I must get hold of Elif without delay; send a message to her mobile.
He remembers that he doesn’t have a mobile. A mobile means a link with the world. Wherever you are, they will find you. I’ll use Jan’s phone when he gets back from fishing. There’s no need for that. I’ll call from the Gasthaus. A very short message: ‘You don’t have to come, I’m fine.’
The child walking along in front of him disappears among the rocks. He is playing his usual game of hide-and-seek, but this evening Deniz panics; he is anxious about his son. ‘Bjørn,’ he calls. ‘Bjørn, please come out. I’m not playing.’
To lose Bjørn … The last time we saw each other, Dad, you asked me if I knew what it was to lose a son. You were suffering; you were sad. Even I noticed. You know, you always say I’m insensitive. For a moment I even thought of doing the things you wanted me to do, being what you wished me to be and trying again. However, hadn’t you considered the risk of losing your son when you sent me off to become a war correspondent? When I could stand it no longer and came back, and you sneered at me saying scornfully, ‘Didn’t that job work out either?’ When you lamented the fact that I couldn’t be like others named Deniz?
‘Come on, Bjørn. Come out. Look, it’s late. Daddy is going home now.’
The child comes out laughing from behind the rock where he has been hiding. ‘I frightened Daddy, I frightened Daddy!’
‘Don’t frighten me again. Daddy doesn’t have any other sons. And, besides, we are as hungry as wolves. Let’s go straight home and have dinner. Let’s see what Bestemor has prepared for us.’
The child points to the boat approaching the quay in the slowly darkening sea. ‘Look. Our boat has arrived. Let’s go and see if there are any passengers.’
This is another game: Bjørn’s game of waiting for the mysterious strangers he imagines will disembark from the boat that links the island to the mainland. Deniz knows that the child is really waiting for Princess Ulla. In the fairytale world they have invented Ulla may miss them very much, come down from her star and come back to earth one day. The boat either returns empty from its last run, especially in the winter months when it gets dark early, or a few belated villagers get off the boat. Very seldom there are one or two strangers who cannot face continuing their journey and prefer to spend the night on the island. There are more arrivals in the summer months, especially at this time. They stay at the Gasthaus. The child is not content with these. ‘Why doesn’t anybody come to us, Daddy?’ he asks. His high-pitched frail voice quavers with disappointment, loneliness and sadness.
‘Our island is far away. Not everybody is brave enough to come here. That’s why.’
‘Then how did you come, Daddy? Are you very brave? You weren’t afraid of pirates or the Devil, were you?’
‘No I wasn’t afraid, Son.’
How can I tell him I was afraid; that I was a skein of fear that rolled to these parts; that I’m here because I was afraid?
Actually, how did I come here? How can I tell him about my cowardice, my weariness, my desertion? How can I explain to him that I am a deserter of life? The old man had written on the wall of the Gasthaus just before he committed suicide, ‘Fleeing from war was easier than fleeing from life.’ He had signed it ‘the unknown deserter’. Not the unknown soldier but the unknown deserter, the deserter of life…
The child runs towards the quay. The woman with the baskets disembarks first, then two students from the island, perhaps returning home from examinations. Then … Bjørn stops dead in his tracks. The boat has another passenger, a foreigner — finally a real foreigner!
As Deniz approaches the quay to fetch the child he realizes in the twilight that the passenger is a woman. The woman in jeans and a light-coloured T-shirt has slung a large bag over her shoulder and is walking with deliberation towards the jetty.
I know that walk and that bag from somewhere, just as I know the woman with the baskets from afar without even seeing her face. For a split second — that infinitely tiny, short and yet infinitely long moment that is filled with everything a person is: all that he has experienced, felt and thought — he wonders what he should do.
It’s too late. Passing the little boy standing perfectly still as though he is still enchanted and without paying any attention to him or even noticing his presence, the woman walks resolutely towards Deniz. The yellow lights of the quay make her face look pallid and its lines deeper. There is that insincere smile hovering on her lips; the one that Deniz knows so well, that he is wary of and which he doesn’t like.
He doesn’t know, he cannot sense that the smile is a mask for Elif’s insecurity, her fears and anxiety. He doesn’t know that the woman’s heart is pounding madly and that her jaw hurts from clenching her teeth so hard; how many sleepless nights the decision to come here has cost her and with what great effort she controls her desire to run back.
‘The woman with the baskets hasn’t changed at all in twenty years,’ says Elif in a casual, natural voice, as though they had been speaking only a little while ago and had had a long chat. ‘This must be a real Devil’s Island where zombies live. So how are you?’
He notices that her voice trembles, her cold smile disappears and that her face becomes sad.
‘Mother!’ he says amazed and hesitantly.
‘Well, how are you,’ she asked in the casual tone they use in television serials. Good question. How am I? Yes, indeed, how am I on this Devil’s Island where zombies live?
The woman with the baskets hasn’t changed in twenty years. That much is true. Is it always the same woman, or is it her daughter? Deniz is astonished now that he was never curious about this. Small wooden houses in pastel candy colours, a quay with piles of fishing nets on both sides, a miniature ship with a bridge and a funnel linking the island to the mainland, women with baskets on their arms, pot-bellied bearded fishermen, steep cliffs above and the ruins of the old castle … That’s the sort of place this is, not really worth thinking about, where people quietly live their natural, straightforward, uneventful lives and die in the same natural way. Just as it should be, just as I want it to be … So that means I’m fine.
He wonders what dragged him back to the Devil’s Island of his childhood after all those years. Was it fate? Nonsense! What is fate other than the steps we take or the paths we choose? Perhaps it would be better to call it coincidence. Yes, just a coincidence. When he joined his father’s close friend — the famous war correspondent and a prominent member of the press — and went to Iraq, he did not know he would reach the small island in the North Sea in such a circuitous way.
It would be more accurate to say that he was sent to Iraq rather than that he went there. It was his father’s idea that war photography would be a suitable job for him. It was not his own choice. Ömer had said to his friend, ‘Let’s send Deniz to Iraq with you. I’ll take care of the bureaucracy — visa, accreditation and the rest. It will be a new beginning for him. He will learn about the job from you. Deniz is a good photographer. I have faith in my son.’
He knew his father was lying, that after those dreadful days that he didn’t want to remember his father no longer had any faith in him; and, what was worse, he had every reason not to. Deniz was embarrassed and reluctant, but he could not refuse to go. He had nothing to lose anyway.
They were the days when his indifference and lethargy turned into failure, failure turned into hopelessness, hopelessness into fear and fear into shame. He was all alone, incompetent and desperate. He had built himself a dream world. In that world he was successful, brilliant and the best. He was all that his mother wanted and all that his father expected him to be. He left everyone behind, ran like a thoroughbred, took the lead and reached the summit amid applause. This fictitious world where dreams mingled with lies and where the borders between the two were undefined was his only refuge. He had friends in that world, phantom friends. They loved him; they admired him. He went on trips with them, imaginary trips that he had never taken, never made. He had a small pretty girlfriend in that world with whom he walked hand in hand, whose warm lips he felt on his own, someone who loved him, who took him seriously, who didn’t mock him or look down on him. The girlfriend that had never existed, that lived nowhere except in his dreams…