The Few

A Novel

Hakan Günday, Alexander Dawe

• Publisher: Arcade
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781628727098
• eBook ISBN: 9781628727104
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"I am here. Where are you?" These desperate words link the two protagonists of Hakan Günday's raw and fearless novel The Few. Derdâ is an eleven-year-old girl pulled out of boarding school by her mother who, without telling her, plans to sell her as a wife to a conservative tribesman. She goes with her new husband to London, where for five years he abuses and all but imprisons her. Even after escaping, Derdâ soon finds herself preyed upon by Londoners as well as other Turkish immigrants who have formed a criminal underworld. In a parallel story set in Turkey, Derda, an eleven-year-old boy, buries his dead mother in secret to avoid being taken to the state orphanage. Alone, he becomes with an illegal book printing operation. He finds himself obsessed with a Turkish novelist, who Derda grows convinced died because he felt misunderstood and unappreciated. Increasingly unstable, Derda targets two contemporary writers, whom he accuses of stealing the writer's fame. The Few is an unflinching story of the vulnerability of the world's youth when cultures, politics, and generations collide. In a time when countless refugees and children slip through the cracks, it is a powerful admonishment not to forget those who are helpless victims.

DERDA

“Derda?” said Isa.

“My dad had this friend. It was his name.”

“So? What’s it mean?”

“How should I know?”

“So ask your dad.”

“He’s in jail,” said Derda, getting to his feet.

He brushed off the dust. Isa’s excitement got the better of him.

“What’d he do?” he asked.

“He killed that friend.”

But Isa didn’t get it. He was staring blankly at Derda when they heard the sound of a car. They turned toward the sound. Then they looked at each other. Isa jumped to his feet and took off running. Derda followed right behind him. But Isa didn’t know the cemetery so well and was soon lost. He sprinted randomly down the cemetery paths. Derda made it to the fountain in the square first, winning the race, and there wasn’t anything Isa could do about it. He was new. And he was embarrassed he’d lost. Isa had to sit and watch while Derda filled up his plastic tanks and approached the parked car.

Derda had never seen these people before, but he knew the tomb they’d stopped in front of very well. It was where he got his best tips. Practically every day, someone would come and read the Koran at that tombstone. And afterward, they’d be sure to give him something. And sure enough here was someone else reciting the Koran in front of the tomb. An old man. With a long robe, just like all the others. But this time there was also a girl at the tombstone. A girl his age. Has she been here before? Derda thought. He didn’t recognize her. He went up to the old man and held up his tanks.

“Should I pour water over the grave, uncle?”

He was so used to it, it must have been the thousandth time he’d heard a voice like this. The anguish in the reader’s lilting voice was palpable. Derda spoke the language. He also knew that he had to persevere. Perseverance was an absolute. It was the first condition for getting money from these types. He waited patiently, not moving an eyelash, and with an ever so slight change in his voice reciting the Koran, the old man gave him the answer he was waiting for. Derda dashed to the head of the tomb and began pouring water over the earth, following the girl, who was pulling out weeds. They moved around the tomb and then, as he was filling up the birdbath, the girl stretched out her muddy hands. Derda watched the water stream out of his tank and over the girl’s hands.

“Thank you,” she said.

It was practically a whisper. Derda was going to say something too, but as soon as he opened his mouth, his feet were cut off from the ground and he landed in a heap on the path near the tomb.

When the dust settled, he saw a man the size of a giant looming over him. “What did I do?” he wanted to yell, but he didn’t. He pulled his knife out of his pocket, thinking he could drive it into the giant’s knee, but he let that thought go, too. Then the old man growled some kind of command and the giant reached into his pocket and Derda watched him pull out some change. The money meant nothing to the giant. But Derda really needed it. He hadn’t had a thing to eat all day. But he wasn’t going to get a thing from that giant with the beard. Especially because of the girl. He saw the girl’s face as he turned to leave. It was like she wanted to say something to him. Almost as if she wanted him to save her. But maybe Derda’s hunger was making him see things.

Isa had watched everything from a distance. He ran over to Derda. He had lost both the race and the customers and he wanted to rub it in.

“You did it wrong.”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t have gotten so close to the girl. Those guys don’t like that kind of thing.”

“Fuck them!” said Derda.

He walked past fast. Faster. Deeper into the cemetery. Straight into the darkness of the thickening shade of more and more trees. Isa was following him.

He shouted, “Where are you going?”

Derda stopped and looked over his shoulder.

