He stopped at an intersection and asked the nearest ruffian sputtering out of the mouth of a side street.
“I’m looking for a place called Çolak, you know it? It’s a meyhane.”
It was a kid Derda’s age. He looked at the hand pressed against his chest to stop him, then at the face across from him. Derda’s face looked like those people in Beyoğlu who people are afraid of. He was scared, too.
“A meyhane?” he said.
“Çolak, Çorak, something like that.”
“Huh, I don’t know,” the kid said.
“That’s okay. Do you know Oğuz Atay?”
The kid was taken off guard. He was so surprised he started to stammer.
“Uh, yeah … yes, but …”
He was going to ask Derda why he’d asked, but Derda was gone. If he had known he could have saved a life with just one yes, would he have stammered and nodded like that? He watched Derda go for the first ten meters, after that he couldn’t see him anymore. Derda got mixed in with the people. And the people with Derda.
After he’d asked seven more people and gotten the answer, “Huh, I don’t know,” seven more times, he went up to a chestnut roaster at the head of a side street that smelled of sewage and asked him the names of the meyhane. And he got a different answer.
“There’s a place called Çorak down there. Go down, take a right at the third street.”
Then Derda bought some chestnuts. He walked, ripping off the husks. He went down the street he was supposed to go down. He turned right where he was supposed to turn right. He took five steps, and then he saw a sign stuck out on the sidewalk staring right back at him. A lit-up sign. With ÇORAK written on it. He crumpled up the paper bag in his hand, tossed it on the ground, and went inside.
As soon as he entered, a waiter whose red tie poked out from the collar of his blue sweater approached him.
“Yes?”
Derda pushed the waiter’s chest with his left hand and pulled the revolver out from his waist with his right hand and fired two bullets close to the antique chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Just like Tayyar had taught him. Without bending his arm.
The sound of the shots reverberated so loudly through the storied meyhane that, for a moment, people couldn’t even hear their own screams. Their ears started to come back to life as they knocked into each other, trying to get under the tables. As soon as their ears worked again, what they heard was Derda. He was yelling at the waiter who stood, frozen.
“Pull away those tables, get everyone out in the open! Fuck you, hurry up!”
The waiter felt the hot barrel of Derda’s gun against his forehead and he stepped back gingerly. “Okay, brother, okay!” He turned around and started to pull away the tables where people were hiding between and below.
“Stand up, you ass! Stand up!” Derda shouted.
“Let me see your face. I want to see everyone’s face.”
And from the place he stood, as much as he could see, he came eye to eye with a young man. He’d come out from under a table but he was still folded over in fear. His hands were up and he was shaking his head. He had had seven rakıs but the two shots had made his mind clear as a bell.
“Fuck off!” said Derda. “Go, get out of here, fuck off!”
At first the man didn’t understand. Then, followed by the revolver that help him clear his mind, he walked past Derda and out the front door without lowering his hands or stopping his shaking head. As soon as he was gone Derda was eye to eye with another young man.
“You, get out of here. What the fuck are you looking at? Fuck off!”
And he ran out of the meyhane. Derda was pacing in between the tables, driving out any young person he saw. “Go fuck yourself, asshole!” Twelve men and nine women left Çorak in tears. The only ones left behind were three men between the ages of sixty and seventy-five sitting around one single table.
Derda walked up to them and asked the man with the beard, “What’s your job?”
The man with the beard opened his mouth to say, “Now, look here!” but Derda screamed.
“I said, what’s your job?”
When a man with glasses next to the man with the beard said, “Whatever your problem is, we’ll solve it. Look, he’s a journalist. But don’t do it like this!” Derda laughed.
“Is that so?”
When he saw Derda smile like he was going to take the barrel of the revolver away from his face, a wave of relief washed over the bearded man for a second. “Of course, son, I’ll help you with whatever you want to say. Just tell me!”
“So for you to listen to his problem, there had to be a gun pointed at your face? Is that it?” yelled Derda.
“Whose?” the bearded man and the man with glasses said together.
“If I say his name, will you remember, you fucks?”
The only one who hadn’t spoken until that moment, and, interestingly enough, the only fat man among them, yelled, “You tell us, tell us, who is this about?”
Derda held his breath, directed the revolver’s barrel to the bearded man, and pulled the trigger. He shot the journalist in the mouth. The
