When he saw that there wasn’t a speck of dust remaining he ran his hand over the tomb and smiled. Then he looked down at the stone path under his feet. Under the path beneath his feet lay his mother’s left rib cage and heart. The path ran between all the tombs, covering all the buried pieces of his mother. He leaned over the tomb and caressed it, whispering, “See you tomorrow.”
Derda was sixteen years old.
“Hey, what’s up?” said Remzi.
“I’m good. You been waiting long?” asked Derda.
“No, no, come on, let’s go.”
They walked out of the cemetery gates. The bus was pulling up to the bus stop and they ran to catch it. They leapt up the two steps onto the bus then stood facing each other, hanging from the leather straps. The first one to speak was the would-be genius of his age, Remzi.
“They pay good money, but the work’s kind of tough.”
“That’s Ok,” said Derda.
“They’re a bit, well, you know, so don’t try to push it or be stubborn or anything.”
“No way, man. What am I going do? Act like an ass? As long as they give me my money, I don’t care. I don’t care about anything else.”
“And,” said Remzi, “if you get on their good side, they’ll give you a sales point, too. And then you’ll earn more.”
“What do you do?”
“I work the machines. In the depot.”
The employers quickly learned the value of Remzi’s talents when they saw him comfortably working with all the complicated machines and mechanisms.
“For now, I’ll just be doing loading, right?” asked Derda.
“Yeah. You get the stuff from the depot and load up the van. Then you deliver the stuff to the sales points. Come on, this is where we get off.”
They got off the bus and started walking down a dismal street off the main road and stopped in front of a three-story building. Remzi grabbed Derda, who was rushing up to the front door.
“Not there, down here,” said Remzi, pointing to a flight of stairs at the side of the building leading down to the basement.
They went down the stairwell. Remzi banged on the iron door at the bottom. A voice answered them from inside. A gruff, muffled voice.
“Who is it?”
“Remzi.”
The door opened and the strong smell of a printing press hit their noses. As the odors rushed out, Remzi and Derda went in. A man with glasses stood beside the open door. A man who’d aged when he was still young. Like age had just fallen on him all of a sudden one day.
“Is this your friend?” His words seeped out from the spaces of his missing teeth. It was like they’d all escaped from his mouth one night.
“Yes,” said Remzi. Then he turned to Derda. “This is Brother Süleyman,” he said. “My boss. He looks over everything.”
He made a sweeping gesture indicating all the machines of the printing press: everything. The building’s basement was bigger than it looked from outside. It was probably twice the width of the building itself. Or maybe all the books piled on top of each other gave it that impression. Thousands of books and enormous printing machinery.
“No one else’s here yet?” asked Remzi.
“Nope,” said Süleyman. “I just got up myself. Get the tea on, let’s have some. What’s your name?”
“Derda.”
“Look, son, do you know what kind of work we do here?”
“Remzi told me a little about it,” said Derda.
Remzi was in front of two waist-high cupboards against the only wall in the warehouse not covered by piles of books. On top of one was a stove. On top of the other was a kitchen sink with a faucet that never stopped dripping. There was a refrigerator next to the cupboards. Remzi put the water on to boil in the makeshift kitchen of the depot that doubled as Süleyman’s home. The smoke curling out of his cigarette mixed with the steam from the teapot. Süleyman cleared his throat with a hearty round of morning coughs and then spoke.
“I don’t want to hear about you doing anything stupid, not even once, you understand?”
“I understand,” said Derda.
“Israfil will be here soon. He’ll explain the job better than I can. But let me tell you loud and clear. Now, you might wind up in trouble sometime but if you tip the police off to what’s going on here, they’ll get you. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Don’t worry,” said Derda.
“Wrong! I can’t even worry about worrying. You have to think about it. If you do your job like a man, if you keep your mouth shut, then you’ll get your money.”
“Fine,” said Derda.
He didn’t care about the depot or about anything Süleyman said. The only thing he wanted was to make a bit of money. Because he was way too old for the cemetery now. His pained expressions didn’t fool anyone. And after all, the hand reaching out for money didn’t reach up anymore. Now more often than not the hand came down to the customer. Derda was taller than most cemetery visitors, who were, after all, bent over in mourning. And besides, the cemetery walls had almost entirely fallen down, and they were being rebuilt. They were saying that Yasin was going to be let go and private security guards would be brought in. And they weren’t going to let the kids inside anymore.
It wouldn’t be long before the cemetery children
