The walls of Stanley’s bedroom echoed with cries of pain and pleasure, but the leather and steel accessories there were mere details, details to help victims get in the mood. In the real world there were telephone cards, briefcases, neckties, handbags that came with free perfume samples, glasses you wore just because they looked cool, color contacts, hair dyes, brochures for epilation at discount prices, and sports equipment bought to lose weight in the privacy of your own home but kept stashed away in the bedroom. The ears of bad children that get used to being yanked as they’re yanked more and more, the steady rise in radiation levels, two-bedroom ground floor apartments bought on thirty-year payment plans; doing all the shopping on installment plans, the rule of law, police batons, food that gives you cancer, cigarettes that do the same—not to mention all the secondhand smoke—and the porcelain caps on the divinely radiant smiles of political and religious leaders. Words like “please” and “thank you” and the entreaties and apologies that always follow the very real violence of the real world. So it wasn’t unhealthy for a person to accept his or her relationship with life for what it was—mostly painful, rarely pleasurable—and play the game according to its rules.
As some psychologists vapidly say to patients who participate in nights of S&M—it’s only about understanding what’s what. These tendencies aren’t only the traumatic consequences of molestation or violation experienced in childhood. It was life itself that was traumatic, all of it, the whole damn thing. And especially all those things which on the surface don’t really seem traumatic—like being born. In other words, postpartum depression isn’t a psychological illness particular to new mothers; a state of depression was life itself, the compulsion to go on living, in spite of life.
Stanley watched Mitch and Derdâ until he couldn’t stand it anymore. He got up, took off his clothes, and then bent over Mitch’s greasy, tattooed back and pushed himself inside him. Derdâ began beating both of them at the same time. She’d beaten Mitch so badly that he probably wouldn’t be able to walk after it was all done. He put his clothes on and pulled out a twenty-pound note from his leather jacket and tossed it onto Stanley’s bed. Derdâ wasn’t amused. Despite the dark and ugly decor in the room, she found the gesture distasteful. Maybe she just didn’t think it was respectful to toss money like that at the queen. From now on, it’ll be different, she thought, and she turned to Stanley who had finally come to his senses.
“Your name?”
“Stanley.”
Thus, she finally learned the name of the blue-eyed man she’d dreamed would save her from Bezir. Stanley would save her, although not quite in the way she initially imagined. Stanley will collect the money from now on, she thought. I won’t touch it. Like most people with powerful imaginations, Derdâ had no understanding of money.
After the redheaded walrus left the apartment, she gave Stanley—as she’d promised—one of the two ten-pound notes. Derdâ went home and examined the bank note; she was curious about the woman wearing the crown. She’d seen her somewhere before. Once upon a time she’d thrown up on that face.
Six days later, Mitch came back—this time with a camera. They’d told Derdâ about the plan in advance. They had her kneel before Bezir’s lectern, intently focused on the open Koran, the heavy-framed photograph of the Kaaba featured prominently before her. Then Stanley came into the living room in a full latex suit. That’s when they’d start rolling film. They had it all planned out.
Derdâ remained motionless for a few minutes on her knees before the lectern. Then she began to slowly sway from side to side as she moved her lips, pretending to recite from the Koran, although her words were unintelligible. Then Stanley entered the room. His hands were handcuffed behind his back. He stopped two paces away from the lectern. Derdâ’s eyes rose slowly to meet his. She shut the Koran and stood up. As she rose she picked up a forty-centimeter-long rubber horse whip she had beside the Koran. She approached Stanley, then unzipped one of the many zippers slashed across his latex suit. A piece of uncircumcised flesh rolled out. Stanley did everything in his power to remain flaccid. Derdâ lifted lightly the tip of the lifeless flesh with her whip and Mitch zoomed in on Derdâ’s eyes for a close-up. Derdâ shook her head and coolly said, “No, no, no.” Then she snipped the air with her fingers as scissors. She opened and closed them three times.
Stanley’s flesh was quickly swelling with blood and Derdâ snapped it with the end of her whip. Then she squinted at the sign on the armchair behind Mitch. She’d written her line on a large piece of paper and practiced it over and over with Stanley. It was barely intelligible through her thick Turkish accent.
“I will circumcise you,” she said. In Derdâ’s thick foreign accent the words were all the more sexy.
From then on, neither Derdâ of Yatırca nor Stanley of London spoke. They only groaned. One threatened and the other groaned in fear. What happens between East and West, happened then between Derdâ and Stanley. Threat and supplication. Punishment and reward. Apathy and violence. Sadism and masochism.
Mitch knew he was holding a masterpiece when he burned the CD in his cramped flat. He was right. Within a week the forty-four-minute film of a man’s circumcision by a covered Muslim woman would be the rage through all the dark clubs and the dark houses of London. They would be awestruck
