The Few

  “How long could you make me wait?”

  Anne nodded her head. There were tears in her eyes. She put her hand on Derdâ’s shoulder.

  “We’re going to finish this together,” she said and then hugged her.

  Tears fell from their eyes. From then on Anne had a daughter and Derdâ had a mother. Just then, Saniye felt a sharp pain pierce her heart. She didn’t know why. It must be all this hard work with the animals, she thought, all this damn work at the house and with the animals.

  Derdâ’s face between Anne’s hands beamed with her first smile in twelve weeks.

  Derdâ got dressed and left her room. She had finally freed herself of heroin. She took the first step in the right direction on her last day in Hope, when descending the stairs to the first floor. Making her way down the winding staircase, she saw the crowd below. She felt like the mysterious and beautiful girl who had come late to the ball. They all looked up at her with pride. But there was something akin to jealousy in the eyes of other addicts. And there was a hint of hopelessness in the eyes of the doctors and therapists, because they had witnessed on countless occasions such celebratory beginnings end in countless addicts lurching back to their former lives before finishing even the first week of treatment. But hope always prevailed so now they applauded. They applauded Derdâ with smiles on their faces. Some of them slapped her on the back and others embraced her.

  Of course none of them would be there at all if a chemist by the name of C. R. Wright hadn’t invented heroin when he added various acids to morphine in his attempt to develop a new kind of painkiller. Back then there wasn’t a place known as Hope. But heroin was born. And there was no going back. Maybe they could have used a time machine so that people could go back in time and stop Wright from proceeding with his experiments. The man had little difficulty discovering the drug. The year was 1874 and he was in London, in St. Mary’s Hospital. In the building in which Derdâ died twice and came back to life twice. Heroin was invented on the third floor and now every year seven thousand heroin addicts were committed to the second floor where they lay on the brink of death.

  Holding a cracked leather bag and wearing her black sunglasses and her white uniform, Anne waited for Derdâ in the garden. She smiled when she saw her step out of the building and she waved to her. But not to say good-bye. Derdâ took ten steps forward and Anne took one. They met one another and stopped. The young girl took her sunglasses out of her pocket and put them on. And the Blues Sisters stepped under the Hope sign on the front gate.

  In a gray Seat parked only fifty meters away from the main gate, two MI5 officers watched Derdâ and Anne get into a taxi.

  “Now what?” one said.

  “We wait and see,” said the other.

  A young blond sitting in the back seat stuck her head between the two officers and said, “And what if she complains about us, Dad? You know, she did mention us in court. What if she tries again?”

  Without taking his eyes off the Hope sign over the main gate, the driver answered, “Don’t worry about it. The case is closed.”

  The driver was looking at the Hope sign. Perhaps this was why he felt overly optimistic. Didn’t everything begin with hope? Considering all that Derdâ had talked about in the trial, the officer thought he could uncover a child porno ring. He went to the address in Covent Garden where fifty-two men and a woman had been filmed. He found a camera left in the apartment and the boy with the glasses who had shot the scene, too. Watching the film he felt his heart nearly stop, as if it had been crushed in a door. His son, for whose sake he had been working overtime to support his education at Cambridge, was the first of fifty-two boys to have fucked Derdâ. No matter how much the son insisted, they had no idea how young she was, and the father could never forgive him. He even considered initiating some kind of legal action against his son.

  But the day they first examined the crime scene he and his partner destroyed the camera and the memory card. They prevented Derdâ from saying too much about the event during her trial. But there was something else: They didn’t know about the camera boy’s nosey younger brother. He had already made a copy of the film off the memory card and emailed it to all his friends. The MI5 officers heard about it later. One week before his son and the other fifty-one were due to graduate. The scandal shamed them into leaving school. It blew up when the younger brother brought the film to the Cambridge campus to share with some of the first-year students. He was caught by campus security. A radical feminist professor refused to let the scandal be contained. The university authorities struggled to keep the story from spilling over the campus walls. But to no avail; the scandal came to an end and was sealed with the sentence: “We won’t dismiss you from school, but you will choose to leave yourselves.” So that year’s graduation ceremony at the economics department was sparser than anticipated.

  But for now the officer seemed perfectly content as he sat in his gray Seat looking at the Hope sign above the main gate. We are all too willing to be deceived by appearances. Nothing is more important than being resilient enough to cope with life.

  In the end, the MI5 didn’t just walk away from Derdâ’s life. They ran.

  Derdâ and Anne arrived at Anne’s one-story house in Newbury Park in northeast London.

  “Here we are,” Anne said. “My palace!”

  Big sparkling windows at the front of the house let in the glowing sunlight. The curtains and the front door were white. A low picket fence ran from the back wall to the sidewalk, framing the back garden. The architecture of the house was simple, giving the impression of a doll house that had been magically enlarged a hundred times. And Derdâ was enchanted. Not because the house was extravagant in any way. For the first time, she was stepping into a real home.

  They went inside and threw open the windows, breathing in the fresh air. Three bedrooms and a living room. Anne took Derdâ’s hand and led her to a small bedroom.

  “This one is for you.”

