Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [6]
“We have nothing to talk about, I won’t have anything to do with a coward like you,” she said, before pushing me aside with her elbow and strutting over to the conveyor mirror platform. I followed her.
“We work together, so we should interact in a civilized manner, even if it will end soon!” I was shouting.
“Okay, so what do you want?” She had raised her voice too.
“Come to my room tonight. We should talk.”
“No, I can’t be alone with you.”
I reached out and grabbed her arm; in the same instant the spotlight came on. Following some confusion, people in the audience started laughing. My arm and part of my face had become visible next to her.
“Let go! What are you doing? You’ll ruin the show,” she said.
“Tonight …”
“Okay,” she said. “Promise?”
“Yes! Now go,” she said and started her dance. Everything was ruined.
Nigel’s headaches had started again. I didn’t mind much when I heard him whispering to Xenia backstage, “It’s time we found someone to replace this guy.”
Whenever Nigel had a headache, he withdrew to his room and occupied himself with bookbinding. He kept saying that he came from five generations of Hungarian bookbinders, bragging about it at every opportunity. Though I couldn’t really appreciate his craft, I did derive a strange kind of pleasure from the books he bound, as if I was touching some sort of sacred relic. While working as an illusionist, he bound books of various sizes in his spare time, to keep in practice so that down the road he could teach his yet-to-be-born son the fine art, and thus keep the family trade from dying out. Most importantly, I recall him explaining that this occupation was the perfect remedy for a headache. I recall him saying to Xenia once: “Why on earth do you take those stupid painkillers? We should just bind books together.”
That night Xenia came to my room for a few short minutes. “I can’t leave Nigel alone. Let’s talk in Istanbul tomorrow,” she said, and then she quickly made her way, barefoot, across the hardwood floor of the hotel, back to her room down the hall.
We were in Istanbul the next day. There was a knock on the door, so faint that at first I wasn’t even sure that’s what it was. It was careful, reminiscent of the light footsteps on the hardwood floors in the hallway. I emptied my glass of rakı at once; there was another knock. It was Xenia.
She was talking with a raised eyebrow; I was trying to listen to her. I perceived what she said as disconnected words, not as a meaningful whole. I recalled images from the night she had come to my room for the first time. Scenes from our games, games she had played with increasing audacity. Now, she had knocked on my door cautiously, she was telling me what a knucklehead I was, she was going on and on about me not having the balls to face the fact that some things were finished. Perhaps she only said it once, but I kept spinning her words in my head and developed the impression that she was repeating the same thing over and over again. I was contemplating the shadows on her face. It was like watching a riveting thriller: The intimacy I once saw in those shapely eyes was fading away shade by shade, being replaced by an aggressive, shrill, even enraged, façade. The skin of Xenia’s face was cracking, peeling away like topsoil in drought and yielding to the features of an ugly, cruel mythological beast.
I wanted to say, Oh, my Xenia, even if we have to finish everything, let’s do it gently; we may hurt each other, but let’s not ruin all those beautiful moments. Or something like that. Instead, a snarl escaped my lips: “You must die!”
My voice scared even me. You would perhaps deem me completely crazy if I told you what happened next, using the same words, in the same order that I did during my interrogation. In fact, the district attorney argued that I was acting the part. I can say this much: What I said and did from that moment on had nothing to do with the