More: A Novel (41 page)

The second I entered the Ship, the receptionist handed me an envelope and said:

“Your passport arrived. You gave the shipping people my name. Don’t do that!”

“Don’t worry, it won’t happen again,” I should have said, but I’d memorized something else:

“Is there an envelope for me?”

Naturally I didn’t wait for an answer, leaving the man gaping at me and walking to the elevator. Then I went up to my room. Then I collected my things. Then I left the building known as the Ship. Then the building known as the Ship sank. Because I said so.

8
   Spelled
gat
in Turkish.

9
   The names of victims or alleged criminals are disclosed by the Turkish media in initials.

10
Quote by Rumi. “Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair.”

11
Referring to recruiters for military duty, mandatory for every male citizen of Turkey over the age of eighteen.

12
In Turkish law, closer in meaning to French law from which it’s derived,
force majeure.

13
The attack on Madımak Hotel in Sivas, Turkey, on July 2, 1993, which resulted in the killing of thirty-five mostly Alawi intellectuals and journalists by an anti-Alawi, pro-sharia mob.

UNIONE

One of the four basic techniques of Renaissance painting. As in Sfumato, colors and tones dissolve into one another. However, unlike Sfumato, the colors and tones used are always saturated and vivid.

Bearded, at least 1.80 meters in height, the middle-aged man wore only a white piece of cloth over his loins. It was cold, but he didn’t care about that. His eyes were closed, feet just as bare as his torso and legs. Hands joined at his chest, he manipulated his breath in order to slow down his pulse. For that moment, out of everything the world offered him, he accepted into his mind only those he needed. He didn’t need to be cold, so he didn’t feel the cold. Right next to him was a large table. And on the table was a glass cube, the sides of which measured at most forty centimeters. One of its surfaces was removable, providing the cube with an entrance no bigger than itself.

We were on a street. A crowded street. On the pedestrian walkway of a district where people jostled one another to shop harder and faster. They talked. They haggled and burst out laughing. The sound of motor vehicles from the surrounding avenues pervaded the air. Engines were gunned, brakes slammed on, and windows rolled down to dump out music like butts from an ashtray. All the sounds merged and vied with one another to bore into our ears. The noise of the city was crushing us all. But the man stood up straight and heard nothing else but his heartbeat. I was sure of this because the unhearing expression on his face was somehow familiar. Only the face of a man who had started to beat along with his heart would bear those lines, I knew …

He opened his eyes and gazed at life. To be more accurate, he opened the gates of his eyes and we gazed into his life … He spun on his heel to face the table next to him. Slowly he lifted his right knee and placed his foot on the table. His legs were as long and flexible as a frog’s. He leaned against the table with his fingertips and hoisted himself onto the table in a single move. Now he looked much taller. Focusing on his breathing once more, he inserted his right foot into the cube and set it on the bottom. Bending down, he placed his right knee against the far corner of the cube. Meanwhile he had one hand on the cube and the other on the table for balance. He remained like that for a few seconds before putting his hips inside the cube and seating them on the bottom. He lifted his right hand he had been gripping the cube with up till then and touched his face with his fingers as he drew it toward himself. First his elbow, then his right shoulder, went into the cube. He stopped … So did we. Then slowly he bent his head down and into the cube. Moving his right leg inch by inch, he was able to make some room for himself, however small. With the fingers of his right hand, he gripped the tip of his left foot and started to pull it toward himself. This way his left foot went over his right shin and his legs, from the knees down, formed an
X
, pressing against the glass surface of the cube. Raising himself slightly on his right hand against the narrow base, he brought his hip slightly farther away from the door of the cube. Only his left arm and left knee remained outside. He raised his arm and thrust his knee in the cube first. Then he slowly lowered his left hand. With his entire body inside a tiny cube, the man’s left hand hovered over the table, palm exposed, as though it weren’t real. Then the hand fluttered down like a piece of cloth to gracefully fold over his right foot.

