The Few

  “Take one step forward,” said Tayyar. “This is the amount of space you should have between yourself and Hanif.”

  Derda did what he was told and took a deep breath and held it in. He was afraid. Tayyar saw his hesitation and yelled, “Don’t be scared. Fire!”

  Derda turned around in place and pulled the trigger. He didn’t lower his arm, nor did he bend it. Three bullets in Tayyar’s chest and two between the shoulder blades of Israfil as he tried to run away. The last one plunged into the back wall of the house.

  He opened his narrowed eyes as wide as he could and saw the two men sprawled on the ground like two crooked lumps. As soon as he saw them he shut his eyes. He expected some sign of life from Tayyar or Israfil. But the garden of the house was as silent as the vineyard. Even the dogs had stopped barking.

  Derda raised his head and released the breath he’d been holding. He looked up at the sky. One raindrop fell onto his left cheek. Then another one onto his forehead. “Just stay calm,” Tayyar had said. He’d done just what he’d been told. After so many years, Derda was breathing easily for the first time. Without the fear burning his throat. Two steps from two corpses. Under a naive rain.

  First he stuck the revolver into his waistband. Then he tore off his gloves and threw them to the ground. He raised OĞUZ and ATAY to the sky. So that there would be no one left who had not seen them.

  The dogs sensed they’d been left ownerless, and they started to bark and whine. Their eyes filled with blood. Because, just like child soldiers, they had no tears to cry.

  The very day Steven’s mission at the consulate was completed and he left Istanbul, Tayyar had called Hıdır Arif to tell him about his suspicions about Gido Agha. This is what passed in their conversation: “Gido has something going on behind our backs. He came to see me recently. He’s looking for the man at the head of your Istanbul operations. Someone known around here. I took a look, put out some feelers. I’ll have us a look myself I said. Then he asked about our contract. It was obvious he was going to take me into his confidence, and take me on as an informer.”

  “The man has no god.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “So what exactly are you going to do?”

  “Give him the go-ahead, I’ll go under his orders. Let’s see what he’s up to.”

  “Good idea,” Hıdır Arif had said. “But we can’t let my father find out. He absolutely cannot find out that you are going after that bastard.”

  “You just play it cool. I’ll find some excuse. I’ll say, may God forgive it, I’m going to take a look at operations abroad.”

  Tayyar hung up the phone and picked it up again. This time he called Gido.

  “Yes, Brother Tayyar!”

  “Forgive me, brother. Brother, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “This Hıdır Arif has double-crossed me so bad, if my father weren’t in the middle of it I’d strangle him. And I’m saying, I don’t want this whole thing to blow up. If you arrange some things in Istanbul for me … if I could leave this to you.”

  “Of course, Tayyar, think nothing of it. It’s a good thought,” Gido Agha had said.

  Then, lastly, Tayyar called Steven. For the British residence permit that he’d been promised in exchange for services provided to MI6. Steven had had told him, “Not to worry, we’ll have it sorted in no time at all.” But that no time at all got longer and longer. In that ever-lengthening period of time, Tayyar had left the Hikmet organization, liberated himself from his beard and robe, and had manipulated both Hıdır Arif and Gido Agha into thinking that the other was an informant. But then he started to get himself into trouble. Because both Hıdır Arif and Gido Agha got wise to the situation, and when it got to that point, Tayyar’s judo skills were not going to be much use to him. And, seeing how Sheik Gazi had appointed one of his own sons as his successor anyway, the others started to distance themselves from Tayyar. That meant the old man knew something. Maybe when he told Tayyar he wouldn’t cry again, what he meant to say was, “You’re not going to cry again, because you’re going to make others cry.” And no one wants a man around who’s going to make them cry.

  Tayyar, first sliding out from beneath their rules, and then being sidelined by the clan and from the order, invested all the money he’d gotten from the MI6 into all sorts of criminal activities he’d always thought about doing. One of these was the illegal printing press printing pirated books that Derda did the hauling for. And, to protect that business, he invested in having Hanif the Trashman killed.

