Djinns E-Book

Fatma Aydemir

• Herausgeber: Peirene Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 530

Beschreibung

For thirty years, Hüseyin has worked in Germany, taking every extra shift and carefully saving, even as he provides for his wife and four children. Finally, he has set aside enough to buy an apartment back in Istanbul – a new centre for his loved ones and a place for him to retire. But just as this future is in reach, Hüseyin's tired heart gives up. His family rush to him, travelling from Germany by plane and car, each of his children conflicted as they process their relationship with their parents and each other. Reminiscent of Bernardine Evaristo or Zadie Smith, Djinns portrays a family at the end of the 20th century in all its complexity: full of secrets, questions, silence and love.

Leseprobe

Fatma Aydemir

Translated from the German by Jon Cho-Polizzi

CONTENTS

Title PageTranslator’s IntroductionHüseyinÜmitSevdaPeriHakanEmineGlossaryAbout the AuthorThe Peirene SubscriptionCopyright

Translator’s Introduction

How does one properly introduce a translation of a novel that requires no introduction in Germany? Perhaps through a brief overview of the work’s translatability: since its 2022 publication, Fatma Aydemir’s Djinnshas already been adapted for three separate stage productions: at the Nationaltheater in Mannheim, the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin and the Schauspielhaus in Düsseldorf. Plans are also under way for a cinematic adaptation of the book. In addition to these Germanlanguage cross-media ‘translations’, the novel has begun to circulate beyond the German-speaking world too. From Finnish to Bosnian, Polish to French, Danish to Dutch to Turkish, it has been or is currently being translated into over a dozen languages, and I’ve been struck by the multiplicity of ways this novel speaks to its respective readers across languages and communities.

A journalist, writer and public intellectual, Fatma Aydemir is also something of a household name in Germany. The granddaughter of Turkish-Kurdish immigrants, Aydemir was, for many years, an editor for Berlin-based periodical Die Tageszeitung(taz) and writes for feminist culture publication MissyMagazine. She was also an initiator of bilingual news portal taz.gazete, which works to combat state media repression 2in Turkey. Her breakthrough novel, Ellbogen(Elbow, 2017), was the recipient of both the Franz Hessel and the Klaus-Michael Kühne Prize for best authorial debut. The 2019 essay collection EureHeimatistunserAlbtraum(YourHomelandIsOurNightmare), which Aydemir co-edited with Hengameh Yaghoobifarah – with its scathing social critiques and poignant personal confessions – became an overnight sensation in German-speaking Europe, encapsulating the discontents of a new generation no longer willing to conform to the social norms of a patriarchal, heteronormative, white Christian identity. The volume has already become part of the standard curriculum for contemporary German studies in universities across much of the anglophone world.

Djinns, Aydemir’s second novel, has been described as thebook cultural critics will reach for in a hundred years in their attempt to make sense of the zeitgeist of Germany today. And indeed, the critical reception of this work has reignited debates on the very function of literature in the German-speaking world: at once lauded for its precision, its scope, its intimacy and its daring, Djinnshas simultaneously been lambasted for its bold, no-holds-barred critique of German society and its open rebuttal of modern Germany’s well-guarded public image as the refined, redeemed and reconciled successor of its violent mid-twentieth-century self. Djinnsjoins the ranks of an increasing body of recent German-language literature grappling with the traumatic aftermath of German unification. It documents the xenophobic violence and pogroms that characterized the migrant experience of 1990s Germany, a history that has long been eclipsed by the national narrative of unity, the end of the Cold War and the triumph of West German capitalism and 3democracy. Literature, so goes the age-old German adage, dare not be too openly or immediately political – it must maintain critical (and chronological) distance. Literature should operate in the abstract realm of aesthetics, not the concrete realm of an often deplorable reality. Proper German literature ‘sounds different’, one establishment critic wrote of this novel. But the contemporary cultural-creative scene, not to mention German readers, seems, overwhelmingly, to disagree.

How, then, does one approach a novel that in many ways successfully defies the expectations of its reading public? Over the last decades the adjective postmigrantisch(postmigrant) has increasingly become a catch-all for the reception and evaluation of an ever-expanding body of cultural production by racialized creatives in the German-speaking world. But this self-designation has fallen out of favour with many critics and creatives in recent years, who argue instead for the necessity of reframing post-migrant discourse within a wider, postcolonial analysis, rather than simply applying it as a convenient adjective for categorizing the diverse and often socially critical works of particular artists and writers.

Can Djinnsthen be classified as a work of postmigrant literature? Yes and no. Djinnsis certainly a novel informed by the confluence of Kurdish and Turkish migration histories. It is a multigenerational story of movement, immigration and varied attempts at integration and assimilation – and in that sense, the expression of an experience which transcends national borders and narratives. Its prose is translingual and its plot line transnational. Yet Djinnsis also a work of fiction profoundly situated in the circumstances of life in contemporary Germany, and it is precisely this grounding that may help us rethink 4established notions of national literature. The postmigrant nature of the Federal Republic of Germany, of course, plays no small role in this. But to limit one’s reading of the work to the author’s or characters’ biographies would also be to limit one’s understanding of the centrality of migration in the globalized world we all inhabit today.

I could wax poetic about the merits, achievements and tremendous impacts of this novel. As a translator, however, it occurs to me that it need not be my task to muddy the waters with details on the contents or reception of this book. And as an avid reader, I’m acutely aware of the fine line between framing an ‘imported’ work of literature and descending into unwarranted plot spoilers and interpretations. It strikes me that it should be my task, instead, to discuss some of the specific linguistic facets of this novel and to shine light where the opacity of translation might overshadow some of the work’s special qualities.

