The Few

  If they’d lived in a country where people burn their dead and only have to look up at the sky to remember them, they couldn’t have made even 5 kuruş. But in the city where they were born, those still living remembered their dead by going to the last place the dead were seen—the cemetery—and standing at the head of their graves, blowing their noses a few times, and giving a little money to have the marble washed and scrubbed. This was where the kids came into the picture, armed and ready with their plastic brushes and tanks of water. They were opportunists who knew how to watch the visitor for that moment of weakness as they stood remembering the dead. They knew just when to plant themselves in front of them and stick out their little hands to collect money from the pity tree.

  Their business was a side industry to life. Like the bond between life and what comes after, an added layer of communication between the living and the dead. People expected that the children, less than a meter and a half tall, blinking their eyes meaningfully, would pray for the peaceful rest of the dead, in exchange for the tips. If that’s what they were hoping for, then people must not rest, in peace or otherwise, when they die. In many cases it’s not until they die that they wake up, their eyes as wide as life preservers. For these people, there’s no such thing as “resting in peace.” Especially since they can’t even sleep anymore. But for everyone, the situation two meters under is totally different than the situation up top. The truth down below: worms, bugs, and lots and lots of flesh. The fantasy on the surface: “Rest in peace, Dad,” “Sleep in light, my love,” and lots and lots of prayers.

  And so no one thinks they’re being entirely absurd. They think they’re speaking honestly when they say it, right in front of the dead. The dead who don’t know anything about it and who couldn’t care less. “Come on then, pour some water, and get rid of those weeds.” Humanity’s fantasy world, the cemetery remains intact. And children were the Peter Pans of that fantasy world. They all looked so much alike that brothers couldn’t be told apart. In the eyes of the adult world it was like they stayed the same, never growing up.

  A child, so it is said, grows up when he learns about death. But such sentiments were meaningless at the cemetery. Because if you grow up by learning about death, what happens if you make money cleaning tombs? Do six-year-olds hope to grow? Will it make Süreyya taller so she can jump down off the wall? How big could they get? They’re like the dead themselves. They don’t grow or change. And if they are the dead, then the world underground is the mirror equivalent of the world above it. Everyone’s dead and that’s that. But that’s not the way it worked out. The kids fell asleep on the tombs they cleaned, but nothing was going to happen. While they started up a game of hide-and-seek as the sun went down, nothing was going to happen. They didn’t feel a thing. Nothing was missing, nothing was wrong. They were the first to notice. Maybe the thing that was missing or wrong was just that they never felt anything.

  Whatever it was, they just didn’t think that a cemetery and its tombs were that important. They weren’t afraid of the dead coming back to life or of ghosts. The only thing they were afraid of was bad weather on a holiday. The only thing they were afraid of was a rainy holiday when people who normally flooded into the cemetery would say, “It’s going to be nothing but mud there,” and not bother to come to the fantasy world they called a cemetery. Besides that, they could care so little about the dead and anything about death, that, sticking flowers left on the tear-soaked earth behind their ears, they tried to break the record for hopping from one tomb to the next without touching the ground.

  The oldest was twelve years old. The littlest ones were six. They were a thousand dark years away from mothers holding their children as they watched horror films set in cemeteries. The cemetery wall was always there right behind them. Maybe later on they would all come together somehow. Those inside the walls and those outside. One would be a teacher, the other a school janitor. One a judge, the other a clerk. One a doctor, the other a blood salesman. One a prosecutor, the other a lying witness. One an architect, the other a laborer. One a pianist, the other a piano mover. One a member of parliament, the other selling simit at rallies. One a mistress, the other a son of a bitch. But which would be which? Has any research ever been done? Any scholarly article written? Has any work been done to compile the statistics that mark the relationship between people who spend their childhoods washing tombstones and their future career choices? Or do they even know the word “career”? They don’t have a choice, anyway. In short, if a person starts to earn money from the dead from the age of six, what do they do later in life? Derda had an idea on the topic.

  “I’m going to search for buried treasure. There’s treasure buried around here. But no one knows where.”

  The others were quiet, listening. The topic was sufficiently intriguing.

  “What treasure?”

  Derda grinned like he was the master of all the world’s secrets.

  “You’ll find out when you’re older.”

  The kid he said that to was two years younger than he was. His name was Remzi and if he ever took an intelligence test, his family would be called into a special meeting to be told their son was a genius. But Remzi had never even been to school. He’d taught himself how to read and count and add by reading the inscriptions on the tombstones. He’d memorized all the names, birth dates, and dates of death on all the tombstones. Without even really noticing he was doing it. Now he was listening to Derda, but at the same time his busy mind was trying to add up the number of letters in the sentence he’d just listened to with the number he was about to say.

  “That’s great but …”

  “Incoming! Incoming!”

