Endgame Page 2

‘Uncle’s called me over.’

  He greeted me with a nod and left.

  ‘Not a bad kid,’ said the proprietor.

  ‘Seems like a polite fellow,’ I replied.

  ‘Polite, eh? A real killer.’

  ‘What?’ I said. I thought I had misheard him.

  ‘A murderer,’ he said, as if telling me the young man was a cobbler.

  ‘Did he shoot someone?’ I asked.

  ‘Shoots them all the time,’ he said, ‘but he never gets caught. He’s Oleander Ramiz’s nephew.’

  I looked him straight in the eye, but the expression on his face was grave, almost sad. ‘When he was a kid, his uncle ate the oleanders in their garden and poisoned himself. Imagine that. That’s how he got the name.’

  ‘What’s his uncle do?’

  ‘Him? He’s a killer too.’

  I leaned back and looked at him again. Sad and tearful eyes. He seemed troubled by stories he had never shared and mysteries that would never be solved. His shoulders were hunched, like a man resigned to his fate. I felt that he would either become a good friend of mine, or a calculating enemy.

  ‘I saw a sign back there, sea for sale,’ I said.

  ‘Oleander wants to sell the beach.’

  ‘It’s his?’

  ‘How could the beach be his?’ he said, looking at me as if I was a fool.

  ‘Well, how can he sell it then?’

  ‘He can’t … But he wants to.’

  ‘Give me another beer, will you?’

  The expression on his face brightened and then I knew that we would become friends. ‘And one for you,’ I said. ‘This round’s on me.’

  Over the second beer, he told me about the killers in town. Yugoslavian refugees had come ‘eons ago’ – as he put it – and fought with the locals, even killed each other.

  ‘What’s the issue?’

  ‘Land, marijuana sales, women … This place now has a real reputation. They even go elsewhere to kill people.’

  ‘But it seems like such a peaceful place.’

  ‘It is,’ he said.

  ‘I’m looking for a quiet place. Any places for rent around here?’

  ‘We could find something for you. Not many people are looking to rent around here.’

  That evening I rented a two-storey house with a large veranda that overlooked the town.

  That’s how it all started.

  IV

  Sitting on this bench I’m wondering how I ended up at this dead end. What’s left? Am I here because I befriended a pot-smoking restaurateur? Or was it that strange sign along the road that started it all? I marvel at how the seemingly impossible is precisely what I was dealt.

  If I had only ignored that sign, or left the restaurant without saying a word, I would now be leading another life. I might be living in a mountain village, working on a novel, my only real concern labouring over the right words for the last sentence of a chapter.

  But now I’m sitting on this old wooden bench, listening to the breathing of a slumbering town. I am watching all the dreams up in the sky and considering all my options: I could run, spend the rest of my life in jail, or I could take my life.

  What if I hadn’t seen that sign along the road? What if I hadn’t stopped at that restaurant? What if I had just finished my meal and quietly left? How believable is a story that begins with a plate of köfte and a pot-smoking restaurateur? But then consider God. His stories are beyond belief.

  I confess that I’m a little jealous of God.

  He’s killed millions but not once did he ever stop to consider the consequences. No one ever blamed him. Or at least he was never tried in court.

  Years of human history but not one of his chapters was ever truly criticised or judged, all his coincidences never challenged by the law.

  How does he get away with so much?

  By killing off the unbelievers?

  I’ve also taken a life.

  But this doesn’t make me a lesser God. I am a murderer.

  I can see the walls of the houses swell and fall with the breath of those who sleep within them, I can see the entire town as if under a thick cotton quilt. I know most of the people there but I can no longer imagine what they are dreaming. No one knows what another dreams, and even the dreamer doesn’t know what lies ahead. The hidden meanings in the dark world of dreams have always frightened me, images fluttering ceaselessly through my mind, indecipherable, only partially revealed to me in sleep, perhaps veiled to my waking eye but wandering quietly in and out of my mind, leaving behind a trail of crippling devastation that I can hardly comprehend.

  The town is silent.

  Everyone is sleeping. Sleeping together.

  Do they know that they will wake up in the morning to the news of murder?

  What will they say about me?

  What now? I should leave now. With every passing minute they’re more likely to catch me. That is if I want to get away.

  I’m paralysed.

  Exhausted.

  God must be exhausted. Killing takes so much out of you.

  But does he ever feel remorse? Regret for having brought me into this world. Or was I created expressly for this purpose? But why choose me for the crime? Why give life only to later snuff it out?

  I am alone tonight, with only God to grapple with or blame.

  What would I say to him if he came and sat down here beside me?

  ‘Why did you do it?’ I would ask. And he might say, ‘The crime is yours. You took that side road, stopped at that restaurant, settled in this town, and then you committed murder.’

  But who really took that life? Me? Or was it God?

  Why should I go to prison for his crime?

  And why worship God if he granted me the power to kill?

  It is the eternal question: ‘Why me?’

  And is the answer simply: ‘Because I had a plate of meatballs’? That’s hardly satisfying.