Even the most casual of German-language readers would be struck by the high number of Turkish-language words in the source text. These words appear in the German narrative without gloss or italicization, as if to imply that they need no further explanation, to highlight their de facto presence in German society. After all, it has been more than sixty years since Germany’s 1961 Recruitment Agreement with Turkey, facilitating state-regulated labour migration for the Turkish diaspora. The impact of this remains visible today: according to German state authorities, by the end of 2022, there were nearly 1.5 million Turkish nationals living in Germany, a country of just over 84 million residents (this number does not include the even larger number of German citizens of Turkish heritage). And yet the novel’s intervention is of tremendous significance 5precisely because nearly all these words do, in fact, require additional explanation for the ‘average’ German reader. Despite the omnipresence of Turkish culture in Germany these days, the Turkish language is rarely taught in German schools. It’s no secret that the bilingualism of Turkish-heritage speakers is actively discouraged in many social and professional contexts. Most German speakers cannot recognize more than a mere smattering of highly Germanized Turkish words for food, such as the inevitable döneror perhaps çay. Aydemir’s insistence on writing the Turkish presence into the linguistic fabric of her novel therefore demands a certain reckoning from her reader with what has, by now, long since become a lived social reality.

In keeping with the author’s choices, but in recognition of the diverse experiences and socialization of an English-language readership, I have both retained a large number of these untranslated Turkish words in my translation and eschewed their italicization in my formatting. But I have opted to include a short glossary of English translations and explanations – not only for the untranslated Turkish words but also for the untranslated vestiges of German, Kurdish and Serbo-Croatian in the novel. Unlike in the author’s original German, I have also chosen to use English spelling for a number of words where the English equivalent bears a recognizable similarity to the original Turkish or Arabic (words like azan [Turkish: ezan], arabesque [arabesk] or hodja [hoca], for which the author chose to privilege Turkish words over their German-language counterparts).

While it is certainly not my intention to provide anything resembling an introduction to the Turkish language (I would be utterly unqualified to do so), I have also included a small guide 6for the English-language reader when it comes to Turkish letters whose pronunciation differs markedly from the English:

C/c [dʒ] similar to the English j in jar

Ç/ç [tʃ] similar to the English ch in chop

Ğ/ğ [ɰ] pronunciation differs by association, but often similar to an unstressed English w, or something like a placeholder indicating a brief pause between letters

İ/i [i] similar to the English ‘long e’ in speed

I/ı [ɯ] similar to the English ‘short u’ or the e in roses

Ş/ş [ʃ] similar to the English sh in shop

In addition, the German consonant ß, the ‘sharp s’ or ‘Eszett,’ is equivalent to the English s in street, while the German s (before most consonants) is pronounced similarly to the English sh, as in shop.

Thus, for example, the name Cemwould be pronounced more like the English noun gem; çayis pronounced more like the English transliteration of the Hindi chai; the first sin the German word Straße(street) is pronounced more like the English sh, while the Eszettis pronounced more like the standard English s(ˈʃtʁäːsə). I am aware that it is, at best, a cursory overview, but the brief phonetic table provided here is intended as a reader’s aid and not as a substitute for in-depth engagement with the Turkish (or German) language.

The glossary is also short and is intended to be used solely as a reader’s reference for untranslated vocabulary. Although I began my work by compiling a comprehensive list that included 7the vast number of references to cities, films, people, songs, TV shows and so on that appear in this novel, I eventually opted to restrict the glossary to specific non-English vocabulary, as deciding which cultural references to explain to a global readership became frustratingly arbitrary in the context of such a transnational work. I also chose to forgo explanation of most specific Islamic vocabulary (including the names of figures or places as well as the titles of passages from the Quran), though I did, at times, provide more common English-language equivalents.

The word kanake(also kanakin[feminine], kanaken[plural]) plays a central role in the German-language novel. A word of Malay and Polynesian origin meaning ‘child’, ‘human’ or ‘brother’, the term has come to be used disparagingly in modern German (presumably by way of Dutch or Low German colonial derivation) to denote those of perceived Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Muslim or North African heritage. During the 1990s, with the influence of imported US hip-hop culture and a discourse and affect inspired by Black activism in the United States, the word was increasingly reappropriated as a term of self-empowerment within these minoritized German communities. This application was popularized in mainstream German culture through the use of Kiezdeutsch(literally, neighbourhood German), the youth jargon spoken in predominantly racialized inner-city communities, German hip-hop culture and the work of anti-racist activist collectives such as Kanak Attak. The word appears throughout the novel with varying nuances according to the positionalities of the individual characters. The reader should be aware that this word carries significant derogatory connotations in standard German and that its casual use is never appropriate outside 8the communities who have endeavoured to repurpose it as an emancipatory tool.

References in the novel to Mölln and Solingen (potential spoiler) refer to two of the most infamous cases of right-wing terrorism in the immediate post-unification period. Both were the sites of fatal arson attacks by German neo-Nazis who set fire to the homes of Turkish immigrant families. Although many such xenophobic attacks occurred during this period (and indeed continue to occur in Germany today), these particular instances received widespread media attention due to the deaths of several victims in each case: two children and their grandmother died in Mölln, while nine others were seriously injured; five family members died in Solingen, while fourteen others were injured. Particularly in Sevda’s chapter, the word Solingenacquires a complex relation to the character’s own socio-economic ascent, as the city is also associated with the production of high-quality cutlery and knives that have become something of a hallmark of an affluent German household.

Finally, lest the minutia of my introduction convince you otherwise, I would like to end by stressing the incredible readability of this book. Preparations for the translation took me on physical journeys from Eastern Anatolia to Istanbul, Oakland to Detroit and the Black Forest to Berlin. The pages of the novel alone, however, should suffice to carry the engaged reader on a similarly harrowing journey: back into the volatile decade following Germany’s unification, from the mountains of Kurdistan to the factories and labour domiciles of West Germany, and onward through a new nation’s reluctant transformation into one of the most culturally diverse and dynamic countries in Western Europe today. Djinnsis at once a 9touching family narrative, a sweeping modern-day epic, and a timeless examination of the lies, loves and losses of a life lived navigating between worlds. It is, truly, one of the definitive novels of our generation. 10

DJINNS

Hüseyin

Hüseyin… do you know who you are, Hüseyin, when you see the shining contours of your face in the reflection on the balcony door? When you open the door, stride across the balcony, and a warm breeze caresses your face while the setting sun glimmers between the rooftops of the apartments in Zeytinburnu like a giant tangerine? You rub your eyes. Maybe, you think, maybe every obstacle and every conflict in this life was only there so that, one day, you could stand up here and know: I’veearnedthisformyself. With the sweat of my brow.

