Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [101]
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 dolmu 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 dolmu 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 dolmu, 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 dolmu’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 dolmu 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 dolmues, and thus home, having had their fill of hot tea and heated conversation for the day. Rushing out of the dolmu, the girl wanted so badly to call out to them. Her eyes sought theirs—anything but the disconcerting gaze of the dolmu 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