The Few

  Her eyelids blinked opened as a black silhouette shifted over her. Realizing someone was in the room, she opened her eyes and quickly sat up, holding a pillow tightly over her breasts. Rahime was sitting on the edge of the bed looking at Derdâ’s naked shoulders, smiling. At first Derdâ couldn’t understand how she’d gotten in, and then she was confused as to where she was. Remembering that Rahime had her keys struck her mind like a stone hurled with hatred. Who knew how long she’d been there. Just next to her in bed. It was morning and the curtains were a shade brighter in the sun. Maybe she had seen her the night before?

  “Once I was beautiful like you.”

  Derdâ let out a deep sigh. Rahime stroked Derdâ’s shoulder with the palm of her hand and continued to speak: “But look at me now. What has become of me?”

  Rahime lay down on the bed in her chador. And putting her head on Derdâ’s chest, she wept. Derdâ caressed the cloth covering her head—it was only thing she could do to console her.

  The day was quiet and no one performed prayers. Toward evening, Rahime came to see Derdâ with a shoebox. She whispered, “Do you know what’s inside?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she opened the box and took out an object wrapped in scarves. She untied the scarves and presented Derdâ with a small, metal radio.

  She turned on the radio and whispered, “Don’t ever tell anyone, ever!” Siouxsie and the Banshees were singing “Peek-a-Boo.”

  Rahime laughed and said, “I don’t understand a thing but it’s just so good, isn’t it?” Derdâ laughed, too.

  They listened to music and danced until midnight in the only way they knew how. They mostly held hands and jumped up and down, turned themselves around, and bumped into each other. They were doing the pogo, though neither of them knew it.

  But it was exasperating for Derdâ to have to swear every half an hour with her hand on the Koran: “I won’t tell anyone about the radio.”

  Derdâ woke with a knot in her throat that wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t swallow. It was like a small steel ball was lodged in her throat; she could hardly breathe. It was the last day before Bezir came back and she just couldn’t relax. Each passing moment brought the day closer to its end, each passing second. That was why she had a knot in her throat.

  She was thinking of her next-door neighbor’s eyes; she imagined the blue around his pupils, hovering there just before her. Then his pale face came into focus around his eyes, and as it became clearer and clearer, Bezir’s dark face faded away and with it the knot in her throat. She considered knocking on her neighbor’s door. I could tell him to take me away? Beg him to kidnap me? But how would she speak to him? In what language? Then she realized she could communicate with him through pictures. She could draw out her thoughts. Everything: How she came to the apartment five years ago, and the way Bezir tortured her. How they would leave the apartment together and never come back. They would simply walk out the front door, hand in hand. She’d draw him a picture of a heart, an enormous heart.

  She jumped out of the bed and raced into the living room. Bezir’s notebook and fountain pen were on his lectern. He was studying Arabic. She grabbed the notebook and the pen and stretched out on the floor. She opened a blank page and she drew a self-portrait. It was easy—a black snowman. Then she drew Bezir beside her—a white snowman with a beard. Next to them she drew their apartment building. Then she wrote the year, the year she came to England. Then she drew a straight line below the two figures, and her basic graphic novel moved to its second scene. Now the white snowman was holding a thick club, and the black snowman was on the ground. She needed a red pen to draw the blood, but she couldn’t find one in the house. She ran to the kitchen and got the bread knife. She slowly drew the knife back and forth over her finger like a saw. A red line appeared on the surface of her skin. She returned to the living room and rubbed her own blood over the black snowman. In the third scene, she carefully drew a blue-eyed man leading Derdâ out of the apartment building. And in the final scene she drew a heart and colored it in with the last drop of blood she could squeeze out of her finger.

  She tore the pages out of the notebook, got dressed, and left the apartment. Rahime opened the door, still holding her Koran.

  “What do you want?” Rahime demanded. She’d forgotten everything: that Bezir was gone and that during his absence Derdâ was supposed to spend the days with her. She’d forgotten all about the songs they’d listened to together the other night, everything. Derdâ tried to smooth things over and said that she had just come over for some bread.