  How could Tayyar have known? That a kid he’d seen years before for half an hour at most would be the one who, thousands of days later, would kill him within another half an hour?

  How could Derda have known? That by killing Tayyar, he took revenge not only for himself, but for everyone?

  How could Israfil have known? That he should never have brought Tayyar and Derda together?

  How could Hanif the Trashman have known? That because of Derda, he was still alive?

  How could mankind have known the results of existing?

  And to all the same answer: They couldn’t have known.

  Maybe that’s why life can go on. Because no one can know in advance just what it was all about. If a person could foresee all the outcomes of all his actions, surely he’d stop living right then and there. He’d stop himself from living, he’d stop life. In horror. In fear of committing any action while his heart was still beating. For the stark end result of every action is pain, and if women and men really knew this, maybe they wouldn’t perpetuate the human race. But maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe they do know and still they continue. But in the end, he was a human being, and it was his nature to cling onto life. He would have done anything for life. If necessary he’d abandon his mother’s corpse in the maternity ward, he’d even go forth into the world still bonded to a twin, because at least he’d still be alive.

  Derda wasn’t eleven years old anymore. He didn’t have to cut up bodies anymore to be able to carry them. It wasn’t easy, but he managed to drag first Tayyar then Israfil to the bottom of the sand dune. He went through all the pockets of both men. He found a packet of money, a revolver, a box of shells. If he had known how to drive, he would have taken the keys to the Mercedes off Israfil, but he didn’t, so he didn’t.

  On his second trip circling around the house he found a shovel, and returning to the recently departed, he started churning up the sand that was turning into mud in the increasing rain. Within a few minutes, there was no dead man left lying. Maybe it wasn’t in the soil of the earth, but at least they had been buried somewhere.

  He went back into the house and shut the door behind him. As long as it rained, he had to wait inside. First he went into the large living room. He stepped onto the staircase rising from beside the far wall. When he arrived on the second floor, he walked down the corridor and turned the doorknob of the first door he came to. He entered a room with a double bed and, above it, a large photograph. A black and white photograph inside a gilded frame. Israfil was standing with his hands on the shoulders of a woman seated in front of him, and she held a baby in her arms. All three were smiling. Even the baby. Derda stepped onto the bed like he was going upstairs and he bounced and bumped as he walked across the bed, straight to the photograph. He was a nose’s distance from the baby when he started to cry. Tracing over the baby with the fingers of his right hand, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Whatever had happened, there was no reason for Israfil to have been killed. He was like someone who stumbles onto a battlefield. Of course the truth of the matter was that Israfil had arranged everything so Derda would be the one to shoot the man and rot in prison. But Derda’s mind was so full of thoughts of Tayyar that that didn’t even occur to him. Looking at the OĞUZ on his fingers, he said, “You, too. Forgive me,” and he crumpled down onto his knees. His sobs shook the bed. He cried looking at the photo, pressing the palms of his hands against the image again an
d again. When he had no more tears left to cry, he curled up like a child and slept in the bed of the man he’d killed. In his slumber, there was no trace of the regret that had risen like a great flame.

  He took all the frozen meat he could find in the freezer in the kitchen and dumped it out onto the living room floor. Then he took a ball of string he’d had to turn the house upside down to find and went out into the garden. He propped the front door open with a chair so it wouldn’t swing shut. As soon as they saw Derda, the dogs started to bark. Their barks got even louder and more frantic the closer he got to their kennel. They started to jump and butt their heads against the chicken wire.

  Derda tied one end of the string to the sliding iron bar on the kennel’s gate, then started pacing backward until he reached the iron fence surrounding the garden, feeding the string out as he went. Then he dropped the now slim ball of string to the ground and grabbed onto the fence. He jumped over the fence and landed outside the garden. He crouched down and pulled the ball of string through the iron bars of the fence. The first time it didn’t work, but on the second tug the iron bar slid open and in one leap the dogs jumped out the open gate and flew into the garden. In one fell leap, they were out of the kennel and lunging after Derda. They were going to kill the stranger. They stuck their muzzles through the iron bars and tried to jump. But they couldn’t reach him. The stranger was half a kilometer away, smiling. “Go on,” he was saying, “go on inside, there’s food in there.” Then he turned around and walked away. To the highway on the horizon.