  Our lives are made up of moments, like seeds we choose to water and that sometimes sprout and grow. Later we’re surprised to see what they have become, and we call them God’s coincidences because we believe God scattered these moments, these seeds, over the course our lives, and that he watches to see which ones we choose to water. But then again, doesn’t he already know so much from the very beginning?

  I watered the wrong seed.

  Are you amused?

  Are you suffering beside me? Steeped in the same fear? In the same overwhelming tide of helplessness?

  But can you feel these emotions?

  Or do you only know them by observing this mortal plight?

  You created us so you could taste emotions that you would otherwise never know. To see and feel desperation, weakness and fear from your own creation.

  So here is my description of helplessness, something I now know all too well: a human face pressed against a wall by a thousand hands, fixed in place, unable to breathe, no escape and no salvation.

  But how can I convey these feelings to you? I am dying to do so but these are things you will never know.

  I am God’s teacher but this pupil of mine will make me pay with my life.

  He knows my suffering.

  And my fear.

  A fear that makes me cold, like a block of ice on my back. I am shivering from the cold.

  But it was a magnificent journey that led me to this moment of abject terror. No one would have believed it. I never would have expected so much if not for that black speck of foreboding that took shape in my heart, laying there in the shadows, and I chose not to watch it grow.

  Nobody wants to see the truth, so why should I?

  But now I was face to face with it, and it was staring me in the eye.

  God was revealing inescapable truths.

  I saw the truth.

  Horrified and full of fear, I saw the truth.

  V

  I rented a really nice place. It was fully furnished, and decorated like the home of a nineteenth-century aristocrat, with carved cab
inets, large mirrors, velvet wingback chairs and beautiful carpets. But it didn’t feel overcrowded and the arrangement of furniture lent the place a peaceful air. A mountain breeze was always drifting in through large, bright windows, fluttering the curtains.

  I always had breakfast on the veranda, between carved wooden columns, looking out over the sea, which was light green where it met the golden sand of the beach. It grew darker in the distance, occasionally flecked with white. The palm trees and the red oleanders and the station dome shimmered in the sunlight.

  The caramel-coloured floor tiles helped keep the house cool. In the morning I would walk through the house barefoot, looking out every window, gazing at the olive groves, the mountains, the vineyards. I would look out over the town and the sea, taking in the palm trees and the oleanders, and then I would wander among the jasmine, the roses, the bougainvillea and the lemon trees in my garden; it was a paradise without an Eve.

  Remzi and I became good friends and he rushed over whenever I needed help. He even found a woman to take care of the house. As Hamiyet fluttered about the house, cleaning and cooking, she wore a smile that was always changing but never absent, one of those smiles that I could never quite define, a smile that intimated a secret sin, never shared in either happiness or grief.

  But she spoke to the furniture.

  She would whisper to cabinets, tables, chairs, sharing her secrets with them. Once I caught her arguing with a broom. But when she wasn’t talking to the furniture she would give me all the gossip from town. More and more I started to feel like I had come to a den of sin, and as I got to know the people I could put faces to the stories.

  Hamiyet was a tall, powerful, busty woman, and she wasn’t shy. She’d roll her skirt up over her calves when she mopped the floors; and when she leaned over to pick something up, her breasts sometimes slipped out of her blouse. She never seemed to mind.

  I was full of energy when I woke that morning.

  Hamiyet was prattling away with the plates and the tablecloth, and the eggs she had made for my breakfast. It had rained the day before but the sun was shining in a bright blue sky, and the scent of wet grass and dirt, the fruit trees and the flowers was in the air.

  I’d told the woman to meet me if she liked my books but I was beginning to have regrets.

  I hadn’t had a meal with a woman for such a long time. I was a lonely man. It seemed like no one in the world knew I still existed. And there wasn’t even a splash when I released a new book. I was unhappy and angry, but I did my best to stay in touch with people. I tried to make peace in the hope of driving away a grudge people didn’t even know I carried in my heart. But I had walled myself up in a monastery, and I was reluctant to venture outside. I had settled into a life of seclusion.

  I was weak and fragile and this made me angry. I was full of anger and self-loathing, and I felt sorry for myself. Swinging back and forth between two very different states of mind, I either wallowed in defeat or I was drunk on the dream of an imminent victory, a commander setting out on one last adventure, rallying the troops, crying ‘I’ll show the world yet!’ But then I would suddenly find myself steeped in the sadness that comes with inevitable defeat.

  ‘If you like the books …’ I had said to her, because I wanted her to read them, someone to read them, someone to say something. I wanted to end this oppressive silence. A buried resentment drove me to say it.

  Normally I’d never mention my books to a woman before the first date.

  I was frustrated for having told her, but no one notices the anger that rages inside me, the ungrounded fear and loathing. The bravado of a beaten man.

  It wasn’t easy facing these truths. I was on the verge of giving up and just not going.

  But I was dying to see if she’d come.