You hear the first evening call to prayer from the balcony of the apartment – this spacious, three-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor. The apartment you worked and saved for, for almost thirty years, while raising your four children and providing your wife with an admittedly humble but never meagre life. You lived your days to the rhythm of three shifts, Hüseyin. You took on every Sunday, every holiday, overtime. Took advantage of every available bonus in the metalworks to make sure your family could get by. To buy new football boots for the little one, pay off the older one’s debts and still set a little something aside. And now you’ve finally done it. You’re fifty-nine and a homeowner. In a few years, when Ümit finishes school and you can finally leave Germany, that cold, cold-hearted country, there’ll be an apartment waiting for you in Istanbul with your 14name at the door: Hüseyin! You’ve finally found a place you can call home.

Enjoy it, Hüseyin. Listen as the blaring music from the shops in the streets below grows quiet. Now there is only the azan. The azan and the honking and the cries of the millions who must still navigate the streets and go about the business of their days. Hear the call of the gulls. Inhale the humid air tinged with exhaust and the smell of burning rubbish. Let your gaze fall on the bustle between the houses below before you go to pray.

Look, a new location of İbrahim Tatlıses’s lahmacun restaurant has opened over the way. You used to love his music so, Hüseyin. You bought one of his albums. Every evening, at the boarding house, you’d pop open a bottle of Kristallweizen; the hum of the record player would follow the hiss of the cap. The bağlama in the opening notes of ‘Tükendi Nakdi Ömrüm’. Do you remember, Hüseyin, the countless cigarettes you smoked to this song? How your body dissolved into one single white puff of smoke inside the narrow kitchen of the home? The kitchen at the end of that long, dark hallway. You could feel İbo because he sang of the people in his songs, of those to whom no one else lent an ear. The poor, the darkling, those hard-working people from the countryside. Those people like you, Hüseyin. And you felt İbo because, like you, he too had discarded the language of his parents. Discarded it like an unused sack of stones.

But now you can no longer stand him. You despise İbo, Hüseyin. How he hops around on his show on Friday evenings. Speaking nonsense. And gawping at his belly dancers. This honourless man who had a simple merchant shot at the Urfa bazaar because the merchant did not want to serve him. Or at least so the papers had said. 15

No, Hüseyin, this is by no means the kind of man whose cassette tapes you’d want to buy or listen to. And besides, İbo has long since transitioned from folk music to arabesque. And you’ve long since given up both alcohol and tobacco. And without alcohol, it’s almost impossible to tolerate arabesque. And even if you could, what could the songs of such a man provide? A man who beats his women and wears this crime in public like a badge of pride? Nothing. But still, Perihan and Hakan and Ümit will no doubt be impressed by this restaurant. It belongs to the most famous person in the country, after all. You won’t be able to say a thing, Hüseyin, when your children rush over there each day to stuff themselves.

And you will pay for their food, too. You’ll watch them peacefully. And silently you’ll be glad that you can finally provide them with the opportunity to spend each summer here in Istanbul from now on. Istanbul, this splendid city, over which so many centuries of wars were waged and so much blood was shed. And all for naught. For no one has ever understood that this city will never permit itself to be conquered. In the end, the city always conquers you. In the end, you will be nothing more than another layer of dust on the earth beneath the feet of new conquerors, always with the same desires. And Istanbul will absorb and devour all of them, reducing all to dust. Nourishing itself on them, forever growing in its incandescent splendour.

You, Hüseyin, you already knew that someday you would return to Istanbul. Already, the first time you arrived in this city. Back then you’d come by train from your village. You disembarked here for a week, you stayed with relatives before you boarded the bus and then the train to southern Germany, where you were assigned a job. They put you in a line with 16other workers there, they inspected your naked bodies, and they examined the contents of your underpants. That was in the spring of 1971.

Germany was not what you had hoped it would be, Hüseyin. You’d hoped for a new life. But what you received, instead, was loneliness. And loneliness can never be a new life. For loneliness is a cycle, the constant repetition of the same memories inside your head. The perpetual search for new wounds within your long-departed ego. The longing for those people you left behind. But what could you do, Hüseyin? You couldn’t just return to your village. And so you stayed. And you did the things you had to do so that your coming here would at least make sense.

How time flies, Hüseyin. In the last twenty-eight years of your life, you’ve earned more money than you would ever have dreamed of in Turkey. You earned it because you were never too good for any work. The kind of work no German would do. You could not have known, Hüseyin, that your body would soon, far before retirement age, grow as weary as the German economy after unification. Like your many colleagues, in that moment when the two exhaustions came together and the doors of the metalworks closed, you, too, had wanted to take early retirement. But you received no certification. Although your back had twisted inside like a C after all those long years bent before the furnace. And your knee had begun to ache dreadfully after even the shortest walks.

But even this had some validity, Hüseyin. For how else would you all have got by back then? With three children at home, on a pension of only nine hundred marks? From your savings? Would you have wanted to give up this apartment, Hüseyin, just so you could have started to relax a few years earlier? A few years 17earlier, but in Germany forever more? Of course not, Hüseyin. And so you went on to a different factory for less pay and even fewer benefits. But it was still enough to amass the necessary savings. To put away a bit more towards your pension. And besides, it was hard to call folding cardboard work, especially after all those years melting scraps of metal at 1,500°C. And so you drudged through five more years, Hüseyin, until last year, when you personally asked your cardboard boss, as politely as you could, to be discharged. And he acquiesced. And you finally found time to look at apartments in Istanbul. Time to rededicate yourself to your faith which had, for long years, wilted like an unwatered flower. Time to listen to yourself and time to make peace with your demons. And next week, when you turn sixty, your pension will finally kick in, Hüseyin. They call it early retirement, but nothing about this feels early.

