Authors: Hakan Günday
Ultimately, it was two corpses that carried me into this life: the wish to live and the wish to let live … The former was my father’s wish, the latter my mother’s … And so I did live … Did I have any other choice? Surely … but who knows, maybe this is just how the physics of living goes, and somewhere it’s written:
The Physics of Living 101
Every birth equals at least two deaths. One to do with the wish to live, one to do with the wish to let live; two deaths.
For the newly born, however, those deaths must ensure that he lives his life unaware that he is even breathing.
Otherwise, said person will be made up of war and ends every day as a corpse.
Yes, maybe my name is Gaza …
And I never thought about committing suicide.
Except, at one point … I felt it.
Now I’m going to tell myself a story and believe only that. For every time I turn and look to the past, I see it’s changed again. Either the terrain is diminished, or its history compounded. In this life nothing stays in its place. Nothing is content with where it is. Maybe nothing has a place really. That’s the reason they won’t fit into the holes you leave them in. All the while you’re measuring away and digging holes in just the right size, but it doesn’t work a damn bit. They all wait for you to blink. So they can run off. Or switch places and drive you insane. Especially your past …
And now it’s time … time to tell every single recollection once and for all, seal it off. Because this is the end! I’m never going to turn and look back again. Not even in the mirror, I’ll look it in the eyes. With every word I’ll nibble at it until I’ve eaten it up. Then I’m going to scrape it off my teeth with a toothpick and grind it under my soles. That’s the only way to comprise only the present … otherwise the body I live inside will do anything to stop time! Because it knows everything: that it will die, that it will decay… who was the piece of shit that told it this? The body knows it’ll croak and disappear! In fact, that’s why … clamping its jaws on to life like a rabid dog, it makes me repeat the same mistakes time and time again. Time and time again! To buy some time through those déjà vus that take me back to the past, even if for an instant … but it’s over.
When I finish my story and am silent, I’ll only make new mistakes from then on! Mistakes so foreign they’ll kick time into full gallop! Mistakes so unknowable, they’ll turn wall clocks into magnetized compasses! Mistakes no one’s heard of, let alone made before! Mistakes as great and recondite as the discovery of a lost continent or extraterrestrial life! Mistakes as extraordinary as men who make machines that make men who make machines that make machines! Mistakes as tremendous as the invention of God! Mistakes as unanticipated as the second-biggest invention following God, that of
character
! As magical as the first mistake of a newborn! A mistake as deadly as being born! That’s all I want … and maybe some morphine sulfate.
Turkey is only the difference between the East and the West. I don’t know which one you’d have to subtract from the other to leave Turkey, but I do know for sure that the distance between them is equal to Turkey. And that was where we lived.
A country whose geopolitical significance was discussed daily by politicians on TV. Before, I couldn’t figure out what that meant. Turns out geopolitical meant a decrepit building, pitch dark on the inside, that buses with glaring headlights used as a rest stop in the middle of the night just because it was on the way. It meant the huge Bosphorus Bridge, 1,565 km long. An enormous bridge passing through the lives of the country’s inhabitants. An old bridge, one bare foot on the Eastern end, the other shoe-wearing foot on the Western; all kinds of lawlessness passing over it. It all went straight through our bellies. Especially those referred to as
the immigrants
… We did what we could … to make sure they wouldn’t get stuck in our throats. We swallowed and sent them on their way. Wherever it was they were going … commerce from border to border … from wall to wall …
Needless to say, the rest of the world also did its part and provided them with the desperation necessary to start running from the place they were born to the place they were to die. Every variety of desperation. Desperation of every length, width and age … As for us, we simply carried out the demands of our country’s latitudes and longitudes. We carried to paradise those who’d escaped from hell. I believed in neither. But those people believed in everything. From birth, practically! After all, they assumed: if there is famine-afflicted, war-wracked hell on earth, there must surely be a heaven as well. But they were wrong. They’d all been played for fools. The existence of hell wasn’t necessarily proof of heaven. Yet I could sympathize with them. This was what they’d been taught. And not just them, everybody … a dazzling tinsel-framed painting was being sold to the entire world population. And in that painting, good sparred with evil; heaven with hell. Yet there was no such war and never had been. The vitally crucial war between good and evil, expected to endure until the apocalypse, was the biggest ruse known to mankind. A ruse necessary to ensure the absolute effectiveness of authority and social order by the shortest route possible. For if the simultaneous existence of good and evil within every person were not generally accepted, the identities of everyone in whose name people had died, meaning every leader who ever lived, would start showing stains. There would be confusion, clashing thoughts, and no one would ever give their life for anyone else again. But that’s not how it worked out and so it became that the simplest way to get people to fight one another to the death was the war between absolute good and absolute evil.
