Genre: Psychological Fiction / Drama
Word Count: ~9500 words
Reading Time: 37 mins
Translator: Enes Talha Coşgun (Edited and polished by Gizem Çetin)
Original Story: Read “Geç Gün Doğumu Kırmızısı” in Turkish
She was afraid of falling from the balcony. The fear arrived all at once: as sudden as the minute hand touching twelve, as final as the calendar turning a page, as irreversible as time’s arrow. She was afraid of the lies that would be told in her name. She was afraid her death would be dressed up in a seven-letter word, generous with its i‘s, with a romantic ring to it: suicide. How polite it sounded! Like abide. Like pride.
And murder? Was murder like that? No. Murder was a coarse word, a word that smelled of blood even on its way out of the mouth. Whoever threw her from the balcony would never call it that, if only out of respect for the victim’s beauty. “She just slipped over the railing,” they would say. Like those women in the news who, at the most unexpected moment (on the way to a job interview in some office tower, say), fell from the umpteenth floor of a skyscraper…
That was what Aysel feared, sitting in a nightgown the color of night, drinking tea beneath a wall clock that showed it was just past midnight. She lived alone in an old three-story building on a narrow street. It wasn’t very high. Still, it was high enough to break her bones.
For the better part of a season she had lived with threats against her life. A close friend, a lover, a company and a million dollars had turned what she’d thought was an ordinary life into a city that had come through a war.
A year and a half earlier she had been a doctor whose life was only just beginning. Her dreams were in her head and her hopes were in her heart. She had finished her compulsory service, completed her residency in dermatology, saved some money and taken courses in entrepreneurship. She had also found a kindred spirit. Together they were going to start a company making cosmetics for disfigured faces. People who had lost their faces to illness, accident or disaster would find their way back into the world through its products.
It was Aysel who suggested naming the company after her partner, whose name had such a lovely sound to it: Rozerin. First light. The business idea had been Rozerin’s, too. She was seven years younger than Aysel, and she said she’d been inspired by something that had happened to someone she knew, though she never gave details. The sign went up on the front of a flat. Inside, the walls were painted white and decorated with sunflowers and roses. The products were lined up in gleaming display cases. Dr. Aysel and Rozerin, sales specialist, sat down to wait for their customers.
By the end of the first month, word had begun to get around. One Monday morning, a car could be heard pulling up in front of the building. The stairs carried a pair of feet. The office door opened and a man of medium height stepped inside. His face was covered, as far as possible, by a surgical mask. His eyes couldn’t be seen. Though these were the hottest days of summer, he wore a thin jacket, and on his head was a painter’s beret.
The partners were having breakfast in the back. Rozerin, who still lived with her parents, was saying how much they longed for a child, how they wanted to adopt or become foster parents. The footsteps cut the conversation short. Aysel left her tea half finished, wiped her mouth and went out front. She smiled at the visitor’s invisible face. “Hello,” she said. “Welcome.”
The customer, with quick movements, pulled a large, curled notebook from his trouser pocket. He showed Aysel the first page, written in advance. In capital letters it said: I CAN’T SPEAK. SORRY.
“That’s quite all right,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
Slowly, the man peeled back his jacket. His arms were covered in raised, blistered scars. The skin had lost its natural color and turned every shade of red.
“I see,” Aysel said. “You’d like something for your arms. If I knew how the scarring happened, I could recommend the right product.”
She took a pen from the pocket of her white coat, handed it to him, and showed him to a seat.
The man laid his notebook on the table among the magazines. He turned to a fresh page and wrote, in a hurried, broken hand: chemicals and fire.
“Ah,” said the doctor. “One moment.”
She hurried to the stockroom and came back with a tube of cream.
“This is Deep Effect. It combines active ingredients that regenerate skin cells with a first-class concealer. I can’t promise healing for a burn this deep, but I can tell you it’ll give your arm a healthy, natural look, and it won’t cause any allergic reaction. Shall we try?”
He nodded. Aysel opened the tube and dotted cream onto several places on his arm, then worked it in with her fingertips. The color of the skin changed at once, and when the cream dried, it looked like any ordinary arm. The customer bent his head low, eased his mask down a little, and studied it. He raised a thumb.
“You like it? Wonderful. How many tubes would you like?”
He held up three fingers. Aysel said, “And also…” then, “Never mind,” and fell silent and stood up.
The man caught her by the sleeve of her coat and held up the page he’d just written on.
And also what? My face?
“Well,” said the doctor, feeling caught out. “To be honest, I thought you might want something for your face too, but…”
He flipped to a new page. I’m sure you have nothing that could help my face. Then he drew a smiley.
“Oh, you couldn’t be more wrong,” the doctor said, smiling. “We have products for even the most badly damaged faces. Would you take off your mask? Let’s have a look at where things stand.”
