And so no one thinks they’re being entirely absurd. They think they’re speaking honestly when they say it, right in front of the dead. The dead who don’t know anything about it and who couldn’t care less. “Come on then, pour some water, and get rid of those weeds.” Humanity’s fantasy world, the cemetery remains intact. And children were the Peter Pans of that fantasy world. They all looked so much alike that brothers couldn’t be told apart. In the eyes of the adult world it was like they stayed the same, never growing up.
A child, so it is said, grows up when he learns about death. But such sentiments were meaningless at the cemetery. Because if you grow up by learning about death, what happens if you make money cleaning tombs? Do six-year-olds hope to grow? Will it make Süreyya taller so she can jump down off the wall? How big could they get? They’re like the dead themselves. They don’t grow or change. And if they are the dead, then the world underground is the mirror equivalent of the world above it. Everyone’s dead and that’s that. But that’s not the way it worked out. The kids fell asleep on the tombs they cleaned, but nothing was going to happen. While they started up a game of hide-and-seek as the sun went down, nothing was going to happen. They didn’t feel a thing. Nothing was missing, nothing was wrong. They were the first to notice. Maybe the thing that was missing or wrong was just that they never felt anything.
Whatever it was, they just didn’t think that a cemetery and its tombs were that important. They weren’t afraid of the dead coming back to life or of ghosts. The only thing they were afraid of was bad weather on a holiday. The only thing they were afraid of was a rainy holiday when people who normally flooded into the cemetery would say, “It’s going to be nothing but mud there,” and not bother to come to the fantasy world they called a cemetery. Besides that, they could care so little about the dead and anything about death, that, sticking flowers left on the tear-soaked earth behind their ears, they tried to break the record for hopping from one tomb to the next without touching the ground.
The oldest was twelve years old. The littlest ones were six. They were a thousand dark years away from mothers holding their children as they watched horror films set in cemeteries. The cemetery wall was always there right behind them. Maybe later on they would all come together somehow. Those inside the walls and those outside. One would be a teacher, the other a school janitor. One a judge, the other a clerk. One a doctor, the other a blood salesman. One a prosecutor, the other a lying witness. One an architect, the other a laborer. One a pianist, the other a piano mover. One a member of parliament, the other selling simit at rallies. One a mistress, the other a son of a bitch. But which would be which? Has any research ever been done? Any scholarly article written? Has any work been done to compile the statistics that mark the relationship between people who spend their childhoods washing tombstones and their future career choices? Or do they even know the word “career”? They don’t have a choice, anyway. In short, if a person starts to earn money from the dead from the age of six, what do they do later in life? Derda had an idea on the topic.
“I’m going to search for buried treasure. There’s treasure buried around here. But no one knows where.”
The others were quiet, listening. The topic was sufficiently intriguing.
“What treasure?”
Derda grinned like he was the master of all the world’s secrets.
“You’ll find out when you’re older.”
The kid he said that to was two years younger than he was. His name was Remzi and if he ever took an intelligence test, his family would be called into a special meeting to be told their son was a genius. But Remzi had never even been to school. He’d taught himself how to read and count and add by reading the inscriptions on the tombstones. He’d memorized all the names, birth dates, and dates of death on all the tombstones. Without even really noticing he was doing it. Now he was listening to Derda, but at the same time his busy mind was trying to add up the number of letters in the sentence he’d just listened to with the number he was about to say.
“That’s great but …”
“Incoming! Incoming!”
Remzi’s calculations were left up in the air. Four cars rolled in through the gate. The first to see them sounded the alert. The kids leapt up; many started to run. Remzi could have finished his sentence, but he needed money, too. Just as much as the others. He got up and ran after the others, shaking the numbers out of his head. They were all gone. In any case, in a few years, not very many, if he just kept doing what he was doing, his talents would evaporate one by one and he’d be nothing more than any other ordinary man. Anyway, it wasn’t anything to be afraid of. But he didn’t know that. And then he couldn’t really stop his mind from racing even if he wanted to. Even now he was thinking about which of the cemetery’s 7,226 tombstones the treasure could be buried under. Then he visualized each and every one, one at a time. Maybe that’s why he didn’t see what was in front of him. He ran straight into the marble of a family tomb and fell down.
He looked at his bleeding elbow then looked up and yelled, “Hey, wait for me!”
Everyone heard. But no one waited.
“What else can we do, Hasibe?” said the woman.
She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She put her arms around Hasibe’s shoulders,
