When he pulled out the sheet of paper inside, he looked up at the woman and patted the earth next to him. The woman sat down on the ground. At Derda’s side. And she leaned her back against Oğuz Atay, too. She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them. And she planted her eyes on a faraway tree. On a tree where, once upon a time, Derda had slept in the shade and dreamed.
DERDÂ’S LETTER
Dear Derda,
I know how to start but I have no idea how this letter will end. But first of all, I will call you “you,” nothing formal. Maybe the first time I see you, I won’t be able to do that. But for me, you are you, someone I know. And anyway, the first time I see you I’ll be so excited that it’s highly probable I’ll even forget your name. But one of the things that gives me courage to write you this letter is that. My name. Our names. Because they are both the same. They’re both Derda. Anyway.
I was born in a small village called Yatırca. When I turned eleven I was forced to marry and I was taken to London. I stayed a prisoner for five years in an apartment there until I escaped one night. I started doing heroin, then I started doing everything to be able to keep doing heroin. To the point where once I even slept with fifty-two men. It was filmed and now I know there are millions of people out there who saw me like that. I’m telling you all this because I want you to know me. Know me completely, with nothing left out. Up until today, I haven’t been able to tell all this to anyone like this, openly and simply. But now, it’s like I’m telling it all to myself and I can write everything calmly. Actually, I’m probably calmer than if I had been telling it to myself. I’m writing to you with a strange peace of mind. Anyway …
When I was sixteen, I met a woman named Anne at a rehabilitation center where I went to get off heroin. She was a retired nurse. She treated me with a love that I’d never known until that day and she took me into her home. Then years passed and I became her daughter. Anne’s daughter. Her name was written like that, anne, like “mother” in Turkish. Was written, I say, because two years ago she died of a brain hemorrhage and I, in losing her, lost everything.
The first thing I did when I was able to feel alive again was to read her diaries. She hid her diaries like buried treasure. In her diaries I read that Anne had once worked in London at the Atkison Morley Hospital in Wimbledon.
In the year 1976 on the 22nd of December, Anne, at the time twenty-eight years old, was on night duty in the intensive care unit when a patient was brought in. It was a patient who’d just come out of surgery for a brain tumor. It was a Turk. And who was it, do you know? Maybe you already know. In any event, his name is written on your fingers. It was Oğuz Atay.
Oğuz Atay stayed in intensive care until the 31st of December with Anne always at his side.
The first thing Oğuz Atay said to her was this: “Your name is written the same as the word ‘mother’ in Turkish.”
Oğuz Atay couldn’t sleep because of the horrible pain in his head. Apparently he even called his head “Ağrı Dağ,” a joke of course about it being a “mountain of pain,” and also the Turkish name for Mount Ararat. Of course Anne couldn’t have deciphered the meaning of that but she did Oğuz Atay the favor of writing it down on a piece of paper. Then she copied out the sentence in a language she didn’t understand, letter by letter, into her diary.
They talked until morning every night for eight nights. At first, Anne just listened. Because in those days the only thing in Anne’s head was death. Suicide. Not for any particular reason. The reason was everything, her whole life. From everything she had lived. Some people are like that. They’re just much more sensitive than other people. They carry death around on their back like a bag and when they get too tired they’re the first ones to tire of the weight and open it up. Anyway …
For whatever reason, Oğuz Atay sensed what Anne was thinking about. Maybe he could just feel it and so he told her only about life. About his desire to stay alive. Those eight nights were so affecting that Anne was convinced to let herself live. Because across from her was a man struggling with life like Don Quixote, and he was telling her how to live with all the words he had felt in his heart until that day.
Anne talked about his English.
“It was like Shakespeare was across from me, and I listened to him speak like I was reading from a book. I can’t write his words here. The moment I write them the meanings of all the beautiful things he made me believe would be ruined. He didn’t give me any chance. There was nothing I could do but believe in him and what he was saying.”
After Oğuz Atay was released from the hospital they never saw each other again, but Anne never forgot him. If you ask me, I think she fell in love with Oğuz Atay. But she never mentions anything like that in her diaries. There’s only this