  “We don’t have any,” Rahime snapped. “I don’t have anything for lying bitches like you!”

  Derdâ smiled as Rahime slammed the door shut. She hurried back upstairs. She was so excited about her plan that she was afraid she might abandon the whole thing if she stopped to think about it for even a second. So she didn’t. She ran straight to her neighbor’s door and rang the doorbell.

  She heard footsteps, and the door swung open. Stanley had just woken up—he had heavy, dark circles under his eyes from all the meth he’d done the night before. He was wearing nothing but leather pants, with the top button undone. His torso was covered in tattoos. Hardly any skin was left uncolored. Derdâ took a step back, her pictures trembling in her hands. She was afraid of all the devils she’d just seen in the tattoos. But she thought of Bezir and how he’d be coming back soon and she held out her pictures. Stanley took them and closed the door.

  She didn’t know what to do. She stood silently in front of the closed door. She waited for a few minutes before she went back to her apartment with a final glance over her shoulder at Stanley’s door as she stepped inside.

  Night fell over London. Derdâ could see the lights racing over the city streets from the bedroom window. She sat in the armchair with her knees pulled up to her chest, looking out over London, but not really seeing anything. She was afraid. What if he shows the pictures to Bezir? she thought as she gnawed at the insides of her cheeks. She stared at her reflection in the glass for hours, thinking about killing herself. She could just open the window and jump.

  She stood up and realized that she’d forgotten to take off her chador. It was still wrapped around her like a second skin. She hadn’t even taken off her gloves. She couldn’t be bothered. She took a step forward and opened the window. She felt the first drops of newly falling rain on her face. She looked down to the ground twelve floors below and then out into the distance. Suddenly there was a heavy knock on the door. The doorbell was broken.

  Feeling empty, Derdâ left the open window and slowly walked through the living room and down the corridor toward the door. She opened the door listlessly, not even lifting her head to see who was there. But there on the floor she saw a pair of Dr. Martens and as she slowly lifted her head she saw a pair of legs covered in black leather, a black T-shirt, and finally Stanley’s face. Her eyes met his blue eyes. They were looking over Derdâ, peering into the darkness of her apartment, as if looking for someone, trying to understand if anyone else was home. He placed his hands on either side of the doorframe and leaned forward, looming over Derdâ, as he tried to get a better look inside the flat.

  “Is anyone else here?” he asked in English. Derdâ involuntarily turned her head and looked into the apartment. Then she understood. She turned and said in Turkish, “No, nobody’s here,” opening her palm to Stanley to emphasize it. Though a little surprised by the gesture, Stanley understood what she meant. He took Derdâ by the wrist and pulled her out of the apartment, just like she had drawn in her graphic novel. Derdâ hardly had time to reach out and shut the door. I’m leaving, she thought. At last, I’m leaving. But they didn’t go far. They passed the stairs and then the elevator and went into Stanley’s apartment.

  They passed through an empty entrance hall and down a dark corridor and stepped into a large bedroom. Derdâ knew the layout even though she’d never been here before. She knew it like the back of her hand—it was the exact same layout as the apartme
nt she’d been living in for the past five years. In her bedroom Bezir kept the bed up against the wall. In Stanley’s room, there were black curtains hanging from chains, and there was a black leather armchair beside a double mattress on the floor—the one Derdâ had seen when she first moved in. The walls were covered with foldout posters from Torture magazine. Looking closely at the posters, Derdâ saw what the men and women were doing to each other and she dropped Stanley’s hand and stepped back. Her instinct told her to get out. Stanley put his hands on her shoulders and smiled. He slowly held up his hand and gestured for her to stay. Then he caressed her head. Derdâ began to pull off the cloth covering her face but Stanley stopped her. The tall man shook his head. He didn’t want to see her face. Derdâ understood. But what did he want? She’d find out soon enough.