How the time flies. Who knows, maybe you’ll never go back to Germany again. Maybe you’ll just stay here. Maybe Emine and the children will stay, too, after they arrive and see how perfectly you’ve arranged the apartment for them. Maybe Ümit will just finish his schooling here. Maybe Perihan and Hakan will both fall in love here and finally want to get married. You tremble at the thought, Hüseyin. But why? Was it not you, back then, who wrung your hands and wanted to deliver your elder daughter, Sevda, to a man? Who gave her an ultimatum when she was seventeen and a half years old? You’ll marry this one or that one, you can decide, but you will take one of them and start a family. And then at least we won’t have to worry what Germany will do to our Sevda. Our Sevda, who always wants too much from life, who’s never satisfied with what she has, with what she 18can achieve. Was it not your idea, Hüseyin, to deliver Sevda into safety in this fashion? Was it not your idea to kill her dreams?

But poor Hüseyin, Sevda did as she pleased. And even with two children on her lap, she kept doing it all the same. Can you not see? So now, instead, you worry about Perihan and Hakan. But you should have realized long ago, Hüseyin, that your fears for your children seldom guide you to the right decisions. Yes, you smile, Hüseyin. And well you should. For today is a good day: perhaps the best day of your life.

All the furniture has arrived. The men arranged the furnishings according to your plan: the mirror and the heavy double bed for Emine and you in the back bedroom, the patterned futons for the children in the two smaller rooms. In the living room stands an ornate chest of drawers of dark, polished hardwood, exactly how Emine will want it. She will like the chest of drawers, of this you are sure.

Emine, whom you have loved since you first saw her in the neighbouring village. You had just come back from your military service then, a little crazed from the experience, a little broken. And this young woman passed you in the alleyway with her head lowered, white as a cotton blossom. The very next day, you’d called to ask for her hand. Called at her aunt’s, for by then Emine’s parents were long dead. Her aunt had tried to suppress her joy, for she had not wished to reveal her toothless smile, and yet she had seemed gladdened by the notion of one less mouth to feed. That was thirty-three years ago. And you have always loved Emine, more than you love yourself. Even during those eight long years when you were so far away from her in Germany. You always thought of her, you fell asleep each night on dreams that carried you to Emine. To the smell of the rosewater she rubbed 19each morning behind her ears. To the coolness of her skin, cool even beneath two thick layers of blankets. None of the German women you met in the bars along the river during those lonely years could still the yearning you felt for Emine. Quite the contrary, Hüseyin: the closer you drew to these women, the greater your longing grew.

Then it became possible to bring her and the children after you. The long wait came to an end. You moved together into the dim ground-floor apartment of a yellow high-rise building across from the factory. A building where only Turkish and Italian workers and one ancient German widow lived. And you made the best of everything; you sent your children to better schools than you ever could have dreamed of in Turkey. You did everything. You gave your all, except, perhaps, with Sevda. But the firstborn child is always an experiment. What could you do? People make mistakes. And you could do better with those who followed after, isn’t that right, Hüseyin? All but the firstborn. Only your firstborn child.

And now, Hüseyin, you’re waiting for Emine, again. For this time it is she who is in Germany, and you: here in Turkey. Next week she will follow, with Hakan, Perihan and little Ümit, who finally has summer holidays. You flew earlier to prepare the apartment. Halime Bacı, your friendly neighbour from the apartment below, already arranged a cleaning woman for Sunday to look after the details. Your glance falls on the kitchen, Hüseyin, through the balcony’s French windows. The pile of apricots, still wrapped in newspaper, that Halime Bacı brought this afternoon. You were lucky, Hüseyin, to find such a helpful and respectable neighbour. Such things are no longer the rule these days, not even here. 20

The call to prayer has already ended. But it doesn’t matter if you pray five minutes late today, Hüseyin. And so you push open the doors to the kitchen, unwrap the newspapers and let warm water run over the fruit. You leave the balcony doors open so the synthetic smell of the new furniture can waft away. The apricots are already slightly fermented, the way you like them. Sugary sweet and almost mush.

You eat one, and then another. And you’re just about to walk to the bathroom, Hüseyin, to prepare yourself for prayer. You’ve just decided not to wash your sticky fingers in the kitchen but to head straight to the bathroom, where you will wash your hands and your face and your arms and your head and your ears and your neck and your feet anyway. You’ve just taken one step from the kitchen towards the hallway when you feel a sharp twinge of pain in your left arm.

You wonder whether you overstrained yourself earlier helping the men carry those two sofas and three futons down the hall, even though they had said graciously that they’d be fine. The furniture wasn’t that heavy anyway. But the pain does not subside. A stabbing pain. Again and again. Like an axe, cleaving your flesh apart.

Hüseyin, cold sweat beads on your neck. Your body does not know this kind of pain. And suddenly a tightness spreads across your chest as if your whole torso were contracting to no larger than a button. You remain on your feet, Hüseyin. You stand, crossing your arms over your chest as if hugging yourself. And then you have to sit down anyway. You take two steps towards the living room, where the brand-new dining table and the matching upholstered chairs are waiting, but after these two steps you’re overcome by such a wave of nausea that you turn towards the 21bathroom instead. But it’s too late for that, Hüseyin. Your body bends in half, and you vomit then and there, by the front door, in the middle of the hall.

You cough, falling to your knees and crying as loudly as you can for your neighbour, Halime Bacı. You hammer with both hands on the floor, but you don’t know whether she will hear you knocking. The world is spinning. You see bits of apricot on the oak-finish laminate of the floor. Your body struggles to right itself from this crouch, but you just can’t manage it, Hüseyin. Everything is too heavy. Too much. Too tight. Your chest is rocked by sudden cramps, and while you’re screaming for Halime you jerk upwards, lose your balance, and your body tumbles to the floor amid your vomit.

You keep your head high, with all your strength. You scream, struggling for air. You scream again. And suddenly you hear Halime Bacı’s voice outside in the main hallway. The slip-slap of her rubber slippers ascending the stone stairs. The cramp in your upper body releases for two seconds. Somehow you manage to heave your arm against the doorknob, to open the front door. And then another cramp, more forceful still. A pain so deep, so bitter, the likes of which you’ve never known before. Cries flood from your body. They sound so odd; you can’t be sure whether they’re yours at all. They must come from somewhere else, outside. It’s not possible for you to make such a noise.