  When he reached the highway, he saw there were lanes going in three directions, but he didn’t know which direction he wanted to go in. But despite his state of panic he managed to remember which way the Mercedes had come from, and he crossed to the other side. He was going to go back to Istanbul. There was only one thing he had left to do. The last thing he was going to do in this life. After that, he didn’t care. But first he had to flag down a car. Or a truck would do. A red one stopped.

  “Where you going?”

  “Istanbul.”

  “Hop in!”

  The driver was an old man.

  “What are you doing in these parts, son?” he asked. “There are wild dogs around here, this place is cursed.”

  You couldn’t tell that Derda had two corpses to account for. He was just a kid who, at the age of seventeen, had the last spark of life he was ever going to get. That, and he was just a tad afraid. Because he hadn’t had time to clean himself up.

  At first he didn’t answer, then all at once he asked, “Do you know a place called Beyoğlu?”

  The old man laughed.

  “Aren’t you listening to what I’m saying to you? What are you going to do in Beyoğlu?”

  “My dad’s waiting for me there.”

  “What’s your dad do?”

  “He’s a writer,” said Derda.

  “What’s his name, maybe I know him.”

  “Oğuz Atay.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  For a second, Derda thought of pulling the gun out from under his shirt and shooting the man. For not knowing Oğuz Atay. But he gave up on the idea. It’s not his fault, he told himself. Those guys who ignored Oğuz Atay wouldn’t be driving a truck now. So he forgave the old man.

  “You will,” he said. “Pretty soon you’ll hear about my dad.”

  The driver laughed again.

  “Yeah, why not, let’s see.”

  They didn’t speak again.

  When he got out of the truck, the sun was just starting to leave Istanbul behind. The old man had told him how to get to Beyoğlu but it didn’t help him out any. He didn’t know any of the roads or the square he’d mentioned. He only knew Beyoğlu. And that was only the name. Saruhan had told him: “All the stuff he wrote about and the drawings, they’re all in Beyoğlu. There was one meyhane in particular, it’s famous. What was its name … Çolak? Çorak? anyway, something like that.”

  He flagged down the first taxi that passed. “Beyoğlu.”

  When they arrived in Taksim Square, the driver said, “Well, this is it.”

  Derda was searching out of all the car’s windows. “Where?” he asked.

  The driver released a deep sigh to calm himself and then, jabbing a finger toward Istiklal Street, he said, “Go down there. All of that is Beyoğlu.”

  Derda got out of the taxi and walked into the crowd, thinking about just how many people lived in Istanbul. For years he’d lived in a cemetery that only saw people on the holidays. He was totally thrown off balance by all the noise and the crowds. Actually, Derda had gone precisely there to find the place where he would lose his balance. But Beyoğlu was too much for him. People were passing in great streams all around him and all the lights on Istiklal went in one eye and out the other. He didn’t know what direction he was walking in, nor how many people’s feet he was stepping on. He just kept moving forward. Even if he didn’t know where he was going, at least he would keep going forward.

  He stopped at an intersection and asked the nearest ruffian sputtering out of the mouth of a side street.

  “I’m looking for a place called Çolak, you know it? It’s a meyhane.”

  It was a kid Derda’s age. He looked at the hand pressed against his chest to stop him, then at the face across from him. Derda’s face looked like those people in Beyoğlu who people are afraid of. He was scared, too.

  “A meyhane?” he said.

  “Çolak, Çorak, something like that.”

  “Huh, I don’t know,” the kid said.

  “That’s okay. Do you know Oğuz Atay?”

  The kid was taken off guard. He was so surprised he started to stammer.

  “Uh, yeah … yes, but …”

  He was going to ask Derda why he’d asked, but Derda was gone. If he had known he could have saved a life with just one yes, would he have stammered and nodded like that? He watched Derda go for the first ten meters, after that he couldn’t see him anymore. Derda got mixed in with the people. And the people with Derda.