  Stanley took off his T-shirt, lifted one of the pillows on the mattress, and pulled out a rubber bat. Then he knelt down on the bed and gave it to Derdâ. She took the bat, and Stanley lowered his eyes. Then he unzipped his pants and brought them to his knees. He braced himself against the mattress and looked up at Derdâ like a dog. Derdâ could see a hard piece of flesh jutting out from his midsection, and she noticed bruises around his swollen spine. Caressing the protrusion between his legs as he balanced on his knees, Stanley looked up at Derdâ and begged her with his eyes. He was waiting for the first blow. In a sudden movement, she slammed the bat down on his back.

  Her eyes went dark with terror and Derdâ ran out of the room.

  But three hours later she was back, beating Stanley so much that the paint on the bat began to peel off.

  Stick was a pub on a corner deep in the backstreets of Camden Town, a neighborhood fueled by the underground scene of madmen and degenerates. Stanley stood behind the bar absently wiping a beer mug with a towel as filthy and pathetic as a floor mat as he talked to Mitch, who sat on a stool at the bar. Mitch was American. He had come to London because where he was from most people thought S&M was a brand of soda. He’d found Severin in the personals of Torture magazine and he quickly made himself her slave. But it didn’t work out. She woke up one morning and told him she was a lesbian. Set free from his bondage with her, Mitch lost his grip on reality and sank into a dark void. He was listening to Stanley’s story, wiping beer off his chin with the back of his hand and adjusting the monocle over his left eye. It was attached to an earring in his left ear by a thin chain.

  “But you should see her, man, she’s beautiful! It’s hard to explain, I don’t know. You know these Arab women—totally in black. You can only see their eyes. She’s one of them, probably Turkish. I mean, there are lots of them in the building, the custodian told me. He’s a Turk, too, I think. Whatever, she has a husband or a brother … some guy with a beard. They live in the flat across from mine. I’d seen the girl a couple of times before, but of course we’d never spoke. But yesterday she comes and knocks on my door.”

  “How old you think she is?” Mitch asked.

  “How should I know? But she must be pretty young. At least she seems young.”

  Hearing this much was enough to turn Mitch on. But he wasn’t sure if he should start stroking himself through the hole in his pocket—Stanley might get annoyed if he realized he was doing it. He stopped himself and asked him for another beer.

  Stanley took his dirty glass and refilled it with beer and put it down in front of Mitch. It was ten o’clock in the morning and Mitch was the only customer in Stick. They kept talking.

  “What was I saying? Yeah, she just came over and knocked on the door. She had these pictures. I took them and looked them over. She’d obviously drawn them herself.”

  Mitch was already a little drunk. Excited, he said, “Didn’t you ask her in?”

  “Patience,” Stanley said. “Listen, she’d drawn all this stuff on paper she’d ripped out of a notebook—a man hitting a woman, and something even stranger, there was a heart, painted in red, but guess what—I think it was real blood.”

  “Fuck,” Mitch moaned. He thought of Severin. She always got sick when she saw blood. “Fuck,” he said again.

  Stanley laughed and went on.

  “I’m serious. Whatever, so I wait until evening to make sure the guy with the beard wasn’t around. I kept checking the scene through my peephole. The man never turns up. So I go and knock on the door. She opens it and I look into the apartment and it seems like she’s there alone.”

  “Did she say anything? I mean, didn’t you talk to each other?” asked Mitch.

  “No, no, she doesn’t know any English. Anyway, so I took her over to my place. You won’t believe it, Mitch, it was like a dream! An incredible dream!”

  “Did you see her face?”

  “Are you crazy? What’s the fun if I see her face? I didn’t see her face at all. Not even her hands. She was wearing black gloves.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Mitch said. “They go to the Tesco on my street. Five women all dressed in black. They walk up and down the aisles like ghosts. I was behind one of them at the cash register once. She was wearing those long black gloves …”

  Mitch went quiet. He tried to imagine all the Muslim women in the world with every part of their bodies, even their faces, covered. Then he said, “If you ask me, they’re probably the sexiest women in the whole world.”

  “Who?”

