Free More: A Novel by Hakan Günday

crying, to find my father, tell my father everything. I couldn’t. It might have been because I was selling the water. Because Father might be mad if he found out … He pushed a wad of grass into my mouth. It wasn’t an egg in his mouth, I saw then. He chewed and his eyes got even redder. I chewed and nothing happened.
    The prints stayed on my forehead half the day. His fingerprints. I waited for them to disappear. They didn’t. They sank into my skin and bled into my forehead. I tried to sit down for two days and couldn’t. Then in secret I bled …
    How ever did I tell Dordor and Harmin, how was I even able? Maybe I didn’t know what I was saying. Perhaps I was simply raving … They both listened. They exchanged glances and said nothing. The only thing they did was to not take me back that night, telling Father I was to stay on the boat. I stayed there three days, in fact.
    When it was time to leave, the men in the shed came out of the back of truck and, walking right past me and staring at me the whole time, got on Dordor’s boat. Then Dordor and Harmin returned the following morning with an empty boat, just like always. Aruz called my father the same day and told him that the goods hadn’t been delivered to Greece. Not knowing how to reply, my father asked Dordor, who in turn said:
    “We killed them all. Whatever we owe you, we’ll pay.”
    My father was once again at a loss for words because neither Dordor nor Harmin told him why they did it. They were both seaman enough to be able to keep a secret. I wonder to this day why they didn’t tell my father the truth. Probably because they knew it wouldn’t make any difference. Maybe it was because they didn’t even trust their own father!
    When Aruz received the news, he said, “This is the last time! The first and the last! I won’t excuse this kind of thing ever again! Tell them to send the money!”
    Dordor paid Aruz for the six heads lost during delivery, and Aruz then returned it to their relatives. One of them, however, the oldest one who watched, was from a clan in Libya. A clan that was a regular in other trafficking services of the PKK as well. Since Aruz was under the impression he could talk his way around anyone at any time, he didn’t take the situation seriously at first and said the ship had sunk. On Aruz’s orders, Dordor even sunk the Dordor a week later. But the Greeks, hoping to blackball the PKK on a drug deal they had going with the Libyans, downright poured salt into the wound by claiming the boat was in great shape and couldn’t possibly have sunk. This created a complication that was beyond Aruz’s control and in the realm of other trafficking deals. Aruz tried to withstand the pressure for as long as he could, but that turned out to be only four years. When he saw that diplomacy was no longer enough and that the issue was getting too dangerous, Aruz called Dordor one night to say:
    “I like you both … We’ve done business for years now … but I’m at my last straw here. Now … decide. You or him? One of you is enough.”
    He was asking them which one of them to kill. He was a businessman after all. He had in mind to keep doing business with the one who survived. I don’t know how they made the choice. Actually, I have an idea … One night four days before Aruz’s men showed up with their knives, as we sat on the boat, Dordor had taken a drag off his joint and looked up at the stars, and then spoken:
    “You know what we used to do? When a tour boat or something went by, we’d wave at it. Then we’d check out who was waving back … how many of them were chicks and all that. Sometimes it was only dudes waved back. And we’d say, man, even from this far away, the broads can tell we’re not much to look at … We’d do odds and evens over the ones who waved …”
    Maybe that was how they decided who would die. Or perhaps Dordor never told Harmin about his conversation with Aruz and kept all the short straws to himself