Then years passed and Anne came to Turkey. And she came, if you are reading this letter, exactly to the spot where you are standing right now. The Edirnekapı Şehitliği Sakızağacı Cemetery. To the head of Oğuz Atay’s tomb. She mentions a letter in her diary. A letter she wrote to Oğuz Atay. Who knows what she wrote? Anyway …
And so, Anne came to bury the letter in Oğuz Atay’s tomb. This is what she wrote in her diary:
“I buried the letter above him today. Maybe years will pass and it will only mix in with the soil. Or maybe as soon as I leave, his soul will read it. Then a boy came up to me. He looked so poor, so terribly downtrodden. I suppose he was working in the cemetery washing tombs. He said something to me. But of course I couldn’t understand what he said. I gestured that he should clean the tomb. If only I had given him a bit of money. But I was so sad that I started to cry and I left running. I didn’t even look behind me.”
I found out that you worked in the cemetery. Could that boy have been you? I doubt it. But who knows, maybe it was.
After I had read Anne’s diaries, I understood that it wasn’t just her that had saved my life. Maybe Oğuz Atay counts, too. Maybe he also saved me from that hell. Because Oğuz Atay saved Anne’s life. And if there hadn’t been any Anne, I would have been destroyed.
So I figured that much out but I didn’t even know then that a man called Oğuz Atay had even existed. And here I am at the University of Edinburgh, a professor of literature, did you know that? How embarrassing it was not to know who he was! And I should say here, I apologize for my Turkish. It’s the first time in my life that I’m writing a letter in Turkish. And this will be the first time in twenty-nine years that I return to Turkey, to ask you to read this letter.
As soon as I finished Anne’s diaries, I started to read everything that Oğuz Atay had written and do all the research I could to find about him. And then you jumped out in front of me. And all the news to do about you. Your photographs, what you’d said during the court case. I couldn’t believe it. Especially when I read your name.
Now I’ve read the letter over again from the beginning and I can see how badly I’ve written it. There’s an “anyway” at the end of every paragraph. Anyway, not anyway! If I kept going beyond every “anyway” there’d be thousands of stories I couldn’t possibly write now.
I feel like a young girl. It would have to be an eleven-year-old girl who would write all this to you like this. Anyway!!
Like I explained at the beginning of this letter, we’ve arrived at the section where I don’t know where its thread is going. We’ve arrived at the end. Because I’m not sure what I want from you. But it’s like, there’s you and me. I don’t know what I’m going to say.
If you’re still reading this you’re still beside me. But if you believe all this is just some coincidence, you can go right away. Let’s go on with our lives and forget everything.
No, I can’t lie. I can’t go on with my life and I can’t forget anything.
Because I also read Oğuz Atay, and I’ve met you.
Maybe you’ll say, how much can you know someone through photographs and news clips? You’re right. Maybe very little. In that case, let me say this: I know you az, just a little.
Do you see it, too? Az, it’s such a tiny word when you say it. Just A and Z, just two letters. But between them there’s an entire alphabet. There are tens of thousands of words and hundreds of thousands of sentences you can write with that alphabet. The thing I wanted to say to you and all the things I couldn’t write are between those two letters. One is the beginning, the other is the end. But it’s like they were made for each other. So that they’d be brought together and read as one. It’s like they climbed over all the letters between them, one by one so they could meet. Just like me and you.
And so maybe there’s a lot more than just “a little.” Maybe life and death are like az. And maybe, I know you just “a little” means I know you better than I know myself. And maybe “I don’t know” means maybe I’d do anything to learn. Maybe a little means everything. And maybe it’s the one and only thing I can say to you.
I couldn’t think of a better place to meet you than at the head of Oğuz Atay’s grave. Because if you read it and leave without even looking back, I’ll bury this letter in the soil.
Derdâ
DERDÂ AND DERDA
They woke up at the same time. They turned and looked at each other. Derda stretched his neck out to reach her lips and he stayed there where he kissed her.
That day they wandered the streets of Edinburgh. Night fell fast and they returned home.
Derdâ went to the living room. Derda went to the bathroom.
He shook the can of spray paint in his hand and he drew a big, red O on the big bathroom’s big wall. Derda looked at it for a few minutes, smiling. A blood-red letter on a snow-white wall. Then he added an A inside the O. He looked at it like it was the first time he was seeing it. Or like he’d spent his whole life looking at it.
He went into the