The man drew a deep breath and turned the page. Are you sure?
“Goodness, that’s our job,” she said, and her smile widened. “Please, relax.”
With one movement he pulled off his beret, revealing a burned, hairless scalp. With the second, he freed the mask’s loops from his ears.
Aysel swallowed without letting it show and held on to her smile by force of will.
The man’s face had lost the shape of a face altogether. The nose and mouth had melted away, leaving a hole like the mouth of a well. His throat lay open to view. His uvula trembled; his tonsils sat on either side like gills. His eyebrows were gone. One eye had melted away entirely; the other, misshapen, looked out at her between lids that had partly fused together.
“Yes, the damage is more extensive than I’d thought,” she said, with a thoughtful expression. “But it’s not hopeless. You’ve probably had several operations, and the plastic surgeons have done everything they can.”
The customer nodded slightly.
“What we need is a mask made just for you, one that’s practical and looks no different from a real face. We’d have to work together for a while. Only…” She hesitated here. “It would be expensive.”
The man bent over his notebook. So if I don’t have the money, you won’t help me?
For a moment Aysel wanted to snap at him, Do we look like a charity, pal? But her heart was still beating too fast. She kept asking herself how anyone could go on living like this, and her mind kept producing horrible scenes in which her own face melted.
“Of course we’ll help you,” she said. She sat calmly, her posture composed. Not a trace of the storm inside her showed on the surface. “You’re in urgent need. You don’t ask a starving man for grocery money. Honestly, all this should have been taken care of long ago. So…”
Inwardly she was furious with herself. Why on earth did you have to bring up money, you idiot?
I don’t want to owe anyone, he wrote. The moment I can’t pay, I’ll stop coming. Don’t worry.
Aysel couldn’t think of anything to say. The customer was already putting his mask back on. He tore a page from the notebook and handed it to her, paid for the cream, and left. On the paper were a first name, a surname and a phone number.
“Sinan…” the doctor murmured.
Two mornings later, the same sounds came again: the engine, the footsteps on the stairs, the door easing open. Aysel’s heart started pounding the way it had when she’d first seen his face without the mask, before she had even consciously registered the sounds. Her body was quicker than her mind.
“Stay put,” Rozerin said, getting up. “I’ll get it.”
The doctor wanted to jump up and stop her. She might have explained: Better if I go. It’s Sinan Bey. I’m the one who saw him first. I’m the one who can help him. Move, please, it’s my turn. She did none of it and said none of it. She sat like a stone, a fork in her hand.
It wasn’t long before Rozerin came back. “The customer’s asking for you.” Aysel rose with a smile she couldn’t stop and went out front.
This time Sinan wore a baseball cap and a sleeveless T-shirt. His arms were skin-colored and smooth as a statue’s. Makeup. The cream at work. He took out his notebook, opened it to a page, held it against his chest and bowed his head slightly.
In careful, legible letters it said: Thank you, ma’am. Below, in smaller writing: It’s wonderful to wear short sleeves in summer. In the bottom right-hand corner was a heart.
“You’re very welcome, Sinan Bey,” the doctor said brightly. She was about to say more when she heard the rustle of the notebook. On the next page: It was rude of me not to ask your name.
“It’s Aysel,” she said, and waited for her heartbeat to settle.
They sat down together and sketched out a plan. Aysel called a plastic surgeon whose lectures she had attended in medical school, described Sinan’s case, and asked what might be done. The professor said he’d have to examine Sinan before giving an opinion; he needed to see the extent of the tissue loss for himself. They set up an appointment.
There were so many things Aysel wanted to ask Sinan. Questions that had nothing to do with her work, born of pure curiosity. How did he eat without a mouth? Could he taste, could he smell? How had his face come to this? Could any chemical do this much damage? What had he looked like before the accident? His voice… what had his voice been like? She could ask none of them, and she couldn’t make a single one of them go away. The noise in her head gave her a headache.
Rozerin sat at the computer, sometimes busy with her own work, sometimes watching her partner out of the corner of her eye. Even after Sinan had gone, she said nothing. She buried herself in her phone and began typing. Aysel sank wearily into one of the customer chairs and gazed out the window, miles away.
It was late afternoon, cooled by a summer rain. Traffic lights and headlights shone off the asphalt as if off a mirror. Aysel was walking along the road with a mind emptied out by thinking, her aimless eyes fixed on the pavement to prove it. She was wearing heeled sandals, and they had gone sodden. An ordinary worry wound through her wet curls: how was she going to get home without being soaked from head to foot?
A yellow light, thick as sunrise, came right up beside her and stopped. When she turned, she saw a taxi at her side. Then her eye fell on the rear window; she recognized the figure behind it, felt their eyes meet, and smiled. The back door opened. Sinan gestured for her to get in.