You see the long frame of Halime Bacı’s frightened face above you. You can’t understand what she’s saying, but she quivers. She looks terrified. Pale. Her face is a mirror in which you see the reflection of your own fate, Hüseyin.

The fuzzy thoughts inside your head grow suddenly clearer: this is the end. Finished. Over. This is how you’ll die. Covered 22in your own vomit. A sticky mess of fruit in the apartment you dreamed of all your life. You’ll die like this, without a glimpse of the sparkle in Emine’s eyes when she first sees the place, without feeling the youthful excitement of your youngest daughter and two sons. You’ll never know what they think of the furniture you chose, of the bustle of the neighbourhood. Of Istanbul: a city they know only from postcards and a few short stopovers during their youth, and of course from TV.

Just like you, Hüseyin. Why did you want to move to Istanbul anyway? What do you truly know about this place? Was it really the place you dreamed of, or merely a memory? A memory of leaving home, a stopover on your way to the factory, a place between forgetting and the toil that followed. The first place where you could breathe.

You want to breathe, Hüseyin. You don’t want to die. Not now, even though you are devout. Even though you’ve always said you’ll be ready when Azrael comes for you. Maybe, you think now, maybe you’ve secretly hoped your faith would grant you a long and healthy life. How naive you’ve been, Hüseyin. You’re not ready. It simply can’t end this way. Not like this. You would pray to Allah if your tongue were not as heavy as lead, your mouth so cleft with the pain roiling inside you like an uncontainable wildfire: set to scorch the earth and burn away all hostile life. You would beseech Azrael that he, or she, or it grant you just one week more. Please, just one week more. Just this short period of grace. To open the apartment doors to your dear family, the doorway here before you, and lead them into the bright rooms. This is Hakan and Ümit’s bedroom; this room is for Perihan. This is the living room, and here, our balcony. Over there is another balcony attached to our bedroom, Emine. 23Just one week more to walk along the water with them. To pour your children a çay, to hold your daughter’s hand and tell her how very much you love her. To tell your sons you’re proud of them. To call Sevda and beg her to forgive you. To hear the voices of the grandchildren you’ve missed for all these years. Maybe a bit more than a week. You stopped smoking long ago, Hüseyin. That was meant to prolong your life. How can you die of a heart attack now, of all times, and miss everything that was meant to happen in this apartment? Your apartment, Hüseyin.

Hüseyin, you strain your eyes. You keep them open. You look around. Halime Bacı was gone, but now she’s back again. You understand that Halime has called an ambulance, is begging you to hold on. She wipes your brow with a damp towel. Ice-cold, it runs across your forehead and nose, over the twitching corners of your mouth. For a second it feels as though a hole has opened in your heart. A hole through which all the pain is vanishing, is sinking. Disappears.

Hüseyin, you know this will only last an instant – this respite from the pain. You know it will return, come soon. The pain will return. You can’t say how you have this knowledge, how you know with such certainty, but the next cramp will surely come. And it will be monstrous. It will carry you far from here. You know this. And so you use this yawning emptiness in your chest, use the final strength you find within you, to move your lips. Panic-stricken and pale, Halime stares questioningly. She lowers her ear to your mouth to better understand what you have to say, Hüseyin. You whisper it. One word. And Halime asks, ‘What was that? Come again?’ But you cannot. You see a shadow fall across the wall. You feel those cold beads of sweat gathering at your neck. But you need not be afraid, Hüseyin. That shadow 24is only me. I promise you, I will tarry here. In this house. In this apartment. I will watch over your family when they arrive. I give you my word, Hüseyin. I promise. But it is time for you to go now, Hüseyin. Even I can do nothing to change this.

Don’t be afraid, Hüseyin. Come. Just take one breath. Take one little breath. Only as much air as you need to compose yourself. To murmur your words. You’ve held on to them for a lifetime. For this moment, Hüseyin. But now you don’t want to say them. Because you don’t want to give up yet. But that is no longer in your hands, Hüseyin. There’s nothing in your hands, Hüseyin. And you want to do it, before it is too late. You take a breath. One breath to let go. To decide for yourself this is the moment to let go. And so you take a breath, and you whisper ‘Eşhedü en la ilahe illallah…’

25

Ümit

The call came in the night. A scream.

Ümit wasn’t sure whether the scream was just another remnant of those recent dreams that had been leaving him tied up in knots. He lay in bed until he heard the apartment door open and Hakan’s voice inside. Barefoot, Ümit tiptoed from his bedroom only to find everyone – Peri, Hakan, his mother – huddling together in the night. Stony-faced, no one so much as noticed Ümit’s presence in the room. Howcouldthishavehappened?Justlikethat?Whydidn’ttheysendhimtoGermanyimmediately?Howexactly?Withahelicopter!Whatwouldthathavechanged?Theydon’thavedecentdoctorsthere!Thatcan’tbe.It can’t be… Their murmurs filled the darkness of the apartment until the sun rose, ushering reality in with it.

Baba was dead. And they needed to go. Immediately. Find a flight to Istanbul with four seats free in the middle of the summer holidays. Forget it. Peri sobbed over the telephone with every travel agency, her glittery face crumpled as though she’d just returned from a long night out partying. Hakan scowled, chain-smoking on their balcony. And Ümit’s mother. Ümit’s mother had become a collapsed heap of limbs strewn across their sofa, as impossible to reconstitute as the stewed meat in a pot of goulash.

Peri found a flight from Frankfurt rather than Stuttgart. Three seats instead of four. Hakan popped open a can of Red Bull and 26began calling around to find a separate flight. Secretly, Ümit was glad to be missing his appointment with Dr Schumann, but he was also ashamed of these thoughts. Feraye Teyze’s son from next door shuttled them through traffic in his BMW 3 Series. They flew on an airline none of them had ever heard of, leaving their in-flight meal, sausages in some kind of gruel, untouched until the flight attendants collected their trays. Peri and Ümit’s mother cried incessantly while Ümit stared out of the oval window at the candyfloss clouds. He was thinking of the tectonic plates he’d learned about in geography. Floating above this continent towards a rough landing at its outermost limits. The people around him clapped their hands. The sun was setting twenty kilometres from Asia.