“Home,” he said. “You go, too. No one comes later than this. No point waiting around for nothing.”

Isa watched Derda’s back disappear for a few seconds. Then he stuffed one hand in his pocket, grabbed the empty tank with his other, and walked down to the cemetery gates, the tank bumping against his knee the whole way. As for Derda, he slipped through the shadows and arrived at the wall. His house was right on the other side of that wall. On one side his house, on the other side the cemetery. Just the way his father had wanted it. “It’ll be easier to build,” he’d said. “Here’s a beautiful wall already built. We’ll put up three more, and then just stick a roof on top. There you have it. Home sweet home.”

His mother had done her best to protest but his father wanted to make the most of the little money he had. And so he built their house right up against the cemetery wall because the total cost of the house would be one wall less. It was just like the other houses around them. Some people called this sort of house a gecekondu, a homemade house built illegally under the cover of night. But his mother could never stop saying it was “just like a coffin.” She lived cooped up in that house until her death, from cancer, just the day before. Just one of the two hundred thousand who suffer from eye cancer. Maybe looking at that wall did it to her. The cancer made the woman forget how to see, made her forget her own name, then even how to breathe. The only thing she didn’t forget was how to say the house was “just like a coffin.” Even after she went blind, she still could see the wall by running her hand over the contours of its stones.

She died on her floor mattress with Derda by her side. She called him to her side just before she died. “Come here.” Derda came to her side, and then she died. As if she wanted to say, “Come here and see how a person dies.” And so Derda saw. He even cried a little. But then he pulled himself together and got to his feet. His plan was to go to their cemetery wall neighbors and pound on their doors until their doors broke down. But he stopped at his first step as if in revolt. He’d remembered Fevzi. Fevzi who’d run away from the orphanage. Fevzi who’d run away from the orphanage and started living in the cemetery. “Don’t tell anyone, but …” He remembered the beginning of his story. “Ten guys jump a guy, you know? They’d say they’d be back to do it again. I was so scared I never went into the bathroom again. I hid bags behind the closets. Then I’d shit in them at night.” So ended his terrible tale of shameful cowardice. What if … Derda said to himself. What if they find out my mother’s dead? They’ll send me to the orphanage, too. My dad’s already in jail. But instead of sitting and worrying, Derda came up with a plan. No one knew his mother was dead. Well, then, there was no need for anyone to find out. I’ll bring her to the cemetery and I’ll bury her! he thought. If the floor of the house hadn’t been poured concrete, he would have buried her then and there. But it wasn’t a shovel that was going to make her coffin.

He clambered up the wall, gripping the hand-sized hollows worn into the surface, then jumped down to the other side and walked along the side of his house, fighting his way through the tangled branches of a fig tree. He turned the corner and came to the front door of his house. He took the key from his pocket and was about to insert it into the lock when a creeping scent hit his nostrils. When he opened the door, the source was all too clear. His mother was rotting. He had to find a way to get the corpse to the other side of the wall, and fast, and then bury it in the first loose earth he could find. But Derda’s mother weighed twice as much as he did. She could rot all she liked, but she’d still be eighty kilos. He had barely been able to roll her off her mattress and onto the floor. The night before he’d pushed her onto the floor and slipped into her bed. He hadn’t cried too much. The woman had been sick for eight months and for eight months she hadn’t been to a doctor or a hospital. She’d been dying right before his very eyes. Derda had gotten used to it. The woman had prepared him. “If anything happens to me, tell the neighbors,” she said. “They’re good for nothing, but tell them just the same. They should tell your dad, too, he should know. Have them bury me somewhere around here. No point sending me back to the village. And tell them I hope God damns them all!”

Since her husband had gone to prison not one of them had come over to see them. Even when they knew she was sick, they couldn’t take the twenty steps to go visit her. What Derda made working at the cemetery didn’t really let them live, but it kept them alive. In a word, they’d been abandoned. To themselves and to their own survival. “It’s all your father’s fault,” the woman would say. “Because of him they won’t even look us in the eye!” Before she fell ill, she’d sold dill at the market. Yasin, the guard at the cemetery, got the dill from a relative of his. But when that relative started asking for the woman instead of money, she dropped the dill and the market.

