She was talking with a raised eyebrow; I was trying to listen to her. I perceived what she said as disconnected words, not as a meaningful whole. I recalled images from the night she had come to my room for the first time. Scenes from our games, games she had played with increasing audacity. Now, she had knocked on my door cautiously, she was telling me what a knucklehead I was, she was going on and on about me not having the balls to face the fact that some things were finished. Perhaps she only said it once, but I kept spinning her words in my head and developed the impression that she was repeating the same thing over and over again. I was contemplating the shadows on her face. It was like watching a riveting thriller: The intimacy I once saw in those shapely eyes was fading away shade by shade, being replaced by an aggressive, shrill, even enraged, façade. The skin of Xenia’s face was cracking, peeling away like topsoil in drought and yielding to the features of an ugly, cruel mythological beast.
I wanted to say, Oh, my Xenia, even if we have to finish everything, let’s do it gently; we may hurt each other, but let’s not ruin all those beautiful moments. Or something like that. Instead, a snarl escaped my lips: “You must die!”
My voice scared even me. You would perhaps deem me completely crazy if I told you what happened next, using the same words, in the same order that I did during my interrogation. In fact, the district attorney argued that I was acting the part. I can say this much: What I said and did from that moment on had nothing to do with the person I have been historically. Yes, I believe that the human being lives his or her own life as a historical subject. Every moment builds on the one before. Life progresses like the words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters in a meaningful text. Every time I recall what I did to Xenia, I believe in retrospect that I experienced a strange fracture in the flow of my life, the way we pause at an expression at odds with the flow of a text.
I wasn’t the one who opened the petroleum lamp on the bed stand and hurled the liquid on her. I wasn’t the one who screamed, “You’ve been a witch, and now you should be punished like one, you cunt!” I wasn’t the one who took his lighter out of his pocket, all the while savoring the lines of horror breaking out on her face. I wasn’t the one who swung the burning lighter, catching the flame on her dress. I wasn’t the demon who dashed out and held the door shut as she, engulfed in flames, ran around in a frenzy. Or perhaps it was me, releasing the flames of the hell now in charge of my rage. I made a mistake; just once in my life, I made a mistake.
I was so sure the smell of burnt flesh, hair, and nylon was coming from my own private hell that I casually took out a cigarette once she had ceased trying to force the door. I remember. I was surprised not to find the lighter in its usual place, in my right pocket, and considered for the first time the possibility that these things were true, that they had happened outside my own private dark world, somewhere within this nightmare called life. I remember. I was walking backwards down the hallway, trying to understand the uneasy mutterings of the crowd gathering close by, trying to piece together a meaningful whole from whatever they were saying. That, I remember. The rest, I don’t. I don’t remember that I ran under pouring rain for hours, wandering with a soggy, disintegrating cigarette between my lips before finally returning to the hotel. I don’t remember being arrested and put in a hospital. The next thing I remember is how someone with a long face and matty hair questioned me, keeping his deep and glinting eyes on me the whole time: “Why did you burn her?”
Nigel visited me two months after I went to prison. He looked as calm as ever, but a little worn out. He stared at me, motionless, for some time. When he parted his lips, as if struggling to talk, lines formed on his forehead and around his eyes.
“Why did you kill her?” he asked.
I had lost everything. I didn’t owe him anything. I annihilated something which belonged as much to me as it did to him. I smiled.
“You watched the trial; everything was discussed there, everything I did was reported in the papers, with details even I wasn’t aware of. What more do you want to know?”
“You owe me. A lot.” He said this in Turkish. Although not on the same par with Xenia, Nigel too was very adept at learning languages.
“What do you think I’m doing here? I’m paying my debts,” I said, smiling.
“I’m talking about what you owe me, not the ones running this world,” he shot back, once again in excellent Turkish.
“It’s all the same to me. I’ve lost everything. There’s nothing more I can give you.”
“You haven’t lost everything; there is always something more to lose. Just wait. You’ll see,” he said. He walked away before I had the chance to truly consider his words.
Three months after that visit I received the first book. Similar to the books previously bound by Nigel, it contained thirty-six pages in a sturdy binder. The binder and the pages were made of Moroccan leather or very delicate deer hide. One More Thing To Lose: Volume I was written on its cover. In it were depicted the painful moments of someone’s life and, on the last two pages, the person’s murder and cremation in his own home. Each of the pictures occupied almost the whole surface of a page and was accompanied by a few words about the person. I thought it wasn’t terribly meaningful to rack my brain over these puzzling words, which at first appeared odd and nonsensical; I put the strange volume in my suitcase. A few days later, I remembered the drawings in that book when I got the news that that my childhood friend İlhan had burned to death in his house.
I reported the matter in a letter to the district attorney with the long face and matty hair. He was good at what he did. He investigated the incident with a meticulousness that was hard to come by in those years, interviewed Nigel, and decided not to press charges. I don’t know what Nigel told him, how he convinced him of his innocence, but I can’t forget those four words the prison director said when he brought me the news: “He proved his innocence.” It was that simple. This couldn’t be the price for a crime I had committed in a fit of madness. İlhan was totally innocent here. Why on earth did Nigel kill him?
I became obsessed with reaching Nigel. It was so unfair to expect an inmate to track down an avenger roaming free outside. There were just a few things I wanted to say to him. When I wrote those down, I realized that whatever I wanted to tell him was exactly the answer to the question he had asked when paying that visit to me. How about telling him why I killed his girlfriend? The guilt that I felt for İlhan’s death weighed heavily upon me.
Just as I was finally beginning to readjust to everyday life, quieting my conscience and soothing my injured ego after months of agony, a new book arrived. It was delivered to me on the anniversary of Xenia’s death. Again, drawings and red ink on delicate deer hide or Moroccan leather. This time I instantly recognized the warm face of my first serious girlfriend. In spite of all those years, the curling lips, arched nose, and slightly crossed eyes of Zeynep, my first love, left no room for doubt. In the following nightmarish days I read the papers, listened to the radio, and lived in fear. It didn’t take long: Zeynep had been found in her house, dead. She was charred.
I wrote to the district attorney again. I pointed out the similarity between the ways and the dates upon which Zeynep and Xenia had died. I argued that Nigel was seeking revenge and therefore punishing the people I loved in the same way that I had killed Xenia. Two weeks later the district attorney came to see me and reported that Nigel couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with this crime; he had proven that he was performing on stage at the time of the murder. Astonished, I asked the district attorney, “How could you determine the time of death for a charred corpse?” He went through the files he had and hastily read the statements of three witnesses. The super of the building, a shopkeeper of the neighborhood, and Zeynep’s husband, a captain, had all given testimonies clarifying the time of death.