  A single bed and a small wardrobe. Derdâ turned and hugged Anne.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Anne and Derdâ sat together in chaise longues in the back garden, drinking tea in the setting sun.

  “So, my little lady,” Anne said. “Now let’s see, when would you like to start school?”

  Derdâ put her tea down on a low table and pulled off her dark sunglasses. She rubbed her chin and said, “I think I’ll just rest for ten years and then let’s see.”

  Ten years flew by.

  The University of Edinburgh’s main garden was full. People were there to celebrate the graduation of the English literature department, established two hundred years before. It was the first English literature department in the world at a university level. An enormous copper plaque in the corridor of the historic building was inscribed with more than a thousand names. At the end of every academic year the names of the top five students in that year’s graduating class were inscribed on the plaque. With Anne’s surname, Derdâ was now the last name on that list.

  For her eighteenth birthday, Derdâ received a dossier of official documents. Realizing what it was, she began to cry. As she signed the adoption papers her tears smeared the ink. With this signature, she effectively divorced herself from Saniye and began a new life with a new mother. The court decision came back three months later. Derdâ celebrated her eighteenth birthday one more time. But this time there were two candles on the cake. For Anne, Derdâ was born in the rehabilitation center. Saniye’s daughter may have been eighteen, but Anne’s daughter was only two. And soon, two-year-old Derdâ, the most successful of all the top five students that year, would step up to the platform to speak. Anne sat beside her, adjusting her long black hair.

  “I’m so proud of you,” she said.

  “I wonder if you’ll still be so proud when I tell you the subject of my graduate thesis,” Derdâ said, smiling.

  “How bad could it be?” Anne asked.

  “Donatien Alphonse François’s influence on English li
terature.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The Marquis de Sade!”

  DERDA

  “Derda?” said Isa.

  “My dad had this friend. It was his name.”

  “So? What’s it mean?”

  “How should I know?”

  “So ask your dad.”

  “He’s in jail,” said Derda, getting to his feet.

  He brushed off the dust. Isa’s excitement got the better of him.

  “What’d he do?” he asked.

  “He killed that friend.”

  But Isa didn’t get it. He was staring blankly at Derda when they heard the sound of a car. They turned toward the sound. Then they looked at each other. Isa jumped to his feet and took off running. Derda followed right behind him. But Isa didn’t know the cemetery so well and was soon lost. He sprinted randomly down the cemetery paths. Derda made it to the fountain in the square first, winning the race, and there wasn’t anything Isa could do about it. He was new. And he was embarrassed he’d lost. Isa had to sit and watch while Derda filled up his plastic tanks and approached the parked car.

  Derda had never seen these people before, but he knew the tomb they’d stopped in front of very well. It was where he got his best tips. Practically every day, someone would come and read the Koran at that tombstone. And afterward, they’d be sure to give him something. And sure enough here was someone else reciting the Koran in front of the tomb. An old man. With a long robe, just like all the others. But this time there was also a girl at the tombstone. A girl his age. Has she been here before? Derda thought. He didn’t recognize her. He went up to the old man and held up his tanks.

  “Should I pour water over the grave, uncle?”

  He was so used to it, it must have been the thousandth time he’d heard a voice like this. The anguish in the reader’s lilting voice was palpable. Derda spoke the language. He also knew that he had to persevere. Perseverance was an absolute. It was the first condition for getting money from these types. He waited patiently, not moving an eyelash, and with an ever so slight change in his voice reciting the Koran, the old man gave him the answer he was waiting for. Derda dashed to the head of the tomb and began pouring water over the earth, following the girl, who was pulling out weeds. They moved around the tomb and then, as he was filling up the birdbath, the girl stretched out her muddy hands. Derda watched the water stream out of his tank and over the girl’s hands.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  It was practically a whisper. Derda was going to say something too, but as soon as he opened his mouth, his feet were cut off from the ground and he landed in a heap on the path near the tomb.

  When the dust settled, he saw a man the size of a giant looming over him. “What did I do?” he wanted to yell, but he didn’t. He pulled his knife out of his pocket, thinking he could drive it into the giant’s knee, but he let that thought go, too. Then the old man growled some kind of command and the giant reached into his pocket and Derda watched him pull out some change. The money meant nothing to the giant. But Derda really needed it. He hadn’t had a thing to eat all day. But he wasn’t going to get a thing from that giant with the beard. Especially because of the girl. He saw the girl’s face as he turned to leave. It was like she wanted to say something to him. Almost as if she wanted him to save her. But maybe Derda’s hunger was making him see things.

  Isa had watched everything from a distance. He ran over to Derda. He had lost both the race and the customers and he wanted to rub it in.

  “You did it wrong.”

  “What?”

  “You shouldn’t have gotten so close to the girl. Those guys don’t like that kind of thing.”

  “Fuck them!” said Derda.

  He walked past fast. Faster. Deeper into the cemetery. Straight into the darkness of the thickening shade of more and more trees. Isa was following him.

  He shouted, “Where are you going?”

  Derda stopped and looked over his shoulder.

  “Home,” he said. “You go, too. No one comes later than this. No point waiting around for nothing.”

