The Few

  Derda stood up and yelled, “Today, you have been slain for Oğuz Atay, sons of bitches! For Oğuz Atay!”

  Then he turned around in place and ran to the door, knocking over chairs as he went. He pointed his gun and yelled “Out of the way! Out of the way! Fuck you!” at the people who’d gathered outside of Çorak. The people scattered and Derda started to run, not knowing where he was going. When he heard a police siren, he turned into the first dark street he saw.

  That night, Derda ran until morning. It was a miracle that he wasn’t caught, because all the police in Istanbul were after him.

  By some coincidence or twist of fate, all the streets he went down led him to the overpass where Saruhan sold pirated books. In the first light of day, he went up the steps like King Kong climbing up the Empire State Building, and at the top he saw the clock seller. He’d come early that morning for some reason. Their eyes met and the clock seller nodded his head in greeting. Then he turned away and started setting the alarm of the clock in his hand.

  Derda dropped to the ground where Saruhan would set up his sales point and he leaned back against the guardrail and stretched out his legs. It was the first time for hours that he’d stopped moving. His hand went to one pocket. Then to the other. He was looking for cigarettes. He looked up and called over to the clock seller.

  “You got a cigarette?”

  The clock seller looked up. “Hang on.” He set the clock in his hand on display and walked over to Derda while he stuck his hand in the pocket of his raincoat. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. Then when the man was two steps from Derda, he pulled out a revolver from his other pocket and pressed it up against the head of the boy, who was still seated on the ground.

  “Lie down,” he said, calmly. As if he were telling him to lie down and have a little nap.

  Derda did as he was told and got down on the ground.

  Derda, having been to all corners of Istanbul that night in one form or another, had one more question as he was arrested by the undercover police assigned to the university environs.

  “Well, are you going to give me a cigarette or not?”

  Even as he was still completing his deposition to the police, before he’d even left the presence of the prosecutor, Derda’s story was being printed in all the newspapers and broadcast on all the television stations. The man with the beard whom he had killed had been one of the most prominent journalists in all the country. And the others, the injured ones they were trying to keep alive in the hospital, were two writers. Two writers of novels. The fat man wasn’t of any particular note, but the one with glasses practically ate prizes for dinner. So everyone wanted to learn every detail. First and foremost the question was: Was this attack in any way connected to terrorism?

  At first, the deposition Derda gave the police seemed so ludicrous that they were convinced he must be a terrorist. But with the details he gave them, the tattoos on his fingers, and the clarity in his confession to the point that he himself led them to new developments in the case, they finally came to believe what he said and they accepted his testimony.

  “I,” Derda had told them, “I shot them for Oğuz Atay. I don’t know who they were. I didn’t care. I was looking for a writer to shoot, or a journalist. They were there. I pulled the trigger and shot them.”

  “But who is Oğuz Atay?” a policeman close to retirement asked him. Derda was handcuffed at the wrist but still he jumped to his feet. “You asshole!” Two policemen behind him pushed him down by the shoulders and forced him to sit down and shut up. Then one of them asked, “What does this have to do with Oğuz Atay?”

  “Do you know why Oğuz Atay died, do you know? From grief! And who drove him to despair? Who made him so depressed? Everyone alive then who didn’t care about him. If you don’t believe me, go and read all his books. Then go read about his life. I shot those bastards to get revenge for him.”

  “Well, do you regret your actions in any way?” they had asked him.

  “If they have no connection to Oğuz Atay, I might feel some regret.” Then Derda stopped and thought.

  “But actually, no, shove it, I don’t. Because everyone who lived at that time and knew about Oğuz Atay and didn’t see what was happening to him, no matter who they are, they’re guilty. So I don’t regret it or anything like that. Do you know what I do regret, though? I thought those two bastards were dead when I left.”

  “And what is your connection to Oğuz Atay?”

  Derda smiled at the question.

  “What do you mean, what is your connection? We’re the Oğuz Turks!”

  This response immediately engaged their renewed interest in the inquest. The police were excited to have uncovered a previously unknown terror organization.

  They asked, “And who are these Oğuz Turks? This is an organization? How many of you are there?”

  “Look, even I don’t know. I mean, I know that they’re out there somewhere, but who they are, how many people, I have no idea. But I see their symbol tagged everywhere.”

  When they asked, “And what symbol is that?” Derda drew an A inside an O on a piece of paper. One of the policeman started to say, “But isn’t that …” but the other grabbed his arm to silence him and asked, “You made all the young people leave the meyhane. Why?”

  “Oğuz Atay died in 1977. At that time, those people may not even have been born yet. Or maybe they were just kids. That’s why I let them go.”

  “And where did you get your weapon?”

  “From a man named Tayyar.”

  “And where is he?”

  “I buried him somewhere, but if you asked me where, believe me, I don’t even know. I mean I know where, but I couldn’t tell you how to get there.”

  “Is there anything else you’d like to say?”

