Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [100]
Earth to Daddy, Nazlı might have said. Don’t mind me, I would have replied. The dolmu was passing by the Kadıköy Girls’ School just then. Back when I was in my early teens, we used to come here a lot after school, to pick up girls. I was going to tell Nazlı that, but then I changed my mind and sank a little further into the dolmu’s threadbare seats.
I had a girl on my mind, a girl from two years ago. It was a winter day, and late afternoon was turning into early evening. She was running late to her afternoon tea. The light was different then; twilight was already setting in. I wasn’t with the girl on that day. It was another man who sat next to her. The same man, with his dark face and skittish eyes, that I would later grow sick and tired of seeing, first in the newspapers, in sketches based upon witness testimonies, then in photos, and finally in the flesh. But on that day, at that hour, he was still just a traveler en route to Moda, sitting next to a girl. Another man among men. Except he wasn’t. In gray police files he was known as the “Ümraniye psycho,” a man who raped children in secluded corners of the city, then killed them and carved his signature, deeply, into their tender young necks. But still, he looked like anyone else: he was ordinary, common, his eyes dull and distant.
Twenty-four hours after the incident, the Moda muhtar at the time gave a press conference in a corner of the apartment-building courtyard where the girl’s body had been found, describing the incident as “the degenerates’ invasion of Moda” and avoiding other questions posed by the press; it was just too close to election time.
The girl was so young. Her breasts had just budded the previous spring. She had a few pimples, but her face was still that of a child, her dimples still those of a baby.
When the eight-person dolmu had taken off two years earlier, the girl had felt a slight tingle on her right leg. At first she assumed that it had something to do with the way the space between the seat rails was sucking her in. Sitting on a seat of shriveled, gray animal hide, a piece of skin wrinkled and bitter, she stretched her leg down to feel for the floor beneath her plaid skirt. The tingle, however, continued. Sliding back and forth on the seat, her skin on the skin of the seat, it seemed to her that the tingling was about to pass. But soon it was replaced by another discomfort. A heaviness. As if something had been added to her leg. A third skin. At that moment, she could not fathom why on earth the third skin might be there. Her head was, at best, in the clouds. That’s what her grandmother would have said, and then chuckled.
Her grandmother must have been waiting for her then, with the tea brewing. There would be meaty pide to go with the tea, and her grandmother’s scrumptious lemon cake.
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