A young man whom I’d taken to be one of the spectators up till then immediately approached the table, picked up the glass lid of the cube, and paused. After a few beats, he sealed the cube with the glass surface. The only things we could see now were fragments of a pair of legs, crossed, and the hairless head bent forward between them. He was wedged inside a cube as high as his knee. We were observing a man become so small so as to cease existing. Or maybe so as to come into being …

I wept. And not just because the man in front of me, folded into himself, reminded me of being under the corpses. I had another reason: an incident I’d played a part in three months ago … I just couldn’t forget. Because it had changed everything. Everything!

I was nearing the end of the second year of my lynch tour. I’d been veering from one country to the next for the past two years. I honestly hadn’t expected this much. On the first plane I’d boarded to start off the tour, trying to imagine what awaited me, I hadn’t really had high expectations. The world, however, was very quick to verify the savagery of the hate it was loaded with. In the space of two years, I attended more lynchings than I could ever begin to count. It was like everyone had been waiting for me to show up before they could start chewing one another out. They’d waited for me to join them all this time and would tear apart one of their own only when I did. Or I was just imagining things and the world had always been this way. It was a cradle of lynchings before I came along, and would be after I passed. It was rooted not in soil but in hate. And all I did was walk over it.

The Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, mainland Europe, Britain … there was sure to be a lynching going on in every one. You didn’t even have to be at the right place at the right time. Lynching was ubiquitous and constant. It sufficed to read a few newspapers in various languages and smell the air. The creature called man thrived on lynching, this much I could see …

I saw hundreds flock to a single child like a school of piranhas to tear its flesh apart, and likewise drag a woman around by her hair and rape her for hours … I saw it all, because I was there and one of them. I watched dozens of bodies burying people instantaneously. I even willingly became part of these flesh structures frenziedly crushing them. The more I saw of those we buried, the more I saw of myself. Our mere presence covered and suffocated them every time in the form of a heap of bodies. I really had been able to change sides. I was no longer the one under the rubble. I was one of the bodies forming the rubble.

I saw kids … lynching one another in front of school buildings … kids who, not content with only that, documented everything with cell phones and dispensed them online like flyers to ensure lifelong humiliation for the lynchee. I saw the happy slappers too. Kids who sneaked up on random, unsuspecting people on the street, struck them, and ran. Whose friends in turn documented the deed to publish online … I saw the suicide bombers of the Middle East. People who exploded. Who lynched in reverse! I saw the lone bombs who, rather than being lynched
by
the mob, lynched
the
mob. Then I fantasized about a British kid who was killed when he chanced upon a suicide bomber on his happy slapping spree, which made me laugh. I saw that there were countries where some games were impossible.

I witnessed the constant effusiveness of the mob. The perpetual cries and bellows … Every word was a piece of coal. To spur on the fire. It distracted me. So I listened to Nasenbluten to block it out. Ears hidden behind my turned-up collar, I heard only the music. For two years it was all I saw and heard.

And I tried to get better. I tried to make peace with people through my lynching of them. If in a rare, lynch-free locale, I used cash to provoke them. I assaulted derelicts with people I coaxed off the street. That’s how I came to realize that being a foreign power wasn’t that much of a challenge. Cash solved everything, period …

When all was said and done, however, I didn’t improve a bit! I was every bit as gravely sick as I had been in my days at the Ship. Aside from lynch-related negotiations or relations, I couldn’t communicate with people. That wall between us never came down. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. The effects of the lynchings I’d attended eventually wore off and disappeared. Like morphine sulfate, lynching turned into a burden I couldn’t relinquish. It became no different than the births Emre made me watch. Lynch mobs killed or maimed people with the same ease with which those babies were born, as though it were the world’s most mundane feat.

The lynchers, on the other hand, were the same everywhere. The concept of crowd dynamics was for real. The mob’s shepherd was the mob itself. The individual’s fate rested in the hands of the mob he was in. This was the state of things regardless of whether the instigator was a group of provocateurs or simply the willpower of each separate individual. In fact, everything that ever went wrong in the world was caused by a silent agreement between billions of people. A person who witnessed a rape on the streets could be charged with complicity for not helping the victim. When societies displayed the same behavior, however, there was no charge, because it wasn’t even considered as a crime then. The characteristics of lynch mobs all over the world boiled down to the same thing. Whichever language they spoke, whatever appearance they had … all individuals that came together to form the mob thought the same thing when, chasing the victim around, they saw one another:

“This is what I’m doing now. Because you’re doing it too. You lynch, therefore I lynch!”

