They broke out laughing. But suddenly Stanley became serious.
“She just really turns me on with that black chador. And this isn’t just a fantasy of mine. It’s the real thing! They’re nothing like the idiots around here who wear ironed skirts during the day and latex masks at night. These women are always in that black robe. And they’re proud to be wrapped up in it. It’s like they don’t even need to walk, they just glide, you know?”
“Right on,” Mitch said, thinking of Severin again. Severin worked in some shitty bank wearing some standard suit. “Then what happened, what did you do?” he asked Stanley.
Stanley took off his T-shirt and turned around. His back looked just like Derdâ’s—covered in dark purple bruises. Mitch stretched out his trembling alcoholic hand and touched them. When Stanley turned around he was pleased to see Mitch’s mouth wide open in surprise.
Stanley locked the front door and went into the women’s bathroom with his American friend and came into his mouth. He hadn’t cleaned the men’s room yet.
When he reopened the bar, Regaip was the first person to walk in. The moment Stanley saw him he bolted to the back of the pub, knocking over chairs as he went. He thought he could lock himself in the toilet stall where he’d made the American get down on his knees not too long ago but he was wrong. Regaip broke the door down with one powerful kick, grabbed Stanley by the back of the neck, and forced his head down into the toilet bowl and flushed. For a few moments they remained still as the water flushed over Stanley’s head. Then Regaip yanked Stanley’s head out of the bowl and smashed it into the wall. Stanley waved his hands in the air and said, “Alright, alright …” Regaip took a step back and waited. Stanley reached into his back pocket, took out two hundred pounds, and handed the money to Regaip. It was half of what he owed him for this month’s meth. Regaip took the money and said, in English, “I’ll be back for the rest next week.”
He turned around and walked out of the bar. When he saw Mitch cowering behind the bar, pitifully brandishing an empty whisky bottle in the air—clearly too afraid to actually hit someone with it—Regaip shouted out, “Motherfucking fags!” in Turkish and calmly walked out of the pub. But once on the sidewalk he suddenly stopped, turned around, and walked back into the pub. His voice was even louder this time, and still in Turkish.
“You’re going to hit me with that, are you, you bastard?!”
Mitch’s eyebrows shot up when he saw that Regaip had come back for him and his monocle fell from his face and dangled ludicrously from his earlobe, nearly ripping it open.
Bezir asked her one more time: “What did you say?”
“Shopping. Can I go with Sister Rahime? They always forget some things when they shop for us.”
Bezir asked her again, this time in three clear parts. “You? You want to go out? With Sister Rahime?”
This was enough. Derdâ wasn’t going to insist. He’d made his point.
“No,” she said. “Never mind, they always shop for us, too.”
Bezir sat on the couch, leaning back with one leg folded under him.
“Now are you going to tell me about the armchair?”
“What armchair?” Derdâ said.
“That one. You moved it.”
He pointed at the armchair that Derdâ had put in front of the window when he was away—for four days and four nights. Now it was back in its normal place opposite the couch. Derdâ didn’t know what to say.
She stuttered as she spoke: “May … may … maybe I pulled it over there when I was vacuuming the floors …”
Bezir smiled.
“Is that so?”
He pulled out his leg, stood up, slowly placed his hand on the back of Derdâ’s neck, and squeezed, but not too hard.
“Come with me,” he said.
He brought Derdâ to the window. The curtains were drawn. She had no idea what he was planning to do. She felt a sudden rush of fear.
Then she felt a heaviness on the back of her neck as Bezir forced her down to her knees. He knelt down beside her and forced Derdâ flat onto the floor, pressing her face into the carpet.
He asked her, “Then what the hell is this?”
Derdâ couldn’t see anything, only individual strands in the carpet. Bezir realized this and lifted her head up a little. But she still couldn’t see anything but the carpet, nothing more.
“What is it?” she finally managed to say. “What I am supposed to see?”
Bezir pointed to a small indent.
“You see this! This!” he screamed as he dragged the girl’s head over to the other indent thirty inches to the right.
“You see this, too!”
Then another indent.
“And this one here!”
Then the last one.
“And this!”
Still on her knees, he forced Derdâ to look at each indent the armchair had left in the carpet, rubbing her face in them.
“I don’t know,” Derdâ cried. “I really don’t know!”
She started to cry. Bezir hated it when she cried.
“Who then? Someone else? Was someone else in here? Did someone else move the armchair over here! Did someone else draw the curtains to look outside? Did you let someone in here? Is that what you’re telling me? Is that why you want to go shopping? You want to go see him?”
Bezir wasn’t shouting now. He spoke in a stiff, muffled voice, because Ubeydullah had told him before that he was making too much noise. He’d even asked if he was doing anything to the girl.
Then
