“Thank you,” Anne said, smiling as she sat down. It was the first question that she asked all addicts. She always wrote down their answers in a little notebook, doing everything she could to better understand them.
“Why don’t you tell me about your experience with heroin?”
Derdâ turned and said, “Why? You thinking of starting?”
Anne smiled.
“Oh no, I’m just wondering what it feels like, that’s all.”
Derdâ stood up and stormed off. Anne followed just behind her. In about a hundred steps, Derdâ stopped and leaned over to Anne to whisper, “You know fireworks, right?”
Coming closer, Anne said, “Of course.”
“They explode like this.”
Derdâ raised her hands and flung open her fingers.
“Yes, I know. All the different colors. I love watching them,” Anne said.
“That’s what it’s like when you’re on heroin …”
Anne interrupted her.
“So you see fireworks, then?”
“No,” Derdâ said. “You are the fireworks!”
Anne hadn’t heard such a powerful description of a feeling in some time. She jotted it down in her notebook later on. She never forgot the expression. She found it incredibly moving.
“What a beautiful way to put it. You know, you should be a writer.”
“Yeah, right,” Derdâ said, sarcastically, with only half a smile on her face.
“Why not? Isn’t writing just another mode of expression? Do you go to school?”
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
Derdâ thought of Fehime from Yatırca.
“Maybe, I don’t know.”
Derdâ turned to Anne.
“I read your file. You’re still young and, believe me, you can do whatever you like. You have a whole life ahead of you.”
Derdâ stopped to think and so did Anne. Derdâ spoke and Anne listened.
“I’m already dead. Can you understand that? Dead! I just haven’t been buried yet, that’s all.”
Anne smiled.
“You seem to be breathing a bit too much for someone who is dead.”
Derdâ was silent. She didn’t think this woman would be able to understand all the things that had happened to her. So she walked away. Her mind was hazy. They had started a new Naltrexone treatment at the center.
She turned and asked, “How do you spell your name?”
Anne knew how addicts suddenly changed conversation. She spelled out her name without hesitation.
Derdâ quickly replied, “In my language, ‘mother’ is written the same way.”
“I know,” said Anne.
“How would you know?”
But suddenly she was sick and the only thing she’d managed to eat at breakfast, some strawberry yogurt, dribbled out of her mouth. She was also on Revia and the side effects included impaired vision, dizziness, fatigue, and nausea. Derdâ could hardly keep anything down, even her own stomach bile. It purged her body, but also her mind of the profanities and the physical suffering she had endured.
After Derdâ gave her last testimony at court, she came back to Hope to start her tenth week of treatment. She occasionally came to group therapy sessions but never spoke to the other addicts. She participated as little as possible in the discussions and waited impatiently for the end. To her mind she had nothing to say. There was no one there capable of understanding her anyway. Only Anne, she thought, only Anne could understand her, if only a little. Anne could understand her suffering, her regret, how she hated life and how she wanted to die, as if Anne had felt the same way too once in her life. Anne could finish Derdâ’s sentences using just the right words. Derdâ hadn’t really loved anyone for years. She couldn’t explain the feelings she had for Anne. She loved her but she didn’t understand why.
Anne had long since accepted the fact that she couldn’t even begin to imagine the weight of all the tragedies Derdâ had suffered. What she saw in Derdâ was a silently flowing waterfall. Anne wanted to wash her weary hands in that waterfall. She thought of this as love.
“Do you see that tree?” Anne asked as she pointed out a hundred-year-old plane tree whose roots were bursting up out of the earth. She paused and then laughed. “They look like bell-bottoms.”
Derdâ was ready to smile but held herself back. A concern emanated from a deep, dark place. If she exposed positive feelings perhaps she would be punished. She was scared of the punishment she would get when Anne left. If she got better, Anne would disappear. So she only nodded.
Anne noticed her silence and putting her arm in Derdâ’s she whispered, “I’ve always wondered about your hair. Did you know that?”
Derdâ ran her hand over her head.
“Do you miss it?” Anne asked.
“I don’t know. I’m afraid of it.”
Following a long silence together, Anne was as convinced of her love for the young girl as she was of the offer she was about to make.
“Do you know what we should do? We should go to your room right now and cut off all my hair. And you’ll do the same. We’ll shave it all off.”
“Are you crazy?” Derdâ said.
“Of course not,” Anne said, smiling. “It’ll grow back. But this time you’ll let yours grow out, too. We’ll do it together. What do you say?”
“I know this trick!” Derdâ said. “It’s no different than the way you just stood there beside me when we first met, trying to pull some pity out of me.”
“Not at all, my dear lady, nothing of the sort. And that wasn’t just a technique. Anyway, what do you say? How about being promoted from skinhead to hippie?”
Derdâ felt ten years old, thinking only of herself, of her own happiness. She thought, if Anne cuts her hair she won’t be able to leave me till it grows back, so she won’t leave me.
“It’s a deal. Let’s go. You ready now?”
Anne pretended to be scared, covering in mouth in surprise. “Oh no …”
“Too late now,” Derdâ said and then, taking hold of a lock of Anne’s blond hair, she shouted, “we’re cutting it all off!”
When everyone at Hope—the therapist, the psychiatrist, the two enormous security guards, the three women in the kitchen, the four cleaning women, and the six members of the board who came every month to