  “Muslim women. See, they must be just too sexy, and that’s why they cover themselves like that. The message they’re giving us is, if we uncovered ourselves you guys would lose control. You get it? They’re saying to men, look, if we took off these clothes, you’d lose your minds! Yeah, that’s it … I’ve never thought of it like that before … but that’s just how it is! Otherwise, why would a woman cover herself like that, unless she was the hottest woman in the world? They’re probably afraid of being raped. Think of it this way, have you ever seen a beautiful naked woman? Not one. It’s like Muslim women are some kind of weapon, like a lethal weapon, so lethal that they’re always kept wrapped up. They’re like nuclear bombs, man. Never fired but it’s enough just to know they’re there. If they ever uncovered, it’d be the end of the world. They’d enslave everyone. Maybe they’re actually enslaved Amazons …”

  They broke out laughing. But suddenly Stanley became serious.

  “She just really turns me on with that black chador. And this isn’t just a fantasy of mine. It’s the real thing! They’re nothing like the idiots around here who wear ironed skirts during the day and latex masks at night. These women are always in that black robe. And they’re proud to be wrapped up in it. It’s like they don’t even need to walk, they just glide, you know?”

  “Right on,” Mitch said, thinking of Severin again. Severin worked in some shitty bank wearing some standard suit. “Then what happened, what did you do?” he asked Stanley.

  Stanley took off his T-shirt and turned around. His back looked just like Derdâ’s—covered in dark purple bruises. Mitch stretched out his trembling alcoholic hand and touched them. When Stanley turned around he was pleased to see Mitch’s mouth wide open in surprise.

  Stanley locked the front door and went into the women’s bathroom with his American friend and came into his mouth. He hadn’t cleaned the men’s room yet.

  When he reopened the bar, Regaip was the first person to walk in. The moment Stanley saw him he bolted to the back of the pub, knocking over chairs as he went. He thought he could lock himself in the toilet stall where he’d made the American get down on his knees not too long ago but he was wrong. Regaip broke the door down with one powerful kick, grabbed Stanley by the back of the neck, and forced his head down into the toilet bowl and flushed. For a few moments they remained still as the water flushed over Stanley’s head. Then Regaip yanked Stanley’s head out of the bowl and smashed it into the wall. Stanley waved his hands in the air and said, “Alright, alright …” Regaip took a step back and waited. Stanley reached into his back pocket, took out two hundred pounds, and handed the money to Regaip. It was half of what he owed him for this month?
??s meth. Regaip took the money and said, in English, “I’ll be back for the rest next week.”

  He turned around and walked out of the bar. When he saw Mitch cowering behind the bar, pitifully brandishing an empty whisky bottle in the air—clearly too afraid to actually hit someone with it—Regaip shouted out, “Motherfucking fags!” in Turkish and calmly walked out of the pub. But once on the sidewalk he suddenly stopped, turned around, and walked back into the pub. His voice was even louder this time, and still in Turkish.

  “You’re going to hit me with that, are you, you bastard?!”

  Mitch’s eyebrows shot up when he saw that Regaip had come back for him and his monocle fell from his face and dangled ludicrously from his earlobe, nearly ripping it open.

  Bezir asked her one more time: “What did you say?”

  “Shopping. Can I go with Sister Rahime? They always forget some things when they shop for us.”

  Bezir asked her again, this time in three clear parts. “You? You want to go out? With Sister Rahime?”

  This was enough. Derdâ wasn’t going to insist. He’d made his point.

  “No,” she said. “Never mind, they always shop for us, too.”

  Bezir sat on the couch, leaning back with one leg folded under him.

  “Now are you going to tell me about the armchair?”

  “What armchair?” Derdâ said.

  “That one. You moved it.”

  He pointed at the armchair that Derdâ had put in front of the window when he was away—for four days and four nights. Now it was back in its normal place opposite the couch. Derdâ didn’t know what to say.

  She stuttered as she spoke: “May … may … maybe I pulled it over there when I was vacuuming the floors …”