  “I also shot a man called Israfil. Actually, I wasn’t going to shoot him, but he was there, so … But really, I wish I had thanked him, he brought me over the Bosphorus Bridge.”

  “What else did you do?”

  “I don’t know. I also beat up my dad. I smashed in his mouth and broke his nose.”

  The prosecutor took especial interest in Derda’s case. He reviewed the police deposition and tried to figure out if the kid was mentally ill or not. But he couldn’t figure it out alone so he forwarded the case to a psychiatric clinic he knew. And there, too, the panel of highly educated professors was divided. Some thought Derda was the sole inhabitant living in a world of his own creation, while others decided he was nothing more than an ordinary killer. But some time later, when they learned how many pieces Derda had chopped up his mother into, and at what age he had done it, the opinions of the panel went from two to one. It was still too early to make a definite diagnosis, but it was apparent that Derda’s mental situation could not be that of a normally functioning, healthy individual. If nothing else, normal people who have normally functioning brains keep it to themselves or sue someone when faced with difficulty. They don’t go and gun people down.

  The case was heard by the Juvenile Court, where each and every hearing was besieged by television reporters. The television channels aired documentaries about Oğuz Atay, and Tutunamayanlar was discussed in panel discussions. The same discussion was also alive and kicking in the divided psychiatric clinic. Some thought that while he lived, Oğuz Atay had indeed suffered injustices, but others thought that connecting such a thing to his death was impossible, and that his death had absolutely nothing to do with literature. If even for a brief interval, Oğuz Atay was so widely discussed that even the driver of the red truck heard his name on the radio and learned who that kid he’d picked up a while back had called “my dad.”

  But then, after a while, the programmers realized that these and similar discussions weren’t garnering the viewership they once did, so they shifted their focus to Derda himself. They had guests on their shows to talk about the problems of illiteracy, about children who worked in cemeteries, and about childhood violence. And then, even if it had nothing to do wit
h it, they talked about substance abuse and addiction. Because paint thinner and huffers are the poisonous words that paralyze a viewer on one channel.

  “How could a name like Oğuz Atay go hand in hand with such a violent act? It’s hard to even believe. Just think about the state of our streets.” This type of sentiment was built up, then brought down. Everyone seemed to have an idea about Derda’s frightening imagination. Especially after everyone heard what Süreyya and Celal said to the cameras. Celal revealed all through his tears.

  “He shot me! My only son, I hadn’t seen him for years and then he near well killed me! That’s just how the boy is, it’s just not right. I’m talking to those with experience here, bring me my wife, let me have a proper funeral for her. Every night she haunts my dreams.”

  Only Isa refused to speak. He didn’t answer the questions of any newspaper journalist or TV reporter. As much as they pressed him, he pressed the words back down his throat. Maybe it was because the only person he was ever going to tell any story to was hidden behind all the people pressing the microphones in his face.

  When they were released from the hospital, the fat man was left with only one eye, and the man with the glasses had lost his physical symmetry. He was going to limp to his dying day. And when they got out of hospital, both of them were in a hurry. To write their new books. One of them wrote A Single Bullet and the other Çorak Life. And both of them wrote on the first pages: In memory of Oğuz Atay. Because, as soon as they both could speak again, both the fat man and the man with glasses talked incessantly about their deep respect for Oğuz Atay. But they worried the people listening weren’t sufficiently convinced, so they dedicated their books to the man just to make sure. Of course, Çorak Life became a prize-winning novel. And of course, the book release party was held at Çorak. And as for the fat man, once again he didn’t receive the interest he might have hoped for.

  But beyond these developments, the event that garnered the most attention was the funeral for the man with the beard. Anyone who had anything to gain by talking about his life, his writings, or by organizing readings of his work, each and every one gave teary declarations into whatever television reporter’s microphone they could find. One of them called him “a martyr for literature,” which was copied clear enough in the headline in the bearded man’s newspaper:

  THOUSANDS WALK FOR LITERATURE MARTYR.

  And right below it, Derda’s photograph. Taken as he exited the court building. Between two police. His fists handcuffed together, stretched out in front of him. He looked straight into the lens above OĞUZ and ATAY. “Scandal in the court” was written next to him. And below that, “Murderer gets off with twenty-four-year sentence!”

  Although they were presented throughout the court case, the medical reports about the suspect’s mental health didn’t do him any good. The court decided first and foremost to appease the roar of public opinion, so instead of sending Derda to some sort of treatment center, he was sentenced to juvenile penitentiary. Until he was eighteen. After that, he’d be transferred to a regular prison. But no one was happy with the twenty-four-year sentence. He was expected to be sentenced to life in prison without parole, but he only got life, which meant that after serving twenty-four years he could be released on parole. Dependent of course on good behavior. His punishment was nothing more than the immediate result of group hysteria. The hysterics were operating under the delusion that, if Derda received three times the life sentence—each one worth thirty-six years—they could rest assured that Derda would rot and die in prison and they could go back to their homes and live in peace and harmony forevermore. But the hysterics had overlooked one thing. And that thing was that Derda had committed the murders the week before his seventeenth birthday, so he had to be tried as a minor. Maybe if he had tested his patience for another week, his crimes would have been piled on his adult back and the courts would have been forced to process Derda as an adult. But that’s not the way the legal calendar turned. It worked another way. In a way that helped no one.