And now it’s shining again, completely indifferent to the fact that a life has ended and a family has been broken. The sun drips from the windowpane to claw at Ümit’s eyelids. The rush of a thousand motors bores its way in from the outside world while Ümit lies here in the same unfamiliar apartment that had taken his father from him. Lies here wishing that the world will grant him one small reprieve, if only for a second. That the world will stand still so he can find time to prepare himself for everything to come. To come up with a plan to sneak away, or simply remain lying in this room – still reeking of fresh paint – to lie here and let the day pass by without anyone coming to bother him.

Ümit shuts his eyes, squeezes them tight, trying to return to that unencumbered place he sometimes reaches just before sleep. Just before he finally nods off, clocks out. Drifting. Lost. Wandering in the dark, endless shadows of a tangled German forest. Shortly before he sinks, there is that span of time between unsleep and sleep that envelops him in velvet, lifts him from 27the floor and carries him away. That moment his mother calls şekerleme. Sugar sleep.

But it’s useless. The heat is grilling him alive in bed. A metallic taste he can’t identify coats his tongue. For some strange reason, it reminds Ümit of childhood. Something clatters in the kitchen, someone’s talking in the room next door. Cars are honking on the street below, music drifts up from the shopfronts. Anything is better than those unearthly wails the night before. Guardedly, he opens his eyes. The ceiling has the colour of vanilla ice cream. Ümit could puke. The way everything in this apartment smells so new. Like it’s still waiting to be brought to life. But it will never be brought to life. Death lives in this place.

Ümit peers over at the empty bed beside him, the green sheets folded neatly on the extended pull-out sofa. Hakan still hasn’t been here. Hadn’t he planned on taking the red-eye flight from Strasbourg? Hopefully he’ll make it on time for the funeral, Ümit thinks. There’s no way Ümit wants to be there by himself with his sobbing mother and sobbing sister, whom – truth be told – he’d gladly do anything to help if only he knew how. Hakan knows his way around these things. No doubt he’ll be here any minute, breezing in freshly shaven with his hair trimmed down smartly at three millimetres, his steel jaw chewing away every uncertainty like bubblegum. Hakan can bolster everyone, at least a little bit. Hug his mother, pat Peri on the shoulder. And Ümit will stand beside him, like he always does, watching, trying his best to do everything the same way.

The room is stuffy; Ümit can barely breathe. But he wants a little more time to himself here on the pull-out sofa before he has to face Peri and his mother. When they’d arrived last night by taxi from the airport, there was already a line of men waiting there, 28chain-smoking apathetically, ready to gather up their luggage from the driver as they tried to make themselves useful. In front of the apartment door upstairs, there’d already been a mountain of dusty grandma shoes: semi-open, black, brown, dark blue. Leather, or plastic that looked like leather. Inside, at least fifty women pressed together, praying, crying, praying again, as if they’d studied the art of mourning for years with the selfsame piety with which they’d learned their prayers. The men withdrew to wait downstairs on the street below. But who the hell were all these people? How had they all learned the news about Ümit’s father so quickly? Who’d invited them anyway?

Ümit had sped as quickly as he could from his room to the bathroom and he’d locked the door behind him. He listened to the muffled lamentations from the room next door while seated trembling on the edge of the bathtub. The one crying the loudest was not his mother. He couldn’t place her voice at all; she sounded like a crazed monkey. When Ümit finally turned the key and opened the door cautiously – crossing the darkened hallway to creep into the crowded space his father had once decorated to be their living room and that now stank unbearably of old women’s sweat – he saw that the crazy ape was, in fact, his Auntie Ayşe.

He could identify her by her left eye with its white lashes and the missing eyebrow. It seemed oddly naked. Ümit noticed that this eye was also a different colour from the right one. It was strange how Ayşe Yenge cried so much: she couldn’t have been that close to her brother-in-law. Ümit’s father had rarely spoken of his brother Ahmet or his wife, Ayşe. They had never come to visit. They had never called. Not even on Bayram. Ümit only recognized her from a black-and-white photograph in which she and Ahmet Amca had posed arm in arm in front of a rosebush. 29It must have been taken after they’d moved to Vienna. Ümit’s parents had similar pictures from their early days in Rheinstadt, standing before floral arrangements or next to the fountain on Poststraße. Ümit liked these kinds of pictures, and he’d spent a lot of time studying them. Maybe because they told a story of searching: about the search for beauty in a new life.

Ayşe Yenge had been seated cross-legged, large and imposing, in the middle of their living room. Seated between two women dutifully counting their prayer beads who looked like bodyguards. These two were the only ones who weren’t crying. Their bodies were draped in long black garments resembling sheets, revealing only the round globes of their faces. Ayşe’s headscarf, on the other hand, had long since slipped down around her shoulders. She slapped her hands over and over against her knees, emitting rhythmic cries. Maybe she’s afraid she’ll be the next to go, Ümit thought. Maybe that’s why she’s crying so much. Or maybe she was still mourning her own husband, who had passed the year before.

Ümit looked around for his mother and Peri, noticing at the same time that he himself was slowly becoming the centre of attention in the room. There’d been nothing he could do about it. The many women seated around him on folding chairs or on the floor rattled themselves to their feet, one after the other, in slow motion. They reminded him of zombies in the horror movies Hakan sometimes watched late at night. They formed a zombie queue to express their condolences to him one by one with wet kisses and hugs. Some spoke to him in a language Ümit didn’t understand. They all smelled the same: like bad breath and Kolonya perfume. Each time they came in, Ümit did his best to leave a bit of room between his scrawny chest and the women’s soft warm breasts, but it was hopeless. 30

He hunted around the room for Peri out of the corner of his eye. When he finally found her, he tried to signal to her to come to his rescue. But Peri remained standing in a corner, staring at her feet. The way she was rubbing her cheeks in disgust with the backs of her hands told him that she, too, had fallen victim to this eddy of commiseration. And yet Ümit couldn’t help but feel terribly alone surrounded by all these unknown women’s kisses. He felt like a little orphan boy, wept over and pitied by a world that knew he’d never amount to anything now without his father’s shielding hands over his head. A loser.

