Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [79]
As the night wore on, the supposed friend sitting across from me became a dark stain, his lips sealed, often covering his face with his hands. At one point I noticed he was breathing heavily and swallowing hard. When he removed his hands, I was unsettled by the glimmering trail that ran down his cheek and onto his lip—the path of a tear.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He obviously needed to get something out of his system. Then, finally, he mentioned a connection with an organization. He had been in jail for a while in his youth. His brother had been killed. He choked up while telling me about those dark days. I searched his gestures, his behavior, for signs that might shed some light, but all I saw was death, and the fear thereof. It wasn’t only his brother who had him so distraught; tears continued to well up in his eyes.
“I can’t get that night out of my mind,” he said.
“What night?” I asked.
He looked at me with sorrowful yet determined eyes, then he told me, the words falling slowly from his mouth: “The night the decision was made to kill your father.”
At first, I didn’t want to believe him. If I was going to hear the truth, it had to be the whole truth; I asked him to tell me everything.
“The three of us were members of the same organization, your father, Kenan, and me,” he said. He continued to drink as he talked. “Your father didn’t like what the organization was up to, for a lot of reasons, and so he split. That was betrayal, and the punishment for betrayal was death.”
I asked as nonchalantly as I could, “What kind of an organization was it?”
He hung his head, then called the waiter and ordered another drink. He seemed to want the rakı, which had already numbed his body, to rub him out for good, obliterate his very existence once and for all. His eyes were damp and bloodshot and he began mumbling. His face was covered with deep lines, like the threads of a spider web. He was trying to console himself with the din of his own words, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Then he went silent.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Organizations, politics, you know … The hard part, once you’ve made all the pieces fit together, the hard part is really grasping what it is you’re fighting for.”
The past was consumed by an unquestionable void. But no, it wasn’t empty; whatever was there was definite and intimidating. Cevat Bey took another sip of his rakı and leaned back. He thought I’d understood everything, from his eyes I gleaned that much, but I hadn’t understood a thing. For a moment, I thought it would be a friendly gesture to take him home and tuck him in, but my curiosity got the best of me. “So who ordered my father’s murder?” I asked.
He leaned against the table and drained his glass in one gulp.
“I did,” he said.
His eyelashes weren’t moving, he wasn’t breathing. It was dreadful. An amorphous, indescribable moment. Then he stood up, calmly; he was no longer crying.
“Vasili, my son,” he said. “Let’s take a walk in Fener. You can take me wherever you want.”
A WOMAN, ANY WOMAN
BY TARKAN BARLAS
Yenikapı
An old friend and I are on the ferry, deep in conversation, washing the old days down with a few cups of tea. We talk about our junior high days, looking for movie theaters where they’d pepper the karate flicks with porn, and how lucky we, two smooth young boys, were to have survived those catacombs unscathed, and we laugh. Some of our tastiest memories have to do with our laying in wait for a girl, any girl, to practice the things we’d risked life and limb to learn about in those dark theaters. Tea helps the memories go down more smoothly, makes them easier to