And Sefer, turning his head for a moment and seeing him smile, asked, “Please excuse me for asking, but how does it feel?”
“What?” Derda asked.
“Being reunited with freedom after twenty-four years.”
Derda sucked half of the cigarette between his fingers down in one drag and spoke.
“You should ask the other prisoners. I don’t have a place to go, myself. I mean, if you left me on the outside, I’d go back and stay there for another twenty-four years.”
His answer surprised Sefer, and he remembered the first thing Derda had said to him.
“But didn’t you say there was someplace you had to go? I thought that’s what you’d said.”
“Yeah, there’s that,” said Derda. “Prison was hard only when I had someplace to go. Otherwise, I didn’t care.”
While Sefer was thinking about how a person, halfway through a seventy-year-old’s life span, who’d spent twenty-four years between four walls, could not care, he turned into a wide avenue. Derda recognized the street immediately. It was the street that led to the cemetery. Nothing had changed. Of course the sidewalks, the color of the asphalt, the walls, the buildings, and the people had changed. But one thing hadn’t changed at all, and that made all the other things not count. And that was that the street went to the cemetery. Just to the cemetery and nowhere else. So he didn’t even bother to ask, “Are we going to the cemetery?” Instead, he leaned forward to look out of the windshield to look for a sign. He looked toward the sidewalk on the left hand side. He was looking for a sign that once said NAIL. But he couldn’t find it. He didn’t see any marble workshops nor any bar. He looked at the tattoos on his fingers and thought of Isa. Thank you, he said inside. Wherever you are, thank you.
They slowed down as they passed through the cemetery gate and Derda’s eyes searched for Yasin’s guardhouse. But his eyes came back empty because the guardhouse had been knocked down years before, and a two-story building with a glass facade had been built in its place. There was no gate with iron bars now. The cemetery was just closed at night. There was a barrier that opened automatically. There was no guard or anyone else to see Derda. He wondered how they kept the kids out. Was a barrier really enough? He didn’t know what to think. He couldn’t even have imagined that the gecekondu neighborhood of houses stuck right against the cemetery wall had been totally destroyed. When he lived in one of those houses, it had been like hell to Derda. And no one could destroy hell. At least, no person could. In any event, there was nothing left of that neighborhood or of the kids who would hop over the wall or pass under the barrier to work in the cemetery. They were all at school now. The school that somehow Derda never made it to.
When they arrived at the square where there’d once been a fountain, the attorney stopped the car and looked at Derda.
“After this, I think you know where to go.”
Derda opened the door and got out of the car and watched everything that had belonged to his childhood pass before his eyes and go. In and out in one breath, everything in the cemetery passed. He was seeing the one place that in all of his twenty-four years in prison hadn’t been touched. The same tombs, the same tombstones, the same trees. Maybe a bit older. Like Derda. But that was all.
“It was very nice to have met you!” the attorney yelled behind him. But Derda didn’t hear him. He was walking deeper into the cemetery where he knew the tombstones as well as the dead. His feet knew just where he was going but even so, Derda felt drunk. He touched the tombstones as he slowly made his way through the shade of the trees.
And then his feet stopped like they’d sunk into the earth. Because at the head of Oğuz Atay’s tomb was a woman, standing, with a white envelope in her hand. A white envelope.
Derda didn’t do what he’d done all those years before. He didn’t hide. He didn’t hide himself among the trees or hold his breath. He just walked. Straight to Oğuz Atay and the woman.
The woman turned around when Derda’s shadow fell over her, and she asked, like a dream wrapping around him, or like they were the only two people left on the face of the earth, “Derda, right?”
His squinted as he answered her. “Yes.” He looked at her with the same hope as the sailor, lost on the seas, looks at the sight of the mainland on the horizon. In two words, the woman’s voice already seemed so familiar to him, and the way she looked into his eyes … Derda had to tell himself it was impossible. He practically shouted it to himself.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I’ve exhausted you in bringing you all the way out here.”
Derda’s two ears and two eyes were so full that he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Maybe if time had stood still he would have been able to figure it out. Especially this strange similarity. But the minute hands and the hour hands didn’t pay any attention to Derda.
“I know what you’ve been through,” the woman continued. And she took Derda’s hand. The OĞUZ hand. Then she put the envelope into his hand. “If you will read this, you’ll understand everything. I wrote it to you. It’s a letter.”
Derda fell down onto his knees at the base of Oğuz Atay’s tomb like he was eleven years
