More: A Novel (21 page)

So I gave up on my left hand and banked on the right. I could feel each individual rib underneath the fabric. I pushed as hard as I could, but the wall on my right was at least as sturdy as the one on my left. I didn’t give up, however. I tried over and over. The more I tried, the more panic replaced my fear. In my panic I started not caring what I touched. Whatever I could grab with both hands, I shoved. My left hand even went in the mouth and out again. In the meantime I also kept on hitting the wall across from me with my feet. I was like a thrashing worm. I continued to kick and shove from where I sat until I was short of breath. But it was no use! No use at all …

That’s when I started to cry. I shed tears and sobbed loudly, breathlessly. I hadn’t cried much in my life, but had burst into sobs for the second time this week. Of course the situation I was in was multiple times more horrifying than Rastin seeing through my lie. As was my crying. Multiple times louder! I opened my mouth as if I’d tear it right open and in my voice that had long gone hoarse, howled like some strange animal. After all, there was no one to see. There were dozens of people around me but none of them could see my unsightly weeping. I cried so hard my eyes hurt from squeezing them shut. I was like a baby who’d started crying in his mother’s womb. A baby who cried because he knew he wouldn’t get to leave his mother’s womb. A baby who cried not to take his first breath, but to release his last …

My weeping juddered to a stop a few minutes later, like a train braking. My tears petered out and eventually dried. I was like a dead body now. A corpse sitting motionless, hands on knees just like before. I was one of them. Like one of the people surrounding me. The only difference was that I was still breathing. All of this seemed like a mistake in calculation. Me being the only survivor in a pile of corpses where all should be dead had to be some sort of mistake. But in that tiny void, I was the only one capable of making mistakes. If there had been another, he was dead now. So all of this was my fault. Everything … and this fault must be corrected …

I was sure no one would be able to find me. That road we’d been riding on must have been out of use for years. And we didn’t matter the tiniest bit to the captain waiting for us at that dark cove! He, like us, like the Afghanis, was illegal. Even our existence was illegal! I highly doubted he’d try to track us down. He’d never take that kind of risk. Right then I thought of Yadigar. Our legit partner in crime!

Maybe he knows
, I thought. What road we’d take and where we’d go to deliver the goods … but then I realized he wouldn’t care, either. It would have been unseemly for him to coincidentally find us, so far away from the patrolling area of the gendarmerie. He had no reason to put himself in danger. No one would come to save me. I was the only one that could.

Suicide had ceased to be an option in my mind. It was more of a sensation like a thousand knives stabbing me all over at the same time. It was like hate! That was the instant I ceased to think of suicide but to feel it. My sixth sense was suicide! If everyone around me was dead, then so would I be! My lighters would be good for something when I burned myself to death. I’d set us all on fire. First I’d set alight the ones around me, then myself.

I was such a fool I really thought I could do it. I was such a fool I even pulled the pack out of my pocket to try. I was such a coward, however, that I couldn’t do a thing. I was afraid not of dying, but of burning. Plus how was I supposed to go around setting fires with that meager flame and all the wetness around me? Lighter in hand, I just froze there … and it suddenly made more sense to set alight a cigarette rather than myself.

When the flame from the lighter lit up that tiny hole, it was too late. I struck the lighter, forgetting for a brief unwitting moment how much I feared the light and the things I could see in it. But I was able to neither bring the flame up to the cigarette that was between my lips, nor even move. For in its light, I saw hell itself. And in that hell, the only fire was the one in my hand. That would mean that I was the devil and this was my home.

But I wasn’t able to regard for too long the walls of my home and, vomiting, flicked off the lighter. With my hands I wiped what I could off my jaw. And just as I tried to dry my palms by rubbing them against my trousers, twelve small, glowing dots I hadn’t noticed until then caught my eye. They glowed on my wrist along with the minute hand, the hour hand, and the stick that indicated seconds. The face of the watch, the governor’s gift, showed quarter past three. Like in that photo in
From Kandalı to the World
. But this time, it was night. The darkest night of the world, in fact. For no one was burning and not a single flame was rising in hell. When really it was what lit up the Earth, not the sun: hellfire … and maybe some morphine sulfate.