  Remzi’s calculations were left up in the air. Four cars rolled in through the gate. The first to see them sounded the alert. The kids leapt up; many started to run. Remzi could have finished his sentence, but he needed money, too. Just as much as the others. He got up and ran after the others, shaking the numbers out of his head. They were all gone. In any case, in a few years, not very many, if he just kept doing what he was doing, his talents would evaporate one by one and he’d be nothing more than any other ordinary man. Anyway, it wasn’t anything to be afraid of. But he didn’t know that. And then he couldn’t really stop his mind from racing even if he wanted to. Even now he was thinking about which of the cemetery’s 7,226 tombstones the treasure could be buried under. Then he visualized each and every one, one at a time. Maybe that’s why he didn’t see what was in front of him. He ran straight into the marble of a family tomb and fell down.

  He looked at his bleeding elbow then looked up and yelled, “Hey, wait for me!”

  Everyone heard. But no one waited.

  “What else can we do, Hasibe?” said the woman.

  She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She put her arms around Hasibe’s shoulders, but she herself was crying, too. She couldn’t stop herself. It was like all the pains had compounded, crashing over her like an avalanche. Her head was lowered, like the sun would never rise again. But actually, the dearly departed was not her daughter. Nor had she even seen the girl, not even once. But, whatever the woman whose shoulders she held felt, it hit her heart just as hard. If nothing else, she felt love. Maybe she wasn’t her child, but she did love her husband, and so she transferred the love. And just think, a girl like that, just twenty-six years old. She killed herself, so far away where she was working in service of the nation. For the nation’s children. She had met the mother of the deceased at a teacher’s association event. It was an evening organized for family members of teachers who were serving so far away. They were fond of one another instantly. It was like they already knew each other. How could they not? Both of their loves were posted at the same school. One a daughter. The other, a husband. One was Yeşim. The other Nezih. One a new teacher. The other the assistant principal. One was a wren and the other the cat that caught her.

  Yeşim realized that her life’s search was for death. And in the end, like not a f
ew people, she succeeded in getting her corpse buried. What she wasn’t able to do in a letter, she worked out with a pistol. With her retired colonel of a father’s ancient pistol. She crumpled. The old man who owned the gun now held the marble slab with two hands and kissed it. After her attempted suicide at school, Yeşim was released from her post and she returned to Istanbul. For the first few days she didn’t speak. The next few days she laughed too much. Then the next day she shot herself.

  Now she was lying in a brand-new tomb while two meters above her they couldn’t care less about what had happened. If she could have, she would have sprung back to life. Nezih’s wife held out her phone to Yeşim’s mother, and she set it against her ear. “My condolences, my friend,” he said. Nezih’s friendship was artfully orchestrated. He gave his condolences from the other side of the phone.

  At just that moment if Yeşim could have, she would have opened her eyes as wide as her eyelids could open. She’d have ripped open her shroud with her fingernails. She would’ve scratched and dug at the earth above her like a beaver until she reached the surface. Then she would have torn the telephone out of her mother’s hand. If she could have done it, she would’ve opened her mouth as wide as she could and screamed, “Fuck you, you son of a bitch!”

  But Yeşim couldn’t do any of that. She couldn’t even flutter one single eyelash. It had been twenty-six days since she’d been buried. She probably didn’t even have a single eyelash left. Hasibe didn’t know what else to say, so she said “thank you” and handed the phone back to Nezih’s wife. The woman shut her phone and wrapped her arms around Hasibe. They cried together.

  Derda, for his part, was waiting for the moment when they would fall silent. The moment when they would begin to collect themselves. But which one should he stretch his hand out to? The old man, or one of the women? If they give me chocolate instead of money, I’ll throw it back in their faces, he thought to himself. The greatest counterstrike in the arsenal of the cemetery visitors was just that: candy or chocolate. Their hands would dive into their pockets, and getting hold of the three or four candies they’d positioned earlier, they’d take them out and hand them over with a “Here you go, son.”

  The first to stop sobbing was Nezih’s wife. Despite the fact that the woman was becoming like family to her mother, Yeşim was a stranger to the woman. Not so the case with her husband, Nezih. So her tears were the first to dry. Derda didn’t miss the chance and stuck out his palm. Looking at the child’s disheveled face, Nezih’s wife opened her handbag and took out her coin purse. No spare change. She was forced to go for paper money. The least valuable, of course. She wanted to pull out just one note, but out came two. She regretted it, but it was too late.

  “Just out of the blue, we gave good money to some strange child. Anyway, may it be a blessing on our heads,” she said later when she went home, to her son, a university student five years younger than Yeşim.

  Just as fast as Derda snatched the money he ran out of the cemetery and straight into the closet corner shop. He got a sandwich with sautéed meat and ate it then and there. He ate three of them, one right after the other. He practically choked himself. He grabbed a soda from the refrigerator, cracked it open, and downed it all in one swift move. Down the hatch. Then he started to come to. He remembered he had the last pieces of his mother back home to bury. That’s the first thing that came to mind as soon as his stomach was full. The five pieces of his mother, right behind the door. As soon as night falls, he said silently to himself. He paid the grocer and left, but he turned right around and went back inside.

  “Give me a pack of cigarettes.”

  “Which ones?” the grocer asked.

  “The cheapest,” said Derda, “and a box of matches.”

  And that’s how he started to smoke, with the last money left in his pocket. He was eleven years old.

  Isa caught Derda at the cemetery gates and couldn’t hold himself back a second longer.

  “Buried treasure! We have it in my new cemetery.”

