He tried to stand up. But his head was spinning and he couldn’t get up. Blinded by hunger, slowly he planted himself over his feet and stumbled to the door. He took the key and stepped outside. Three meters away, eight-year-old Süreyya sat on a rock. She had a candy bar. It was like Derda was transfixed. Süreyya was small for her age and couldn’t do anything but cry, but Derda didn’t even notice. He tossed the thick, rich candy bar into his mouth and watched the little girl as he chewed. And then he started to hear again. First Süreyya’s tears, then Süreyya’s mother’s screams.
“You trying to be like your dad, you dog?”
The woman could have reached him in four steps, but she took the fifth to get more momentum to slap Derda. The slap jolted Derda awake.
“Where’s your mother?” the woman yelled.
Then she turned, looked straight at the house, and yelled, “Havva! Get out here and look what your shit of a son did!”
She held Süreyya’s elbow while she kicked at Derda on the ground. But she was wearing slippers so her kicks weren’t too fast or too hard.
“She’s not there!” Derda managed to say. “My mom’s not home!”
“What do you mean, she’s not there?”
The woman stopped kicking and pulled Süreyya onto her lap.
“She went to the hospital,” Derda said. He hadn’t even considered what he’d say if anyone asked about his mother. “They put her in the hospital.”
All at once the woman pitied Derda. It must have been a record of going from crying to smiling. Like a seed flittering through the air, the journey from hate to pity in under a second.
“What are you going to do?”
Derda got up and, like all the kids did, brushed off the dust that kicked up and fell all around the cemetery houses. Whatever there was in the earth there; there was death. The dust of death was in the air. He didn’t want to infect anyone with it.
“I’m going back and forth. She’s Ok now. They say she’ll be out soon.”
“Do you have food and everything?” the woman asked. She was still rocking the whimpering Süreyya on her side. Then she got fed up and gave the girl’s cheek a light slap and chided her with a “quiet, you!”
“There’s some, but it won’t last long,” said Derda.
“Come over tonight. I’ll give you something.”
Derda said “Ok” out loud to her, but “tonight?” inside to himself. Tonight wasn’t soon enough. There were hours still before the sun would set. Derda watched Süreyya and her mother walk away and slip inside their house and decided he needed to find a job. He had to earn some money. With money, he could buy bread. Maybe even a little cheese. Whatever he could. He realized he’d forgotten his work kit, his tanks and brush, and he went back home. He felt so faint he swayed as he walked. The candy bar hadn’t been enough. His head was still spinning.
The cemetery kids gathered in the shade of the trees around the central fountain, laughing. The boys joked with each other, sitting on the marble borders around the graves. The girls picked the blooms off the stems of flowers that relatives of the dead had left and were sticking them in their hair. Some still weren’t old enough to go to school. Some had never been to school. Others came to the cemetery after school. There was no time for homework. Everyone had some reason why they had to work. But there wasn’t any industrial park, nor any busy main street where they could sell packs of tissues anywhere near there. All they had was the cemetery. Their world was the cemetery, thousands of square kilometers of cemetery.
If they’d lived in a country where people burn their dead and only have to look up at the sky to remember them, they couldn’t have made even 5 kuruş. But in the city where they were born, those still living remembered their dead by going to the last place the dead were seen—the cemetery—and standing at the head of their graves, blowing their noses a few times, and giving a little money to have the marble washed and scrubbed. This was where the kids came into the picture, armed and ready with their plastic brushes and tanks of water. They were opportunists who knew how to watch the visitor for that moment of weakness as they stood remembering the dead. They knew just when to plant themselves in front of them and stick out their little hands to collect money from the pity tree.
Their business was a side industry to life. Like the bond between life and what comes after, an added layer of communication between the living and the dead. People expected that the children, less than a meter and a half tall, blinking their eyes meaningfully, would pray for the peaceful rest of the dead, in exchange for the tips. If that’s what they were hoping for, then people must not rest, in peace or otherwise, when they die. In many cases it’s not until they die that they wake up, their eyes as wide as life preservers. For these people, there’s no such thing as “resting in peace.” Especially since they can’t even sleep anymore. But for everyone, the situation two meters under is totally different than the situation up top. The truth down below: worms, bugs, and lots and lots of flesh. The fantasy on the surface: “Rest in peace, Dad,” “Sleep in light, my love,” and
