Three more guards appeared in the doorway, taking turns at shooting and then disappearing behind the jamb. Kudseyi's eyes blinked at the fire from their guns, but he could not hear the shots anymore. It was as if his ears and brain were full of water.
He curled up, fingers gripping a cushion. A painful convulsion ran through him, down to the pit of his stomach, pinning him into a fetal position. He looked down. His intestines were gushing out, unrolling between his legs.
Everything went black. When he came to once more, Sema was reloading her gun at the foot of the steps, beside one of the chests. He turned toward the edge of the dais and reached out his hand. One part of him could not believe what he was doing. He was calling for help.
He was calling to Sema Hunsen for help!
She turned around. With tears in his eyes, Kudseyi was waving his hand. She hesitated for a second, then bent below the continuing gun blasts, climbed up the steps. The old man groaned in thanks. He raised his shivering, gaunt red hand, but she did not take it.
She stood up, braced herself and took aim, like a bent bow.
In a flash, Kudseyi understood why she had come back to Istanbul.
Quite simply to kill him. To cut off that hatred at its source. And perhaps also to avenge a tree of life, which he had had cut off at the roots.
He blacked out again. When he next opened his eyes, Azer was diving onto Sema. They rolled down to the foot of the steps, among the scraps of leather and pools of blood. They fought as waves of fire still continued to break through the smoke. Arms, fists, blows-but not a single cry. Just obsessive, obstinate hatred. The physical fight for survival.
Azer and Sema. His evil brood.
On her stomach, Sema was trying to raise her gun, but Azer was pushing down on her with all his weight. Holding her by the nape of the neck with one hand while with the other he pulled out a knife. She slipped from his grip and rolled onto her back. He lunged and stuck the blade into her belly. Sema spat out a muffled cry of blood.
Lying on the dais, Kudseyi could see it all. His eyes, like two slow valves, were pulsing in a counterrhythm with his arteries. He prayed that he would die before the end of the fight, but he could not resist watching.
The blade flew down, rose, then went down again, ferreting its way into her flesh.
Serra arched up. Azer grabbed her shoulders and forced them back to the ground. He threw away his knife and plunged his hand into the open wound.
Ismail Kudseyi drifted far away into the shifting sands of death.
A few seconds before the end, he saw crimson hands stretched toward him, carrying their cargo…
Sema's heart in Azer's fingers.
EPILOGUE
In eastern Anatolia, the snow at high altitudes begins to melt at the end of April, thus opening a path to Nemrut Dab, the highest peak of the Taurus Mountains. Tourist excursions have not yet begun, and the site remains perfectly preserved, in total solitude.
After each mission, he looked forward to this moment when he would return to his stone gods.
He had taken a flight from Istanbul the day before, on April 26, and had landed at Adana in the late afternoon. He had rested for a few hours in a hotel near the airport. Then, later that night, he had taken the road in a hired car.
He was now driving eastward toward Adiyaman, having covered two hundred fifty miles. Long pastures surrounded him like flooded plains. In the darkness, he sensed their vague, supple undulations. These rippling shadows were a first step, the initial shift toward purity. He remembered the beginning of a poem he had written in his youth, in old Turkish: I have sailed the seas of greenness…
At half past six, he drove past the village of Gaziantep, and the landscape changed. In the first glimmers of daylight, the Taurus Mountains appeared. The fluid fields became stony deserts. Bare, abrupt, red spikes poked up. Craters opened in the distance, like dried sunflowers.
When confronted with this scene, the average traveler always feels rather apprehensive and vaguely anxious. But he loved these shades of ochre and yellow, growing deeper, brighter than the blue of the dawn. He was at home. This aridness had forged his flesh. It was the second stage of purity.
He remembered the next line of his poem:
Kissed the borders of stone, the empty eyes of shadow…
When he stopped at Adiyaman, the sun was struggling to rise. At the garage in the town, he filled his gas tank himself while the employee was cleaning his windshield. He stared at the pools of iron and bronze-tinged houses laid out as far as the foothills.
On the main avenue, he saw the Matak warehouses, his storerooms, where thousands of tons of fruit would soon be stocked before being treated, turned into jams or exported. He felt no pride at all. Such trivial ambition had never really interested him. Instead, he sensed the approach of the mountains, the nearness of the ridges…
Three miles farther on, he turned off the main road. No more asphalt, no more signs. Just a track cut into the mountain, snaking up through the clouds. At that instant, he truly felt that he was back on native soil, amid the flanks of purple dust, the spiky grasses forming aggressive clumps, and gray-black sheep parting just enough to let him through.
He passed his village. Women in gilded head scarves walked by, with faces of red leather, fashioned like copper trays. Wild creatures, as hard as the earth, immured in prayer and tradition, just like his mother. There might even be some members of his family among them…
Higher up, he saw shepherds clustered along a slope, wrapped up in baggy jackets. He could see himself, twenty-five years before, sitting in their place. He still remembered the Fair Isle sweater he had worn as a coat, with its dangling sleeves, his hands pushing out a little farther each year. The stitches in the wool were the only calendar he had.
He felt a tingling sensation in the tips of his fingers-the feeling of his hands on his shaved scalp when he was shielding himself from his father's blows. The softness of the dry fruit as he ran his hands over the surface of the grocer's large bags on his way back from the pastures. The walnuts he gathered in autumn, whose juice stained his palms all winter…
He was now entering the veil of mist.
Everything became white, soft, damp. The flesh of the clouds. The first clumps of snow bordered the road. A special sort of snow, impregnated with luminescent pink sand.
Before going up the final section, he put chains on his tires, then continued. He bounced on for about another hour. The snowdrifts shone more and more brightly, assuming the shapes of languid bodies. The final stage of the Pure Way.
I have caressed the snowy slopes Scattered with pink sand, Curved as a woman's…
Finally, he spotted the garage at the foot of the rock. Above, the tip of the mountain remained invisible, shrouded in layers of fog.
He got out of his car and savored the atmosphere. The silence of the snow weighed down on the scene like a block of crystal.
He filled his lungs with icy air. Here, the altitude was over six thousand feet. There was some nine hundred feet still to climb. In preparation for the effort, he ate two chocolates. Then he set off with his hands in his pockets.
He passed the janitor's lodge, closed until the month of May, then followed the path of stones that barely emerged from the bed of snow The climb became difficult. He had to make a detour to avoid a steep slope. He advanced, leaning sideways, his left hand on the slopes, being careful not to fall into the void. The snow crunched beneath his feet.
He started to pant. His entire body felt strained, his mind alert. He reached the first terrace-to the east-but did not linger there. Here, the statues were too eroded. He just allowed himself a few minutes' respite on the "altar of fire"-a platform of bronze-green frozen rock, which offered a hundred-and-twenty-degree view of the Taurus Mountains.