As the water washed away the blood, her wounds became apparent. Blood had flown from between her thin legs, something between those legs had been dismembered, something had been torn, something was dead. Though the water cleaned away the blood stains, purple tattoos remained all over Derdâ’s body. Parts of her were damaged, parts of her were broken, but certain things were newly born. She had purple eyes. Now Derdâ had an eye on her back, though she couldn’t use it yet. In time, she would learn how to open that eye.
She wanted to eat the soup set before her but she just couldn’t. Rahime took the spoon from her hand, blew on it to cool the soup, and poured it through Derdâ’s lips. After a few spoonfuls, an “ah” passed through Derdâ’s lips. It then became a capital “A.” And she multiplied them: “AAAA!”
Eventually only intermittent breathing interrupted the wail: “AAAAAAAA … AAAAAAAA … AAAAAAA …”
Her lips didn’t close until Ulviye from the fourth-floor apartment came up to give her an injection of diazepam. She couldn’t close her lips. She wasn’t aware of her screaming, her eleven years compressed into a wail. And then she fell asleep.
When she woke up she was sixteen. Lying on the couch, she looked up at the ceiling in the silence of a warm afternoon. She was startled by a noise from behind the door. She stood up and covered herself in her black chador. She couldn’t see through the peephole because the lens had fallen off balance, so she opened the door a little and peeked out.
First, she saw a leaf. A big leaf on a big house plant in a big pot. Then she saw an armchair, a black leather armchair. Then she saw Stanley, a tall, thin man. He was pushing a glass coffee table to the side of the corridor to open a passageway for a man in blue overalls carrying two boxes to get into Stanley’s new apartment. Pushing the low table aside, he stood up and looked at the other furniture around him. Then he saw the head and shoulder of his neighbor, Derdâ, peering at him from behind the door. He didn’t smile or say hello. He just stared at her jet-black eyes framed in pitch-black cloth. Derdâ disappeared immediately as if something had pulled her back. She shut the door as if taking refuge behind it.
Evidently, they had found a tenant for the flat opposite, which had been empty for five years. This meant that from then on Derdâ would have to cover herself when she swept the threshold or when she saw Bezir off at the elevator in the morning. This was the first thing that came to mind. To cover herself so that she’d be invisible to a stranger. She knelt down and put her ear against the door to listen for signs of life. She heard noises. Soft, loud, and sudden noises. She tried to match the sounds to different pieces of furniture. If she knew that none of her assumptions were true, who knows if she would’ve stayed there with her body pressed up against the door until the door outside was shut and the corridor was silent. Maybe she wouldn’t have cared at all, but Derdâ had nothing else to do. She’d lived in this flat on the twelfth floor for five years. The only difference between this apartment and her room in Kurudere was that there was no longer an iron ring around her ankle. Now the ring encircled her whole body.
She only left the flat on Fridays. It was exactly sixteen steps to the eleventh floor where Rahime held open the door. All the women there were members of the Hikmet Tariqat and they came there to listen to a speech called sohbet, a kind of religious conversation. At first Derdâ couldn’t understand why it was called a conversation. As far as she knew, a conversation was two-way. But after some time, she stopped caring. She only made sure not to sit beside the old man, Vezir, who whined out the Hadith with saliva sputtering out from his mouth. Whenever the old man spoke he made a terrible noise accompanied by ample spit. He could go on and on for three hours, his eyes closed over the final hour.
The women huddled together on the floor to make enough space for everyone else. Derdâ liked the spot between the big yellow armchair and the wall. She always went down a few minutes before the sohbet began. She liked to feel hidden. For the last two years she wore her two-piece black chador when she went down to the sohbet (normally she preferred the single-piece chador with an elastic band at its waist) and secretly kept her left hand in her baggy şalvar pants, her middle finger inside her. As the women in the room listened intently, weeping and often bursting into flights of hysteria, Derdâ came at least three times during the three-hour sohbet, moaning every time.
She was like everyone else in the crowd, her voice part of the general hum. Moving her curled finger to caress the walls of her vagina, she fantasized about being held down and fucked by a dozen anonymous men. But she never rushed into the final episode of her fantasy, the summit of her pleasure. In the final fantasy, a miracle had rendered Bezir motionless. He seethed with anger as he was forced to watch his wife’s face contort with pleasure. At every sohbet she imagined another way Bezir would be unable to move. Sometimes he was paralyzed by an illness, sometimes his hands and feet were bound, sometimes he was held down by three men. Derdâ stared at Bezir’s suffering face while she moaned. Then the sohbet ended and everyone returned to their own apartments. Bezir arrived two hours later and