  After he’d asked seven more people and gotten the answer, “Huh, I don’t know,” seven more times, he went up to a chestnut roaster at the head of a side street that smelled of sewage and asked him the names of the meyhane. And he got a different answer.

  “There’s a place called Çorak down there. Go down, take a right at the third street.”

  Then Derda bought some chestnuts. He walked, ripping off the husks. He went down the street he was supposed to go down. He turned right where he was supposed to turn right. He took five steps, and then he saw a sign stuck out on the sidewalk staring right back at him. A lit-up sign. With ÇORAK written on it. He crumpled up the paper bag in his hand, tossed it on the ground, and went inside.

  As soon as he entered, a waiter whose red tie poked out from the collar of his blue sweater approached him.

  “Yes?”

  Derda pushed the waiter’s chest with his left hand and pulled the revolver out from his waist with his right hand and fired two bullets close to the antique chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Just like Tayyar had taught him. Without bending his arm.

  The sound of the shots reverberated so loudly through the storied meyhane that, for a moment, people couldn’t even hear their own screams. Their ears started to come back to life as they knocked into each other, trying to get under the tables. As soon as their ears worked again, what they heard was Derda. He was yelling at the waiter who stood, frozen.

  “Pull away those tables, get everyone out in the open! Fuck you, hurry up!”

  The waiter felt the hot barrel of Derda’s gun against his forehead and he stepped back gingerly. “Okay, brother, okay!” He turned around and started to pull away the tables where people were hiding between and below.

  “Stand up, you ass! Stand up!” Derda shouted.

  “Let me see your face. I want to see everyone’s face.”

  And from the place he stood, as much as he could see, he came eye to eye with a young man. He’d
come out from under a table but he was still folded over in fear. His hands were up and he was shaking his head. He had had seven rakıs but the two shots had made his mind clear as a bell.

  “Fuck off!” said Derda. “Go, get out of here, fuck off!”

  At first the man didn’t understand. Then, followed by the revolver that help him clear his mind, he walked past Derda and out the front door without lowering his hands or stopping his shaking head. As soon as he was gone Derda was eye to eye with another young man.

  “You, get out of here. What the fuck are you looking at? Fuck off!”

  And he ran out of the meyhane. Derda was pacing in between the tables, driving out any young person he saw. “Go fuck yourself, asshole!” Twelve men and nine women left Çorak in tears. The only ones left behind were three men between the ages of sixty and seventy-five sitting around one single table.

  Derda walked up to them and asked the man with the beard, “What’s your job?”

  The man with the beard opened his mouth to say, “Now, look here!” but Derda screamed.

  “I said, what’s your job?”

  When a man with glasses next to the man with the beard said, “Whatever your problem is, we’ll solve it. Look, he’s a journalist. But don’t do it like this!” Derda laughed.

  “Is that so?”

  When he saw Derda smile like he was going to take the barrel of the revolver away from his face, a wave of relief washed over the bearded man for a second. “Of course, son, I’ll help you with whatever you want to say. Just tell me!”

  “So for you to listen to his problem, there had to be a gun pointed at your face? Is that it?” yelled Derda.

  “Whose?” the bearded man and the man with glasses said together.

  “If I say his name, will you remember, you fucks?”

  The only one who hadn’t spoken until that moment, and, interestingly enough, the only fat man among them, yelled, “You tell us, tell us, who is this about?”

  Derda held his breath, directed the revolver’s barrel to the bearded man, and pulled the trigger. He shot the journalist in the mouth. The bullet went right into the mouth opened to say, “Don’t do anything crazy.” The bullet went in his mouth and through the back of his neck and lodged into the wall behind all at once. The man crumpled like his knees were broken and the man with the glasses tried to get under the table. The only man left standing was the fat man. Derda looked straight at him then shot him through the left eye. His two hands flew to the blackening hole where his eye had been, then as he fell into a heap, Derda bent down and shot the man with the glasses under the table. The man raised his hands in an attempt to protect himself, and the bullet that spun out of the revolver pierced through his palm and into his knee.