  I wanted her to like my books, and I missed those conversations you have on a first date, when every word is loaded, and anything can happen. I wanted to feel alive again, I wanted someone to admire me, someone who could lead me back to the world of people. I wanted to break down these walls built by arrogance and fragility. I needed someone, but I was afraid to admit it.

  In her presence I knew that I’d become another man, whose confidence would rise with every sentence. A woman’s voice would change me. I would become a garden swirling with all the scents that come after rain. I knew that much.

  If she came everything would change.

  The hours dragged by. I followed Hamiyet around the house. I collected fruit in the garden, watched the doves build nests above the veranda and flicked snails off the trees.

  I arrived early and sat down at one of the tables under the magnolia tree in the garden.

  Slowly the place filled up with customers. Bigwigs in dark suits alighted at tables like black birds. They were both a frightening and comical sight to behold, with their dark suits and loosened ties and enormous bellies, sweating in the heat. From time to time they’d look over at me suspiciously, making me feel like an outsider. I felt like a zebra among lions.

  Then everyone turned to the door. She was there, looking out over the garden.

  The black birds were staring at her hungrily. But she didn’t seem to notice.

  She greeted everyone in the garden as she came over to me, even exchanging a few words with some of the men, and for a moment it seemed their lust was compassion. They were calmed by her innocent expression, the coy and child-like look in her eye, her grace and the polite distance in her voice. They even seemed a little ashamed, and they wanted to protect her.

  I felt the same compassion too, and the lust.

  She had the power to tame these savage birds. In an instant. It was impressive to watch.

  But I saw something else.

  She wore two different smiles on her face, one on top of the other, and when she moved her lips you could almost see the other smile – a self-satisfied, ironic and belittling smile, the real emotions hidden beneath a gentler smile.

  That’s when I understood her most dangerous ability: to suddenly inspire compassion. Unhappy with his creation, God sent prophets to spread compassion and to preach against the dangers of lust. It was one of their main messages. But it went unheeded because God, master of contradictions, planted in the human heart a wild desire, a spark left by his awesome powers, that humans were destined to battle – God wanted so much to happen – and most were overwhelmed in the face of this power; if only in their dreams, the most pure of heart, committed the sin in their dreams. And although we could not obey the prophets’ words we learned how to act in the face of sin, we learned how to face it down or take flight, if we do not eventually fall prey to it.

  Compassion is another story.

  Closing the doors on lust, God flung open a door to compassion. We travel easily on the road to compassion, with no doubt in our heart, determined and never afraid.

  The enigmatic smile on her face told me she knew the power of compassion. Her compassion was a kind of Trojan Horse – a God’s compassion – and doors were flung open and she rode in with a conscience veiled. All lustful thoughts had been banished.

  God wouldn’t say it but I will: ‘Be careful of the compassion of a beautiful woman.’

  Some conceal selfishness and beauty with compassion, and they have the power to devastate and destroy.

  It was an idea I wanted to include in my new book, a new message from a prophet, and I wanted God to know.

  On second thought I realised that if I did a reader might issue his or her own Godly declaration.

  ‘Mortals, beware the conceit of authors.’

  A lust that inspired my conceit, and her compassion.

  We were gladiators in the arena. I knew so much. But knowing so much did nothing for me.

  I was helpless.

  She was wearing a white dress with dark blue polka dots and chic sandals, red nail polish on her toes. I wanted to have her.

  Then and there.

  My emotions were locked away behind stronger walls but she could portray a r
ange of emotions on her face whenever she wanted. That was something I simply couldn’t do.

  And her counterfeit emotions were displayed so brilliantly that hardly anyone could detect the smallest trace of what she was truly feeling.

  When she flashed that innocent, vulnerable smile, even the truth behind was blinding.

  As she sat down whispers rippled through the garden like a breath of wind. They were trying to work out who I was.

  ‘I’m starving,’ she said.

  She had a beautiful smile.

  The waiter hurried over to our table and she ordered nearly everything on the menu.

  ‘Is all that for both of us?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no, I’m just really hungry.’

  ‘Hard to believe you’re that hungry,’ I said.

  ‘I love to eat.’

  ‘Seems so.’

  She put her bag down on the chair beside her, a small leather bag with a little golden chain on the handle.

  ‘Did you read the book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a sin to say you liked it.’

  ‘I’m not a real reader. I don’t think my liking it would really mean anything. Does my opinion really matter?’

  I wanted to reach out and grab her by the shoulder and say, ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Did you like it?’ I asked, calmly.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You hesitated. Did you really like it?’

  ‘I loved it.’

  ‘Then why don’t you just say it? Say it like you just ordered all that food. You’re allowed to speak about books in the same way, with the same appetite. It’s not bad manners.’

  A bashful smile fell over her face and for a moment she looked like a little girl.

  ‘I really liked it. You write beautifully. And you have a thing about writers and women. You know a lot about them.’

  ‘What did you like most?’

  I wanted to talk about it, her favorite parts, memorable chapters and sentences. I wondered if she had specific comments to make. Did she really think that I was a good writer? Was she a real fan?

  I’m not satisfied with light praise.

  No writer ever is.