Those who said, “You’re the good ones!” actually meant to say, “Go and die in my name!” while those who said, “You’re the ones who’ll go to heaven!” meant, “Those that you do in are going to hell!”
Hence heaven and hell, good and evil, split the creature called man down the middle and created a vendetta between the two halves, turning him into a total dolt. So it was that the formidable salesmen of the past were able to wrap lifetime-guaranteed servility in the sacred theory of conflict and sell it to free people. Getting submissive dogs to fight and kill other submissive dogs was the whole point! It wasn’t that darkness was against light, nor was it vice versa. There was one true conflict, relevant only to biology: death or life …
In the illegal transportation of people, that was really the only thing to be mindful of: that the number of living persons delivered be the same as the number picked up. Other than that, it didn’t matter how many of them had run from hell expecting to get to heaven. We were carrying meat. Just meat. Dreams, thoughts, or feelings, these weren’t included in the pay we were receiving. Perhaps if they’d paid enough, we would have carried those with caution too. I, in fact, could have willingly adopted this mission and made sure the dreams they’d dreamed up back in their homes—or in whatever hole they were born—didn’t break during the ride. A few Hollywood movies would have done the trick. It would have secured their faith in heaven. Or, to implement the classic, time-honored method, handing them a holy book. To only one of them, though, as it goes in history. So he could tell the others. He could tell it any way he liked … In fact, I would have done it all for free, but I wasn’t old enough and didn’t have the time. Because there was always work to be done.
“Gaza!”
“Yes, Dad?”
“Go, get the chains from the storage.”
“OK, Dad.”
“Get the locks too.”
“I will, Dad.”
“Don’t forget the keys!”
“They’re in my pocket, Dad.”
I was lying. I’d lost them all. But I hadn’t imagined that I’d get caught. I got two slaps and a kick for it, as a matter of fact. How was I to know that father sometimes had to chain them up?
“Gaza!”
“Yes, Dad?”
“Go get the water, pass it out!”
“OK, Dad.”
“Not one per head like you did last time! You give two people one bottle, got it?”
“But, Dad, they always say …”
“What?”
“More!”
I was lying. Yes, they always said, “More!” because that was the only Turkish word they knew, but the issue at stake here wasn’t the water being in demand, but my diminished profit. I’d begun selling the water we normally gave out for free. Without my father knowing, of course … I was ten now, after all.
“Gaza.”
“Yes, Dad?”
“Did you hear that? Did somebody just yell?”
“No, Dad.”
“Guess I must’ve imagined it …”
“Guess so …”
I was lying again. Of course I’d heard that scream. But it was barely two days since my discovery that a certain appendage I possessed wasn’t only for pissing. Therefore my only wish was that we’d get the job done as soon as possible so I could go back behind the locked door of my room. There were twenty-two adults and a baby in the back of our moving truck. How could I have known that that cut-off scream belonged to a mother when she realized the baby in her arms was dead, before the others clapped panicked hands over her mouth? Would it have mattered if I did? I seriously doubt it because I was now eleven.
There’s no absolute way of knowing how people smuggling began. But if you take into account that it’s possible to undertake such a task with just three people, it’s possible to go way back in human history. The only rewarding line in an otherwise useless book I read years ago was:
The first tool man used was another man.