Ümit hasn’t left the bed. But he can hear scraps of conversation and footsteps in the hallway where his father died. The air hangs smouldering in the bedroom. Unbearable. Ümit wants to move, but he can’t. He’s lying in his own sticky juices. He has to think about the strange language of those zombie women, and the way his mother spoke to them yesterday in the same tongue. Why hadn’t he known his mother could speak a foreign language? And why hadn’t he ever heard this language before? He always thought his mother could only speak Turkish and about three words of German. And suddenly there she was, responding to these women, and Ümit didn’t know what she was saying. Where had she learned it?

Ümit guesses it must have been Kurdish, because the Kurds are always in the news these days. Ever since they captured that Öcalan guy. But how can it be that Ümit never knew his own mother was Kurdish? Had his father been Kurdish too? What would that make his siblings? What did that make Ümit himself? Had he not been listening properly when they’d talked about these kinds of things? Had he been too busy daydreaming? You’re supposed to know 31what you are by the time you’re fifteen. Ümit can’t just walk up now and say: Anne,areweKurdish?That would be ridiculous. Embarrassing. You’re supposed to know these things.

Ümit finally manages to get up. He does it quickly, opens the window a crack, reaches for his Walkman, then slips back onto the sheets. He’s got up too quickly, and the room is spinning. Ümit’s head feels heavy. That metallic taste isn’t just on his tongue any more, it’s spreading into his brain. Each new breath into his body feels mechanical, and his ears squeak like his thoughts were creaky hinges. Ümit sighs and switches on his Walkman to tune out the squealing in his ears. Biggie raps: Andifyoudon’tknow, nowyouknow. The sound rattles straight through Ümit’s tinny brain. Hakan had given him this cassette tape recently, shortly before he moved out. At first, Ümit had been happy finally not to have to share a room with his big brother any more. But as soon as Hakan was gone, Ümit was overcome by a strange fear: what if he suffocated in his sleep and no one was there to notice?

At least he gets to share a room with Hakan here again. That is, whenever Hakan finally makes an appearance. Ümit fast-forwards to Mariah Carey. She wasn’t on Hakan’s original tape, of course. Mariah was not his jam. But Ümit had recorded over one of Hakan’s more boring tracks with ‘The Beautiful Ones’ when it was playing on the radio. Unfortunately the DJ had started talking over them right at the climax of the song, just when Mariah and Dru Hill were getting into it. Which is why Ümit has decided to get himself a copy of the Butterflyalbum here. Peri told him there were shops in Turkey where you could put together your own mixtapes with any song you could think of, or else buy bootleg albums for a mark or two. Ümit wouldn’t know these 32kinds of things on his own; he was only nine the last time he was in Turkey. All he can really remember are the sugar crystals on the Haylayf biscuits and the little girl who got run over by a lorry on the street in front of the biscuit shop. They’d scraped up her body before his eyes: tiny and delicate as a lifeless bird on the roadside.

Normally, Ümit has to cry whenever he thinks about the biscuit girl. And usually whenever he listens to this Mariah Carey song too. But ever since the news about his father, everything’s been different. Since that phone call yesterday, since that scream in the night. Or no. More precisely, ever since Ümit padded half-asleep into the living room and found his family, or what was left of it, seated before him, tear-streaked and in shock. Now Ümit can’t cry any more. He tells himself that from now on he’s going to be somebody else. The damage has been done, but he can’t feel it yet. Its presence hasn’t registered in Ümit’s body. Nothing hurts. There’s only this one feeling: regret.

Ümit always has to think about that day at one of his home matches when his father came and stood at the edge of the football pitch. He’d stood there all by himself on the sidelines, and all of a sudden he had shouted: ‘Saldır! Koş oğlum!’ Ümit had kept running. He hadn’t even looked at his father, his head throbbing instead with swirling thoughts and shame. Shame that his father had yelled commands at him in Turkish across the entire football pitch instead of standing around with the other fathers drinking a light beer and giving the odd commentary in German. He’d been ashamed of his father for stopping by like that on his way home, a full bag of groceries in one hand – a bag from the budget supermarket. All Ümit had wanted was not to be associated by his teammates with those discount groceries. And that same night, he’d begged his father not to come to his matches any more. He’d 33stood meekly in their kitchen, hands in his pockets, and said only, ‘Baba, you distract me from the game.’ But his father had known precisely what this was really all about. His father had responded with a single look. A look Ümit now wished had never been.

There is an emptiness. It’s been there for a while. It was already there when his father was still alive. And, of course, at some point Ümit will get used to his father’s absence. You get used to anything. But how long do these things take? And more importantly: when will the others get used to it? When will he be able to speak to his mother again without being afraid of seeing that fear in her eyes?

Ever since yesterday, she’s looked like she’s in a constant state of panic. Panic, perhaps, because she doesn’t know if she can survive this pain? Will Ümit only be able to share in missing his father, too, after he no longer has to worry about his mother and sister? They seem like they’ve completely lost it ever since that phone call in the night. They broke down at the airport. They broke down on the plane. They broke down going through customs. And they broke down at the taxi rank. They were both so haggard by the end that they’d had to hold on to each other, crouching, trying not to get lost while they dragged themselves along the rubbish-littered street. But Ümit could only stiffen, lower his gaze, try to be as unobtrusive as possible: like a stranger lost in thought who only happened by chance to be standing next to these two broken women. Willing himself away to another world entirely, or maybe just ten paces further, because this world seems to expect something of him that he cannot provide.

Dead. He is dead. But what exactly is death anyway? Is death a state like sleeping, only longer? Never-ending. Like a dream, but without those flights of stairs one sometimes stumbles down 34into waking? A kind of sugar sleep? And aren’t we all dying constantly over the course of our lifetimes? Because we wake each morning as a different person? Every day a bit sadder, a bit more afraid? Awaken each day as someone with a little bit less faith. Hadn’t the person Ümit was only yesterday also died during the night? Can we ever find our way back to the lightness we felt in ourselves at, say, the tender age of ten? No? Then where was that boy now? Where?

