THOUSANDS WALK FOR LITERATURE MARTYR.
And right below it, Derda’s photograph. Taken as he exited the court building. Between two police. His fists handcuffed together, stretched out in front of him. He looked straight into the lens above OĞUZ and ATAY. “Scandal in the court” was written next to him. And below that, “Murderer gets off with twenty-four-year sentence!”
Although they were presented throughout the court case, the medical reports about the suspect’s mental health didn’t do him any good. The court decided first and foremost to appease the roar of public opinion, so instead of sending Derda to some sort of treatment center, he was sentenced to juvenile penitentiary. Until he was eighteen. After that, he’d be transferred to a regular prison. But no one was happy with the twenty-four-year sentence. He was expected to be sentenced to life in prison without parole, but he only got life, which meant that after serving twenty-four years he could be released on parole. Dependent of course on good behavior. His punishment was nothing more than the immediate result of group hysteria. The hysterics were operating under the delusion that, if Derda received three times the life sentence—each one worth thirty-six years—they could rest assured that Derda would rot and die in prison and they could go back to their homes and live in peace and harmony forevermore. But the hysterics had overlooked one thing. And that thing was that Derda had committed the murders the week before his seventeenth birthday, so he had to be tried as a minor. Maybe if he had tested his patience for another week, his crimes would have been piled on his adult back and the courts would have been forced to process Derda as an adult. But that’s not the way the legal calendar turned. It worked another way. In a way that helped no one.
At the unveiling of the sculpture of the man with a beard in front of his newspaper’s building, the speaker made this speech: “This attack was a speech against freedom. That the sentence received was only twenty-four years amounts to nothing less than an official endorsement of the act.”
Two years had passed since the event, and if people wanted to remember, they could do it by monumentalizing the martyrs to literature. They didn’t want to remember it by thinking they had lost a child from their very own families; it was easier to believe that a very, but very, secret organization had struck and killed. No one wanted to reject that theory, anyway. The bearded man was killed for his beliefs. And that was that. And maybe because of that, they’d made the statue of him more handsome than he had ever been in real life. That’s how people wanted to remember him. But don’t we all have a job on the side, as long as we live? Designer and Director of the Past are positions of such honor after all.
Derda had explained all the details about how Tayyar and Israfil had given him the gun to kill Hanif the Trashman, but the court practically overlooked the deaths of those two men in their decision. They turned details that should have worked in Derda’s favor into incriminating evidence. Anyway, it wasn’t like anyone got up and went on television to cry and say what good people they had been. But once Israfil’s son did try to attack Derda as he left the courts. But police held him back and he couldn’t get to the boy who had once apologized to his photo. And as for the members of the Hikmet movement, they took it as some sort of sign. They attributed all that had happened to Tayyar as consequences of his leaving the order, and for years to come in their conversations they told his tale. May it be an example to the children.
The last thing was for the pieces of Derda’s mother to be dug up from all the places they’d been buried and sent for autopsy. When it could be concluded that Derda had had nothing to do with her death, all the pieces were put in a cardboard box and returned to Celal. Her aging husband walked meaningfully past all the television journalists and got into a taxi, the box in hand. Then he got out two streets later. He tossed the box in the first dumpster he saw without even breaking his step.
Every year Derda was in prison, he received a mysterious package. The prison wardens would slip it to him secretly. Sometimes there was money inside, sometimes drugs. Hanif the Trashman was sending them. He had followed the whole case very closely and understood that it was all because of Derda that he could still draw breath. He’d have paid whatever he could; the debt of a life is not small. The man was true to his nickname—he lived on the streets. For years he’d collected paper from trash cans to scrape out an existence, piling them into the sack bigger than he that he dragged behind him and cashing it in by weight. When he was Derda’s age he’d killed a man for the first time so he could sleep under a dry roof. He knew all too well what prison was like. And also the value of a life, scraped out from childhood by sorting through the trash.
Derda never found out who was sending him the packages. For the first few years, he really believed they were from Oğuz Atay himself. From his soul. Then after some time he stopped thinking about it. Actually he stopped thinking altogether. Up until the day he pulled a cell phone out of a package. In his nineteenth year in prison.
There was no one he could call. So for the first few weeks he barely even touched
