When she heard that Bezir had been murdered Derdâ didn’t feel a thing. But an hour later she started to cry when she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. And she couldn’t stop. The tears came from somewhere deep inside her, she was heaving tears. “Why?” she said to herself through her quivering lips. “Why, why, why …” Then slowly she pulled herself together. She composed her face and she dried the tears on her cheeks. She answered her own question in a whisper: “Why didn’t I kill him myself?”
Then she laughed at herself in the mirror. She wondered what Bezir would do if he could see her now. What would he say? Would he beat her? Would he kill her? Would he throw her out the window?
Derdâ shouted at the mirror: “You couldn’t do shit to me! Nothing! I’m right here! Come on you fucking son of a bitch! Here I am! You checked out, you bastard! You got the fuck out of here!”
She went through all the foul language she’d learned from Nazenin. She hadn’t had the chance to learn anything new. When Bezir’s image in the mirror faded, leaving only Derdâ’s own reflection, the bathroom was still and Steven quietly moved away from the door and tiptoed down the corridor.
Derdâ could’ve stayed for five more years in that bathroom saying to the mirror what she hadn’t said for the past five years. But instead she took one final look in the mirror and said, “Fuck!” And she left. It was her last conversation with Bezir: a conversation without Bezir.
Like all addicts, Stanley could crunch figures faster than a calculator. He was sure that Derdâ had close to three thousand pounds. She was still wearing the same T-shirt, which meant she probably hadn’t spent much of the money she’d saved up. Stanley wasn’t sure how to approach her about it. So he decided to wait as he slowly finished his last few grams of heroin.
One night Stanley got the lucky break he was waiting for—Derdâ came into his room to bum a cigarette.
“I’m all out,” said Stanley, “but I do have this.” and he took a bag of heroin out of a metal box by his bed and shook it in the air like a little bell. Taking a step toward the silent bell, Derdâ asked him what it was. The answer came to her in full force ten minutes later. And from then on Derdâ had no reservations whatsoever about spending her money to get the exact same answer over and over again. She went to Stanley’s room every day. She didn’t wince at the sight of the needle over her arm because she’d been convinced by the almost-two-hour-long speech Stanley had given her. He sounded like a salesman pitching a state-of-the-art vacuum cleaner. Derdâ had been locked up for five years, a total of sixty months, close to two thousand days, almost forty-five thousand hours. And this gave her forty-five thousand reasons! Forty-five thousand reasons why she watched with curious eyes as the needle punctured her skin. She had forty-five thousand reasons to do anything, except suicide. Not that. She wasn’t going to die. To compensate for those five years, she was going to live another fifty, no, another five hundred years. But if she kept on visiting Stanley’s room, she’d have to make do with only a couple of years before her eyes closed on this world.
Meanwhile, she continued with her English lessons. She had ordered Steven never to speak Turkish again. She remembered the grammar she’d learned from her books. Now she only needed practice. She was in the test-drive phase. But when it came to heroin, the test-drive phase was different. It wasn’t like any new car that you could test drive and then just walk away from without buying. A test-drive with heroin only ended in a crash. If the driver was still alive, he had to buy the wreck. He had to pay the price of surviving the accident. The price was a lifelong struggle to never crash again. But for now, Derdâ was still in the early days, just gazing out the window, enjoying the view. There were no obstacles on the horizon and so it never occurred to her that she’d eventually crash. But her money was running out. In a way, that wasn’t a problem because Black T at the Finsbury tube station always helped her out. He always gave Derdâ a discount when she and Stanley went up to see him for a fix. They were neighbors.
Then time sped up and it seemed fragmented. Days, sometimes weeks, passed without either of them realizing it, and soon there were obstacles all over the horizon.
Everyone had sat down for dinner. With a smile on his face, Steven looked at his son and Derdâ. He no longer had any idea who Derdâ really was. Both their faces were pale, as pale as northern Europeans. The purple eyes that were once on the young girl’s back were now on her nostrils, which had trouble taking in air. Steven was serving pasta.
Sitting down, he said triumphantly, “I have a new idea.”
Worried by the enthusiasm in his voice, Stanley and Derdâ exchanged glances.
“What if we gave chadors a local brand name and produced them ourselves. Of course, they’d be the standard black, just like the one I have on now, but we could have a brand somewhere here on the chest, like ‘Stevens’ … Or …”
Steven went on thinking
