The stepson
by Mehmet Bilâl
Sirkeci
It was one of those winter evenings when the darkness descends early. His hands burned from the cold, his stomach from hunger, and his heart from longing for his mother. He looked at the kiosk in front of Sirkeci train station, at the spit of twirling meat, the döner, fat seeping out of it onto the fire below. He swallowed. He reached into his pocket. He had just enough money for one more night in a bachelors’ room — unless he took care of it tonight, then he wouldn’t need to pay for the room anymore. But what if his stepfather failed to show up again? It would mean another night of dining on simit, that’s what.
When he had reached his home that frosty evening, the woman who opened the door was a complete stranger to him. It was from this sinister woman, with the gaping front teeth and foul look in her eyes, that he learned his mother had died. The woman was one of his stepfather’s wives, and she told him that she’d moved into the house after his mother’s death. She refused to explain any further. The woman started to shut the door, but he grabbed it, forcing it back open. How did his mother die? When? And where was his stepfather? The woman said nothing about his mother, only that she hadn’t seen her husband in a long time. He stopped by once in a blue moon to drop off some cash, but he never stuck around for long. That was all she could tell him. She shut the door.
The roots of his hair were damp with sweat, there was a tingling in his knees, and the tips of his toes had gone numb. He sat down on the wet concrete step in front of the house. He was frozen in a state of shock and grief. His facial expression, the thoughts and questions running through his mind, the entire flow of life, all of it was frozen in a state of temporary coma. At every door he knocked on that night, he met the same response: “I don’t know anything about it!”
Both he and his mother were outsiders in this place, his stepfather’s hometown. Something had happened, someone had done something to his mother, and now everyone was keeping it from him, as if they’d made some kind of pact of silence. There was a sternness in their answers, a chilliness in the voices, and an unbreachable distance in their faces. They didn’t want him, didn’t want him wandering the town’s muddy streets like some stray shadow, didn’t want him asking questions, didn’t want him knocking on their doors; they wanted him to evaporate, to get lost, and for good. It was as if his mother had been erased from their memories all together. So where was his stepfather?
With no place to go, he spent his time behind the neighborhood coffeehouse, shivering and whimpering like a dog in a graveyard. At the end of the second day, he was getting a drink and washing his face at the fountain behind the mosque, when the sound of the imam’s frazzled voice sent a chill down his spine. Though only a few years older than him, the imam looked like a ghastly old man, what with his turban, robe, and beard, and squinty eyes behind dark glasses; in a voice that sounded like something out of the netherworld, the imam was saying something about his mother’s death. He approached the imam timidly so that he could hear better. It had been months since the young man’s mother had died, the imam explained. It was the young man’s stepfather who had informed the imam of the woman’s death one evening, asking that she be buried the next day following the morning call to prayer. It is only for Allah to judge, it is true, the imam said, and as a sinner the stepfather bore the weight of his own sins. But he had to admit that he did not like the look of the stepfather that night. Instead of sorrow for the departed, his eyes had shined with raw sparks of fear, sated flickers of rage. Of course, only the dearly departed, the man’s stepfather, and Allah knew what had happened that night, whether the woman had passed on naturally, or due to an accident, or whether she was the victim of a malicious deed.
“So, you mean you have no idea why or how my mother died?” the young man suddenly asked.
Unfazed by the interruption, the imam told him that other than the suspicious look in the stepfather’s eyes, there didn’t appear to be anything out of the ordinary. Maybe she really had died of natural causes; maybe she’d just run out of breath or her heart had just stopped beating.
It was obvious, however, that the imam had not taken a liking to his stepfather, a man who in his entire lifetime had not once donated a dime to the mosque, attended anyone’s mevlit service, or gone to Friday prayer, or any of the bayram prayers for that matter. Or maybe the imam simply felt a twinge of pity for this desperate, suffering young man.
There would be no peace for him, and he would not be able to mourn properly, until he knew the why and how of it, and the imam was aware of this. And so he told the young man that his stepfather had gone to Istanbul, that he was there in a neighborhood called Sirkeci, that there the young man would find a coffeehouse run by his relatives, and that he could ask his stepfather to tell him the truth of the matter himself once he found him. The young man felt an urge to hug the imam, to kiss his hand, to wipe his skirts on his face. But he was out the door before the imam could even finish saying, “May God pardon his faults.”
There was no doubt in his mind: It was his stepfather who was responsible for his mother’s death. That tyrant, that drunkard, that asshole with the many wives had consumed his mother, whose very hand the young man held in such high esteem that it seemed too precious for his lips. He’d taken her life. Sent her to the grave much, much too early, without even going to the trouble to tell her son about it.
He knew that if he did not get his revenge, he would be defiling the memory of his mother, damning her love for him, betraying the breast whose milk he had craved since his first breath of life.
When he first disembarked, the crowd and noise that he found in Sirkeci had sent his head spinning. The tram siren, the honking cars, the people scurrying along the muddy sidewalks, all of it had unnerved him completely, and so he ran, straight to the sea with its billowing waves a few hundred meters in the distance, sprinting, as if toward some kind of miracle. While catching his breath he stood looking out at the ships rocking back and forth in the water, the greedy seagulls squawking in the air, the men fishing from the Galata Bridge, the larger bridge connecting the two sides of Istanbul, and the misty beauty of the opposite shore, which extended before him like a living, breathing postcard. He was hungry, as usual. It was then that he purchased his very first simit in Istanbul and quickly devoured it, right down to the last sesame seed.