She paced back and forth in the living room until noon and then left the apartment and knocked on her neighbor’s door. Stanley wasn’t working that day. Without even looking at his face, Derdâ stepped into the apartment and walked straight to Stanley’s bedroom. Stanley followed. Derdâ bent over his bed and took the bat out from under the pillow. Stanley raised his index finger to tell her to wait. He took a three-piece studded collar from one of the chains hanging from the ceiling and fastened it around Derdâ’s neck. He took a step back to look at the girl in black now wearing an S&M studded choke collar. He was in awe. Then he slowly undressed and assumed a new position. This time he remained standing with his hands together above his head. His eyes closed. As the hard plastic bat came down on his back and the back of his legs, his penis became more and more erect. He remained still until a translucent liquid spurted out from the tip of his erect member and as he opened his eyes he opened his palm to Derdâ, who stopped beating him. Stanley leaned over and picked up a bracelet lined with nails and slipped it inside-out over his cock slick with come. The nails ran over his flesh as he moved the bracelet up and down. He looked up at Derdâ and she understood right away what Stanley wanted her to do. Her black-gloved hand clutched the bracelet and moved it up and down exactly twelve times. This time the liquid was tinted with blood.
Derdâ threw the plastic bat down on the bed and started to search the house. She was looking for something—a book, any book. And soon enough she found what she was looking for—not a book but a magazine, a TV guide. She opened it to a random page and showed it to Stanley who followed her about the house eagerly as he got dressed. Enunciating loudly, she said, “English,” in an attempt to make herself totally clear. She always felt that her voice was barely audible beneath the cloth over her mouth. She pointed at the pictures in the magazine and said again, “English!”
“I don’t get it. What do you want?” Stanley asked.
Derdâ pretended to write something in the air and Stanley brought her a pen. On the back cover, there was an ad for handbags. In the ad, a naked woman bent over with both her hands on her calves, her breasts covered with the advertised bag and the brand name written exactly where her legs came together. Derdâ put the pen on the bag and scribbled. Then she circled the woman’s eyes and scribbled some more, all the while saying, “English!”
She realized something was missing—so she added a question mark at the end of all her lines and then Stanley finally understood. He took the magazine from Derdâ, and pointed at the naked woman and repeated the word in English several times.
“Woman,” Derdâ repeated after him.
That day Stanley came twice and Derdâ learned thirty-six new words.
“There’s the famous Big Ben,” Hıdır Arif said.
But Gido Agha wasn’t listening. He’d just bought into a heroin ring and he couldn’t think of anything else. Smuggling heroin was eight times as lucrative as smuggling diesel oil.
He’d come to London to negotiate with his fellow countrymen—Turks who’d lived in London for a long time. Although he’d negotiated with men from villages he’d never heard of before, he still considered them his people for they were weaned on the milk of their Kurdish mothers. But he never discussed business with women. He’d told his compatriots in London that he wouldn’t take the heroin over the Bulgarian border. He said they would have to take it from there; he couldn’t get involved with transportation after that. They agreed, but said because the costs would be higher his cut would be smaller. Gido Agha wasn’t pleased. And so Big Ben just drifted by unnoticed. He was only really interested in buildings that were his.
But then Hıdır Arif wasn’t happy there either, on the Thames in a none-too-small boat that they had rented for the day. But all the same, they couldn’t pretend they didn’t know each other just because they were thousands of kilometers away from their homeland. They had lots of things in common—around two hundred thousand things. That was the population on the expanse of land in southeastern Turkey that they each ruled separately. Hıdır Arif knew from his father that it was best not to get involved in the affairs of Gido Agha, and although he knew what he was up to, he didn’t say a word about it to him directly.
Likewise, Gido didn’t involve himself in Hikmet Tariqat affairs. They shared the people—their flesh and blood belonged to the Aleyzam tribe, and their souls to the Hikmet Tariqat. It was a fair deal that went back nearly a hundred years. Gido looked after the business affairs of the organization, and Hıdır Arif kept a list of those people who went to the mountains to join the rebel fighters.
Hıdır Arif didn’t give a damn about which flag flew over his land. He knew well that people became the living dead without faith. So Hikmet Tariqat rule would carry on even if China took over. “Kurdistan, the Turkish Republic, People’s Republic of China, what difference does it make?” he used to say to his father, Sheik Gazi—when he could still hear, that is. Hıdır Arif