The sickly emptiness in her mind dissolved at once, and pure joy rushed in. It was as if life had been sentenced to stillness by a pause button, and someone had just pressed play. The colors were vivid, the sounds were fluid. Laughing, showing slightly yellowed teeth, trilling “Sinan Bey, how are you?” like a bird in spring, this monument to delight was hard to reconcile with the woman who, moments earlier, had been trudging along the side of the road.
Sinan gave a thumbs-up. Then he pointed his index finger at her.
“I’m well too, thank you,” she said.
“Where to, miss?” asked the driver.
“Um…” Aysel turned to Sinan. “Which part of town are you in?”
He took out his phone and showed her an address on the map. It was a distant neighborhood, a good half hour away. The doctor’s place was much closer, ten minutes along the very road they were on. Aysel gave the driver directions to her flat and invited Sinan to stay the night as her guest.
“You can stay at mine. That drive’s unbearable in this rain. Please don’t misunderstand…”
A month was all it took for the misunderstanding to become the truth. Aysel began to feel something intense and red for Sinan. She saw her patient often, on the pretext of checking how he was, and invited him back to her place on the grounds that his own was so far away. She learned the details of his life. His age, for instance: thirty-two minus seven. Or that ill-fated accident. What had happened to the man she was falling for was a rare misfortune, or a rare piece of luck, or perhaps both at once.
Five years earlier, he had worked at a factory where strong acids were part of the production process. A machine went out of control; the fire and panic that followed ended with Sinan trapped among the flames and a jet of acid hitting him full in the face. His face melted where he stood. He spent months in intensive care and went through operation after operation. The doctors called it a miracle that he had survived, let alone kept part of his sight. The accident itself was misfortune; walking away from it in one piece was luck. Half empty, half full.
When Sinan returned her feelings, something began between them. His hands were the only way he had to show what he felt. He would take her pale, slightly wrinkled hands in his, then part her fingers one by one, press them, stroke them, play with them, and pour into them his love, his tenderness, his desire.
The first time they made love, it was as hot as an August night. She kissed him until she’d had her fill. Most of all she kissed the places she’d had to force herself not to look away from the day he first took off his mask. His neck, his chin, the place where cheek met the hollow of the mouth, the bared bone of the nose, the tears of joy and wonder sliding from his one eye… Her own body, a little heavy, a little soft, a body she’d never liked, felt to her like marble.
The last of the formality between them was gone. Sinan’s troubles were Aysel’s troubles now. The doctor was ready to do everything she could for his face, without charging a penny. Not that it mattered to her. She loved Sinan as he was, and she felt that even if, by some miracle, he were restored to his old self, her love and admiration wouldn’t grow by one jot.
One morning when the doctor opened the shop door, she found Rozerin out in the waiting area instead of in the back. It wasn’t a strange sight, but it surprised Aysel all the same, because lately Rozerin had been talking less, withdrawing to the back room whenever she could, taking little interest in customers. She spent her days at the computer, messaging suppliers and wholesale buyers in other cities. She had even stopped chatting with her partner. When Aysel had insisted on introducing her to Sinan, she’d spoken to him exactly once: a single sentence and a cold smile.
Now the tall woman with the bangs, though still at her computer, looked bright and animated. Aysel watched her for a while, then called out, “Morning!” and the smile went out like a light.
“Oh,” Rozerin said, after a pause of several seconds, as though surfacing from some sleepwalker’s trance. “Morning.”
Aysel crossed the room in quick, light steps and sat down. “Roz,” she said. “What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing,” said the woman with the bangs. She had snapped her laptop shut and seemed not to know what to do with her hands and feet. “What would be going on?”
“I don’t know. You’ve been so distracted lately.”
“It’s the change of season,” said the younger partner. “Autumn’s coming. It gets to you.”
“I suppose,” Aysel said. Unlike Rozerin, she loved autumn.
In the days that followed, it was the doctor who spent more time at the computer than her partner. She wanted to push every possibility for Sinan as far as it would go. She was researching bionic face projects. Because the nerves in Sinan’s face had been burned away completely, the surgeons considered a functioning face close to impossible. The best they could do was restore his appearance, which was what Aysel herself had proposed in the first place. A bionic face, though, with its electronic circuitry inside, would be able to move, even carry sensation to the brain.
As the October rains left the city starved for sun, sales at the shop began to thin out. Monthly profit fell by half. The partners’ indifference had a lot to do with it. Rozerin missed days now and then, came in late more often than not, and spent half her time at the computer browsing the internet. And Aysel’s mind was entirely on Sinan. She wanted to get through the day’s work as fast as possible and left early in the evenings to get home to the flat they now shared.