Ümit pulls the sheets over his head, thinking of Jonas. Of course, Ümit had promised Dr Schumann he would block out every thought of Jonas like an unwelcome storm cloud. And that when he had difficulty doing so, he would tug at the rubber band he was supposed to wear around his wrist. That thin rubber band, like the kind they put around bunches of spring onions at the supermarket. Dr Schumann had presented it to him like some priceless treasure: an essential instrument for bringing the thought carousel in his mind to a screeching halt. But Dr Schumann is far away now, and his rubber band is lying in a skip at the Frankfurt airport. Ümit is trapped in this apartment of mourning today, and the only thing that can help him escape the present is this carousel. The laughter in Jonas’s eyes when he scored a goal. After matches, Ümit always congratulated Jonas with a fleeting hug, a hug that would then repeat itself a thousand times over in Ümit’s head during the night. Evolving with each repetition, growing longer and more intimate, until finally Ümit and Jonas lay together in the middle of the football pitch, their bodies rubbing together with enough force to start a fire.

Ümit is trying to remember the smell of Jonas’s jersey, which he had sometimes sniffed in the changing room when everyone 35else was in the shower. Jonas’s sweat smelled like Juicy Fruit gum. Ümit’s hand slips beneath his underwear. But nothing happens there. The cassette tape is back on one of Hakan’s songs: ‘Ruff Ryders’ Anthem’. Ümit’s right hand makes a couple more passes before giving up. Weird. This never happens. But maybe it’s part of his mourning – the sadness he could not feel yesterday, at least not like the others. He couldn’t cry; he did not collapse. Ümit could only stand there feeling the presence of the monster inside him. A monster growing ever greater, all-consuming: his thoughts, his feelings, his hunger.

Now, in the sticky half-light under the sheets, he’s thinking about how sadness and mourning might be different for everyone. For his mother and sister, it’s these constant breakdowns, but for Ümit, it’s his dick: lifeless and limp. And then the sheets are torn back and Peri is standing over him blank-faced with a towel around her head. She says something, but Ümit can only hear DMX bellowing his refrain. He jerks his hand from his underpants, instinctively. Peri remains expressionless, turns around, exits the room. Maybe she didn’t notice. Ümit tears off his headphones, throws on a pair of shorts and heads for the bathroom.

He splashes cold water on his face until the lump in his throat loosens. Ümit hasn’t eaten for a day and a half. In the living room, his mother and sister are already seated at the breakfast table. The table is large. Round. It tells of plans for family meals and game nights with Turkish rummy tiles. Things his family doesn’t do. Ümit hates this table immediately. But he sits down anyway because he doesn’t know what else to do. The neighbour woman with the thick glasses from the apartment below is back again. She’s filling their tea glasses. The murmur of the hot water in the kettle hurts his head. 36

‘Where’s Hakan?’

His question hangs in the air.

Everyone keeps chewing on their rubbery bread, drinking tea the colour of rabbit blood. Pretending like they’re having breakfast. But no one tries the apricot marmalade or the watermelon or any of the other things on the table that might actually taste like something. Emine only stares with her puffy eyes into the glowing russet of her tea glass, sitting there like an empty husk. Peri, on the contrary, looks wide awake. More awake than yesterday, anyway. Her freshly washed hair lies in wet braids. She’s almost back to the Peri Ümit usually knows: seated cross-legged in her chair, slurping earnestly at her tea, a hundred thoughts competing in her head.

‘Peri. Where is Hakan?’

‘Missed his flight. Arriving this evening.’ Peri casts a fleeting glance to her right, trying discreetly to gauge their mother’s reaction. Ümit’s mother sets her tea glass down with a heavy sigh. Peri’s dark eyes meet Ümit’s in warning.

‘This evening?’ he asks anyway. ‘So he’s not going to make it to the…?’

A spasm convulses through the room, as though Peri and the neighbour woman were trying to flinch away the word funeralwith their shoulders.

The neighbour takes a seat next to Ümit, laying her clammy hand on his. Her face is long and narrow like the mask from Scream.

‘Your father has been waiting for more than a day. We cannot leave him any longer. We must return him to the earth.’

Return him to the earth? What’s the rush, Ümit thinks. But this time he doesn’t say anything out loud. His mother removes 37her silken headscarf and fans herself with her hands. Her pale face begins to flush. Grows angry. The neighbour woman rises from the table and brings her a glass of water from the kitchen.

‘Here, Emine.’

‘Thank you, Bacım,’ Ümit’s mother says with a strained voice. She takes only a tiny sip.

‘And where is Sevda Abla?’

Peri clenches one eye shut and casts Ümit a withering glare with the other: Just shut your mouth, the look says. Keep it shut.

His mother braces her elbows against the table and raises her open hands as though she wants to offer up a prayer.

‘Rabbim! Grant me patience!’

Peri shakes her head, still glaring at Ümit, already anticipating what’s to come. Now see what you’ve done.

‘These children,’ his mother snarls, her torso swaying like a heavy ship at sea.

Ümit knows what’s coming, too. Everything with his mother has always been dramatic. Each approaching emotion is always heralded by gesticulations and sighs. The crescendo always arrives with a frenzied spike in blood pressure. It’s easy to upset her, it’s always been this way. But even Ümit startles when she slams her fist down on the table.

‘These children! They have only one duty,’ Emine cries, shaking her index finger at the heavens. ‘Only one! That they should bury their parents with dignity. But this is too much for them! Even this is too much!’

Peri scoots her chair closer to their mother. ‘Anne! Ümit and I are here. Don’t get so excited, remember your blood pressure,’ she says, rubbing Emine’s back softly with one hand as though this could stave off the coming avalanche. 38

‘But what’s up with Sevda Abla? Where is she?’ Ümit repeats quietly to the neighbour woman. She merely serves a bit of sheep’s cheese onto his empty plate in answer, shaking her head obliviously.

In the meantime, his mother has progressed into a full rage. She slams her fist against the table a second time. This time, they all startle at once.