Derda’s father had been in prison for six years. Like he told Isa, his father had killed his best friend, his blood brother, Derda the Arab. They met at a cockfight. They’d both bet on the same cock. But it turned out to be the wrong cock. Both of them were incensed they’d lost the last lonely kuruş rattling around in their pockets, and they both got the idea into their heads to cut up both the winning cock and its owner. So they were both lying in wait, behind the warehouse where the cockfight was held. Each was oblivious of the other. One waited at the warehouse’s left corner, the other waited on the right. The cock owner left the warehouse by the back door to get into his van. Both men jumped him at once. But in a deft turn the cock owner broke free and they plunged their knives into each other’s legs instead. They were both too drunk for their knives to penetrate very far, but still they slumped down on the ground. The cock owner got away with his cock, and the guys on the ground got up and tried to figure out just what had just happened. But when they found out there wasn’t much to find out, first they started to laugh and then, leaning on each other for support, they went off to drink. A hospital won’t dress wounds on credit, but Derda the Arab knew somebody who had a taverna where they kept your tab in a notebook and served you rakı just the same.

According to the recollections of people who lived behind the warehouse, it all started with a proclamation: “Now we’re blood brothers.” Then they worked together in their great struggle against poverty. As representatives of the oldest crime tradition—mugging—they’d hang low in the same shadowy spot then jump out at the pedestrians most likely to have fat wallets. Mugging means excessive violence for little money. Mugging means jumping out in front of guys who might be armed themselves, who might not even have fat wallets. Mugging means jumping out with your eyes closed and wishing for just a shred of luck. In the old days, in the oldest style of mugging, it was only children and idiots who would even try it.

One drunken night, at the end of a few years of filling the world’s quota of dim-witted muggers, Derda’s dad and Derda the Arab decided to hold up one last guy on the way back to their cemetery homes. But before they were deep in the deed, Derda’s dad remembered having kissed their victim’s hand a week before on a holiday visit. He was an old man. So he said, “It’s ok. Let him go.” But Derda the Arab wasn’t having it. He cursed the old man and beat him up, but then the soberer of the two men stabbed his partner in crime in the heart. Derda’s dad was left standing. He pulled out the bloody knife, looked around him, and saw the old man struggling desperately on the ground. Then he heard someone, a witness, running toward him. One from a knife wound, the other from a heart attack. There he was in the middle of corpses, calculating which way he should run. He didn’t realize he was surrounded by six sweaty young men fresh from a match on the astroturf pitch. They’d lost 8–1 and they worked out their revenge by pummeling Derda’s dad until the police came. Who could believe that Derda’s father killed his partner to save an elderly neighbor? And so he was damned by the law and damned by his neighbors in the cemetery houses. Derda’s curse had been that his father had gotten drunk enough to name him Derda. And it was only a matter of time before his wife was infected by the curse, too. A few days.

Derda looked at the house’s cemetery wall, thinking. Mostly he was thinking about how he’d be able to hide a bag behind the closet and then shit in it in a dark dormitory. That and exactly what Fevzi meant when he said, “They hold you in twenty places and fuck you in one.”

He needed a knife. A big one. Then he gave up on that idea. This isn’t a job for a knife, he thought to himself. I need a saw. Then he gave up on that, too. An axe. “That’s it,” he said. “I’ll chop up my mom up with an axe. Then I can bury her. Piece by piece.”

But it wasn’t that easy for Derda to find an axe. First he asked the neighbors. And he didn’t lie. “I need it for my mom.” No one had one. And even if they’d had one, they would have shut their doors and buried themselves inside one way or another just the same. “What are you going to do with an axe? Is your mother still sick? Is your bastard of a father still alive? Tell your mother, nothing before he pays his dues!” He always answered in the same way. He just nodded. There was only one person left to ask. The cemetery guard Yasin. Derda ran. He wiped the sweat on his forehead at the door to the wooden guardhouse near the cemetery gates. He didn’t know how to knock at the door so he just yelled, “Brother Yasin!” He waited at the door. Yasin stuck his head out of the window. He’d just woken up from his afternoon nap and whenever he just woke up he was in a foul mood. There was nothing in this world worth waking up for.

“What?”

“Brother, do you have an axe?”

“What’re you going to do with an axe, boy?”

It was like “yes” and “no” weren’t in the language.

Derda gave an exact copy of what he’d heard his mother say—that is, when she could still speak—countless times.

“To chop the branches off the trees near our house. We can barely walk through the garden …”

First Yasin tried to get what he was going on about. But he realized he hadn’t been listening to what the kid had been saying anyway, so with a “No axe!” he pulled his head back inside the guardhouse. Derda watched the empty window for a few seconds before he ran out of the cemetery. H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Derdâ
• Derda
• Derda’s Letter
• Journey
• Derdâ’s Letter
• Derdâ and Derda