On the way she would pick up mulled wine. Sinan couldn’t taste or smell, but he could feel the warmth of a drink poured down his throat through the tube, and he liked being a little tipsy. Food had become an afterthought. To eat, he had to run everything through a blender and then feed it down his esophagus by tube. Aysel didn’t want to watch. She ate out or grabbed something quick at home, because what was the point of eating without him?
She ate less and less, and her body weakened. She grew thinner; the lines of her face sharpened. If it weren’t for the loose skin on her stomach, she might even have looked fit.
She had begun corresponding with a biorobotics company in Canada. They were open to building Sinan a working face, nearly indistinguishable from a real one, but the price was astronomical: a million Canadian dollars, close to twelve million Turkish lira. And the quote was valid only until February.
Aysel had no savings. She rented her flat. Everything she had, she’d put into the company. Sinan had received compensation after the accident, but nowhere near enough. A fever of ambition took hold of the doctor, a hunger to make money, but she had no idea yet how she would satisfy it.
One November evening, with frost in the air, she was looking at her phone while Sinan lay stretched out on the sofa, reading a book of poems by Attila İlhan that he had taken from the shelf.
The book was Aysel’s, though she didn’t read much poetry. The only reason she owned it was that one of İlhan’s poems used her name.
Now and then she would hum this poem like a song, though it had never touched anything in her life:
Aysel stay away from me, I am no good for you,
I feel like my death will be all of a sudden,
I am both wicked and dark, some ugly,
Aysel stay away from me, I don’t want you.
When the redheaded woman saw the book in her lover’s lap, the lines began to run through her without her willing it. Then the hair stood up on her arms and she stopped. For the first time, she understood what the words she’d memorized actually meant. In the black glass of her phone she seemed to glimpse an old witch muttering an ancient curse. She was terrified. She got up and paced, trying to shake off the chill that had dropped into her like the first warmth of spring run backwards. Outside, a wind whistled through the branches, the kind that could lay a skin of ice over a glass of water in an instant.
The company’s income kept falling. In the last month of the year they made not a single lira of profit; they barely covered costs. Far from holding meetings, the partners were avoiding each other altogether. The working day had split into two halves that never touched: Aysel took the mornings, Rozerin the afternoons. Each sat in the shop drinking coffee, killing time, pushing the problems away by pretending they weren’t there.
On the first afternoon of the new year, Rozerin unlocked the door and found a battlefield. She nearly fainted. Shelves lay strewn across the floor, chairs were upended, the cameras and one of the windows were smashed, and, as the police would later establish, the safe had been opened and a hundred and twenty thousand lira had vanished into thin air.
Rozerin couldn’t recover after the burglary. She took pills to sleep at night, had panic attacks now and then, and above all refused to set foot in the shop ever again. The business that had been keeping them, and which no longer made any money, had no choice but to lock its doors.
Aysel, meanwhile, had to be everywhere at once. She came home only to sleep. If Sinan hadn’t been at her side the whole time, holding her up, she’d have collapsed from exhaustion sooner or later. She talked to the police, she ran back and forth between the station and the courthouse. According to the inspector, the thief was an amateur. He’d left traces everywhere, from fingerprints to strands of hair, and the evidence matched the records of a known offender: a gray-haired man in his fifties, in and out of prison for mugging and bag-snatching, living alone with his orphaned grandson, and fighting a progressive, fatal muscle disease. His name was Selçuk.
“He probably wanted to secure the boy’s future before he got any weaker,” the inspector said, by way of motive.
“But if he goes to prison, who’ll look after the grandson?”
“If there’s no family, he goes into care.”
“Actually…” Aysel laced her fingers together. “I know a family who’d want to take the child. My partner, Rozerin, her parents have been wanting to adopt for ages.”
“Have they applied?”
“I don’t think so. But couldn’t the boy just go to them, without all the procedures?”
“I’m afraid not,” said the policeman. “First there’s an initial meeting under state supervision, then the family’s checked to see if they’re suitable. That kind of thing takes months.”
“I see,” Aysel said, and sent Rozerin a message to let her know.
The next day, Selçuk’s body was found hanging in a derelict building. In a note in his pocket he wrote that he had committed his last theft for his grandson, that he was taking his own life of his own free will, that no one was to blame for his death, and that his last wish was for the boy to be well looked after. But the stolen money was never found.
Once the case was closed and things had begun to cool, Aysel suggested a holiday together in Cyprus. Sinan was reluctant. Signs weren’t enough for him; he wrote, nearly tearing through the notebook, that there was no call for that kind of spending when they were so short of money. And besides, how could she think about a holiday while her best friend was lying at home with her nerves in shreds?
Aysel couldn’t make sense of that last sentence. She frowned and read it again.
“Who are you talking about?”
Sinan snatched the paper back. Who do you think? he wrote, and added, in capitals: ROZERİN. And so the fire of their first fight caught.
For the first time since they’d been together, the redhead shouted at him.