  Isa watched Derda’s back disappear for a few seconds. Then he stuffed one hand in his pocket, grabbed the empty tank with his other, and walked down to the cemetery gates, the tank bumping against his knee the whole way. As for Derda, he slipped through the shadows and arrived at the wall. His house was right on the other side of that wall. On one side his house, on the other side the cemetery. Just the way his father had wanted it. “It’ll be easier to build,” he’d said. “Here’s a beautiful wall already built. We’ll put up three more, and then just stick a roof on top. There you have it. Home sweet home.”

  His mother had done her best to protest but his father wanted to make the most of the little money he had. And so he built their house right up against the cemetery wall because the total cost of the house would be one wall less. It was just like the other houses around them. Some people called this sort of house a gecekondu, a homemade house built illegally under the cover of night. But his mother could never stop saying it was “just like a coffin.” She lived cooped up in that house until her death, from cancer, just the day before. Just one of the two hundred thousand who suffer from eye cancer. Maybe looking at that wall did it to her. The cancer made the woman forget how to see, made her forget her own name, then even how to breathe. The only thing she didn’t forget was how to say the house was “just like a coffin.” Even after she went blind, she still could see the wall by running her hand over the contours of its stones.

  She died on her floor mattress with Derda by her side. She called him to her side just before she died. “Come here.” Derda came to her side, and then she died. As if she wanted to say, “Come here and see how a person dies.” And so Derda saw. He even cried a little. But then he pulled himself together and got to his feet. His plan was to go to their cemetery wall neighbors and pound on their doors until their doors broke down. But he stopped at his first step as if in revolt. He’d remembered Fevzi. Fevzi who’d run away from the orphanage. Fevzi who’d run away from the orphanage and started living in the cemetery. “Don’t tell anyone, but …” He remembered the beginning of his story. “Ten guys jump a guy, you know? They’d say they’d be back to do it again. I was so scared I never went into the bathroom again. I hid bags behind the closets. Then I’d shit in them at night.” So ended his terrible tale of shameful cowardice. What if … Derda said to himself. What if they find out my mother’s dead? They’ll send me to the orphanage, too. My dad’s already in jail. But instead of sitting and worrying, Derda came up with a plan. No one knew his mother was dead. Well, then, there was no need for anyone to find out. I’ll bring her to the cemetery and I’ll bury her! he thought. If the floor of the house hadn’t been poured concrete, he would have buried her then and there. But it wasn’t a shovel that was going to make her coffin.

  He clambered up the wall, gripping the hand-sized hollows worn into the surface, then jumped down to the other side and walked along the side of his house, fighting his way through the tangled branches of a fig tree. He turned the corner and came to the front door of his house. He took the key from his pocket and was about to insert it into the lock when a creeping scent hit his nostrils. When he opened the door, the source was all too clear. His mother was rotting. He had to find a way to get the corpse to the other side of the wall, and fast, and then bury it in the first loose earth he could find. But Derda’s mother weighed twice as much as he did. She could rot all she liked, but she’d still be eighty kilos. He had barely been able to roll her off her mattress and onto the floor. The night before he’d pushed her onto the floor and slipped into her bed. He hadn’t cried too much. The woman had been sick for eight months and for eight months she hadn’t been to a doctor or a hospital. She’d been dying right before his very eyes. Derda had gotten used to it. The woman had prepared him. “If anything happens to me, tell the neighbors,” she said. “They’re good for nothing, but tell them just the same. They should tel
l your dad, too, he should know. Have them bury me somewhere around here. No point sending me back to the village. And tell them I hope God damns them all!”

  Since her husband had gone to prison not one of them had come over to see them. Even when they knew she was sick, they couldn’t take the twenty steps to go visit her. What Derda made working at the cemetery didn’t really let them live, but it kept them alive. In a word, they’d been abandoned. To themselves and to their own survival. “It’s all your father’s fault,” the woman would say. “Because of him they won’t even look us in the eye!” Before she fell ill, she’d sold dill at the market. Yasin, the guard at the cemetery, got the dill from a relative of his. But when that relative started asking for the woman instead of money, she dropped the dill and the market.

  Derda’s father had been in prison for six years. Like he told Isa, his father had killed his best friend, his blood brother, Derda the Arab. They met at a cockfight. They’d both bet on the same cock. But it turned out to be the wrong cock. Both of them were incensed they’d lost the last lonely kuruş rattling around in their pockets, and they both got the idea into their heads to cut up both the winning cock and its owner. So they were both lying in wait, behind the warehouse where the cockfight was held. Each was oblivious of the other. One waited at the warehouse’s left corner, the other waited on the right. The cock owner left the warehouse by the back door to get into his van. Both men jumped him at once. But in a deft turn the cock owner broke free and they plunged their knives into each other’s legs instead. They were both too drunk for their knives to penetrate very far, but still they slumped down on the ground. The cock owner got away with his cock, and the guys on the ground got up and tried to figure out just what had just happened. But when they found out there wasn’t much to find out, first they started to laugh and then, leaning on each other for support, they went off to drink. A hospital won’t dress wounds on credit, but Derda the Arab knew somebody who had a taverna where they kept your tab in a notebook and served you rakı just the same.