As the district attorney was trying to convince me, I told him about the tricks Nigel performed with mirrors. I told him about how Nigel was able to project his image onto mirrors and thus appear in more than one spot on the stage. The district attorney rolled the pastel-colored folder in his left hand up into a scroll and with his right gave his knee a forceful and impatient slap; he stood up and cut me off. “Don’t worry, I watched his performance three times. Even if he is doing all of it with mirrors, for him to go from Taksim to Vezneciler, to kill Zeynep, and not only that, but to burn her and then return... how should I say it... is next to impossible. I even arranged for a demonstration to test it. If we brought the suspect in front of a judge, he’d be released after the first hearing.”
He had said his last sentence from outside the bars.
I was hopeless, helpless, and shattered. Two people I loved had been killed in the last two years because of me.
For twelve years I was forced to look on as twelve people from my life were slaughtered, all in the same way, all on the same date. Every time there was a book and there were evidence and witnesses resisting the efforts of the district attorney’s office. No matter how hard I tried to get him to come, Nigel refused to see me. I swallowed my pride and sent him imploring letters, begging for forgiveness. Every time, I promised to punish myself if he’d just stop harming my loved ones. If only he would stay away from them. I tried to burn myself after the sixth murder. I had only burn marks to show for it, going from my right cheek down my neck, to my left shoulder and flank. At the end of the twelfth year, five weeks ago, that last book arrived. Drawings and words of the last living person who meant anything to me: my beloved sister, Safiye. This time there was also a Polaroid in the book, with the caption: Büyükada. I’m waiting for you. The photograph showed an art nouveau kiosk.
Four carriage drivers, huddling by the entrance of the coffeehouse to avoid the rain, were looking at the photograph. The noise of the backgammon and rummikub games in full swing in the coffeehouse was drowned out by occasional thunder; sporadic lightning illuminated the horses on their sorrowful watch. Finally, an old driver piped up, “I know this house. It’s where that foreigner stays. Toward Maden.” The other drivers agreed, conceding those fateful words like the performers in an ancient tragedy. One offered a cigarette to another, and the third threw me a furtive glance before stepping into the coffeehouse. “Let me take you there,” said the old driver.
It was almost dark. We were rattling along a road under clouds blanketing the sky in increasingly darker shades of gray. There in the green, dark forest, I thought each and every one of the mansions, rising like ancient temples with their pointy towers there beyond the large gardens along the shore, must be the house where I was to meet Nigel. The dull lights of Sedef Island were visible now. We and the weary horses continued down the forest path, which was lit by a dirty yellow light. The waves crashing against the shore, the screams of the seagulls, and a dog howling from afar were the only sounds to be heard. Except for the rhythmic pattern of the hooves flowing like a cover of fog into the hills. There was so little left of the hullabaloo of summer; the lustrous, colorful begonias had faded to the color of earth. The yellow leaves of the plane trees blanketed the asphalt and the gardens of the barren mansions, their paint swelling and cracking, covered in wild ivy. Büyükada would wait motionlessly like a cursed, angry, abandoned old man, wrinkled with loneliness, until the spring, when the voluntary exiles escaping the chaos of Istanbul returned. The carriage ride felt as long and exhausting as my entire prison sentence.
I had reached the very pinnacle of my desire to face Nigel and avenge my loved ones he had slaughtered.
“Get off here and walk up that trail. The horses can’t go down there in this weather,” the old driver said.
The moment I opened the door, the lights went out. I took a few more steps into the pitch black. Nigel appeared. He was just in front of me. We were facing off, like two gunslingers. Then, another Nigel appeared out of the darkness. Then another. Then others. Each one was doing and saying something different. When I listened closely, I understood that the rambling narratives were the last words of my loved ones. Each Nigel was repeating, deadpan, the last words of another soul mate of mine.
“You have improved your technique,” I said in a growl.
As the voices of those eleven Nigels faded away, the Nigel in the middle, just in front of me, took a few weighty steps, as if underwater, and spoke: “I improved not only my technique, but the content of the show as well. Seeing as we’re speaking the same language now...”
“If you mean Turkish, fine, but you and I couldn’t possibly have another language in common,” I said.
“We share something else. No matter how much you may deny it, we are both keepers of the secrets of the fire, its purifying effects, its uncanny allure, its geometry. But this is the only knowledge its keeper can’t convey. If you watch the fire very closely, you see that it’s telling you something. You’re mesmerized, and gradually the fire starts conversing with you. You crack the mystery, but can’t teach it to anyone else. You are the keeper of a message so profound and poetic that it has no equivalent in any earthly tongue. We both know that now. Our common tongue is that we know the burning and purifying effects of the flame.”
I dropped the bag with the books of my eleven loved ones. As it hit the floor, I removed the gun I had in my pocket next to Safiye’s book, and fired. Blood spurted from three spots on Nigel’s chest. He collapsed to the floor, squirming. The other Nigels were looking on, just as astonished as I was, as the man writhed. As soon as Nigel died, the images became less clear. I was searching for a light switch when a wall light on the upper floor came on and Nigel appeared once again.
“Sometimes, it is impossible to fully grasp the good or evil of your deeds, of what you’ve done to someone. You judge everything according to your own standards. This is the most ridiculous thing about our world. There is a price for a bottle of water. You pay and buy it. Yet to somebody else it may not mean what it means to you. It means the world to somebody about to die in the desert. In a fit of jealousy, you burnt alive a woman who you considered your plaything, but I lost the meaning of my life.”
I fired again. Nigel died again, writhing in pain, again. He showed up again, spoke again of his pain. I fired again.
I loaded the gun and killed Nigel eleven times.
I had only one bullet left. I asked if he burnt Safiye. He smiled. “I sent all your friends and relatives to you. You didn’t receive them? Damn! And I paid so much in bribe money!” I dropped him with my last bullet. There was a thud on the floor this time.
I picked up the bag and took the slippery trail, grasping at the puny trees that lined it. Lightning struck and I saw the blood seeping from my coat pocket. When I reached the streetlamp at the end of Maden, I took out Safiye’s book. That’s when it dawned on me: The pages I thought were Moroccan leather were in fact human skin, and the red ink, the blood of my loved ones. This was the first time I was walking under rain with the book, the first time I was touching the smooth, slippery surface of the wet pages.