“What’s Rozerin to you?” she said. “You talked to her once, for God’s sake! She’s a total stranger to you. She’s my friend, she’s nothing to you.”
Sinan defended himself with quick, sharp signs. At the height of the fight, he slammed the door and left. Aysel hurled a wine glass after him and watched it burst across the floor. Then she swept the hallway, crying.
Late that night, footsteps came up beside the sofa where she had fallen asleep. Long, slender fingers gently stroked her red hair, gray now at the roots. Sinan left two return tickets to Cyprus on the arm of the sofa.
On the plane, the redheaded woman took the window seat and the faceless man sat in the middle. On her face was a small, private, mischievous smile.
Watching the city sink into the clouds, she thought back to a month before. To the day she had seen a crowd beside a building site, shouting up at someone on the roof…
“Don’t do it, old man!” people were calling. And from the roof: “Get back! Leave me alone!”
“Hey!” Aysel shouted. “Sir, please, I’m a doctor. I’m coming up to talk. Just stay calm, okay?” Ignoring the protests from the roof and from the people around her, she pushed inside and was at the old man’s side in no time.
The first thing she did was grab him and pull him back. “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded, dropping all formality. She hadn’t meant to shout, but her voice came out loud. “Are you out of your mind? Why would you want to jump?”
“You can’t help. None of you can help me.”
“Tell me first.”
Weeping, the old man poured it all out. He called himself useless, a man without a trade. He’d never held a job for more than a few months. He’d got mixed up in crime, gone in and out of prison. He had no pension. He fed his grandson by begging. His daughter had married a brute and been murdered by him; the husband had vanished afterwards. The orphaned baby she’d left behind had no one but his grandfather.
“And as if that weren’t enough, I’m sick. The doctors give me a year,” he said, wiping his eyes. “My knees have nothing left in them. Any day now I won’t be able to walk. I’ll be stuck in bed… There’s no cure. So tell me, doctor, what happens then? Who’s going to look after Devin?”
To shake off the weight pressing on her, Aysel tried to change the subject.
“Your grandson’s called Devin?”
The old man nodded.
The devil touched the back of Aysel’s neck and planted the seed of an idea. Watered by ambition, the seed swelled and put out a shoot, and with it a sly, wicked glint came into her eyes. “I have a proposal for you,” she said. “You do something for me, and I’ll persuade a family who’ll love Devin to apply to adopt him.”
“What?”
Aysel glanced around. “Not here. Somewhere quiet. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Selçuk,” said the old man. There the memory ended.
In her mind, the redhead returned to the plane. Every so often she checked her bag and smiled at the green of the bundled dollars. Honestly, she had been afraid Selçuk wouldn’t pull it off. But the old man hadn’t wavered from his word: he’d broken into the shop, opened the safe with a pick, and counted the money out into her hands, bill by bill. Now a hundred thousand lira’s worth of foreign currency lay in her bag. Afterwards, she had laundered it with forged papers from a jeweler, as if she’d sold gold, and had to hand over a sixth of it in the process, but what did that matter? Especially if her luck held in Cyprus…
She tilted the bag a little to one side, out of Sinan’s view. He knew nothing about the staged burglary or the money. Aysel planned to slip away to the casino and play it. There were two possibilities, after all: win or lose. If she lost, it would stay between her and her own mind. If she won, if she won the equivalent of a million Canadian dollars, she would give her lover the most wonderful surprise. She would win his heart forever.
As they got off the plane, she noticed that Sinan had brought the poetry book. A corner of it poked out where the zipper of his bag had been left open. Her red mind seized its chance and the ill-omened lines began running over her tongue:
How scared you will get, if you sleep my sleeps,
You cannot live any moment of me,
Aysel, stay away from me, I am not good for you,
Don’t get your brightness dirty for me,
Once they’d checked in and unpacked, Sinan signed that he was tired and going to sleep. Aysel watched him drift off, then dressed in a pale pink blouse open slightly at the collar, black trousers and sensible shoes. She brushed her hair and pulled it back. She looked herself over in the mirror. Then she leaned over the bed, whispered in her partner’s ear that she was going out for a walk, and slipped quietly out.
Now she was in the corridor, beneath the gray ceiling, on a road where luck and misfortune meet. She went down to the lobby. The receptionist told her the casino was one floor below. She took the stairs down and stepped into the hall where so many fortunes had changed hands.
There wasn’t a single window, but the room blazed with light. An attendant, seeing her hovering uncertainly on the red carpet at the entrance, came over and explained that she needed to register with her ID and buy chips at the cashier. It was early yet, and the place was nearly empty. Only one table was occupied.
The redhead loitered at the slot machines, losing about fifty dollars, and all the while she couldn’t take her eyes off the men in suits playing poker at that table. When she saw they had finished and were getting up, she went over in small, hopping steps, like a bird on the ground.
