Istanbul Noir - Mustafa Ziyalan [92]
And Anfi had had no trouble finding me. “Google knows everything, maallah,” she had said. She had found Avram first, then me. She was very sick. Her days were numbered. She wanted to see us all one last time.
My schedule at the university was flexible. I’d been separated from my wife for two and a half years. My dog Ganz had died of old age. I had been involved with one of my students and caused something of a scandal. I’d lost all desire to complete the piece I needed to turn in to gain full professorship. I accepted Anfi’s invitation and immediately booked my Vienna—Istanbul ticket over the Internet. The part of me that was afraid of changing its mind quickly took care of plans for the trip, before I had time to lose my resolve.
We were supposed to meet at 2 o’clock, but my plane was delayed and we had to postpone until that evening. It had been thirty-seven years since I’d seen either Kevork or Avram. We had parted ways when I left for college in Ankara, and chance hadn’t brought us together since. The only place that could possibly reunite us had quickly built bridges, thanks to Anfi.
“Yani liked you best of all.”
“It was an accident, Anfi. I was pushed into that same hole at least half a dozen times myself. It was just soft, squishy soil, full of worms. You’d be scared, you’d get scratched up here and there, but that was it. How could I have known? I loved him. You know that.”
“Why didn’t you bring him home right away? To me, to the pharmacy … You might have saved him.”
It was then that the mental block I had erected to keep myself from dwelling on that moment cracked wide open, and the image of Yani lying motionless in the hole forced its way into my mind. His eyes were half-open. He wasn’t breathing. I thought he was faking it. The sand covered the blood on his neck. He let out a scream when he fell, the way we all did. We’d already started walking away. Such was our routine. If you fell in a hole or some trap, you’d follow after the rest of the gang and give them hell once you’d caught up. Finally, we stopped and waited, and when we realized he wasn’t coming, we went back. We couldn’t see that he had a huge piece of glass rammed in his stomach and that his jugular was sliced open. It wasn’t until I’d gone down into the hole and grabbed his shoulders, until I’d seen how his eyes had already gone dull … My gut froze. He wasn’t faking it … I saw the fear, the finality of it all, in the faces of Avram and Kevork. Yani was no more. Our lucky charm was gone. Mourning the death of our closest friend was like a two-way mirror, our cursed faces crying and smirking at the same time. In retrospect, how disturbing that we made a pact with hardly a word. Like the plan was already there, in our minds, just waiting to spring. We would pretend we’d never seen it.
That’s what we did. We kept quiet.
“It was at least ten minutes later when I went down into the hole. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing, Anfi. Just imagine how scared we were. We didn’t grow up with all those gory horror films like kids do today. It was such a heavy, bizarre burden. We were terrified. We felt guilty. And not just for pushing him into the hole.”
Anfi, sighing, looked away. She fixed her eyes upon her long, wrinkled fingers, giving me time to unwrap our crime of thought. She was like a young woman, her slim body shrouded in a somber brown dress. Everybody envied Yani. Especially the boys. We were his buddies. We got to know luck at its source. He was the only one whose mother had a college degree. Anfi was a pharmacist at Life Drugstore. It wasn’t the best-known pharmacy in the neighborhood, but still, it was the place where we dropped our pants to get those painful injections in our butts. Anfi was intimately acquainted with our behinds, our rashes, and the secrets of the neighborhood women.
Later, I developed this kind of habit, where every time I lowered my underwear in the presence of a woman, I’d think