Hasan Toptas - Reckless

Then he fell silent, and for a time, neither of them spoke.

‘These scars,’ he finally said. ‘These scars come from a terrible incident that turned my life upside down sixteen years ago. There was, in one of the city’s busiest avenues, a bookshop that my wife Kader and I loved very much. We visited it once a month, without fail. It was at the entrance of a bustling multi-storey shopping centre, this bookshop, and it was huge, and so well organised, and we could always find whatever book or journal we were after. It had a mezzanine that served as a cafeteria, this bookshop. It had wicker chairs with red cushions, and customers could relax there with a tea or a coffee and a little music. We loved all that, but we also loved Cemalettin Bey, the owner. You know the kind of person I mean: they don’t even need to speak for you to breathe more easily, and open your mind a little — well, Cemalettin Bey was someone like that. Also, this man had this amazing sense of space, and that was why, the moment you walked in, you felt right at home. He knew if you needed him, he could tell just from the way you moved, or didn’t move. And then, bam, he’d be right next to you. . If you were not quite sure what you wanted, it was right under your nose — even if he was many kilometres away, he knew. . So anyway, this is where my wife and I were headed sixteen years ago, on that hot summer’s day, to look at a few new books, but also just to pass the time. And we had just joined the crowd pushing its way up the stairs when suddenly my watchstrap snapped. Thinking it made sense to buy a new one, seeing as I had my watch with me, I left Kader at the bookshop and made my way to the watchmaker at the other end of the same floor. You know how cramped those little shops are, with only room for one: there’s always someone sitting behind a glass counter, and when you walk in, he raises his head and looks you over, almost like you were a watch. Unless, of course, he is holding a watch he has just opened up, in which case he is too concerned with its innards to look up at all, and as you stand there on your side of the counter, waiting, it’s almost like being caught between several different time currents, each flowing in its own direction. And all around you there are clocks ticking away, each in its own fashion, and as you stand there, that’s what surrounds you, the pandemonium of clocks. And so that’s how it was that day when I went into that shop. I had to wait, because the man sitting behind the counter had put on his glasses to repair a shoddy-looking watch with an instrument as fine as a horse’s hair. He was totally indifferent to my presence — as if the watch he was repairing would determine the moment he’d look up at me. And just in case he had reached the most difficult moment of the job, I kept quiet, of course; but I also leaned over slightly, to see if I could find a watchstrap I liked in the display beneath the glass counter. Actually this was something of a lost cause because I didn’t know anything about leather and in the end I was just going to decide on one of the expensive ones, hoping it was good. And who knows, maybe I was, without even knowing it, pretending to be busy so as not to distract the watchmaker. . Acting like I needed to look at these watchstraps anyway, so fine with me if he carried on working. . There is, as you know, a dark little room at the back of our minds in which we learn things by rote, and when the right conditions present themselves, we say or perform the things we learn in that room without even knowing. . What I’m trying to say is that this is what prompted me to behave in this way. But anyway, after I’d been standing there waiting for quite some time, this sallow-faced man behind the counter slowly raised his head to look at me, and while he was doing that, a huge explosion ripped through the building. All I saw before we were plunged into darkness were flying, smashing, terrifying shards of glass. When I opened my eyes, I was in hospital, in a room painted almond green with a ceiling covered with water stains. There were bandages on my arms and legs and around my head. Voices floated in to me from the corridors and the other rooms and the far corners of the building, and every once in a while I could hear people running. All this from the bed I was lying in. It would have been better if I’d heard nothing, though, because there was no one with me, and the sound of those voices made my own empty room seem emptier. The longer I lay there, the emptier I felt inside, and I kept thinking about Kader and wondering where she was, wondering why she wasn’t with me, looking into my eyes, and holding my hand. I found out the next day, of course. It seems that the centre of the explosion was in that bookshop we liked so much — that was where the terrorists had planted their plastic explosives. In due course the morgue returned what was left of my wife’s body, and I failed to find the courage to look at it, not even once. In all honesty, I did want to look at it. I wanted to see her face, and touch her, one last time, but in the end I didn’t. No, I didn’t, I am sad to say. Even though I wanted to. . Was I scared of seeing body parts that had been salvaged, piece by piece, from the wreckage? At the time, I just couldn’t say. There were arms and legs lying all over the place, so maybe I was frightened that they’d matched them with the wrong bodies. Because something like that did occur to me that day. When you had ignorant, thick-skinned officials running roughshod over evidence and all too often destroying it with their own hands, this sort of thing could happen quite easily. But even if they exercised the greatest caution, it could still happen, simply because of the magnitude of the damage, and the chaos it had caused. It’s terrifying just to imagine it. Just think: your loved one’s arm in one cemetery, and her leg in another. . In the end there were fifteen people wounded that day, and five killed. Or to be more accurate, that’s what the records said — three women and two men, five people in all. When really it was six people who died. Because Kader was five months pregnant, so I did not just lose my wife that day. I also lost my child. Without ever having held it in my arms. Without ever having kissed its forehead. .’

