Hope.

  Reading the name on a sign over the garden gate, Derdâ thought about all those people in the world that lived with hope. So people who just passed by the center, maybe only once a day, felt good just reading the word on the sign, Derdâ thought. And she smiled to herself. But her smile wouldn’t last long. She wouldn’t smile again until week twelve in her recovery program.

  The treatment for heroin addicts lasted eighty-five days. It was a difficult journey that was mainly about staying in one place as the body purged itself of the drug. A user completed the treatment with the help of three people. A psychiatrist, who could use mild sedatives as a last resort to help the patient deal with psychological pain. A therapist, who worked to re-establish the spiritual landscape of the patient. And a nurse, or companion, who never left the patient’s side, providing all the support the addict needed, preventing him or her from committing suicide or harming anyone else.

  At the center, a psychiatrist and a therapist worked jointly with twelve patients. The number of companions depended on the season. Most of the addicts tended to come in the fall. Junkies slept outside during the summer, oblivious to the desperate nature of their situation. They were only worried about their lips drying out in the setting sun. But once the weather started to cool off, they dragged themselves out to rehab centers, settling in by the first autumn rains.

  In the rehab center there were at least as many companions as there were recovering addicts. And all of them were volunteers. People willing to do such a job for no pay were either atoning for personal sins or already believed they had been absolved. It required a superhuman effort to spend twelve weeks with a heroin addict. Over the course of the treatment, a companion only slept when the addict slept. A superhuman effort meant closely following another human being, sticking to them like air. Companions were like air when they walked arm in arm with a recovering addict, always by their side, never judging them. They had to be sure the addict was always breathing, pick her up when she fell, wipe away her tears. Pay no heed to her foul language. A companion had to take hold of her wrist as she pounded her fists onto a table, and wipe her chin if she spat or drooled, always with the same smile. And if the addict threatened a companion’s life, there was nothing they could do but wait until one of the two hospital directors intervened. They had to do all this and they had to be everywhere at the same time. Just like air. The managers at Hope called them saints. That was easier. It would break the hearts of all those women—mostly retired nurses—to look them in the eye and praise them using the words “you’re like air” every time they succeeded in curing an addict.

  Anne was Derdâ’s companion. She had worked with her last addict four years ago and left Hope with no intention of ever returning. But Derdâ showed up quite suddenly and because there was a shortage of companions at Hope they had no choice but to call Anne. She told them straightaway she wouldn’t come. She told them that even though she was only fifty-three years old her heart felt old and that she couldn’t handle the work anymore. And she hung up. She stared at the phone for four minutes thinking of the last four years away from the job, before she called Hope back and asked which week the addict was in. She promised herself she wouldn’t go if they told her week one. She knew it was the most difficult week. Watching an addict suffer through the first week locked up in a room, going through countless visits with the doctor, was like witnessing the end of the world. But they told her week two. She’d trapped herself; Anne told them she’d come in the next day. She kept her promise. The next day she found Derdâ. She wasn’t suffering in the throes of immediate withdrawal. She only stared at her with vacant eyes, with Anne smiling back. Anne was living proof of someone who would never retire. She would always continue to volunteer.

  “Hello. My name’s Anne. I will be with you for the next twelve weeks. What’s your name?”

  Without even looking up: “Fuck off.”

  Pleased she at least got a response, Anne said, “Ok, but I won’t go very far. I’m now your companion from now on. So I’ll just stay right here. If you need anything, all you have to do is look up,” and she took two steps back and stood there. This was a tactic she’d developed over the years at the center, a tactic to bring out any shards of humanity left in an addict, with the hope they would rub together and make a spark.

  Derdâ sat on the park bench gnawing at the flesh around her nails while Anne stood just two meters away, her hands crossed over her stomach, her feet firmly planted on the ground. She looked like a kind of sentry guard keeping watch. In the past, she’d stayed in this position for up to four hours. She called it the invitation pose. In the invitation pose, she often thought of her time as a nurse—the endless hours up on her feet—and she tried to leave her body behind, traveling only in her thoughts. And she did just that. But soon enough she found Derdâ’s humanity. Ten minutes. Derdâ couldn’t bear the thought of Anne in that uncomfortable pose and she said:

  “Derdâ. My name’s Derdâ. Come sit down here. Don’t just stand there.”

  “Thank you,” Anne said, smiling as she sat down. It was the first question that she asked all addicts. She always wrote down their answers in a little notebook, doing everything she could to better understand them.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your experience with heroin?”