I’d taken the watch off my wrist and gripped it in both hands. Elbows resting on my knees, I sat motionless. For exactly two hours I’d watched the seconds indicator revolving. Or this was all some autohypnosis and I just didn’t know it. In the glow of the stick that indicated seconds, I tried to forget the hell I’d seen in the light of the lighter flame. At a quarter past five, something happened.

“More … more … more … more …”

Who was speaking? Whose voice was it? Where was it coming from?

“More … more … more …”

Was I hallucinating? But no, I could really hear that voice. It was coming from afar and sounded strangled, but I could hear it. I hollered.

“I’m here! In here! I’m in here! Can you hear me?”

Going silent, I waited.

“More!”

Whoever it was, they were replying to me. Just as I wondered why they kept saying the same thing, my question collided with its answer like a pair of accelerated particles. Because that’s how much Turkish they spoke, that was why! As well as “More!” Because it was one of the Afghanis from the back of the truck! So where were they?

I wished I could ask, but I didn’t know any Pashto. Throughout the years, perhaps a thousand people had passed through the reservoir speaking Pashto, but I’d never cared what they were saying. There wasn’t a single Pashto word in my mind. My ears had heard thousands of words in Pashto but withheld none. My hearsay mechanism, which always and everywhere worked like an obstinate butterfly trap, hadn’t turned a hair in that reservoir. Because it had been sure that Pashto wouldn’t have any use in real life! When really real life was everything that fell outside human perception! I was learning … and hearing:

“More … more…”

I couldn’t figure out where exactly the voice was coming from. It seemed to be shattering into a thousand pieces and coming at me from every direction. Or reaching me through the thousands of holes in between the bodies around me. I didn’t know where it was coming from, but it was always at the same volume. Or at the same low volume, I should say, because it was very faint by the time it got to me. It was as if one of the bodies was speaking from its stomach! Apparently the distance between me and the owner of the voice never changed.

“I’m here!” I’d shout. “I’m here!”

Then I’d fall silent and wait and they would reply, “More!”

That was all. That was the extent of our communication. We repeated this dialogue over and over. We repeated it so many times that it eventually turned into a single sentence, “I’m heremore!”

The hour, for that matter, eventually turned into six in the morning. But still I couldn’t spot a single stirring in the bodies around me. If it wasn’t someone who’d survived the accident and was standing by the pile of bodies, wondering how to get me out, I didn’t even want to think about what it might be. For that scenario would involve someone stuck somewhere else in the wreck just like me. A while later, I had to believe that this was the case. My reluctance was the reason it took so long …

The voice also mustn’t have wanted to believe, for it had yelled, “More!” hundreds of times. Goodness knows where it was trapped, waiting for help from me. For forty-five minutes we’d begged for help from each other in vain. What’s more, they had had it tougher, having had to do it in Turkish, saying the only word they knew.

In the meantime, the vomit that had left me when I saw the walls of hell had long dried up, and I’d vowed not to use the lighter again. But the place that I was at in the world and in my life made me well aware that I could fuck away with any vow within a matter of seconds. Neither my loyalty to my vows nor my spine had been left intact by the boulder I was bent double under! In fact, I hadn’t just lost my loyalty to my vows, but to everyone else as well! I had lost it so much that what little consolation I could give myself came from imagining that my father was dead.

At least he’s done for
, I thought. Then it’d abruptly occur to me that he might not be dead. Maybe he too was lying injured somewhere. But I’d shake this thought out of my head and yell, “No, no! Ahad’s check is cashed! Ahad is no more!”

I’d receive as a reply, “More!”

To which I’d call, “Get it already! I’m stuck in this fucking hole just like you! There’s no point in yelling!”

Yet again it would say, “More!”

