Endgame, page 18
Because I missed her too, and I felt some kind of consolation when I saw Mustafa.
‘Of course,’ I said.
In the morning I went over to his house.
There was a stylish two-person granite table on the terrace, with flowers, freshly squeezed orange juice and little dishes filled with unusual jams.
Mustafa had good taste that could take you by surprise.
He would carefully hide this in his daily life, trying not to appear different from the others in town.
But he wanted to show me he was different from the townspeople. On the one hand he condescended to me but on the other he was genuinely afraid that I looked down on him.
We listened to the sounds of the waves breaking on the shore. It reminded me of Zuhal’s voice. Maybe Mustafa thought the same thing.
‘Have you ever been up to the church?’ I asked.
‘Oh, many times. I’ve been up there a lot.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘A little church … But we can’t have it restored. Everyone’s afraid to even touch it, because the moment that happens people will say it’s all about the treasure.’
‘Ever since I came to this town people have been talking about that church, going on and on, but I’ve never actually seen it. I’m really curious.’
‘Well, let me take you up there and we can have a look,’ he said.
I was taken aback.
‘Isn’t it forbidden to go there?’
‘Forbidden for everyone else. Come on. Let’s go.’
I stood up right away, hoping he wouldn’t change his mind.
We went in Mustafa’s jeep. It was probably the biggest jeep I’d ever seen.
We drove up along the back roads without going through town and then turned onto a dirt road.
There were olive and fig trees along the road, and bushes of yellow broom. The strong smell of ripe figs was heavy in the air.
We wound back and forth up the hill.
At the top there was a plateau surrounded by a wooden fence. And right in the middle was a little domed church of darkened stone. The cross was still standing on top. The windows were broken.
I saw grating on the ground as we approached.
‘What are these?’
‘They probably lead down below the church but have been covered with stones. There’s no entrance and no one knows who covered them.’
Two gendarmes were standing watch a little further on. Mustafa greeted them as we passed. Clearly they were used to seeing him there.
‘Come,’ said Mustafa as we both leapt up the two steps leading to the church and went inside. There were planks of wood that had probably been pews once upon a time, birds had nested in the dome and rotting timber from the ceiling had fallen to the floor. It was filled with the scent of wood, stone, dust and hay. On the opposite wall there was a small statue of Christ on the cross.
‘This is it?’ I said, disappointed.
‘This right here is the heart of the town,’ said Mustafa.
He pulled up a lid on the floor right under the statue.
And he jumped inside.
I jumped in behind him.
It was a room without windows, no door, no way out.
‘Now, I’m sure there’s a secret passage somewhere in this room. But no one has found it yet. We checked every inch of the place and couldn’t find it.’
‘Maybe it’s just not there.’
‘I think it’s there all right, but we can’t find it. Maybe we need to tap out a certain code somewhere but until now no one has been able to come up with it.’
I looked around.
It was a little stone room, completely empty. Stone floors.
It was nothing like what I had imagined.
This ‘legendary’ place which captivated the imagination of a town, and for which people had died, was nothing more than a rundown little building.
I stepped outside and took a deep breath.
In the distance the sea stretched out as far as the eye could see.
I sat down. Mustafa came and sat down next to me.
‘That’s what people always say when they first see it,’ he said, laughing. ‘What did you expect? Chests full of emeralds, silken drapes? If it was easy to find then someone would have found it long ago.’
‘There’s nothing here, Mustafa,’ I said.
He looked out at the sea before answering, plucked a blade of grass and started chewing.
‘You can’t understand, outsiders never do. For you it’s just a church, a heap of rubble you’ve heard people talking about and which you come to see with all these expectations and then you’re only disappointed … It’s not like that for us. This church is what makes this town. Even if there isn’t a treasure, well, there is as long as we believe in it. It’s the soul of the town. Without it everything would fall apart. And then of course you see there really is a treasure here.’
He spat out the bit of grass in his mouth and plucked another blade. A forlorn expression fell over his face.
‘You know that golden coin you saw the other day at the wedding, the pilaf man’s coin?’ he said.
I realised that he expected me to show surprise but I didn’t. I was getting wise to his game.
‘Yes,’ I said, waiting for him to go on.
He pulled out an ancient coin that looked just the same.
‘Once upon a time many different people found coins like this up here … Then they disappeared … But we all know there’s more underground.’
‘And if not?’
‘And if there is?’
‘None of you will ever be able to find out … You’re all stopping each other from getting that far. Why don’t you come together and dig? If nothing else you’ll get to the truth.’
We were sitting there together like two little boys watching the sea. It was a strange relationship: I was the only one who knew how this woman had brought us together. He slapped me on the back.
‘Maybe we don’t want to know,’ he said.
‘You’re right, maybe you just don’t want to know,’ I said.