“Excuse me,” she said, fiddling with her nails. “Could I ask you something?”
“Go ahead,” said the fattest of them.
“I’m new to all this. I need to make some money, you see… Which game do you think gives the best chance of winning?”
As she explained herself in a thin little voice, a smile spread across the man’s face.
“Well, madam,” he said. “At this rate, you’re going to find that pretty hard. Haven’t you ever heard that the house always wins?”
“No…” She took a deep breath. “So I don’t stand a chance?”
He leaned one hand on the table. “How many times do you think luck’s going to go your way? Look, madam, if you don’t want to end up losing everything you’ve got, the first thing to understand is that you only play for fun. There are two possibilities: you win or you lose. If you lose, you’ll start another game out of spite. If you win, you’ll start another game out of greed. The more the game gives you, the hungrier you get. In the end, gambling becomes an addiction you’re guaranteed to lose.”
“I don’t have time for fun. I need money.” She worried that her eyebrows had arranged themselves into something ridiculous and pitiful. “I need a million dollars.”
The men in suits laughed, quietly at first, like water heating on the stove, then all at once it boiled over. They laughed holding their bellies, doubled up with it. Aysel went on biting her lip and picking at her nails. She couldn’t even manage to be offended; she sensed that these fat men were her way out.
When the first one had calmed down, he said, “Forgive us, it’s just… Well. What are you going to do with a million dollars? Now we’re curious. Let’s talk outside.”
They bought her a drink at the bar and listened to her story. Semih (that was the name of the one who’d spoken first) told her that for someone with no capital, like her, raising a million dollars without going into something illegal would be next to impossible.
“Aysel Hanım, my dear,” he said, once they had warmed to each other a little. “If I were you, I wouldn’t even try. Now you’ll ask me why. We men love to chase women. But when women start chasing us, we start fancying ourselves. We stop liking our wives and decide we deserve prettier ones. You know the kind of man who comes into money and divorces his wife. So I’m telling you: leave him the way he is. I think of you like a sister, don’t take this the wrong way, you’re a lovely woman. But it won’t be enough for him. The minute he gets his face fixed, the first thing he’ll do is leave you. I just hope you’re never sitting there one day saying, Semih Bey was right.“
Never! Aysel cried inside, but disappointment kept her from doing anything more than nodding.
She was back at the hotel before dark. She found Sinan at the computer, messaging someone. After the accident he had studied graphic design and started freelancing online, and he was often in touch with clients. So Aysel thought nothing of it.
“Baby, we’re on holiday,” she said, tossing her bag on the bed. “Let it go.”
At midnight she woke with a dry throat. The stars glowed faintly through the light pollution; crickets sang in the garden. Sinan lay beside her, his misshapen lid closed over his one eye. So as not to wake him, Aysel turned over quietly, crawled to the foot of the bed and slid down to the floor. She stood. On tiptoe she went to the minibar, found it empty of bottles, and sighed. The lukewarm water on the table would have to do.
The carafe, an empty glass and the open laptop, its blue light glowing, stood side by side. As she poured, her elbow bumped the trackpad and the screen woke. Sinan had forgotten to shut it down.
She took hold of the mouse to turn it off, and her attention caught on the screen. A file on the desktop: ROZ_CV.pdf.
She hated prying into other people’s things, but she couldn’t stop herself. She double-clicked. The contents were as strange as the name: Rozerin’s CV. Schools, work experience, and so on.
What’s this doing here? she wondered, her eyes moving down the lines.
She knew a little about her partner’s past. She knew that before they started the company, Rozerin had worked in sales for a while at an industrial firm. But when she saw the firm’s name on the page, her eyes went wide in spite of herself. This was where Sinan had lost his face. And the dates showed that the accident had happened while Rozerin was working there.
So Rozerin and Sinan had been colleagues.
The first word to leave Aysel’s lips was a whispered “Why?” Why had they pretended all this time not to know each other? What was the point of the act, the lie? As she stared at the CV, stunned, she noticed a second thing: they had gone to the same high school. Four years at the same school.
As the warm liquid of dread spread through her stomach, she opened the browser and went to her lover’s social media account. She had never used social media, so she didn’t know where to click, and in truth she didn’t know what she was looking for. She clicked on Photos. Here was Sinan before the accident, every year of him: five years ago, high school, even primary school. She went through them one by one, fast.
She stopped at a group photo: more than a hundred teenagers in school uniform, every class together in one shot. The faces were barely distinguishable. Aysel clicked once to reveal the tags, frowned, and leaned in to read the names. Rozerin wasn’t among them.
And if she had been, what would that have meant? She didn’t know. She hit back until she reached the home page, typed Rozerin’s full name into the search bar and opened the profile. She scrolled for a while, then, as if struck by inspiration, scrolled back up and clicked Message. A whole archive spilled out in front of her.
