(Sinan swallows, his eyes wide and rolling.)
“Who do you think you are, trying to stab a man, you fucking piece of shit!”
He didn’t even lower his voice when he saw me approaching. I walked right by them. I followed the wall and dove back inside the ward. They dispersed after me. The other two guys were laughing and cussing left and right.
I didn’t go near Sinan all day. He didn’t talk at all; he didn’t eat; he didn’t go out to the courtyard. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t sad. So what was his deal? He didn’t have the usual fever blister popping out of his lip. And he didn’t seem like a man waiting for his manifest destiny either. He was cold, motionless, as if all the nerves had been ripped out of him. Was it the comfort of simply knowing what’s to come?
Toward evening it started snowing. The men out in the courtyard headed back into the ward, taking cover from the sudden onslaught of slush. I left the crowd and chaos behind and walked up to him.
“What were those guys talking about?” I asked.
No response. He wouldn’t talk. He’d erased me, completely. The Sinan who constantly rattled on to me about all his suspicions had been replaced by this mute dupe. I had no idea what he was thinking. What the fuck was going on? He didn’t talk, not that evening, not that night. I was dying to find out. But that was Sinan. When he shut down, even his fucking maker couldn’t rouse him out of it. I didn’t press him any further. The bastard could stew in his own juices for all I cared.
When I woke abruptly early the next morning, I felt like I was about to come. I found myself trying to suffocate the rod beneath my waist, between a pillow clenched between my legs and the rough texture of the cotton mattress. On the verge of explosion, I got up and went to the bathroom. (When I was new to the ward, Sinan had followed me to the dimly lit bathroom a few times.)
It was still pitch black in most of the ward. It took awhile for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, with just a tiny sliver of light seeping in from under the door. As I walked down between the bunks, I glanced at Sinan’s bed, but he wasn’t there. It was 3 in the morning; all of the doors were locked. Where could he be? I walked toward the stairs leading up to the toilets. When I got to the bathroom door, I heard voices; scuffling and struggling. Slowly, I pushed the door open. There was a pool of blood between the sinks and stalls in their pinkish-yellow glow. I saw the legs of a man, trembling, sprawled out in the pool of blood. The upper half of his body was in one of the stalls. One of his slippers had come off, the other was still on his foot. When I saw his shirt, which had soaked up the blood to the color of rotten cherry, I recognized the broadly checkered design. It was the big guy, the group leader. I took another step inside. Then, above him, I saw Sinan.
He was all over the guy like a spider. He was so agile, stabbing the guy with a shiv, in the neck, in the stomach, all over. The man was nothing but a pulp of muscle and nerves by then. A thin blanket was wrapped tightly around his head. It seemed he’d taken the first hit to the jugular and spurted blood all over the walls. Sinan was rabid, his attention focused entirely upon his prey like some nocturnal animal. He stuck the shiv into the now motionless body a few more times. Then he looked up at the door and saw me.
I took one step back, but I couldn’t take the second. I couldn’t move. I leaned against the wall. He wasn’t at all surprised to see me. He stood up and walked through the pool of blood to the sink. The ice-cold water that ran over his hands and arms was red at first; he rubbed his fingers together until it gradually turned pink, then transparent. He removed his undershirt, now stained with blood. Naked from the waist up, he walked up to me. Then, without a word, and without looking me in the face, he moved straight past me. He was calm, invigorated. And he remained so as he headed out the door and down the stairs. I tried with all my might to move. Finally, I managed to walk down the stairs, silently. It was the longest journey I’d ever taken in that tiny ward. Each step sent a shudder through my body, like a guillotine blow to the neck. I couldn’t control my breathing. It was as if my joints had hardened, like all the spaces between my bones were filled with concrete. I struggled to find my way through the darkness. My eyes were popping out of my head, like somebody pumped up on too much shit. I walked by his bed. He was lying there, under the covers, calm as could be. I reached my bunk. Suddenly the damn bunk that I despised waking up in every morning had become the safest shelter. I was surrounded by the noise of snoring. I didn’t make a sound. The moment I did, one of those shivs would go splat through my neck. I lay down. And stayed there, motionless.
The next morning they took a count. They removed the body of the big guy. It took at least seven or eight of them to lug it down the stairs. An investigation ensued. Nobody was allowed out of the ward until noon. At noon, Sinan went to the door. He’d hurriedly gathered his dirty underwear and placed them in a bag. He said he was going to the Turkish bath. They let him. They never suspected him since he didn’t have any friends, and there was no way he could take out such a big guy.
I would never be his equal. I never talked with him, never approached him again, and never during the night did I look his way... and I never made the mistake of ever, ever getting a wink of sleep.
Black Palace
by Mustafa Zıyalan
Aksaray
I walked down from Atatürk Boulevard, onto Oruçgazi Street, along the wall of Oruçgazi Elementary. That’s where I went to school when I was a kid. I ended up in front of the Oruçgazi Apartment Building. You could still see the marks of posters of old political organizations that had once been on the prowl, and had been prowled down like animals, back in the ’70s. The windows of the first floor were at eye level.
My mother had died in that building. In Aksaray — in “White Palace.” If anything, the world must be bell jar — bottomed, as they say.
The small neighborhood convenience store was still there. The stationery store across from it was too. In its fly-flecked windows were the same books we had used back when I was in school. I was about to go in when a newspaper headline caught my eye: Scalpel. I couldn’t see the rest. I took the paper, stepped halfway in, and paid the dark-complected, mustached guy behind the newsstand counter. Then I turned around and entered the stationery store.
The owner was still wearing a two-piece suit and a tie. “Ohhhh, look who’s here!” he said as soon as I walked in. We shook hands. He sent one of the kids to fetch us some tea from a nearby tea stand. He came closer, as if to share a secret. “No one speaks Turkish around here anymore, sir,” he said, with the grimace of a man suffering from heartburn. “Sniffing glue, turpentine, this and that; you name the vice and they deal in it.” Then, pointing in the direction of the convenience store with his thumb, “They’ve taken over, completely.”
I didn’t ask: Who? The Kurds? He had turned out to be another one of those assholes who thought the city was his own personal property. Maybe out of anxiety, out of fear. After all, fear is one ferocious teacher. We made small talk; we drank tea.
That’s when I saw the blondie for the first time, just as I was stepping out of the store. He wore some fancy, dark-colored jacket; his arms were folded; he seemed to be scratching his chin. In spite of his years, he had the face of a kid. Good-looking fella. He followed me with faintly squinting eyes. Was there anybody else with me? Where were my hands? Perhaps the fact that I was holding the paper in my right threw him off. He smiled, it seemed, ever so slightly. A fleeting thought: Is he making a pass at me or what? Well, there was no harm in that. It once again became obvious to me that I no longer knew the language of the land. The thought gave me an ugly rise. Some sort of fear. For an instant I imagined going straight up to the guy, reaching out with the paper as if to remove some spot of dust from his arm, and then headbutting him square in the middle of his cool smile. I almost took the first step. But then I stopped myself. I winked in his direction. He seemed to be looking elsewhere. I turned around, but made sure not to lose sight of him. I knew as well as I knew my own name that he was keeping me in his field of vision too. So be it. I put some distance between us and turned around for good, and with one ear to the ground listening for steps, started in the direction of Pertevniyal High School. I figured I’d go to the hardware store over there and do some shopping.