His mother had done her best to protest but his father wanted to make the most of the little money he had. And so he built their house right up against the cemetery wall because the total cost of the house would be one wall less. It was just like the other houses around them. Some people called this sort of house a gecekondu, a homemade house built illegally under the cover of night. But his mother could never stop saying it was “just like a coffin.” She lived cooped up in that house until her death, from cancer, just the day before. Just one of the two hundred thousand who suffer from eye cancer. Maybe looking at that wall did it to her. The cancer made the woman forget how to see, made her forget her own name, then even how to breathe. The only thing she didn’t forget was how to say the house was “just like a coffin.” Even after she went blind, she still could see the wall by running her hand over the contours of its stones.
She died on her floor mattress with Derda by her side. She called him to her side just before she died. “Come here.” Derda came to her side, and then she died. As if she wanted to say, “Come here and see how a person dies.” And so Derda saw. He even cried a little. But then he pulled himself together and got to his feet. His plan was to go to their cemetery wall neighbors and pound on their doors until their doors broke down. But he stopped at his first step as if in revolt. He’d remembered Fevzi. Fevzi who’d run away from the orphanage. Fevzi who’d run away from the orphanage and started living in the cemetery. “Don’t tell anyone, but …” He remembered the beginning of his story. “Ten guys jump a guy, you know? They’d say they’d be back to do it again. I was so scared I never went into the bathroom again. I hid bags behind the closets. Then I’d shit in them at night.” So ended his terrible tale of shameful cowardice. What if … Derda said to himself. What if they find out my mother’s dead? They’ll send me to the orphanage, too. My dad’s already in jail. But instead of sitting and worrying, Derda came up with a plan. No one knew his mother was dead. Well, then, there was no need for anyone to find out. I’ll bring her to the cemetery and I’ll bury her! he thought. If the floor of the house hadn’t been poured concrete, he would have buried her then and there. But it wasn’t a shovel that was going to make her coffin.
He clambered up the wall, gripping the hand-sized hollows worn into the surface, then jumped down to the other side and walked along the side of his house, fighting his way through the tangled branches of a fig tree. He turned the corner and came to the front door of his house. He took the key from his pocket and was about to insert it into the lock when a creeping scent hit his nostrils. When he opened the door, the source was all too clear. His mother was rotting. He had to find a way to get the corpse to the other side of the wall, and fast, and then bury it in the first loose earth he could find. But Derda’s mother weighed twice as much as he did. She could rot all she liked, but she’d still be eighty kilos. He had barely been able to roll her off her mattress and onto the floor. The night before he’d pushed her onto the floor and slipped into her bed. He hadn’t cried too much. The woman had been sick for eight months and for eight months she hadn’t been to a doctor or a hospital. She’d been dying right before his very eyes. Derda had gotten used to it. The woman had prepared him. “If anything happens to me, tell the neighbors,” she said. “They’re good for nothing, but tell them just the same. They should tell your dad, too, he should know. Have them bury me somewhere around here. No point sending me back to the village. And tell them I hope God damns them all!”
Since her husband had gone to prison not one of them had come over to see them. Even when they knew she was sick, they couldn’t take the twenty steps to go visit her. What Derda made working at the cemetery didn’t really let them live, but it kept them alive. In a word, they’d been abandoned. To themselves and to their own survival. “It’s all your father’s fault,” the woman would say. “Because of him they won’t even look us in the eye!” Before she fell ill, she’d sold dill at the market. Yasin, the guard at the cemetery, got the dill from a relative of his. But when that relative started asking for the woman instead of money, she dropped the dill and the market.
Derda’s father had been in prison for six years. Like he told Isa, his father had killed his best friend, his blood brother, Derda the Arab. They met at a cockfight. They’d both bet on the same cock. But it turned out to be the wrong cock. Both of them were incensed they’d lost the last lonely kuruş rattling around in their pockets, and they both got the idea into their heads to cut up both the winning cock and