Meanwhile the complete stranger running with him thought the same:

“I’m here because you’re here!”

They meant nothing to me. Neither the people, nor the births or the deaths. Man, sentenced to a prison walled by birth on two sides and death on the other two! Once he was born, though, all four walls of his prison were made of death. That explained, in fact, why fear of death came as the only bonus meaning to life, as Harmin had said. And lynching was the name given to the instant that fear became tangible as a rock.

“Maybe that’s why I’m not getting better,” I told myself. Because the only meaning to my life was the fear of death! And because I still spent my days among others’ fear of death!

Then, one night, I saw that boy … He walked by himself. He must have been fifteen or sixteen. His hands were in his pockets. Head bent, he looked nowhere but at the pavement he walked on. He was an Arab …

From a pub frequented by English Defense League fans whose sole enemies were Muslims, I’d lured several kids by stuffing a few notes into their hands. They’d asked me who I was and I’d replied, “What does it matter! I’ve at least as much hate as you!” They tagged along without even caring to ask who it was that I hated. They were hammered, but I wasn’t. Still I joined in their ruckus and walked with them as I surveyed the surroundings. We were looking to find ourselves an Arab. Anyone who looked Muslim. They didn’t even have to really be Muslim. Looking like one would suffice. That was when we came across the kid. A kid whose only concern was to avoid the chill as he walked with his head buried between his shoulders.

My entourage and I exchanged glances and said, “All right! This is it!”

We were on an avenue where the glow from the streetlamps didn’t quite reach one another, leaving dark areas in between. The occupants of the houses on either side of the avenue seemed to be long asleep. Either that or they must be sitting in the dark, because no lights emanated from the windows. Most importantly, there were no cops in sight.

We were on the left-hand pavement of the avenue. The boy, glancing over at us in an instant of apprehension, was on the opposite side. I intentionally kept my companions chatting. So the boy wouldn’t get suspicious. My experiences over the years dictated that in hunts like this, silence always caused the game to pick up speed and escape. Appearing to be a horde of drunks was always a surefire way of camouflage. Of course, in this instance, the members of the horde I was in really were drunk. That was why, unable to contain themselves much longer, they bolted across the street and toward the boy. Naturally I darted too!

Our footsteps, ringing in the silence of the night, alerted him like an alarm in his ears, and he started running as well. There were nine of us nocturnal animals. For a moment, among those kids, I felt all right again. Like in the old days! Perhaps that’s why I failed to realize … because I was seeing red once more …

The avenue was interjected by an alley and the boy, running as fast as he could, was heading into that narrow road. I’d advanced ahead of the horde without realizing it. The only thing we did was run. My brothers-in-lynch weren’t sober enough to curse and run at the same time. We were fast all the same. We followed the boy into the narrow street. In spite of all the morphine sulfate I’d imbibed over the years, I was running fast enough to impress myself. A few hundred meters later, houses gave way to walls and streetlamps became infrequent.

Staring at the boy’s back as it weaved in and out of the darkness, I hissed through my teeth, “You’ve gone down the wrong street!” Growling, “No one will ever know! No one will hear your screams!”

In the end it was as I’d predicted. The street was a dead end! I was worn out, but it had been worth it! He had nowhere to run. I could see the tall wall at the end of the street. I could see the boy too. He was searching for a door in the walls on either side. Or some hole he could squeeze through … but it was all walls! There were more than thirty meters between us, and despite the darkness I could see him dart this way and that like a little squirrel, and then pause to look at me. Once he knew everywhere he touched was brick, I saw no more necessity in running and slowed to a walk. The boy was crying. I was laughing. I spread my arms to remind him that there was nowhere to run. Now there were at most ten meters between us. Turning my head, I said, “Let’s finish this!” But there was no one with me! I stopped and turned around. The street was deserted. My horde had disbanded to goodness knows where. The sons of bitches had abandoned me! I’d been too bloodthirsty to notice.