It began last summer, on the day Sinan first walked into the company that bore Rozerin’s name.
“Roz?” Sinan had written. “I came for you. And you didn’t even look at me. Why?”
Rozerin had answered half an hour later. “Please… Look, I still feel guilty.”
“And what good does your guilt do me?”
“I started this shop because of you. Ask Aysel. I told her it was someone I knew.”
Sinan had taken over from there. “So first you burn my face off, then you open a company and turn into an angel of mercy?” Then a smiley. “Kidding, Roz. The fire wasn’t your fault.”
The sentences were short and broken. Aysel felt a lump rising in her throat.
“Human error. Management took the blame. You know that. Even if you left the heater on, it should have shut itself off.”
So the fire at the old firm had started because Rozerin left a heater on. And years later, to free herself from the guilt of what had happened to Sinan, she had gone into business with Aysel.
“I miss you, Roz. Talk to me. Just once.”
Ten minutes of silence…
At first Rozerin had done nothing but confess her guilt, but within days she was writing as eagerly as he was. They had reminisced about high school. They hadn’t been in the same class, but they had been sweethearts; there were even photos of them holding hands.
A stretch from the months that followed: “I still love you,” Sinan was saying. “I wish everything could be the way it was.”
“You’re writing this while Aysel’s asleep in the next room? What do you want from me?” Rozerin had replied. “Sinan. I can’t. I won’t be able to see your face, hear your voice. And it’s my fault.”
“Stop it. How many times do I have to say it? It wasn’t your fault.”
Before long Rozerin’s resistance had broken and they’d started meeting in secret. They called each other my love and showered each other with compliments. At one point Rozerin even demanded to know, “Why did you move into Aysel’s place?” Aysel didn’t realize she was crying until she tasted salt on her tongue.
The messages had grown more and more intimate, right up to the previous evening. The last line in the archive was Sinan’s: “The missus is back. Gotta go.”
Aysel heard the missus as a curse. In a fury she shut the browser and the laptop. She hadn’t made a sound, but her face was soaked. Her legs were shaking. She wished with everything she had that it was a nightmare, that she would wake and it would pass. She bit her finger, and it hurt. The pain was real, and so was all the rest of it.
She grabbed her bag and threw herself out of the room. She went straight to the casino. She fed a hefty sum into a slot machine. Watching the reels spin, she knocked back a stiff drink in one go, and just then she heard the ringing that told her she had won.
In five hours, a penniless woman who was loved became a millionaire who had been betrayed.
On the first weekend of March, every customer at a restaurant in Toronto was eating indoors out of the cold, except for one Turkish couple sitting out on the terrace. Wrapped in her thin coat, Aysel smiled at Sinan, whose face was swathed in bandages.
After that night in Cyprus, giving nothing away, she had told him the good news: she’d come into enough money for the bionic face. Sinan couldn’t believe his ears. He made her say it again, and then his one good eye lit up and he threw his arms around her.
In about a month, his semi-organic face would be ready to use without bandages. But already he could move his new tongue and lips, speak, and chew food with his prosthetic teeth. The first time Aysel heard Sinan’s voice, she felt she was walking on clouds.
After paying the Canadian company, she sent the rest of the money to Rozerin with the good news that she could keep the cosmetics business going. In that way, she thought, she had more or less atoned for the theft.
She kept her days and her nights apart. While the sun was high, she took care of Sinan and smiled into his face (really smiled), and when the stars took over the sky’s watch, she logged into his account and read his ongoing messages with Rozerin.
“I miss you so much,” the woman with the bangs wrote. “I keep imagining your lips. I shouldn’t. It hurts.”
“Why? What’s the harm in imagining?”
They talked about Aysel, about how their lives had come right thanks to her. Wrapped in the arms of their betrayal, they sang her praises.
“She’s my best friend, Sinan. What we’re doing is wrong.”
“No, Roz. Give me time. When we get back, it’ll all be over. There’s nothing to feel bad about. We’re adults.”
Aysel made no sound and gave nothing away. She only read.
When sunlight and bright flowers came out to greet May, the couple returned to Turkey. The streets were full of life. Children ran about, giddy with the summer holidays coming. Sinan was the only one the energy didn’t reach. His new face could make every expression any other face could, except one: it never smiled.
Aysel, on the other hand, laughed at every chance she got, never let her smile fade, and orbited Sinan constantly. She invented excuses so as never to leave him alone for a minute. This wore on him badly; he was watching for his chance to be rid of her and go to the other woman, the one he loved.
The first time Sinan smiled was when she said, “Let’s go to Rozerin’s for dinner.” For the first time in days, the couple were happy together. The man especially was beside himself. Every time he pictured Rozerin’s bangs and big eyes, he thought his heart would burst out of his chest. The redhead was happy too, for reasons entirely her own, and laughed without having to fake it.
