More: A Novel (26 page)

But they didn’t listen to me. The faces, which I couldn’t make out because they blended into the crystalline rays of the sun, would not answer. They merely carried me. Still, I obstinately repeated the one word that was on my mind, “More!” until I passed out. But they just wouldn’t get it … Neither whispering nor hollering it did any good. My bearers remained forever silent. But I tried! I said the word any way it was possible to say it. I even said it backward in case the world had turned upside down in my absence: “
Ahad
!”
⁵

I heard voices. One smooth, the other hoarse. One young, the other old. The younger was asking:

“What do we do about the chief of police?”

“We need him. Don’t get him involved. Let the mayor handle it. The gendarmerie, too. Tell the prosecutor, we don’t need anyone implicated in this.”

“They’ve sent in journalists from all over. The entire lawn is filled with cameras … We have to make a statement.”

“Just say that an inquiry is under way and get on with it. Try to focus more on the kid instead. They won’t touch the rest with him in the picture. All that time, without food or water … a miracle. That’s what you say. Say it’s God’s miracle. Give their faith a kick.”

I opened my eyes slightly, and from what I could see between my eyelashes, I was in a hospital room. There was an IV in my right arm. I counted four fat drops falling out of a glass bottle into a small, transparent box and from there into a slim pipe to mix into my blood. Then I turned my head in the direction of the voices and saw, through an open door, into the neighboring room. The owner of the elderly voice sat on the bed while his younger counterpart stood by. I could also see their faces. And I knew I’d seen them somewhere. I shut my eyes again just as the one standing turned his head to look at me. I let my eyelids drop and looked into the darkness and the photo that developed there. I’d figured out who they were: the governor and his errand boy … as sure as I was that I didn’t resemble anyone that could hear, lying there, they lowered their voices and started to whisper. I could no longer hear them.

I once again watched them with my eyes open a sliver, just enough that my eyelashes were still touching, when I felt that something was off. The old man and the young man seemed to have switched places. As if they’d traded identities. The errand boy had become the governor and the governor was committing orders to memory just as though he were an errand boy … but I remembered them both so clearly. I even remembered their exact stances, and even who was looking at whom, in that picture in the newspaper
From Kandalı to the World
. Yet what I was looking at from that hospital bed was telling me the exact opposite. Was it possible that I was this confused? I didn’t think so. Still it was enough to make me doubt everything I knew.

The young man stooped in front of the old one, nodding as he listened. Was it possible that I was misremembering my whole life? Even worse than that, did I seem to have everything backward inside my head? Could there be a world in which the errand boy was really the governor? If there were, did that mean Ender was Yadigar’s father? Or was it me who was Ahad? My heart picked up speed as I started to sweat.

It can’t be, I said to myself. I can’t be this far gone! But what if it is? No, no! I told myself I remembered correctly. I was just about to persuade myself when I saw the young man whom I knew to be the governor kiss the old man’s hand. There wasn’t a
bayram
⁶
coming up anytime soon. I was sure it wasn’t the morning of one, either. I no longer had any cause for doubt. Spending 317 hours in that hellhole had caused me to lose my mind. I started to weep. To scream … I started to swing my head this way and that and into whatever I could. A nurse, then an aide, came running. One held my shoulder while the other gave me a shot. Everything went dark as my voice went silent. I still didn’t stop screaming. Inside the darkness that enveloped me, I screamed and threw myself against walls, but everyone thought I was asleep.

When I opened my eyes again, Ender was sitting next to me. Or someone whom I thought was Ender. I reached over to grab his arm and yelled:

“Ender! Is that you? You’re Ender, right?”

He laughed. “Are you nuts, man, it’s me!”

“But the governor?”

“What about the governor?”

I told him. The things I’d seen and heard. When I got to the part about his father with the “let the gendarmerie handle it,” I skipped it.

But the more I told, the more Ender laughed. Then he said, “What’s not to get?” and this time the more he told me, the more I laughed.