‘I’m so sorry. So very, very sorry,’ Kenan mumbled helplessly.

Ziya’s eyes were brimming with tears.

‘Thanks,’ he said, as he reached for the pack next to his knees and pulled out another cigarette.

For a few minutes, neither spoke.

Meanwhile, the leaves of the oak tree in whose shade they were sitting began to rustle. As each new rustle flew through the air like an imaginary leaf, a tortoise came out from underneath the wild liquorice just in front of them; it took a few steps forward, crunching the grass underfoot, stuck out its head, looked around timidly, and then quickly backed away, to hide amongst the branches.

‘Do you know what?’ Ziya said, as he blew out his smoke. ‘If I’d had a son, he’d be sixteen years old now.’

‘Which means he’d be the same age as my nephew Besim.’

‘So it goes,’ continued Ziya, in a faint little voice. ‘It’s almost as if this thing we call life sent me off into that corner, with a watchstrap as a pretext. Or else, that watchmaker did it, by making me wait. Sometimes I wonder, I really do, if life put that man there, just for this purpose, if it did something to his body to slow him down and then put him in that shop to work, for fifty or sixty years, just so that it could delay me, and keep me far from the explosion. If I know anything, it’s this: if that sallow-faced man behind the counter had been a little faster, there is no doubt that I would have finished my errand and returned to the bookshop at the entrance to the shopping centre, and died there, with my wife and my son. Do you know what? For many years I felt the deepest shame at not having died with them. There were even times when I was ashamed to be living the years they never could. I felt so ashamed, and was in such pain, that a time arrived when I hated life itself. I’d lose my temper, badly. There were times when the winds of fury sent me flying into a meyhane , times when I came to think of the others at my table as my closest friends, and went off to houses I’d never been to, with people I didn’t know, to bend to the will of anyone who happened to be near me, but those days passed and I put all that behind me, soon enough. Those soap bubbles of laughter, that clanging music, those fumes and those dim lights, and all the other props people use to get close to one another — I was spending too much time with people who had given up on life, I decided. I was wasting my pain. The truth is I told none of them what had happened; they hadn’t the least idea of the hell I’d been through, but still, when I sat drinking in their company, the atmosphere seeped into my private hell: the smoke they exhaled would billow across the room and settle inside me. And the endless insipid conversations, they were one long stretched-out moan. The jokes that weren’t jokes, because they lacked even the slightest sparkle of wit. The kisses that meant nothing, beyond flesh touching flesh. The fights. And everywhere — lining the walls, lounging on the sofas, sitting on the floor, lurking in the bathrooms, even, and in places even worse than that — all those people, holding glasses. What can I say? I was wasting my pain, spending so much time in places like this, and that’s why it didn’t last long. I had my wobble, but it was soon over. One way of looking at it was that I left the life I’d known, went as far from it as I could, but then I came back again. And pulled myself together. I found refuge, with the help of that eraser of memories we call time. Or rather, I came to understand that the only way forward was to bury myself in my grief, and accept what had happened.’