Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [66]
“I went to Oruçgazi School back in the day,” I said.
“Whereabouts did you live, son?” he asked. That corner, that aa performance, deserved a proper nightshirt, of the long, flowing, imposing variety. But he was wearing a pressed shirt and pants. Old habits, I thought.
“We lived on Oruçgazi Street.”
“Really, in what building?”
“Oruçgazi Building. I’m the son of Asaf Bey.”
“I don’t think I know him.”
My father’s name was not Asaf; I hadn’t seen my old man in twenty-five years. I decided not to beat around the bush any longer.
“You must know my mother, though.”
“What’s her name?”
“She passed away.”
“I’m sorry. May the remaining live long.”
“May everybody … She had an injured back. She had to take an early retirement for medical reasons, got to the point that she couldn’t even leave the house anymore.”
“We should all be blessed with good health. But that’s just life, I guess. Things happen.”
“Yeah, they happen to some, but not to others. I’ve always been curious. I mean, I’ve always wondered exactly how it was she injured her back.”
He was becoming visibly uncomfortable. He looked tense.
“Back then, they said she’d injured her foot jumping rope with her students. And then one thing just led to another.” He’d swallowed the bait. “Isn’t that right?”
“You have such a great memory, amca! How on earth do you even know that, let alone remember it? And why?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?”
“Did you ever see her around back then? In the street? Here and there? You ever look her in the face?”
That tensed the guy up even more.
“What do you mean, son? Why would we look at a woman like that? Of course we wouldn’t, she was a sister to us, here and in the afterlife.”
“Right,” I said, leaning in toward him. “So would you look her in the face like this?” We were eye to eye. “Like this?” He opened his mouth. But he couldn’t make a sound. I let my own voice rip. “Is that the way you treat your sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters? Huh? You two-bit punks?” It was as if a festering boil had burst within me, like the pus was bubbling up, spewing out of my mouth, out of my nose. “Pieces of shit!” My jaws were almost locked with disgust. “Beatings! Thrashings! Honor killings!” I was on him in two steps, an unstoppable surge of words gushing through my mind. A refrain: “Dungeons, tortures, executions …”
I strapped him firmly to the chair with duct tape, taking care not to rough him up too much. I gagged him. He was old, too old. I remembered my grandmother. Look at him, look at my grandmother. My mother wasn’t religious at all, but my grandmother prayed five times a day and fasted during Ramadan. She was opposed to the death penalty, just like my mother. Back during the coup, during that era known as “September 12,” when these guys were stringing people up, my grandmother, may she rest in peace, would say, “They’re human beings too, my son; they’re our children too, all subjects of Allah.” She’d cry silently. A kind of dry, tear-free weeping. Perhaps, being a woman, there were no tears left in her at that age.
The guy stirred as he slowly came to. Once he understood that there was no way he was getting free, he surrendered to the chair.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll remove the tape, but if you raise your voice, it’ll be real ugly for you, believe me.” He nodded. I took off the duct tape. He coughed.
“Listen, son, you’re making a big mistake. I’m an old, very sick man …”
“You are very sick, true, but yours is a different kind of sickness,” I said. “And you know what? You’ve made everybody else sick too. You made the whole damn country sick …”
“Look, son, the apple of my eye, I’m a retired civil servant of this country.”
“I’m not your son, not the apple of your eye, not your anything. And I am nothing to that state of yours. And it’s nothing to me.”
“Who are you people? Anarchists? Communists? Separatists?”
“What’s that? You mean you don’t even recognize this little neighborhood bastard? One of many, right? You’ve fucked yourself up in the head, old man, all hung up like that about those ‘illegal organizations