‘But we do. Be sure of that. It’s just that we can’t come together. Someone will find the deed to this place. In the end someone will find it. And if need be, there will be – how should I put this – some unsavoury procedures, but someone will find it. Maybe you don’t really understand but the person who takes control of this place takes control of the town. Outsiders don’t get that. Whatever it is that makes a man a man, well, it’s the same in that this treasure makes this town. It’s the centre of power. And power is never shared. If it is, well then it isn’t power. We’re not interested in getting rich, we already are. I’m talking about the people who are powerful enough to find the treasure. We don’t want money, we want the town, and everything in it. The deed to this treasure is the deed to this town.’
‘If it’s not the treasure you’re after but the deed then why are you secretly digging here in the middle of the night?’
I thought he might deny it but he didn’t. He laughed.
‘After I find the treasure I’ll have an easy time finding the deed. Or rather the treasure is the deed itself.’
‘What will Raci Bey say about that?’
He sighed.
‘That’s an important question. I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. We’ll meet and discuss the matter but I don’t think we’ll be able to come to an agreement. The guy has suddenly thrown himself completely into the race for power. But first he should keep an eye on his wife …’
Then he stopped, embarrassed at what he’d just said. ‘Anyway,’ he muttered. ‘I think Muhacir is putting him up to it, getting him to rattle his sword at me,’ he went on, ‘but no need to worry about him. Never mind Muhacir. He’s just a low-grade gangster, a brute, what good will come of him? Thinks he’s going to take the town, and who will let him have it? My fear is that these guys will get lost in their insane fantasies, mess up the whole operation and kill each other in the end.’
Whenever he talked about the treasure he adopted a different manner of speaking, becoming once again the mayor of a small town. Gone was the urban intellectual.
Then it dawned on me. We were confidants.
But it was a one-way street. He shared his secrets with me but I hid my own from him. If I told him my secrets we’d no longer be friends.
‘You know, sometimes I think I should just give it all up and leave. I get so tired sometimes, and everything seems so meaningless. I want to go somewhere and just read history books.’
He had slipped into his other personality. With me he was always switching back and forth between the two roles.
But the strange thing was that I found his mayor persona far more interesting: this was a type of person that I didn’t know and that I found fascinating.
‘You could establish a town in the middle of the forest and make yourself the mayor.’
‘That’s also true. This kind of work makes you sick. And when you sit like this watching the sea and talking it all sounds like nonsense. So what if you get to be the mayor of a town, you say to yourself, but then when you go back and see the people there … The sickness comes back … It’s like seeing the woman you love but can’t have …’
I kept quiet. I couldn’t be sure if he wanted to bring up the subject or not.
I didn’t know if he wanted to tell me something in particular.
On the one hand I liked playing the role of the villain, listening to a man talk about his relationship with a woman I was sleeping with, learning all the details from both Mustafa and Zuhal, examining the feelings they had for each another which they couldn’t share openly, with a power unbeknownst to them that allowed me to possess them.
In a strange way I had become the stronger one in the relationship and although this pleased me it was an exhalted feeling. Every new detail I learned about Mustafa and Zuhal made me stronger but also weaker. Every bit of information was a blow. None of which were strong enough to knock me out, but when they came one after the other I could feel that I was losing my resistance.
After a few moments of silence, Mustafa continued as if answering a question I’d never asked: ‘We’re talking about it but I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She tells me she loves me but then sometimes even this makes me angry. I know that she won’t agree if I ask her to marry me, and so what kind of love is this? Doesn’t a woman want to marry the man she loves?’
And then he asked me the same question.
‘Doesn’t she?’
‘Maybe she’s mad at you too. Maybe there are things she assumes the man who loves her should do.’
‘What, for example?’
‘How should I know?’
I was about to say, ‘You should ask Zuhal,’ but I would have been caught revealing just a little too much, and I stopped myself just in time.
‘You should ask her.’
‘She doesn’t really tell me anything … I don’t know what she wants … And sometimes I think that she doesn’t know herself.’
And that bright smile of a dashing young man was on his face again.
‘Our love is just another treasure. We say it’s there, but no one really knows if it is.’
I answered him with his own words.
‘If you say it’s there, then it is.’
He made a sad face.
‘Love’s not like that. When you say it’s there it actually isn’t. And sometimes when it is you can’t even say it’s there. I said it was and what happened? I looked up and she was married to some other bastard. No, it’s not like that. Not at all.’
‘But what does she say?’
‘She’s insane, in my opinion. You know what she said to me yesterday? That she wants to have a kid with me. Fine, let’s do it, I said. You know what she said? You can’t even imagine … that we’re going to have a kid without getting married. No way, I said and I hung up.’
I nearly broke out laughing. He could see that I was holding back a smile but of course he didn’t really know why.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it? Of course it is. I would laugh too, if someone told me that.’
