He looked carefully at the name on the gravestone. “It’s just a coincidence, two guys with the same name.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not it. The guy knew me.”
Faruk was smiling as we rode up in the elevator. This time I’d asked to have someone come with me. We got off on the thirty-fifth floor and walked down a long corridor and through a glass door. The secretary stood up to welcome us before letting İlhan Bey know that we were there. A few minutes later, we were ushered into his office.
A slightly cross-eyed man wearing metal-framed glasses stood up when we entered the room. He was short and chubby.
Faruk looked at me, I gently shook my head.
He motioned for us to have a seat at the conference table. “How can I help you, Sadık Bey?” he asked.
Faruk was glancing around anxiously. “I came here two days ago, but they took me to see someone else on this floor by the same name,” I said.
İlhan Bey smiled. “That’s impossible! There’s nobody here with the same name as me.”
“But I was here. In this conference room.”
“Well, I’m the only İlhan on this floor,” he said with a smile. “I’m sure I would know if there was anybody else here with the same name!”
A cell phone started to ring. Faruk grabbed his phone and headed for a corner of the room so as not to interrupt us.
“Where did you go to college, İlhan Bey?” I asked.
“Bosphorus University. I studied computer engineering,” he said.
Just then Faruk approached and whispered in my ear: “They found another body a few minutes ago. At Kanyon this time. They’re waiting for us.”
I did my best to give İlhan Bey a smile; after all, it was probably the last time I’d be seeing him.
Burn and go
by Sadik Yemnı
Kurtuluş
“It was you who pushed him. Then you made some kind of pact to keep quiet about it.”
I was so shocked, on so many levels, I couldn’t respond. “Kevork told me. He said it was an accident, an accident that became a source of lifelong agony.”
Anfi pushed back her long hair, which, though white now, was the feature most reminiscent of her younger days. Her large brown eyes were exactly like those of her son Yani; they were full of sorrow. They weren’t accusatory. There was no hate in them. For now, at least.
“When did he tell you that?”
“Two months ago, when I bumped into him on my way back from shopping. He’s changed the least of all. Still has the same thick red hair, square face, large, timid eyes.”
“I was eighteen the last time I saw him.”
“You know what they say, coincidence is a fickle thing. Just five more minutes and I would’ve missed him. He was looking for me. He was shocked at how much the neighborhood had changed in the last forty years, just like you were. He’d knocked on my door, but there was no answer, and so he was about to leave. Clearly, some part of him was thankful. That the past hadn’t opened the door. He jumped when I called his name. You should have seen how he hugged me though. We could’ve been models for some ad. One part of him didn’t want to find me. But the part that did was deeply shaken.”
And Anfi had had no trouble finding me. “Google knows everything, maşallah,” she had said. She had found Avram first, then me. She was very sick. Her days were numbered. She wanted to see us all one last time.
My schedule at the university was flexible. I’d been separated from my wife for two and a half years. My dog Ganz had died of old age. I had been involved with one of my students and caused something of a scandal. I’d lost all desire to complete the piece I needed to turn in to gain full professorship. I accepted Anfi’s invitation and immediately booked my Vienna — Istanbul ticket over the Internet. The part of me that was afraid of changing its mind quickly took care of plans for the trip, before I had time to lose my resolve.
We were supposed to meet at 2 o’clock, but my plane was delayed and we had to postpone until that evening. It had been thirty-seven years since I’d seen either Kevork or Avram. We had parted ways when I left for college in Ankara, and chance hadn’t brought us together since. The only place that could possibly reunite us had quickly built bridges, thanks to Anfi.
“Yani liked you best of all.”
“It was an accident, Anfi. I was pushed into that same hole at least half a dozen times myself. It was just soft, squishy soil, full of worms. You’d be scared, you’d get scratched up here and there, but that was it. How could I have known? I loved him. You know that.”
“Why didn’t you bring him home right away? To me, to the pharmacy... You might have saved him.”
It was then that the mental block I had erected to keep myself from dwelling on that moment cracked wide open, and the image of Yani lying motionless in the hole forced its way into my mind. His eyes were half-open. He wasn’t breathing. I thought he was faking it. The sand covered the blood on his neck. He let out a scream when he fell, the way we all did. We’d already started walking away. Such was our routine. If you fell in a hole or some trap, you’d follow after the rest of the gang and give them hell once you’d caught up. Finally, we stopped and waited, and when we realized he wasn’t coming, we went back. We couldn’t see that he had a huge piece of glass rammed in his stomach and that his jugular was sliced open. It wasn’t until I’d gone down into the hole and grabbed his shoulders, until I’d seen how his eyes had already gone dull... My gut froze. He wasn’t faking it... I saw the fear, the finality of it all, in the faces of Avram and Kevork. Yani was no more. Our lucky charm was gone. Mourning the death of our closest friend was like a two-way mirror, our cursed faces crying and smirking at the same time. In retrospect, how disturbing that we made a pact with hardly a word. Like the plan was already there, in our minds, just waiting to spring. We would pretend we’d never seen it.
That’s what we did. We kept quiet.
“It was at least ten minutes later when I went down into the hole. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing, Anfi. Just imagine how scared we were. We didn’t grow up with all those gory horror films like kids do today. It was such a heavy, bizarre burden. We were terrified. We felt guilty. And not just for pushing him into the hole.”
Anfi, sighing, looked away. She fixed her eyes upon her long, wrinkled fingers, giving me time to unwrap our crime of thought. She was like a young woman, her slim body shrouded in a somber brown dress. Everybody envied Yani. Especially the boys. We were his buddies. We got to know luck at its source. He was the only one whose mother had a college degree. Anfi was a pharmacist at Life Drugstore. It wasn’t the best-known pharmacy in the neighborhood, but still, it was the place where we dropped our pants to get those painful injections in our butts. Anfi was intimately acquainted with our behinds, our rashes, and the secrets of the neighborhood women.
Later, I developed this kind of habit, where every time I lowered my underwear in the presence of a woman, I’d think of those fingers feeling for just the right spot to stick the needle in and then quickly rubbing away the hurt with an alcohol swab. Sometimes the image of a kid lying at the bottom of a pit, gazing at the sky with hollow eyes, would attach itself to these thoughts and spoil the fun.
Yani was an only child. He was fair-skinned like his mother. He was a smart, lively, and kind kid. He wasn’t rough, he didn’t curse or connive or sneak into movie theaters for free, or drop frogs or crickets into girls’ shirts, or take a piss in inappropriate places like we did, but he’d pretend he did all of it. Accept me the way I am, he’d say. And we did. His greatest asset was his luck. In games of chance, he always won. If a wasp stung somebody, that somebody would never be Yani. The neighbor whose window was smashed by a soccer ball would never make out Yani among the group of children. His mischief, his mistakes never lingered long in the collective memory. It was the same in school. He wasn’t always on his best behavior. He’d tattle, copy, cut class, things like that, yet he was always considered innocent as an angel. His innocence was his cross to bear. Yet with time, it became something of a burden that he imposed upon us, his closest friends, to bear in his stead. Until now, I’ve never thought of it in those terms. It’s true, though, that it was a burden. We were the ones shouldering it. It was exhausting. And maybe we just grew sick and tired of it. Even that part of me that still believes I’m making excuses for our envy concedes this point. Such was his luck, that shadow of his innocence. So that his luck might prosper, we had to face the lack of it.