So I don’t suppose it was a very long time before somebody put a price on that earliest tool and sold it to others. Accordingly, the beginning of people smuggling on earth can be dated as: first possible chance! After all, since it also encompasses pimping, it’s the second oldest profession in the world. Of course I was unaware that we were upholding the traditions of such an ancient line of work. All I did was sweat all the time and do the best I could to follow my father’s orders. Yet transportation was really the backbone of human smuggling. Without transportation there was nothing. It was the riskiest and most exhausting step of the process. The later part where the immigrants were stuck in a den, worked eighteen hours a day making fake purses, were made to sleep on the ground, and even got fucked if they struck someone’s fancy, was child’s play compared to what we did. We were the true laborers of the people-smuggling industry, working under the heaviest conditions! First of all, we were under constant pressure. The ones making the delivery, the ones picking it up, the middlemen, they were all after us. Everyone held us accountable for the smallest setback. Time was never in our favor, and everything that could possibly go wrong at first always pretended not to and then went wrong sevenfold. It wasn’t that the operation was so complicated, but as it goes with illegal work, no one trusted anyone else and every step had to be taken as painstakingly as if we were in a field of glass.
The goods came from the Iran border three times a month, were joined up with the ones from Iraq or Syria if there were any, and sent out to us. They usually came in an eighteen-wheeler. A different one every time, of course. Occasionally the goods were divided up and parceled out to vehicles such as trucks, pickup trucks, or minibuses. A man named Aruz organized the entry across the Iran border and the departure of the goods. He was probably
President of the Administration Committee of the Executive Counsel of Coordination for Aiding Persons in Unrestricted International Roaming in Return for a Determined Fee in Compliance with the Tariff of the People’s Revolutionary Movement as Part of Covering the Free Living Expenses and Democratic War Expenditures of the Board of Directors’ Command Dedicated to the Perpetuity of Leadership and the Indivisible Totality of Kurdistan
of the PKK, or something. The
determined fee
required for
unrestricted roaming
was whatever came from the heart. It included the heart. Or the kidneys, plus expenses, or whatever … all in all, if you were to ask Aruz, he would have said that he was one of the PKK’s ministers in charge of smuggling. But he was responsible only for people smuggling. Drugs, petrol, cigarettes, and guns were handled by other ministries. Which was the way it should be: duties that were different in objective should also be set apart managerially. Otherwise everything would get tangled up and poisoned. After Turkey’s exemplary Ministry of Culture and Tourism—which was as bizarre a title as Ministry of War and Peace—no one wanted to repeat the same mistake. When two opposite concerns, one completely occupied with moneymaking and the other with unconditional support and conservation, were brought together under the same ministry, culture was reduced to nothing more than a dried-up giveaway pen, and tourism the halfway erased logo of a five-star hotel on that same pen. But who cared? Not Aruz, that was for sure! Every bit as much an expert of commerce as of violence, Aruz’s approach to tourism was totally different. First of all, he ran his illegal travel agency empire by telephone only. By eating phones, I mean.
That was the presumption, because I could never make out what he was saying with his drowned hippo’s voice, and would repeatedly say, “I kiss your hands, Uncle Aruz!” or sometimes, if I was in a bad mood and felt like pissing him off as well, ask, “How’s Felat?”
When the name of his child, who was nothing like his dream son, came up, he might start grumbling like a beached whale, but would generally just make a sound that might have been laughter, and ask for my father. That, I’d deduce from his having stopped talking. Really, there was a love-hate relationship between my father and him. They could talk on the phone for hours. I think it was also out of obligation. After all, it was impossible for them to backstab each other over the phone.
The backstabbing in question meant of course a part of the goods being missing or being shown as missing. I knew that my father didn’t smuggle out some of the immigrants he received and sent them instead to Istanbul. These were sold as slaves to some form of textile production or other, or some form of consumption like prostitution. Then my father would revert his tone from almighty judge to almighty accused and moan to Aruz about the fake disasters that had befallen us and resulted in the loss of the goods. And since every single calculation was made per head, Aruz would bellow like a rhino at least half an hour, then mumble a threat and hang up on my father because he knew he’d never find a more reliable trucker.