‘A cold beer is what you need,’ he said. ‘Goes well with the grilled meat.’
‘Why not,’ I said obligingly, and in a flash he was back with two beers.
‘Beer’s on me,’ he said, sitting down at my table. ‘I hate this time of day. Everyone’s at home, avoiding the heat, cars hardly ever pass by and if they do people aren’t hungry, and I can’t just close up and go home, and if I stay I get bored so I wait, hoping someone will stop by …’
‘Ah yes, now that’s it,’ he said after taking a swig of beer and nodding to an imaginary friend in approval.
A burly young man, neatly dressed and with his hair combed back over his head, lumbered into the garden. ‘How’s it going, Uncle Remzi,’ he called out to the proprietor.
‘Slow and steady, Sultan,’ he replied.
‘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