  Derdâ turned and said, “Why? You thinking of starting?”

  Anne smiled.

  “Oh no, I’m just wondering what it feels like, that’s all.”

  Derdâ stood up and stormed off. Anne followed just behind her. In about a hundred steps, Derdâ stopped and leaned over to Anne to whisper, “You know fireworks, right?”

  Coming closer, Anne said, “Of course.”

&n
bsp; “They explode like this.”

  Derdâ raised her hands and flung open her fingers.

  “Yes, I know. All the different colors. I love watching them,” Anne said.

  “That’s what it’s like when you’re on heroin …”

  Anne interrupted her.

  “So you see fireworks, then?”

  “No,” Derdâ said. “You are the fireworks!”

  Anne hadn’t heard such a powerful description of a feeling in some time. She jotted it down in her notebook later on. She never forgot the expression. She found it incredibly moving.

  “What a beautiful way to put it. You know, you should be a writer.”

  “Yeah, right,” Derdâ said, sarcastically, with only half a smile on her face.

  “Why not? Isn’t writing just another mode of expression? Do you go to school?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to?”

  Derdâ thought of Fehime from Yatırca.

  “Maybe, I don’t know.”

  Derdâ turned to Anne.

  “I read your file. You’re still young and, believe me, you can do whatever you like. You have a whole life ahead of you.”

  Derdâ stopped to think and so did Anne. Derdâ spoke and Anne listened.

  “I’m already dead. Can you understand that? Dead! I just haven’t been buried yet, that’s all.”

  Anne smiled.

  “You seem to be breathing a bit too much for someone who is dead.”

  Derdâ was silent. She didn’t think this woman would be able to understand all the things that had happened to her. So she walked away. Her mind was hazy. They had started a new Naltrexone treatment at the center.

  She turned and asked, “How do you spell your name?”

  Anne knew how addicts suddenly changed conversation. She spelled out her name without hesitation.

  Derdâ quickly replied, “In my language, ‘mother’ is written the same way.”

  “I know,” said Anne.

  “How would you know?”

  But suddenly she was sick and the only thing she’d managed to eat at breakfast, some strawberry yogurt, dribbled out of her mouth. She was also on Revia and the side effects included impaired vision, dizziness, fatigue, and nausea. Derdâ could hardly keep anything down, even her own stomach bile. It purged her body, but also her mind of the profanities and the physical suffering she had endured.

  After Derdâ gave her last testimony at court, she came back to Hope to start her tenth week of treatment. She occasionally came to group therapy sessions but never spoke to the other addicts. She participated as little as possible in the discussions and waited impatiently for the end. To her mind she had nothing to say. There was no one there capable of understanding her anyway. Only Anne, she thought, only Anne could understand her, if only a little. Anne could understand her suffering, her regret, how she hated life and how she wanted to die, as if Anne had felt the same way too once in her life. Anne could finish Derdâ’s sentences using just the right words. Derdâ hadn’t really loved anyone for years. She couldn’t explain the feelings she had for Anne. She loved her but she didn’t understand why.

  Anne had long since accepted the fact that she couldn’t even begin to imagine the weight of all the tragedies Derdâ had suffered. What she saw in Derdâ was a silently flowing waterfall. Anne wanted to wash her weary hands in that waterfall. She thought of this as love.

  “Do you see that tree?” Anne asked as she pointed out a hundred-year-old plane tree whose roots were bursting up out of the earth. She paused and then laughed. “They look like bell-bottoms.”

  Derdâ was ready to smile but held herself back. A concern emanated from a deep, dark place. If she exposed positive feelings perhaps she would be punished. She was scared of the punishment she would get when Anne left. If she got better, Anne would disappear. So she only nodded.

  Anne noticed her silence and putting her arm in Derdâ’s she whispered, “I’ve always wondered about your hair. Did you know that?”

  Derdâ ran her hand over her head.

  “Do you miss it?” Anne asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid of it.”

  Following a long silence together, Anne was as convinced of her love for the young girl as she was of the offer she was about to make.

  “Do you know what we should do? We should go to your room right now and cut off all my hair. And you’ll do the same. We’ll shave it all off.”

  “Are you crazy?” Derdâ said.

  “Of course not,” Anne said, smiling. “It’ll grow back. But this time you’ll let yours grow out, too. We’ll do it together. What do you say?”

  “I know this trick!” Derdâ said. “It’s no different than the way you just stood there beside me when we first met, trying to pull some pity out of me.”

  “Not at all, my dear lady, nothing of the sort. And that wasn’t just a technique. Anyway, what do you say? How about being promoted from skinhead to hippie?”