  He must have been one of the unluckiest kids in the world. His family had moved from living next to the city’s biggest cemetery to living next to the second biggest. Isa was still cleaning tombs. Cleaning the tombs there reminded him of his old cemetery he’d left behind. But he wanted to forget it. The easiest way to forget was to focus on the new, he thought.

  “And in the fight over the treasure, someone died …”

  Derda started to walk away. Seeing that he wasn’t going to say anything, Isa kept talking.

  “Our cemetery is really big. Bigger than here. Anyway, there’s these two brothers. They hate each other. They both have their own gang. I’m on the younger brother’s side. He doesn’t look big, but whenever they get into a fight he beats up his big brother. Anyway, each gang has its own territory. We don’t get mixed up with each other. Everyone stays on their own side. It’s like here, you can’t just claim a tomb and stand there. Then, one day, there was this rumor about some treasure. But it wasn’t buried on our side. It was on the other side. So we snuck over there. We dug everywhere. But somehow we couldn’t find anything. Then, the next day, one of our guys found this weird tomb, like a mausoleum. But no one knew what it really was. Then they said, yeah, that must be it. But how are we going to dig for the treasure? It’s on the other side. So then we said, let’s go, if we have to we’ll fight, then we’ll dig and get the buried treasure. So we went over there and then there’s this kid from the other gang sleeping on top of it, guarding it. One of the little guys. Lying on top of the tomb, asleep. So we wake him up. He’s terrified. No, don’t do it, he’s begging us. We didn’t listen, of course. You’re going to dig! So he started to dig. Then …”

  “Fuck that,” said Derda. The story was flying out of Isa’s mouth so fast that it smashed right into Derda’s two little words and shattered.

  “Who cares? In the end did you find the treasure? No! So fuck it.”

  Isa’s face went hard like marble. Cemetery marble. His veins stuck to his skin like the green veins running through marble. He understood then what no one had been able to really explain about life. For some, death is a permanent condition. For another, it’s just dust in your eye. Isa looked around at the tombstones and thought it was good that they were dead. That day he believed that humanity died because that was their right. Till the day he died he never believed anything else. Maybe that’s why he became a marble engraver. He walked into one of the workshops on the road going to the cemetery as an apprentice and walked out a master. All because that day Derda cut him off. Because he didn’t let him tell the story of his life. Maybe that’s why Isa only spoke to marble for the rest of his life. If only he could have told his story. Maybe he could have told it to one of the kids at school who listened so carefully to the teacher but somehow never heard him. But it didn’t work out. In the final days of his apprenticeship he made his own tombstone. He hid it in a corner. Every now and then he’d go by and speak to it. To tell it the story Derda had cut off. Over and over again. And then he died. From all the marble dust he had inhaled. Just up and died one day. And his story? Who cares? Especially not after Isa was dead and buried.

  They walked silently to the square. Side by side. Neither could have guessed what was passing through the other’s mind, not even if they’d had a thousand chances. Derda’s dark mood, Isa’s words. Since Derda had chopped up his mother, words just got stuck in his mouth. How would he know, he asked himself. Then, to be forgiven, he took the pack out of his pocket and pulled out a cigarette.

  “Light one up.”

  Isa didn’t refuse. He took the cigarette like he’d been waiting his whole life for it. He lit it like he’d discovered fire. He sucked down the smoke like he’d been smoking for a hundred years. But it was his first time, too. Who knows how many more children started on cigarettes that day? All over the world.

  Derda took a few steps then kicked a pebble with the tip of his toe. The pebble hit Isa’s arm, so he got a free kick. They drove th
at pebble like they were in the World Cup. Sometimes it went off the road and onto the paths but they kept after it. Who knows, on that day, how many kids kicked a pebble. And who knows how many felt like a kicked pebble themselves.

  The morning ezan slid off the houses’ rooftops and into Derda’s ear. His two black eyes opened and saw the ceiling. His nose wrinkled from the smell as he straightened himself over his two feet and stood up. He was late. It was so hard to wake up. His belly was full; Süreyya’s mother had given him a dish of rice. But if he didn’t hurry, he wouldn’t be able to get all five parts buried.

  As he buried the first four parts at the foot of the marble tombs in the row, the sun, outlining the tree branches, had already risen enough to prickle the nape of his neck. He took a deep breath.

  “Just one piece left.”

  He ran to the row of tombs by the wall. His mother’s right hand was under his arm. It was the first piece he’d wrapped in the sheet. He collapsed at the foot of the tombstone. He looked around. He could make out a figure in the distance. In his excitement he’d forgotten his shovel, that is, the pot lid. He dug with his hands but the earth was hard. Somehow the hole wouldn’t get deeper. Then he looked at his mother’s hand. At the hand wrapped in seven layers of fabric. He thought he could fit the hand into its little grave without the extra padding. So he peeled off the hand’s shroud and tossed it off to the side. The naked hand dropped out of his hand like it was on fire. He couldn’t take it anymore. He looked up and looked around again. He looked off to the side of the slab in front of him, to see where that person he’d seen before had gone. But he didn’t see anyone. Must have left, he thought. Who knows who it was.