Indeed, the more assured I was that I hadn’t gone crazy, the more I laughed! It was actually all very simple. Yadigar had told his son and that’s how he knew. The governor and the errand boy belonged to the same cult. A cult formed by former members of the cult we all knew as Hakeem. It was called Tanzim. The old man was Tanzim’s Kandalı chapter. That is, the cult’s regional executive. Be it a town or a city, Tanzim had a chapter in every region it was able to reach. As it was, it was perfectly natural that the young governor, a regular disciple, would show deference to the Kandalı chapter. He was at the service of that old man before the governor or anyone else. I could see now. Especially why the old man hadn’t moved a muscle during the watch ceremony in the government office. It wasn’t as if Tanzim’s Kandalı chapter was going to go around dusting furniture or serving tea. He was a general in a private’s uniform. It had all come to light.

More importantly, I definitely wasn’t crazy. More accurately, I wasn’t the one who was! Hearing that Kandalı was run not by the civil administrator in chief but his janitor had an elating effect on me. I almost got up to hug Ender.

Right then a nurse checked my IV and asked, “How are you feeling?”

I almost blurted out, “Perfect!” I said instead, “I don’t know … OK, I guess.”

The nurse smiled and left the room. It seemed as though she had other patients to check on right away. Was there another survivor? Was I just confused, as I was wont to be? Right then I thought of Ahad. Or more precisely, it was as if one of those bodies fell right onto my forehead and crushed everything underneath. Could it be that he wasn’t dead? I had to find out as soon as I could. I had to be sure I’d never see his face again for as long as I lived.

“Ender … my father?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “They found him in the truck …”

I closed my eyes, and my temples moistened. Two enormous teardrops rolled through my hair and behind my ears into the pillow my head was resting on. For the first time in my life, I was weeping with joy. In fact, right then, I pictured myself walking into a courtroom the day I turned eighteen and changing my year of birth. With this piece of news, I knew I was born again. Meanwhile Ender, cheating off similar scenes in the movies he’d seen, grimly gripped my arm.

When I opened my eyes once more, so many questions crowded my mind that I didn’t know how to begin. Above all else, what was to become of me? Would I be thrown in jail for smuggling? How was it that those bodies had rained on me and how was I rescued? I opened my mouth to start with whichever one, and the governor came into the room with the mayor. Yadigar followed them. The former smiled, while Yadigar showed his clenched teeth in the pretense of smiling.

The governor put his hand on my shoulder and said, “May you have a swift recovery! Allah has bestowed you to us.”

Though I was sure I hadn’t been bestowed to
them
, I thanked him anyway.

Right then I noticed Ender and Yadigar looking at each other and appearing to try to communicate with their eyes. Perhaps Yadigar had told his son everything and hoped to pry the facts out of me through Ender. After all, Ender was the closest likeness to a friend out of everyone I knew. That was the title by which he’d been able to come into my room and wait by my bedside so he could find out everything I knew as soon as I woke. I was Ahad’s son, after all, and what I knew could have dangerous repercussions for Yadigar in particular. Still, none of this held any importance for me at that stage. It wouldn’t be very smart to bring up prison, though. No one was looking at me as if I was going to jail anyway. Quite the contrary, it seemed more like they were looking at an earthquake survivor rescued from rubble weeks later. For the moment I could make do with just hearing about my rescue. And so the governor recounted.

A shepherd had been the first to see the truck and the pile of bodies on the slope. He’d gone to the gendarmerie as soon as he’d seen it. I could imagine the rest. Yadigar, who had called us for days in vain after finding out through Aruz that the goods were never delivered, must have rushed to the site of the accident. Seeing that we were too much of a scandal to sweep under the rug, he’d had to inform everybody. In a short period of time, all of Kandalı, from public prosecutors to the mayor, were gathered around the bodies. So how was it that I’d been pelted by them?

The governor glanced at Yadigar and reluctantly took over. There wasn’t actually much he could say. Judging by the tracks on the slope, he and the prosecutor had worked on an analogous chain of events for the report. According to that, the truck had veered off the road over the edge and turned over almost completely when it crashed into a large crag to its right. That was when my door sprang open, flinging me out. As the truck tumbled down the hillside, I’d tumbled down similarly to end up underneath the rock. Where they’d found me, in the end, was about fifty meters below the road. It had been due to sheer luck that I hadn’t hit any rocks on my way down, just trees and patches of mud. I’d come away from a fall that should have broken all my bones with only the hundreds of scratches all over me.

