But then I really shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve got a penchant for finding myself in the craziest situations. I remember the day I arrived here, for example. They unloaded us from the van, I raised my head, and, Goddamn it, Ahmet! I say to myself. You just stepped in a pile of shit! Now lift your fucking foot. The walls of Sağmalcılar Prison lay before me. Surrounded by white houses, the place sticks out like a bruise on the skin of a pale lady. Shit had gotten real serious real fast. And to think that dude I jumped with a knife was only packing a hundred bucks. Asshole! Hardly compensation for the price I’d have to pay. Made an absolute fool out of me. And if things keep up like this, I’ll be a disgrace until the day I die. But there’s one thing I’ve learned in this life, and always failed to do: Never ever trust your feelings and the reasons behind them. ’Cause they change so damn quickly, leaving you with nothing to do but lick your wounds.
The music stopped all of a sudden. They announced Sinan’s name. The same Sinan I’d just killed in my dream, and then got all choked up about swearing to my interrogators that it wasn’t me. He’s trying to get transferred out of here, but he keeps turning up empty-handed. You can’t just go wherever you want whenever you damn well feel like it, now, can you? As soon as he heard his name announced, Sinan made a dash for the hallway. With a noisy rattle of the keys the door opened, and out Sinan went. Then Orhan Abi picked up where he’d left off, crooning away.
I waited for him to return to the cell. I was sure he’d get rejected. The aftershocks of my dream slowly wore off. I’d never been so frightened by a dream since I was a kid. It’d been on my mind for a long time. I had asked, but Sinan’s lips were sealed.
“You think killing someone’s gonna earn you stripes or something?” he had said to me once. He talked with a whistle through his broken front tooth.
I said nothing.
“Don’t ask me then, go ask your master,” he said.
“The master’s situation’s different,” I said.
“What about it? Self-defense or not, you deal with the consequences.”
The man he called my “master” was a prisoner we worked with in the carpentry shop. Sinan didn’t like him, not at all. He was respected by the other men, like he was some kind of ward ağa or something. Two plainclothes flatfoots tried to rape his wife one night when they were coming back from Kumkapı, and he butchered the guys right on the spot. He got a king’s reception when he arrived at the prison.
Sinan was back before he’d even left. He walked into the courtyard without a word, paced a line all morning. He took it real hard every time his transfer petition got rejected. And this time, too, just like when any little thing happened to him, he felt his whole world was crumbling around him.
I went and sat next to him at lunch. I scrunched up and started eating.
“Use a fork,” he said.
“I’m gonna eat with my hands,” I said.
“Use a fork. You can’t eat like that, you’ll upset your stomach,” he said.
He always told me what to do. Whenever I spoke, he interrupted me and corrected my accent. He told me who I could and couldn’t speak to. And he rubbed my peasant roots in my face every chance he got. As if he were carving out his own little kingdom there between those walls. I continued eating. You shovel in rotten, raw meat with your bare hands, and then you savor every damn morsel, don’t you? So why use a fork just ’cause it’s cooked? I was about to say. But I didn’t.
“Don’t tell me what to do. Gets on my nerves,” was all I said.
“You a hood now, are you?” he said. “Since when?”
To him, I could fall right into the class of degenerates and scum at any given moment. I looked him in the face. I should hate him. He had a china chin, delicate as a woman’s. The veins on his forehead grew even bluer when he was sad. Tore me up inside. I kept doing my damnedest to be his equal. I started eating with a fork. It wasn’t difficult, I simply didn’t enjoy it.
“They’re going to kill me if I stay here,” he said.
“Nobody’s gonna do shit to anybody,” I said.
“Müfit’s got men in here. I gotta scat, and quick.”
“No bird flies out of here without the ward ağa knowin’ about it,” I said.
The ward ağa was a man in his thirties who’d been catapulted to his superior rank as soon as he set foot in here, because he’d killed seven men in a parking lot brawl. He was the man who kept tabs on comers and goers. Next to him, the guards were mere escorts.
The “Müfit! Müfit!” he whined about was the son of the man he’d killed. From what he told me, all hell had broken loose over some broad. Sinan’s childhood sweetheart. He had no idea how he slayed that man, the fat sixty-some-year-old daddy who planted himself in their way the night they tried to elope. Both men were certain of their love for Funda. I can’t imagine Sinan slapping a punching bag, he’s so damn puny. And this Müfit guy told the apartment-building doorman to let Funda know he was on Sinan’s ass. Is there really a doorman at the apartment building where Funda lives? Who knows? Hard to separate the bull from the shit when it comes to these stories. Regardless, Sinan thought he was now in the lion’s mouth. And he’d started acting extra strange the past few weeks. He couldn’t sleep at night, even started praying. He started speaking real fast, like he was mumbling prayers or something. He couldn’t sit still. And when he got like that, he’d get more annoyed with me than ever. Yet for years I’d been closer to him than anybody, Funda even.
“Besides, hard for anything to happen with it being this crowded,” I said. “Barely room to move as it is.”
“Perfect scene for the crime,” he replied. “Can’t tell who’s got whose throat in a crowd like this.”
There were men who’d been killed in here by having hot olive oil poured down their ears, or stabbed to death with a shiv. At least, that’s what we were told, but neither Sinan nor I had ever witnessed anything of the kind here in the ward. So why did I keep dreaming about killing this guy? I looked in his face like we were two good pals. He noticed, and glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. He was scared shitless, as usual, thinking it was all downhill from here. I should just take care of it for him, I thought to myself. Show him what it’s like to be pushed and pulled around at somebody else’s whim. Nobody calling after him anyway. Nobody even writes him letters, except for that bitch Funda. How that chick got this loser to clean the crap off her honor, who knows. Ahmet, my boy, you’d be snuffing the life of a whore-mongering motherfucker; you’d rise above the rank of mere mugger and be a whole class above those pickpockets and ass-fuckers — not so bad, huh? And with the ward ağa watching over you, nobody’d make a peep. It’d be an open-and-shut case. The asshole can find out what it means to suck it up while he rots in his grave.
For a moment I thought he sensed what was going through my mind. He was alert like some nocturnal animal, his nostrils flaring wider and wider. I pretended to not give a shit about him, stabbed some meat on the metal plate. Besides, he couldn’t actually care less about what I was eating, or how.
It was calm in the ward that evening. I ate alone, sat at one of the tables in the corner next to the dormitory. The doors were long locked. The huge, curtainless window looking onto the courtyard with its pile of snow was nothing but a black wall now. They quickly counted us. The sixty-watt bulb bathed its surroundings in yellow. Beneath its light, the faces of the men sitting at the tables looked more anemic than ever. It wasn’t long before the cigarette smoke made it almost impossible to see five feet in front of you. I caught a whiff of another familiar scent there in that smoke. A joint. It was coming from one of the tables by the window. Three men were sitting there sucking it in. They were always together, those three, in the courtyard, in the ward, evenings at the ward coffeehouse. I’d never spoken with them, not once. Sinan, the master, they’d never messed with those guys either. The tall one was shaped like a padlock; huge head, flat body, and virtually no neck. White skin, a little oily. He’d become the leader of the pack, even though he was new to the ward. He always wore a large, checkered dress shirt and a vest. The middle one had small, dark eyes that were pinched together, giving him these broad, open temples. The third one, the tiniest of them, had white skin and gray-blue eyes. I’d heard the big one grew up in Vefa. The other two were from Anatolia.