Maybe the weather was to blame. They hadn’t yet had a proper winter that year. Or maybe it was Moda’s fault. Moda was so wonderful, so beautiful and dreamlike, and in her mind’s eye it would forever remain that way. Or so the girl hoped. One thing was for sure: Within this idyllic landscape, there was no such thing as a stranger. For her, at that time, a stranger — or el as her grandma would say, using the more old-fashioned word, incidentally the same word for “hand” — was something far away and unknown, foreign and distant, far in the future. Like growing pains. Like blood. Like pus. Like death even. All of it unbelievably distant and strange. And that was how it was supposed to be. But next to her the breathing grew grunting and putrid.
There was a girl on my mind, a girl who was gradually fading away. She was alone.
What’s wrong with you today, Dad?
It’s Nazlı. My beautiful daughter. My beautiful twelve-year-old daughter.
Nothing, I’m fine!
Again I get the strange looks, pleading for the ride to be over as soon as possible, so that they can finally be rid of me.
My hand is in Nazlı’s. Hers the hand of a child.
There was a girl on the man’s mind. Her heart beat so quickly, like the hearts of all children.
It would take awhile for the girl to grow certain that the heaviness belonged to a living hand; by then, the dolmuş had made the second turn inland, away from the Marmara shore. The hand continued. It slid, slowly, a little further. Gradually making its way down the twelve-year-old right leg, the hand was clammy with sweat by the time the dolmuş passed the rundown police station. And the girl was sweating too. Not a good day to be wearing such a heavy coat! Not a good day to be running late! Sweat trickled down the girl’s legs; she was unable to move. The hand paused, before suddenly starting up again, gliding along the girl’s young skin. To the very depths. On the right side of her neck the girl sensed a drawn breath, a breath grown hoary, aged before its time. She herself breathed quickly, sharply, through her nose, her nostrils gaping like two big eyes on her face. Someone, a passenger, asked to be let off on Moda Boulevard, where the toy store and the flower shop would open up a couple of years later. The girl felt weighted down, pinned to her spot by the heaviness of the door to her left — a door that could not be opened. First she would try to rest her head against the bottom of the window. How could she possibly shut her ears to the sound of the man’s breathing? The stench of his breath mingled with the diesel fumes, singeing her nostrils. Her child’s body sank lower into the seat of the dolmuş, as she sought to understand the route of the hand sliding up her thigh.
The huge iron gate of the Kadıköy Girls’ School, Kolombo Kabob, Ali’s Ice Cream, gaunt trees at the top of the hill leaning against dim streetlamps. And then the fork in the road, and the dolmuş’s waddling veer to the left.
The girl sat straight up. Stiffly. Waiting. The hand had to be removed from her body. Immediately. She struggled to think about what she should do in a situation like this. The nap of her red coat scorched her neck, and her face flushed red from the heat.
Taking the dolmuş up to Moda meant going to Grandma’s, to safety. Her father would come later. Today was her first time taking the trip alone. Her father had a project he needed to finish up before he could leave work. The next stop, the girl repeated to herself. At the next stop, she would finally be able to wrest herself from the sinister hand. She was terrified of her eyes meeting those of the man sitting next to her and breathing so forlornly.
An early twilight had descended by the time they finally arrived at the last stop. The door opened, and soon the auspicious sound of footsteps broke the evening silence. Two people, a couple of rare visitors to Kemal’s Tea Garden, were heading for the dolmuşes, and thus home, having had their fill of hot tea and heated conversation for the day. Rushing out of the dolmuş, the girl wanted so badly to call out to them. Her eyes sought theirs — anything but the disconcerting gaze of the dolmuş driver, his eyes seeping, damp from the diesel. But for some reason she could not call out; her voice got stuck in her throat.
It was at precisely that moment that she felt it. The hand that had been stroking her right leg throughout the journey had transformed into something else, something humungous, and she sensed that it would pursue her, chasing her to her death. The hand was a person, it was a shadow, it was a nightmare. It had thick knuckles and pudgy palms. A limb marked by dirt and sweat, by the unknown and the groundless. It was a wordless organ; the rhythm of its breathing did all the talking. It was some thing — filled with rage toward the past that had spurned it, cold-blooded in the face of fear, eager to dismember.
The hand, which had assumed myriad forms in the reflections and projections of shadow play with her father, now became something else altogether; growing heavy and awkward, it became another name. It was a complete stranger, so different from the shadows her father projected onto the wall, shadows that she likened to rabbits and wolves, dragons and flying dinosaurs. This hand was something completely different; it was the ghost of the wolf, the dragon, the flying dinosaur. It was a colorless jinn possessed by and emanating fear. It was a shadow merging with other dreadful shadows, growing giant and amorphous. It grew and grew. In it the girl could see ghouls with eyes, eyes that stirred as they looked into the deep, endless, pitch-black darkness. The girl felt it, the breathing of the hand, right next to her now, and in the very pulse beating in her neck.
She should run, run away.
And so the girl ran, but not toward her grandma’s, and not toward Kemal’s Tea Garden; she ran down the hill, past Koço, and toward the stairs. She then made her way, stumbling, along the shore, where the sand turned to gravel, and old caïques docked next to the new. She pushed on, into the heavy wind, until her lungs finally gave out. With all her might she struggled, resisting the vulgar hand as it breathlessly closed in upon her from behind. Panting, in a vindictive voice, the hand told her how much it enjoyed watching lonely young girls die lonely deaths on romantic shores in winter. A knife emerged and was pressed to her neck. Its possessor, the hand, grabbed her roughly and pulled her beneath it. It leaned toward her ear and then, wet and warm, so unlike a hand, so unlike a ghoul, stuck its tongue deep inside her ear. The pervert’s tongue slid around her eyes, into her nostrils, over her chin, her dimples, over her cheekbones, onto her neck. In her every joint she felt the other body weighing down upon hers as the hand nearly choked her. Her red coat, it ripped open as a deep silence seemed to descend upon the shore; there was no longer a body of a young girl to be concealed by the coat, the sweater, the lace-lined undershirt with its sewn-in training bra, or the panties with their matching lace; now, there was nothing but a body doused in its own blood. With its fingernails, the hand dug into her flesh, and with its knife, it sliced her open. The girl was barely conscious. She thought that now, finally, it must be over.
She was wrong. At that moment, she met with another invasion altogether. It entered between her legs and jarred her entire body with a deep, searing pain. Againandagain-andagainandagain. The hand’s eyes pierced the darkness. It loosened its grip on the knife for just a few moments, allowing the girl one gasp for breath. In that instant, she felt that she saw death, and it became clear to her that she would have to fight to survive. With a final spurt of energy, she grabbed some sand and threw it into the hand’s eyes. The knife fell; the hand relaxed its grip. The girl knew that this was her chance. She thought of when she and her father used to play tag during the summer. Run, she said to herself, run away as far as you can.