… Which one of them could it be? Which of the ones from the reservoir? Which of them could have learned the magic word because they knew they would be passing through Turkey? Who could this person be who’d obviously asked around before even setting out in order to ask for more water, more food, more air, more this, more that, and more of everything? With another group I’d have known for sure. But this time a man by the name of Rastin had come between us. They’d had no need to look me in the face with expressions like those of starving children and beg, “More!” as they usually did, instead begging to Rastin in their native language …

The voice was so low I couldn’t even tell if it was a woman or a man. Maybe it was that kid who’d sung the March of Independence with me! His body the size of a leaf, surrounded by corpses on all four sides, trying to make his voice heard …

“Who cares who it is?” I said. “What do I care? What difference does it make? It’s not like he’s going to be able to come rescue me!”

But they didn’t think so and kept repeating, “More!”

So, in order to ignore all else and forget about the enormous disillusionment I was experiencing, I began to stare at the hand indicating seconds. With each tick rightward, I imagined that the sun would rise soon and that surely someone would see the truck or the human pile over me and come for help. I imagined this sixty times per second and 3,600 per hour. I stared at that indicator as though I were counting prayer beads …

It was now seven. I was sure that the sun had risen, but no one was coming to rescue me. I was still in the dark, too. The dead were lightproof. They’d embraced one another so tightly that nothing could penetrate them. Except rainwater and oxygen. No matter how thirsty I became, there was no way I’d ever gather the water droplets in my hands to drink. The water, trickling over the bodies and dripping onto my legs from the edges of the rock over me, repulsed me. Who knows what pathways it took and what it mixed with? Whose blood and saliva? It made me so nauseated that I kept moving my hands around so I wouldn’t touch it.

But it was different with oxygen. I couldn’t avoid that. It entered me even when I sealed my lips shut. It overcame all obstacles in its way just to keep me alive in that hell and found some way to barge into my nostrils. In that very place and time where I thought no one was coming and I was feeling suicide afresh, it would keep me alive to death! I fucking hated oxygen. For not getting off my tail and tracking me down in that hole! Maybe it was a curse! No matter where I went, I wouldn’t be rid of oxygen! I was cursed! Tutankhamen the child pharaoh of the reservoir had finally been cursed! After all, I had a pyramid of my own now! An actual pyramid of human flesh rose above me. In fact, dozens of people had died in the name of erecting it. When I was the first person that should have died! Because this pyramid was mine! I was buried under it, just like I was supposed to be. But a curse put upon me by all those deaths caused me to survive. I’d been buried in my own pyramid along with the curse. Oxygen was the curse I was doomed to breathe in. Such a curse it was, it kept me, the pharaoh, alive in my own grave.

By eight I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I let go of all the urine pooled inside me and straining my groin to get out. My trousers and the ground I sat on grew warmer. For a moment, in the cold, I felt slightly better. I even felt angry for not going for so long. What did it matter what I looked like when I got out of that human trap hole? What would it matter if I puked or pissed or shit on myself? Though of course I’d only been in there for five hours. That wasn’t long enough to leave civilized habits behind. Maybe in a few more hours … say, ten or fifteen hours later, I might turn into a real subterranean animal and start eating my own crap. But five hours were useless. At most one pissed on oneself and thought it embarrassing, then finally arriving at, “Fuck it! Who’s gonna know?”

Really, it all came down to hope. I was kept civilized by believing that the moment I’d mix with humankind again was very near. My suicidal thoughts had evaporated with the sun, which I knew was rising though I couldn’t see it. Once again I was having the dream in which someone found me and lifted the bodies off me, rescuing me. In the hole, pessimism and optimism switched places so often that one would take over my mind before my emotions could adapt to the other. For instance, in the moment I was in what ruled me and everything else was the thought of liberation. It was having its stint, and though I might be in the dark, it was lighting up every corner of my mind. I’d sunk into the lowest depths of the earth, but I still wanted to live. Though I’d practically have to rip my mouth open to breathe, though I’d have to expand my nostrils like craters, I wanted to live. Oxygen was no longer a curse but a hero with superpowers! A superhero that could infiltrate the wall of human flesh to reach me! I wanted to survive!

I wanted it so badly, in fact, that I hollered, “Until everyone dies! If this world has shutters, I’ll be the one to close them!”