Lifting his head, he said, “Just give me his address. And tell me this. Is he useful?”
Hıdır Arif had expected this. That it might come to this. This son of a bitch Gido might hurt the guy. He made a quick calculation in his head. The outcome was to Bezir’s disadvantage. God forgive, he said to himself.
“No, he’s not.”
“Good,” said Gido. He felt much better after that. Then he looked up. “What were you saying, something big to see around here, where is it?”
Hıdır Arif swore under his breath and said, “We already passed it. That was the clock tower, Big Ben.”
And just as they were about to eat, a woman came crashing down into the long wooden table between them. Looking up, they saw that they’d just passed under Tower Bridge. The woman had jumped off the bridge, falling directly onto their boat. And, presumably according to plan, she was dead. The table had been split in two, and Rahime was splayed out on the floor covered in blood, holding a small radio. It was still on. It was stronger than human flesh. “If It Be Your Will” was still playing. Rahime wasn’t wearing her black chador. She’d uncovered herself on the last day of her life. Perhaps she’d had nothing left to hide.
The following day one of the MI5 officers was reading the headline news. “Fuck James Bond!” he grumbled. Pictures of Gido’s bewildered face taken from every angle on a boat covered with the blood of a suicide were all over the front pages. Another paper had an interview with Hıdır Arif:
“We’re not safe in this country! What if this woman had fallen directly onto us? Can’t they at least put a safety net under these bridges! They bleed us for taxes! I have every intention to sue those responsible for this. But God has saved us and we are alive today. I would just like to say to my Muslim brothers that I am fine and there’s no need to worry.”
Kaşıkatlı Seyit Muharrem’s poem, dated 1842 and titled “Hikmet-ül Arz,” was the foundational text of the Hikmet Tariqat:
Your trial will end with your appointed death
Dismiss your feeble state and disdain finality
You may take lives in self-defense
But you must never take your own
As long as you exist you will stay
In life and in peace of mind
Not cruelty nor blasphemy nor adultery
But suicide is the greatest sin in this world
Do you not know to whom your breath belongs?
Do you not prostrate yourself until you are underground?
Not lies nor hypocrisy nor lust
But suicide is the only betrayal of God
As you have come when you were called
So you will go upon being called
If you rebel and cast your own rope
You will vanish in a void blacker than coal
So the first victory in your trial, do not forget,
It is to be patient till your appointed death …
Like all organizations that derive their power from the masses and then create a functional set of rules to command them, the Hikmet Tariqat held that committing suicide meant eternal damnation. The existence and preservation of the Tariqat depended on the existence of its members. And those who died not in the name of the cause but in their own name were good for nothing. That’s why the Tariqat members rejected Rahime’s corpse. She had committed suicide and in her final breath her face was unveiled for the world to see. But even more damning than that was the fact that in her selfish act she almost killed a superior being—Hıdır Arif—and the sect could not forgive that.
It didn’t take long to think the matter through before rejecting Rahime in every way. But Ubeydullah honored his late wife. “There will be a funerary prayer. If necessary, I’ll do it myself!” he said to himself, because all his supporters had left him. As a result of the general opinion on Rahime’s suicide, his otherwise busy, social world suddenly went cold.
Bezir went with Ubeydullah to collect Rahime’s body from the hospital morgue. She was buried in a Muslim cemetery in North London. Bezir arranged everything to please his father. He arranged everything according to Muslim tradition, from the funeral shroud to the washing of the body. After the funeral, Ubeydullah was no longer at peace in his apartment. His heart ached and he felt a new shortness of breath.
Derdâ begged Bezir to take her to the funeral. In a rage, Bezir slapped her across the face so hard that she fell to the floor. She cried; she cried like she never cried before. She screamed and pounded the carpet with the palms of her hands. She had no strength left to bear such oppression. She stood up and ran to the window. She opened it and screamed, “I’ll jump! I swear, I’ll jump!”
Bezir stared at her, silent. Then he turned to leave, but at the door he paused and then walked back into the living room and stood in the doorway staring at Derdâ, her one leg suspended outside the building. Silence. It was as if he was waiting for her to jump and die. Suddenly his massive frame buckled and Ubeydullah appeared behind him. The old man had punched his son’s back with untold violence. Bezir turned and fell to the floor, not because of the power or pain of the sudden blow, but because he had been hit by his father. He hunched his shoulders and lowered his head, and though well over two hundred pounds, Bezir looked like a little ball crumpled up on the floor.
Ubeydullah was crying like a child. He’d loved Rahime. He’d lost his first wife to breast cancer and Bezir was his only son. Though he was thirty-six years older than Rahime, he had loved her dearly all the same. In a way that he loved all human beings—with compassion. He loved her both as his wife and as a child. He might have been the reason she took her
