According to the recollections of people who lived behind the warehouse, it all started with a proclamation: “Now we’re blood brothers.” Then they worked together in their great struggle against poverty. As representatives of the oldest crime tradition—mugging—they’d hang low in the same shadowy spot then jump out at the pedestrians most likely to have fat wallets. Mugging means excessive violence for little money. Mugging means jumping out in front of guys who might be armed themselves, who might not even have fat wallets. Mugging means jumping out with your eyes closed and wishing for just a shred of luck. In the old days, in the oldest style of mugging, it was only children and idiots who would even try it.
One drunken night, at the end of a few years of filling the world’s quota of dim-witted muggers, Derda’s dad and Derda the Arab decided to hold up one last guy on the way back to their cemetery homes. But before they were deep in the deed, Derda’s dad remembered having kissed their victim’s hand a week before on a holiday visit. He was an old man. So he said, “It’s ok. Let him go.” But Derda the Arab wasn’t having it. He cursed the old man and beat him up, but then the soberer of the two men stabbed his partner in crime in the heart. Derda’s dad was left standing. He pulled out the bloody knife, looked around him, and saw the old man struggling desperately on the ground. Then he heard someone, a witness, running toward him. One from a knife wound, the other from a heart attack. There he was in the middle of corpses, calculating which way he should run. He didn’t realize he was surrounded by six sweaty young men fresh from a match on the astroturf pitch. They’d lost 8–1 and they worked out their revenge by pummeling Derda’s dad until the police came. Who could believe that Derda’s father killed his partner to save an elderly neighbor? And so he was damned by the law and damned by his neighbors in the cemetery houses. Derda’s curse had been that his father had gotten drunk enough to name him Derda. And it was only a matter of time before his wife was infected by the curse, too. A few days.
Derda looked at the house’s cemetery wall, thinking. Mostly he was thinking about how he’d be able to hide a bag behind the closet and then shit in it in a dark dormitory. That and exactly what Fevzi meant when he said, “They hold you in twenty places and fuck you in one.”
He needed a knife. A big one. Then he gave up on that idea. This isn’t a job for a knife, he thought to himself. I need a saw. Then he gave up on that, too. An axe. “That’s it,” he said. “I’ll chop up my mom up with an axe. Then I can bury her. Piece by piece.”
But it wasn’t that easy for Derda to find an axe. First he asked the neighbors. And he didn’t lie. “I need it for my mom.” No one had one. And even if they’d had one, they would have shut their doors and buried themselves inside one way or another just the same. “What are you going to do with an axe? Is your mother still sick? Is your bastard of a father still alive? Tell your mother, nothing before he pays his dues!” He always answered in the same way. He just nodded. There was only one person left to ask. The cemetery guard Yasin. Derda ran. He wiped the sweat on his forehead at the door to the wooden guardhouse near the cemetery gates. He didn’t know how to knock at the door so he just yelled, “Brother Yasin!” He waited at the door. Yasin stuck his head out of the window. He’d just woken up from his afternoon nap and whenever he just woke up he was in a foul mood. There was nothing in this world worth waking up for.
“What?”
“Brother, do you have an axe?”
“What’re you going to do with an axe, boy?”
It was like “yes” and “no” weren’t in the language.
Derda gave an exact copy of what he’d heard his mother say—that is, when she could still speak—countless times.
“To chop the branches off the trees near our house. We can barely walk through the garden …”
First Yasin tried to get what he was going on about. But he realized he hadn’t been listening to what the kid had been saying anyway, so with a “No axe!” he pulled his head back inside the guardhouse. Derda watched the empty window for a few seconds before he ran out of the cemetery. He ran to the end of the street and straight into the hardware store. But as soon as he went in he came right back out.
