Holding up his chador so he wouldn’t trip over himself, Steven scurried over to Derdâ who told him to bring her a lighter. Steven raced to the kitchen and came back with a box of matches. Derdâ put the cigarette between her lips and watched Steven light her cigarette. Steven was so excited that his hands were trembling. He clumsily snapped the first two matches in half, but he finally managed to light his master’s cigarette. Derdâ began to smoke in perhaps the most unusual of circumstances.
She took her first drag and coughed twice, and after the next drag, only once. After that, she never coughed again. The inside of the china cabinet was lined with mirrors inside and Derdâ’s eyes were stuck on the image of her long hair like a fishhook stuck in seaweed. She couldn’t take her eyes off her hair. She stared and stared. And stared. She snuffed out the cigarette in a souvenir plate with windmills from Amsterdam and made for the kitchen.
She looked at Steven in the bathroom mirror. She stared at his hands, at the scissors in his hands. First her braid fell to the floor, and then he cut off the rest of her hair. Steven’s eyes found her eyes in the mirror. They asked her if he’d cut enough. But her hair still bothered her. As long as she had hair on her head she’d feel naked in public. “All of it!” she commanded. “Cut it all off. And then you’ll shave my head.”
Steven put down the scissors and finished the job with a razor. He rubbed the remnants of the shaving cream off Derdâ’s bald scalp with a towel and tears welled up in the young girl’s eyes. But she was determined not to let Steven see her cry. She was, after all, his master. She could not cry in front of him. She slid her hands over her scalp. It seemed like an entirely different person was staring back at her from inside the mirror. For a moment, she wondered what her mother would say if she saw her like this, but she stopped herself, straightened, and lit another cigarette. She could stop herself from staring into the mirror, but she couldn’t stop feeling the top of her naked head.
That night she smoked the whole pack. And with each breath she felt a little better, as if she were born again, as if she bore the bald head of a newborn baby on her shoulders. She no longer had hair and so she no longer felt like she needed to cover her head. She wished she’d shaved her head years ago.
For the next few weeks Steven adopted Rahime’s role and Derdâ became Bezir—communicating mainly with her fists—and they rarely left the house. Deep down, both of them felt ashamed, though they never talked about it. Indirectly encouraging one another to be more independent in their new roles, they were able to reluctantly venture outside. They went to the local supermarket. Steven had become comfortable with his new identity much more easily than he’d thought he would. After all, only his blue eyes were visible. People only realized he was a man when he spoke. When he asked for an extra bag in the supermarket, or when he couldn’t make out the expiration date of a product and had to ask a supermarket employee for help.
But there was another reason why people were staring at Steven. It was something to do with planes. To be exact, planes that were flown into buildings on US soil and caused the death of several thousand people just in New York City alone. The September 11th attacks. That’s why he attracted attention, and the attention of his neighbors in particular. Ever since he moved into the neighborhood, Steven had had little contact with them. They despised Rahime from the beginning, but their principles didn’t allow them to express their feelings. After all, in Crouch End people didn’t have anything against homosexuals or transvestites. Their liberal views and tolerance toward all walks of life and lifestyles was a point of pride. They felt they were an example for all of humankind. They wouldn’t have ostracized Steven even if he had dressed up like a little girl. But, like every human being, they had to have someone to outcast. And those planes came at just the right time to satisfy this fundamental need, just at a time when there was nothing left that they could demonize, right at a time when respect and tolerance in society was becoming too overbearing for them, just at that very time in history when it was considered inappropriate to malign someone because of his or her appearance. They hated Rahime the moment they saw her. You could see their true feelings in their faces. Scorning Muslims had become a kind of sport in England, a sport more popular than cricket, even before 9/11. And everyone wanted a part of the game. What’s more, the winners were rewarded with a very special prize for initiating a struggle based on the basest urges and a bonus medal for their nationalism. They were both racist and progressive at the same time. Who wouldn’t want that?
So the time that Steven decided to don his black chador was at the least ideal point in history. But he quickly learned not to care. And Derdâ got used to her bald head and to smoking. In the daytime, she studied English, and at night, they watched Derdâ’s films or other films of the same genre. Apart from that, they remained strangers. Steven had long since given up on his