  At the unveiling of the sculpture of the man with a beard in front of his newspaper’s building, the speaker made this speech: “This attack was a speech against freedom. That the sentence received was only twenty-four years amounts to nothing less than an official endorsement of the act.”

  Two years had passed since the event, and if people wanted to remember, they could do it by monumentalizing the martyrs to literature. They didn’t want to remember it by thinking they had lost a child from their very own families; it was easier to believe that a very, but very, secret organization had struck and killed. No one wanted to reject that theory, anyway. The bearded man was killed for his beliefs. And that was that. And maybe because of that, they’d made the statue of him more handsome than he had ever been in real life. That’s how people wanted to remember him. But don’t we all have a job on the side, as long as we live? Designer and Director of the Past are positions of such honor after all.

  Derda had explained all the details about how Tayyar and Israfil had given him the gun to kill Hanif the Trashman, but the court practically overlooked the deaths of those two men in their decision. They turned details that should have worked in Derda’s favor into incriminating evidence. Anyway, it wasn’t like anyone got up and went on television to cry and say what good people they had been. But once Israfil’s son did try to attack Derda as he left the courts. But police held him back and he couldn’t get to the boy who had once apologized to his photo. And as for the members of the Hikmet movement, they took it as some sort of sign. They attributed all that had happened to Tayyar as consequences of his leaving the order, and for years to come in their conversations they told his tale. May it be an example to the children.

  The last thing was for the pieces of Derda’s mother to be dug up from all the places they’d been buried and sent for autopsy. When it could be concluded that Derda had had nothing to do with her death, all the pieces were put in a cardboard box and returned to Celal. Her aging husband walked meaningfully past all the television journalists and got into a taxi, the box in hand. Then he got out two streets later. He tossed the box in the first dumpster he saw without even breaking his step.

  Every year Derda was in prison, he received a mysterious package. The prison wardens would slip it to him secretly. Sometimes there was money inside, sometimes drugs. Hanif the Trashman was sending them. He had followed the whole case very closely and understood that it was all because of Derda that he could still draw breath. He’d have paid whatever he could; the debt of a life is not small. The man was true to his nickname—he lived on the streets. For years he’d collected paper from trash cans to scrape out an existence, piling them into the sack bigger than he that he dragged behind him and cashing it in by weight. When he was Derda’s age he’d killed a man for the first time so he could sleep under a dry roof. He knew all too well what prison was like. And also the value of a life, scraped out from childhood by sorting through the trash.

  Derda never found out who was sending him the packages. For the first few years, he really believed they were from Oğuz Atay himself. From his soul. Then after some time he stopped thinking about it. Actually he stopped thinking altogether. Up until the day he pulled a cell phone out of a package. In his nineteenth year in prison.

  There was no one he could call. So for the first few weeks he barely even touched the phone. Then one day, he took it in his hand and started pushing random buttons. He knew nothing about the technology before him and he had no idea what he was doing. So when he heard the sound of a film starting up on the screen he was scared. He panicked until he figured out how to shut the thing up. He practically smashed it to pieces and threw it down the latrine. He went about it all wrong, but eventually he hit upon the place to press and the sound went off. Only then could he take a look at the screen with a little more attention and care. A film was playing, some ordinary film. He smiled. After spending twenty-two years on the inside, he could watch the world on the outside from palm of his
hand. He got so excited he even started laughing and chuckling. Then he covered his mouth with his hand to silence himself.

  Hanif the Trashman hadn’t sent Derda a package for three years. It had been three years since he’d been killed. And at the most unexpected moment, too. He’d been shot during an argument in traffic. Now it was his son who prepared the packages. He had listened to his father tell Derda’s story like he was a fairytale hero from another time. Time and time again. Now he was carrying on his father’s legacy. Hanif had never actually told him, “After I’m gone, you will send him the packages.” It wasn’t like he had planned to die or something like that. But in any event, the son considered it his very own mission and kept sending the packages to the fairytale hero.

  But he had no idea what would make a thirty-five-year-old man who’d been in prison for nineteen years happy, so he tried to put himself in the other man’s place. In the end, he decided that the only thing that could soften the explosive boredom of being stuck between four walls would be a phone with a hard drive loaded with countless films and songs. He chose the films and songs himself. It was the only electronic mechanism Derda had ever had in prison. And he couldn’t actually use the phone as a phone, but nevertheless, Derda was pleased. And so, in the end, the son had decided on the right gift.