“Come on, help me out here,” said Derda. He hauled the tanks up by the handles and started to walk. Isa took the third and followed him. It was no easy task to get the tanks over the wall. At one point Derda said, “I’m going to break open a hole in the wall so I can go in and out. I’m tired of jumping over.”
“We have an axe,” said Isa. “It’s my dad’s. Maybe we can smash the hole open with that.”
They were on the other side of the wall. Their hands on their knees, catching their breath. Between gasps for air, Derda asked:
“You have an axe?”
After Isa left the cemetery, Derda went home and tried to scrub the blood off the concrete floor with pieces he ripped off the foam rubber mattress. When he saw a piece of mattress wasn’t absorbing any more, he tossed it into a trash bag at his side and ripped off another. He used the entire foam rubber mattress to erase all trace of the blood. Its stench had seeped into the sheets wrapped around the rotting flesh, and it was in every corner of the house, never to be removed, although the blood itself was no longer there. Derda was exhausted. A kid of ten and one years old. All the strength in his body and all the innocence inside him had been used up. He took off his T-shirt, balled it up, put it under his head, and lay down on the concrete. He rolled onto his side and pulled his knees up to his stomach. A while later, because there was no mother’s womb to curl up into, he stretched his legs out, and stretching for the last time, he fell asleep.
He knew the first lump he picked up was his mother’s left foot. It was the last piece he’d wrapped up so it was at the top of the flesh pile. As much as he could see of the world through the house’s two small windows, the world was light blue. Those hours when the sun’s color mixes into the night. He left the house and jumped over the wall and landed in the cemetery with the lump of flesh and the lid of a pan in his hand. Twenty meters ahead, twelve tombs were all lined up in a row. It was the row of tombs closest to the cemetery wall. No doubt one day those twenty empty meters of space would be filled in, but for now the dead didn’t quite reach Derda’s house. From where he stood, Derda saw nothing but marble tombstones. Marble slabs inscribed with the names of the dead. Marble signs showing where their owners lay on the other side.
The morning ezan from the cemetery mosque was thrown into the winds by the loudspeakers hung in tree branches. Derda was scared. He knew he had hardly any time left. He thought he should put some sort of marker to remember where he’d buried the pieces. But he had no time to figure out what and now the light blue world was starting to wrap around him. Then it came to him. The idea to use the tombstones as markers. Marble slabs. On one side of the tombstones lay the buried coffin with the owner of the tomb. And behind it on the other side he could mix his mother’s pieces into the earth. He went to the foot of the tomb farthest to the left facing the wall and started to dig like his life depended on it. Holding the pan lid with both hands, he dug out the earth until he had made a hole an arm’s length deep. He dropped his mother’s left foot in and pushed the dirt back in with the pan lid. It was covered up. He got to his feet and took two steps back. He was trying to see if you could tell someone had been messing with the dirt. Then he looked up and stared at the tombstone’s inscription. Letters and numbers. A few seconds. He didn’t bother staring at it any longer. Whatever he did know, Derda did not know how to read or write. He turned around and ran and reached the wall in one bound, leaping over it like a creature of the night. Like nothing had happened. Like an insect scurrying into his home.
That morning he went over the wall eight more times. Four times out, four times back. When it was really morning, he knew the cemetery kids would start coming. He couldn’t risk digging any more holes so he stopped for the day. Half of his mother was at the foot of the first five tombstones from the left. The other half was in a pile behind the front door. Derda took two steps and collapsed. Letting the dirty pan lid fall to the ground, he curled his arm into a pillow under his head. He didn’t sleep; he passed out. He hadn’t eaten for two days.
In his dream, he was in the orphanage. He’d never seen it. He didn’t know where it was or what an orphanage looked like. All he knew was what Fevzi had told him. Beds, closets, toilets, and the bigger kids who beat you up. And the hands that would grab you by the neck or ankles at any moment. He didn’t stop for even a second, the whole dream long. He ran between bed and closet and closet and bed but the threat of getting beaten up was always there, following right behind him. Just once, just to see how far away the fingertips clawing at his back were, he looked over his shoulder. And at just that second, he smashed into something with the whole weight of his body. He collapsed, then looked up to see what he’d run into. He saw his mother looming over him. Her eyes were red and
