Finding the coffeehouse that the imam had told him about proved quite a task. In the narrow streets crammed full of jostling pedestrians, salesmen screaming out their pitches, store on top of store on top of store, heaps of merchandise piled high upon tables, and dark office buildings, he was looking for a coffeehouse with a certain name but an uncertain address. “Walk straight ahead, turn right, then go uphill...” “You’re at the wrong place, brother. You gotta go down this street until you see a kiosk on the corner, then you turn left there, and then...”
The cigarette smoke stung his eyes and seared his nose the moment he stepped into the coffeehouse. He scanned the room, searching for his stepfather. There were men yelling, playing cards, rolling dice in a game of backgammon, watching television. He looked at each face. When the apprentice carrying tea on a suspended tray asked him who he was looking for, he told him. But why was he looking for him? “I know him from back home,” the young man said, and gave him the name of the town. That loosened the apprentice’s tongue up a bit. He told the young man that the latter’s stepfather wasn’t there at the moment, and that he only stopped by every once in a while. There was a hotel where he hung out sometimes though. He could tell him the name of the hotel, if the young man wanted to try there.
It was nearby. It wasn’t nearly as difficult to find as the coffeehouse had been. He passed through a number of dark, narrow, muddy, potholed, lookalike streets before arriving at the hotel. It had single and double rooms, as well as twelve-person rooms with bunk beds, what the receptionist referred to as “bachelors’ rooms.” He asked about his stepfather. Perhaps he was staying there? “What you want with him, huh, boy?” the receptionist snarled in response. He repeated what he had said to the coffeehouse apprentice. He wasn’t up to no good; he was just hoping to find his friend from back home. The receptionist told him that his stepfather did stay there, but that he didn’t show up every night. Now, did he want a room or not? He whipped out the money for a bed in one of the bachelors’ rooms.
Toward morning the door opened, startling him so much that he nearly bumped his head on the iron bars of the bed above. It took him a few moments to recall where he was. He wasn’t in the army ward, or in the infirmary at the barracks — then he finally remembered. He had to keep watch. Shivering, he got out of bed and with slow, silent steps made his way to the toilet. The odor was suffocating, and so he held his breath as he peed, for what seemed an interminably long time. He washed his hands and face; there was no soap; he took a piece of tissue paper from the nail in the wall and dried his hands. Quietly, he descended the stairs.
He exited the hotel and walked across the street; there, he knelt behind a large garbage can. His empty stomach was raising hell and his eyes burned, desperate for sleep. He saw a crumpled newspaper on the ground and reached out and opened it. Maybe some reading would wake him up; besides, it was a decent way to pass the time.
A woman in Bayrampaşa shot and killed a man whom she claimed had spread rumors about her... Another transvestite murdered. The transvestite, who was staying at a hotel in İzmir’s Konak district, was found dead, having been stabbed in the heart with a knife... When his neighbor started making passes at his daughter, the man chopped him up with a meat cleaver...
It was a rude awakening: Who sought revenge empty-handed? Well, he did, apparently. How was he going to take out his stepfather? He didn’t have anything, not a knife, not even a shiv. He heard foot-steps and sat up. A tall, bald, potbellied man with a mustache and a long beard was approaching the hotel. He tottered drunkenly. That was him; that was his stepfather, his mother’s murderer. The young man’s heart began racing, beating like a machine gun. He was glad to have found this man, but he was suddenly furious at himself for having shown up empty-handed. Still, he stood up and ran across the street, stopping his stepfather in his tracks.
“What did you do to my mother?”
His stepfather was startled at first. But then he looked closely at the face of the pathetic figure standing across from him, and scowled. Try as he might, the young man didn’t know how to interpret the expression oscillating across his stepfather’s face. Was he an innocent man who had been wronged? Or a sinner whose sin had been uncovered, a petulant drunkard, his mouth and nose twitching unconsciously? Though he reeked of alcohol and was shrouded in a mist of sleeplessness, the man quickly snapped to. He was looking down, in both senses of the term, upon the scrawny body before him, his snot-nosed stepson, who stood screaming at him in that puny voice of his.
“What the hell are you talking about, snot-face?”
In a reflex he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He felt weak and helpless, like a peeled onion, like he’d been ground to a pulp. With all his weakness, he grabbed his stepfather’s collar.
“Did you kill my mother?”
His stepfather swayed slightly before grabbing him by his wrists and throwing him to the ground and kicking him over and over again. The more the young man struggled to get up, the harder the kicks became.
“What the fuck are you talking about? Huh? You little fucker and your fucking mother. Too bad you couldn’t be a man and stand up for her, huh? Fucking faggot!”
As he lay on the ground being kicked, he recalled the house where his mother and stepfather had lived. A house that he could never, not even for a second, call home. He was the last to bed and the first to rise. He recalled his sofa bed, which he couldn’t unfold until his mother and, especially, his stepfather had left the living room for the night. Drunken hands some nights, under a shield of darkness, would touch his shoulders, his chest, his cock, pretending to tuck him in.
He was making his way down Mercan Hill, from the Covered Bazaar to Sirkeci, filled with shame. He had lost his past, his present, his entire life. Because he had lost his mother. He was incapable of taking his revenge. And even at this moment, feeling so useless, he imagined himself embracing his mother, weeping and sobbing, and telling her all about what his stepfather had done.
Beneath drops that resembled neither rain nor snow, he dove into the streets he had wandered through when searching for the coffeehouse. He was looking for the display tables with the knives which had caught his eye earlier. Most stores were closed at that hour and the streets were largely deserted. The peddlers with their socks, lemons, chestnuts, “whorehouse sweets,” smuggled cigarettes, alcohol, mobile telephones, fake perfume, fake Viagra, lighter fluid, pirated CDs, videotapes, and DVDs seemed to all be in a silent daze, moving about like a slow-motion film. Finally he saw a stand with meat and bread knives and cleavers. But the goods on display weren’t what he was looking for; sure, they’d do the job, but they were too difficult to carry. As he looked blankly upon the wares, the peddler asked him knowingly: “So whatcha need, brother? A jackknife, a dagger, a switchblade?”
He felt much stronger after pocketing a switchblade, one that opened just like that — chaak — with the press of a button. He was no longer afraid. He wasn’t thinking of the hunger he felt, or his yearning for the warm embrace and sweet milk-scented breast of his mother; he was thinking about vengeance, and hate.
He’d taken up position behind the trash can again, in that same sheath of darkness across from the hotel. He put his numb hands to his mouth and blew warm air into them. Then he slipped his hands back in his pockets and ran his fingers over the switchblade. It was even colder than his fingers.