He turned to me and said, ‘Now tell me the truth, what would you say if the woman you loved asked you that?’
‘“No problem and let’s do it in the courtyard of a mosque,” I’d say.’
He thought for a moment with two fingers on his lower lip. ‘That’s good. Hold on a second.’
He took out his phone.
‘What are you doing?’ I said, a little worried.
‘I’m going to send her just that. I wish I had said that to her yesterday.’
He tapped out the message and then showed it to me.
If you want to have a kid with me well then let’s do it in a mosque courtyard.
‘Let’s see what she says,’ he said.
Suddenly it was all just a game for him, and he looked like a naughty little child.
His phone beeped. A new message.
He held it out so I could see too.
Together we read her message.
Fine and I’ll leave you there like the heartless animal you are and take our baby with me.
He burst out laughing. I couldn’t help but laugh too. We were like two little boys taunting their mother. But this was a woman we both loved and we had both made love to.
‘What should I say? Let’s write something.’
‘I don’t think you should. You’ll make her really angry.’
‘Who cares, she deserves it. She’s the one driving me mad. Let’s get her back. Come on, just tell me what to write,’ he said.
‘Okay, write this,’ I said.
He was already poised to tap out the words.
‘It’ll be just like an old Turkish movie.’
‘You’re incredible, man,’ he said, and wrote out the message. As we both waited for the answer, I imagined Zuhal taking all this quite seriously. I thought she’d be pretty surprised by the last message. It wasn’t Mustafa’s style.
The phone beeped again. We read the message together.
Are you drunk? At this time of day?
Mustafa was having a great time. ‘Come on, what do we write now?’
I told him to write, ‘Can I call you my wife, dear?’
He had already finished and the message was gone.
It was fun for me to watch the two of them go at it.
Go and say that to your Russian whores.
Now, this wasn’t a message I expected. I’d heard her using much stronger language at home but I never thought she used those words with him.
It was a little surprising.
Their relationship went deeper than I’d imagined. That message wasn’t from a woman showing anger at a man she was in love with but a woman fighting with her husband.
She would never say something like that to me.
Even if she was in love with me she wouldn’t say that.
This was a different kind of veiled intimacy, buried but occasionally surfacing. It wasn’t just love. This was something more. Something that would last.
I didn’t really want to see this.
When I learned that Zuhal cried with Mustafa in his hotel room, and when she told me that she loved him, I felt something I couldn’t quite define. It was the feeling that there was more to what she said, feelings that she had not entirely explained.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ I said, abruptly.
The game wasn’t fun any more.
XXV
The rains came on suddenly. And lasted three days.
Never in my life have I seen such angry rain as I did in that town. Large, hard raindrops fell down from the sky as if it was battling the earth. The swollen drops smashed violently to the ground, unable to contain their anger as they bounced off the ground and splintered into a thousand shards.
It was as if we were under attack from the air. There was a constant din.
Everyone had fled, taking refuge indoors.
The streets and little squares were empty.
Life in the town had been arranged for people who were accustomed to spending their lives outside, and the indoor spaces where people took shelter suddenly seemed very small.
I can’t stand crowded places so I didn’t leave the house for three days.
I listened to Hamiyet chatter away at the furniture.
There were objects she liked very much and there were those she ‘didn’t get along with’. She got along fine with the wingback chairs, and they would share their troubles, but I imagine she had problems with smaller items: she never really liked ornaments, glasses and plates and the like. ‘Now, you just won’t stay in your place,’ she would say.
Every so often I would hear her break a glass or a plate and every time she blamed the object: ‘If you’re going to keep moving around like that, well, then you’ll get what you deserve. Now look and see what I’m going to do. I’m going to throw you out.’
She spoke with these things more than she ever spoke to me.
She didn’t speak to me much but then again we always felt each other’s presence.
It was a difficult relationship to describe.
Between a man and a woman in the same home, who never touched, there was an unnamed, invisible, intangible current, like a draught blowing in one window and out the other, that you could never catch but always felt.
There was this current between us. We both felt it and we delighted in it.
Generally she worked around me. Sometimes we passed close by each other, and sometimes she would roll up her skirt and sweep the floors right in front of where I was sitting, allowing me to watch her. I could see that she enjoyed provoking me.
Not every woman would do this but it came naturally to Hamiyet; her instincts pushed her in that direction, always conjuring up that ‘current’ between her and the men around her, like a bird building a nest or a spider weaving a web.
I knew it.
I knew her, far better than she thought I did.
I saw that wherever she was and whomever she was with she couldn’t stop herself from creating that current.
With the rains the activity online was out of control.
Like the radio chatter between soldiers on the brink of an assault, everyone was in contact or trying to reach one another, but the current that surged between me and Hamiyet was more powerful than anything online.