  Derdâ felt ten years old, thinking only of herself, of her own happiness. She thought, if Anne cuts her hair she won’t be able to leave me till it grows back, so she won’t leave me.

  “It’s a deal. Let’s go. You ready now?”

  Anne pretended to be scared, covering in mouth in surprise. “Oh no …”

  “Too late now,” Derdâ said and then, taking hold of a lock of Anne’s blond hair, she shouted, “we’re cutting it all off!”

  When everyone at Hope—the therapist, the psychiatrist, the two enormous security guards, the three women in the kitchen, the four cleaning women, and the six members of the board who came every month to inspect the facility—saw Saint Anne’s shaved head they thought that perhaps she had finally lost her mind after so many years of unfaltering service. But when she walked in the garden with Derdâ, her eyes smiling, she was far from insane. Both women felt a strange feeling of pride in their baldness. They stroked each other’s heads, like two children afflicted with leukemia, enduring the sessions of chemotherapy together without the slightest fear of death. Two days later a therapist brought dark sunglasses from Brighton.

  Anne put on her pair and handed the other to Derdâ, saying, “Now we can take our picture and send it to a magazine. We look pretty sexy!”

  On the fifth day of the twelfth week they sat silently together with their backs against one of the bell-bottom plane trees.

  “Have you noticed?” asked Anne.

  “What?”

  “How much stronger you are. I’ve seen so many people in your situation who would never do the things you’re doing now. You’re the bravest person I’ve known here, and the strongest. Do you know what this means when you get back to real life?”

  “I don’t,” Derdâ said, running her hand up and down a black thorn jutting out from one of the branches above her head.

  “I do. So tell me, what are you planning to do when you get out of here?”

  Derdâ’s testimony in court covered far more than what the MI5 officers had ever hoped for and had a dramatic effect on the judge who, instead of granting a residence permit, offered Derdâ UK citizenship. She would live out the rest of her life as an English woman. But the MI5 had acted too early. At the end of the seven-month trial, only nine members of the Fighting Wolves (all minors, including Black T) and a few of Bezir’s kickboxers had been convicted. They had planned to extradite Gido Agha from Turkey, but he had fled to Iran. As for Hıdır Arif, he was bound to let the world know all about the charges leveled against him.

  Every time he was interviewed on TV, he reverted to the same old refrain: “This bogus trial has nothing to do with me. It’s an attack on all of Islam, and it is fated to lose.”

  The Dulluhan brothers made plans to move their Westminster base to Dublin. They first cut a deal among themselves, and later Hıdır Arif made a deal with the British, suspecting they wanted to bring them down. But it wasn’t long before Hıdır Arif’s office was raided. During the raid, Hıdır Arif tried to take cover behind his glass glo
be. He took eight bullets, but survived. He believed that a piece of the holy black Hacer-ül Esved stone that was knocked out of the shattered globe had saved his life. Three years later, he died of a heart attack on top of a thirteen-year-old girl whose photograph was too good to turn down. It was just three days before he planned to announce himself as the new prophet.

  The Dulluhan brothers tried their best to manipulate politics in Ireland. But they were frustrated in their efforts and began fighting among themselves, down to the lowest-ranking foot soldiers. One brother was gunned down by a rising IRA militant—someone they had recently supplied with two thousand Glocks. The brother didn’t die but lived out the rest of his life with a bullet in his skull, a bullet that wouldn’t grant him access to his own name, the ability to stand up, to move his fingers or blink his eyes.

  So the best thing that came out of Derdâ’s trial was UK citizenship. Many countries, the US included, saw citizenship as something that could be offered through a lotto played out on the Internet. But the reality was that citizenship granted to someone like that—just given away—was never a source of true happiness. You can see this in the faces of all the immigrants that somehow ended up in England. Or in the surprise most Americans would express if you told them that the miserable lives they were eking out in their own country were given away as the top prize in an Internet lottery.

  Noticing her silence, Anne asked again, “What are you going to do when you leave?”

  Derdâ answered, as if ashamed of confessing her love.

  “I’ll miss you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’ll find out where you live?”

  “And?”

  “I’ll come and sleep in your garden.”

  “And?”

  “No, I’ll just stand there. I’m going to stand in front of your door with lowered head and my hands crossed, like a miserable child.”

  “Ok. And then?”

  “Then you won’t be able to stand it for very long and you’ll have to let me in.”

  “Fine, but tell me this. How long would you wait outside like that?”