When her forehead hit the floor it made the sound of a single clap. No one heard her neck break. When she hit the concrete her heart, beating like a hummingbird’s wings, stopped cold. She was six years old. And the crack in the ceiling, in the darkness, in her fear, that resembled a black bug was only a year older. It had been transforming into an insect every night for seven years. Once the corridor light was turned on and the ward’s door swung open it was nothing but a crack in the ceiling again.
Derdâ’s eyes opened at the sound of the clap and she saw the girl lying on the floor, her neck snapped back. Though it was dark and she couldn’t make out the face she knew who it was. A few hours ago she’d looked her in the eye and told her she had to sleep on the top bunk. She’d helped her clamber up and then told her she’d cut her tongue out if she complained. She’d said it loud enough for everyone to hear. Now the girl was lying on the floor right in front of her. She must have fallen. Or did she jump?
She took her hand out from under her pillow and nudged the girl’s arm. No reaction. She poked her shoulder. She looked up and scanned the ward from between the bunk bed’s iron bars to see if anyone else was awake. Not one head had popped up; relieved, she slowly got out of bed and kneeled next to the girl. She took her by the shoulders and turned her over; she was as light as a cat. Her little face was covered in blood. Derdâ lifted her head and looked around. Sure that no one was awake, she started to cry, biting her lower lip to muffle the sound. She sobbed in silence so no one would wake up.
The little girl was from Yatırca. Yatırca, infamous for its state-funded militia and its informants. Yatırca, as the children called it, the village of spies; Yatırca, those sons of bitches. It was forbidden to help anyone from Yatırca. Not even if they were dead. Derdâ didn’t tell the teacher on duty or do anything that night. She only cried. Slowly she moved away from the girl’s body and quietly slipped back into bed. She herself was from Yatırca and it had taken four years to make the other kids at school forget it.
The blanket hung down from the top bunk, a big triangle whose tip touched the floor. In the darkness Derdâ imagined the blanket was a sail and the bed was a boat. A sailboat that traveled by night. She had seen something like it once in a picture book. A book where colorful boats with white sails sailed over a deep blue sea. Little girls in yellow raincoats stood on deck, smiling as they sailed toward the horizon. A book where all the girls were happy. But it was just a book, some stupid book. Probably the dumbest book in the world, a bunch of crock. Those girls didn’t really exist. If they did, the book would be full of their happy photographs, not those phony watercolors.
“Lord, let me die in my dreams,” she whispered.
She was about to correct herself, and say “in my sleep,” but the boat of her bed sank into sleep. She was eleven years old. Ten and one.
“The dirty little Yatırca girl’s dead!”
Derdâ woke up wishing she had died in her sleep. She kept listening.
“She fell and split her head open! And that idiot Derdâ’s still asleep! Wake up! Get up!”
She knew that voice. It was Nazenin. Her father died six years ago. He was shot during an attack on a police station. The whole town demanded his dead body back, but their protest was forced to disband when Special Forces tanks rolled into town. So the organization took the matter of retrieving the corpse into their own hands. After nightfall they launched a rocket. But the terrible irony was that the rocket didn’t hit its target—the regional gendarme headquarters—but the building right next to it: Nazenin’s house. A slight error in calculation and two walls of their own dead man’s home were brought down and a sleeping baby was blown to pieces. In the end nobody could reclaim the body. There wasn’t even one to be reclaimed because it was buried into a pit near the police station and nature refused to give it back. The regional head of the organization apologized profusely to Nazenin’s family, but in the end they only paid half the promised blood money. People in the town paid the other half in the time-old currencies of honor and esteem. A loan from Ziraat Bank helped them rebuild the two walls, and later two more rooms were added to the house using the compensation money the family received as victims of an act of terror. Nazenin, the oldest daughter of the household, received her share of prominence and was selected resident supervisor in her ward of the regional boarding school. And the whole town agreed that it was lucky the baby was a girl and there would be no blood feud.
Derdâ opened her eyes when Nazenin shook her.
“The girl from Yatırca fell off the bed last night. Wake up, Miss Yeşim is calling you.”
She couldn’t speak so she just nodded her head. She sat up and set her feet on the floor but quickly pulled them away. She lifted her head and looked at Nazenin towering above her and heard just what she expected to hear.
“Clean that up!”
There was blood on the bottom of her feet.
“Didn’t I tell you that girl was to sleep on the bottom bunk?”
Yeşim was posted to the regional boarding school five months before. When she first saw the enormous school building she recoiled in fear, and when she had learned there were only four
