first they kept their distance from me. They didn’t reject me altogether – I suppose because of what Remzi had said about me – and they certainly weren’t hostile, but they didn’t invite me into their circle. And I didn’t try to ingratiate myself with them. I just sat there on my own, reading my newspapers and books.
My first real contact with them was through the newspaper. They’d come over one by one to ask if they could see the newspaper I had just finished reading. And I was always happy to pass them along. Every day I bought new ones. I would read through one, put it down on the table then wait for someone to come and pick it up.
They weren’t in the habit of buying newspapers, but if they came across one they would flip through it. They especially liked reading the paper the day after a football match. They would pore over the sports pages, exchange papers with each other and then lose themselves in a heated discussion. Eventually they even started reading the front pages, and the magazine section.
Coming into the coffeehouse every morning with newspapers under my arm, I could sense they had been waiting for me. Centipede would scamper over to me with a coffee. There was silence until I had finished my first paper, but as soon as I’d put it on the table the person closest to me would ask if he could read it.
I used to enjoy watching the way they would read, studying their movements and reactions.
Soon I had my regular table – it seemed they had made some kind of agreement, because no one ever sat there – and when I came and sat down people would scramble for tables near mine. The person closest to me always got the newspaper first. Tables near mine were like prime opera boxes. I was startled to see how I’d become the most esteemed customer in the coffeehouse just because I bought newspapers.
Later they started to ask me questions when they discussed politics. I gave them brusque answers and they could never quite work out what I really thought. But there was a sea change when they discovered that I knew more about football than they did. I told them I used to play for the Beşiktaş youth team but had to give up football because of a knee injury. It was a lie. But they didn’t doubt me for a second.
I had become the coffeehouse sage.
They consulted me about almost everything.
That’s how I managed to seep into the inner workings of the town.
They told me all the gossip: tragedies and trivial misfortunes, sumptuous weddings and fiery disputes over land – some even said that the entire town would be razed to the ground and rebuilt – the project for a monumental hotel on the beach, the church on the top of the hill, supposedly built by an apostle of Jesus Christ, whose body was rumoured to have been buried there, and how there was a vast treasure beneath the church; they told me about promiscuous women and the strained relations between various gangs, murders and blood feuds, now and then stopping to roll a joint and offering me a drag. I would smile and politely decline.
One night I imagined the town rising up on a cloud of marijuana smoke before it vanished into the sky. I wanted to stay sober so I could see that day.
Everyone was always a little stoned. Even the women in town. ‘What do you expect, abi? Even the kids smoke,’ they would tell me.
But they were always guarded – even when they were a little high – and only gave me half the story, repeating the same rumours over and over, never touching on what really piqued my curiosity, never telling me what was happening on a deeper level.
Then I met someone who would lead me to the other world.
He was a young man who occasionally came to collect Hamiyet in the evening. I wasn’t sure of their relationship, but he called her his ‘aunt’. And supposedly he was staying with her.
I often saw him at the coffeehouse. He hardly spoke to anyone there. He would sit alone, never joining the discussions or arguments, never laughing at other people’s jokes. He just sat there and smoked. They used to say that he was smoking away all the money that I paid his aunt.
He always gave me the impression that a chasm lay between him and all the other regulars in the coffeehouse. He wasn’t cowed or sheepish; he was a strong and powerful young man. He didn’t seem to need other people. He was content with whatever it was that separated him from the others and didn’t want to share it with anyone.
It was the first time I’d seen a state of happiness so completely independent.
Then I realised that every afternoon he disappeared for a couple hours. And not just him: all the other young men disappeared too.
One afternoon I stood up and said that I was going for a walk, and I followed the young men. I didn’t have to go very far: they were all packed into an internet café on the street just behind the coffeehouse.
It was a dim and clammy little shop that reeked of marijuana.
I only had to go to the place a couple times when it wasn’t busy to work out just which chat rooms they were visiting.
Then I started going home in the afternoons. It wasn’t long before I tracked down the young men in different chat rooms, and I would strike up conversations with them using various fake identities. Soon I knew just how each person communicated and I could put a real face to a persona in the virtual world. I got to the point where I had infiltrated the town’s entire online network by tracking everyone’s online address, their usernames, the groups they belonged to and the chat rooms they visited. For the most part, they were chatting with women.
In the afternoons nearly half of the town vanished into this virtual world where they changed their identities and searched for people with whom they could share their secrets, people who were like them, and they would make love.
Over time I came to know who was looking for a man or a woman; and when people found each other they engaged in a conversation full of all kinds of unimaginative sexual banter.
Some had specific proclivities and stronger imaginations; they were looking for someone like them with whom they could share adventures they would never tell anyone.
Discovering all this, I felt like I was in the underworld.
I could see the invisible.
And it tore my life apart.
In the evenings, I chatted with Zuhal and in the afternoons I chatted with the people of the town in a boundless world of realities nothing like the world above ground. The solitary life I led in town was calm and mundane in comparison. The virtual world was dramatically different, full of colour and excitement.
But the unexpected thing was the way the unseen, unspoken and indiscernible truths of the real world cropped up in the virtual world, which was surprisingly familiar.
Looking back, I’m amazed how the half-stoned inhabitants of a sleepy town were able to sink so deeply into sin.
Whose masterpiece made these people? In a small town they lived like kings, openly baring their sins.
Who created all the sins that caused so many books to be banned?
Who is responsible for the sins that people have committed since not long after their creation?
Tonight, on this bench, I see God all around me, and in my mind.
Why were human beings created with souls capable of these sins?
Is the sinner more sinful than the creator of the sin?
Is God a sinner?
If God created sin when he made us, then why punish us for it?
And if God didn’t create sin, is there something in this universe that he doesn’t know? Is there a limit to his power?
Why make me a murderer?
Why have me kill the person he wanted dead?
I see the first light of dawn rising up over the hills behind the town, reminding me that my time is dwindling, and I am restless.
How long would it take them to find