Anne put on her pair and handed the other to Derdâ, saying, “Now we can take our picture and send it to a magazine. We look pretty sexy!”
On the fifth day of the twelfth week they sat silently together with their backs against one of the bell-bottom plane trees.
“Have you noticed?” asked Anne.
“What?”
“How much stronger you are. I’ve seen so many people in your situation who would never do the things you’re doing now. You’re the bravest person I’ve known here, and the strongest. Do you know what this means when you get back to real life?”
“I don’t,” Derdâ said, running her hand up and down a black thorn jutting out from one of the branches above her head.
“I do. So tell me, what are you planning to do when you get out of here?”
Derdâ’s testimony in court covered far more than what the MI5 officers had ever hoped for and had a dramatic effect on the judge who, instead of granting a residence permit, offered Derdâ UK citizenship. She would live out the rest of her life as an English woman. But the MI5 had acted too early. At the end of the seven-month trial, only nine members of the Fighting Wolves (all minors, including Black T) and a few of Bezir’s kickboxers had been convicted. They had planned to extradite Gido Agha from Turkey, but he had fled to Iran. As for Hıdır Arif, he was bound to let the world know all about the charges leveled against him.
Every time he was interviewed on TV, he reverted to the same old refrain: “This bogus trial has nothing to do with me. It’s an attack on all of Islam, and it is fated to lose.”
The Dulluhan brothers made plans to move their Westminster base to Dublin. They first cut a deal among themselves, and later Hıdır Arif made a deal with the British, suspecting they wanted to bring them down. But it wasn’t long before Hıdır Arif’s office was raided. During the raid, Hıdır Arif tried to take cover behind his glass globe. He took eight bullets, but survived. He believed that a piece of the holy black Hacer-ül Esved stone that was knocked out of the shattered globe had saved his life. Three years later, he died of a heart attack on top of a thirteen-year-old girl whose photograph was too good to turn down. It was just three days before he planned to announce himself as the new prophet.
The Dulluhan brothers tried their best to manipulate politics in Ireland. But they were frustrated in their efforts and began fighting among themselves, down to the lowest-ranking foot soldiers. One brother was gunned down by a rising IRA militant—someone they had recently supplied with two thousand Glocks. The brother didn’t die but lived out the rest of his life with a bullet in his skull, a bullet that wouldn’t grant him access to his own name, the ability to stand up, to move his fingers or blink his eyes.
So the best thing that came out of Derdâ’s trial was UK citizenship. Many countries, the US included, saw citizenship as something that could be offered through a lotto played out on the Internet. But the reality was that citizenship granted to someone like that—just given away—was never a source of true happiness. You can see this in the faces of all the immigrants that somehow ended up in England. Or in the surprise most Americans would express if you told them that the miserable lives they were eking out in their own country were given away as the top prize in an Internet lottery.
Noticing her silence, Anne asked again, “What are you going to do when you leave?”
Derdâ answered, as if ashamed of confessing her love.
“I’ll miss you.”
“Anything else?”
“I’ll find out where you live?”
“And?”
“I’ll come and sleep in your garden.”
“And?”
“No, I’ll just stand there. I’m going to stand in front of your door with lowered head and my hands crossed, like a miserable child.”
“Ok. And then?”
“Then you won’t be able to stand it for very long and you’ll have to let me in.”
“Fine, but tell me this. How long would you wait outside like that?”
“How long could you make me wait?”
Anne nodded her head. There were tears in her eyes. She put her hand on Derdâ’s shoulder.
“We’re going to finish this together,” she said and then hugged her.
Tears fell from their eyes. From then on Anne had a daughter and Derdâ had a mother. Just then, Saniye felt a sharp pain pierce her heart. She didn’t know why. It must be all this hard work with the animals, she thought, all this damn work at the house and with the animals.
Derdâ’s face between Anne’s hands beamed with her first smile in twelve weeks.
Derdâ got dressed and left her room. She had finally freed herself of heroin. She took the first step in the right direction on her last day in Hope, when descending the stairs to the first floor. Making her way down the winding staircase, she saw the crowd below. She felt like the mysterious and beautiful girl who had come late to the ball. They all looked up at her with pride. But there was something akin to jealousy in the eyes of other addicts. And there was a hint of hopelessness in the eyes of the doctors and therapists, because they had witnessed on countless occasions such celebratory beginnings end in countless addicts lurching back to their former lives before finishing even the
