Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [62]
He was all over the guy like a spider. He was so agile, stabbing the guy with a shiv, in the neck, in the stomach, all over. The man was nothing but a pulp of muscle and nerves by then. A thin blanket was wrapped tightly around his head. It seemed he’d taken the first hit to the jugular and spurted blood all over the walls. Sinan was rabid, his attention focused entirely upon his prey like some nocturnal animal. He stuck the shiv into the now motionless body a few more times. Then he looked up at the door and saw me.
I took one step back, but I couldn’t take the second. I couldn’t move. I leaned against the wall. He wasn’t at all surprised to see me. He stood up and walked through the pool of blood to the sink. The ice-cold water that ran over his hands and arms was red at first; he rubbed his fingers together until it gradually turned pink, then transparent. He removed his undershirt, now stained with blood. Naked from the waist up, he walked up to me. Then, without a word, and without looking me in the face, he moved straight past me. He was calm, invigorated. And he remained so as he headed out the door and down the stairs. I tried with all my might to move. Finally, I managed to walk down the stairs, silently. It was the longest journey I’d ever taken in that tiny ward. Each step sent a shudder through my body, like a guillotine blow to the neck. I couldn’t control my breathing. It was as if my joints had hardened, like all the spaces between my bones were filled with concrete. I struggled to find my way through the darkness. My eyes were popping out of my head, like somebody pumped up on too much shit. I walked by his bed. He was lying there, under the covers, calm as could be. I reached my bunk. Suddenly the damn bunk that I despised waking up in every morning had become the safest shelter. I was surrounded by the noise of snoring. I didn’t make a sound. The moment I did, one of those shivs would go splat through my neck. I lay down. And stayed there, motionless.
The next morning they took a count. They removed the body of the big guy. It took at least seven or eight of them to lug it down the stairs. An investigation ensued. Nobody was allowed out of the ward until noon. At noon, Sinan went to the door. He’d hurriedly gathered his dirty underwear and placed them in a bag. He said he was going to the Turkish bath. They let him. They never suspected him since he didn’t have any friends, and there was no way he could take out such a big guy.
I would never be his equal. I never talked with him, never approached him again, and never during the night did I look his way … and I never made the mistake of ever, ever getting a wink of sleep.
BLACK PALACE
BY MUSTAFA ZYALAN
Aksaray
I walked down from Atatürk Boulevard, onto Oruçgazi Street, along the wall of Oruçgazi Elementary. That’s where I went to school when I was a kid. I ended up in front of the Oruçgazi Apartment Building. You could still see the marks of posters of old political organizations that had once been on the prowl, and had been prowled down like animals, back in the ’70s. The windows of the first floor were at eye level.
My mother had died in that building. In Aksaray—in “White Palace.” If anything, the world must be bell jar—bottomed, as they say.
The small neighborhood convenience store was still there. The stationery store across from it was too. In its fly-flecked windows were the same books we had used back when I was in school. I was about to go in when a newspaper headline caught my eye: Scalpel. I couldn’t see the rest. I took the paper, stepped halfway in, and paid the dark-complected, mustached guy behind the newsstand counter. Then I turned around and entered the stationery store.
The owner was still wearing a two-piece suit and a tie. “Ohhhh, look who’s here!” he said as soon as I walked in. We shook hands. He sent one of the kids to fetch us some tea from a nearby tea stand. He came closer, as if to share a secret. “No one speaks Turkish around here anymore, sir,” he said, with the grimace