Meanwhile the truck had been sliding along like a turtle on its back, coming to a stop about twenty meters from where I’d fallen, suspended over the trees and crags. According to Yadigar, the cab was pointing in the direction of the road its tires had just parted from, that is to say, the summit of Kandağ. My father, his chest crushed by the wheel he was wedged behind, died on the spot. It wasn’t hard to guess the rest. In the back, suspended at almost forty-five degrees inside the truck anchored parallel to the slope, the immigrants, dead from crashing into the steel walls and one another, slipped out through the slide below them and piled up against the doors. The lock holding the two wings together was unable to withstand the pressure, setting forth the hail of people that pelted me. They rained on me from twenty meters up and trapped me in them. A final particular was that there’d been no skid marks on the road.

“The rain must have washed them away,” said Yadigar.

I added inwardly, “
If
he actually stepped on the brakes …”

Right then the prosecutor came in and told the governor that he’d like to get my statement. The governor, however, replied, “Not now. Let the child rest. You can take care of it later. We should be going too …” As he herded everyone out and pulled the door shut, he winked at me.

Did he mean to tell me something? Quite possibly. Did I know what he meant to tell me? No. But how bad could the implications of a wink be? This is it, I said to myself. This is it! It’s all over. No one is holding me responsible. Ahad is the only criminal here. And perhaps also Yadigar. None of this has anything to do with me. I’m the wretched fifteen-year-old son of a villainous, criminal father. The subtext of my defense hadn’t really changed much since that holding cell Yadigar had shut me up in. I was a victim, and no one could say otherwise. In fact, I was so much a victim that I could get away with murdering anyone that dared say otherwise!

Everything was fine … I even had a TV! I must be in the most luxurious room of the hospital. I turned the TV on with the remote I took off the bedside table. Everything was fantastic … I flipped through the channels. That was when I saw an explosion. A huge explosion! I saw two gigantic statues carved into the almost yellow, wall-like side of an enormous crag, crumble into a cloud of dust. I knew those statues. I knew them well. As soon as I saw it, I knew! I’d carried them around in my pocket for years. Carried on the back of my paper frog … I turned up the volume and listened.

“A week has passed since the Taliban forces gained control of the Hazarajat region of Afghanistan and dynamited the giant statues known as the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The United Nations …”

I can’t say why, but I thought I might drown in what I’d seen and heard. My thumb sought the button on the remote. When I couldn’t find it, I grabbed it with both hands and pressed all the buttons at once, turning off the TV. Everything stopped. Even the drops coming through my IV stopped! First I thought of Cuma. Before all else, him … then I thought of how unfair I’d been when he’d shown me the picture he’d made and I hadn’t believed him, thinking he was just making fun of me. Maybe that was why I turned the TV off. Because I didn’t want to have to look the truth in the eye any longer … because I was ashamed of myself … but there they were! Just like Cuma had drawn them! Those two gigantic statues had really existed and that meant Cuma’s home had been there too. But I’d missed out on the statues. They’d been blown up and become property of the past via a cloud of dust. I hadn’t made it there in time! Could they have torn down Cuma’s home as well? I thought of myself and the bodies that had fastened me onto the earth’s surface. Those two statues had been demolished during the very days I’d been crushed underneath them. Me and those two Buddhas, we’d crumbled into the earth together. So far apart, yet simultaneously … If it was still standing, that was where Cuma’s home was! Somewhere there!

“I’m sorry,” I said. Thinking he might be able to hear. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you!”

But Cuma wouldn’t speak to me. Instead, in the place where I should have been hearing his voice, inside my very head, an ache rose like a black sun. It suddenly rose over all my horizons! It filled my head in a deluge and swept down my neck to spread over my shoulders first, then my chest. I was having the first of the many pain spells I would never stop having. I screamed and screamed! Instead of Cuma’s voice, my own came out.