The moment the three of them came face to face was something to see. Rozerin and Sinan treated each other with indifference and showered Aysel with exaggerated attention. Little Devin ran circles around them, trying to work out what was going on. Aysel watched everything with the closest attention. She had to catch the right moment.
She got deep into conversation with her partner’s mother. She talked about Devin, she talked about the company; she talked and talked. Her eyes were on the mother; her mind was on the rest of the room.
Rozerin, who had been sitting there like a child on a holiday morning, got up on the pretext of making coffee. Within thirty seconds, Sinan said he needed the bathroom. Aysel had been waiting for exactly this. Once he’d gone, she counted to thirty under her breath, rose quietly and slipped into the hallway.
She looked left. She saw him heading for the kitchen balcony. She followed on mouse-feet. When he stepped out onto the balcony, the redhead crept up and crouched beneath the window.
Rozerin stood in the corner of the balcony, leaning against the railing. She wore a loose, kimono-like dress printed with big green flowers. Her eyelids were shaded dark; her chestnut hair was freshly blow-dried. She gave Sinan a quick, frightened hug, then took his face in her hands and drew his lips toward hers.
This was the very moment the red woman had been waiting for. The moment when those organs, among the densest in nerve endings anywhere in the human body, would touch and have their way. She stood and tapped on the glass. The young lovers jumped. They sprang apart and stared at her. She forced the balcony door, swollen with damp, until it gave, and stepped outside.
“Aysel…” Sinan began.
She had promised herself her voice wouldn’t shake. She couldn’t keep the promise. “I know everything,” she said.
“I…”
“I’ve read every message.”
Rozerin turned her head away as if none of it concerned her, and said not a word. When the red woman realized she couldn’t hold back her tears, she turned and walked out fast. Sinan followed like a shadow, saying her name over and over. “Aysel, listen. Please, just listen to me.”
In Aysel’s mind the lines fell like rain:
Either you own the art of death,
Or you will collect fear,
My pains have already unfolded unto you,
My joy can’t even catch yours
When they got home, after a road that went on forever, Sinan decided to play the wronged man. As though he weren’t the one who had gilded four whole seasons with lies, he shouted that he loved Rozerin. Aysel sat down in an armchair. Sinan stayed on his feet and took the floor.
“Sinan, I…”
“Let me finish that for you. You didn’t love me in spite of my face,” he said. “You loved me because it was scarred. Or no: you never really loved me at all.”
The redhead drew a breath that spiraled down like water in a drain. She didn’t even have the strength left to ask a question.
“You know what you loved?” Sinan said, louder now. “Being a goddess. You loved getting to heal some poor wretch, Panakeia! You loved looking down and feeling sorry for me, you…”
“I never pitied you.” Her voice was thick, because in spite of all the promises she’d made herself, she was drowning in tears. “I shielded you from every passing breeze, so nothing could bruise you.”
There wasn’t a flicker of feeling in the way he stood. “She shielded me from every passing breeze,” he repeated softly. “That tenderness of yours reeks of arrogance. It disgusts me.”
“What do you want?” she said, wiping her eyes. “Fine, you don’t want tenderness. You used to say you adored it, but forget that. Tell me what you want from me and I’ll do it.”
“That’s the problem you can’t see. You want me to want something from you. You want me to need you, to come crawling to the goddess’s door and beg.”
She grabbed her hair in both fists as if to tear it out. “What are you doing?” she screamed. “What does that have to do with anything? Sinan, you cheated on me with my best friend. Is this how you wriggle out of it?”
“Because I couldn’t leave you!” he shouted back. “I didn’t have the nerve.”
I’d have given my life to hear your voice, the redhead thought. I never knew it would carry words more bitter than poison.
As if he’d sensed her thoughts, Sinan said, “All right,” and sat down in the nearest chair. “Thank you. Because of you I got my treatment. I can talk; I’ve even got my expressions back. I’ll be in your debt for the rest of my life. But the debt doesn’t include a relationship. I can’t be happy with you. And you can’t be happy with me. Let me go and be happy with Rozerin.”
“I was happy,” Aysel said. “It never once crossed my mind that you owed me anything. If I made you feel the weight of gratitude without meaning to, I’m sorry.”
“So if I accepted your apology and came back, you’d take me back. Just like that. Have you no pride? Was the goddess really this weak?”
She looked out the window and didn’t answer. Was the daylight unusually pale today, or was it just her?
“If we’d had a healthy relationship, you’d never let me back at this point,” Sinan said. “Me, for instance, if Rozerin cheated on me, it would kill me, but I’d leave her anyway. I’d never look at her again. Because if I stayed, I’d always remember the stain, and I could never love her as purely again. But you, you know everything and you’re still ready to take me back. You know I’ve been writing to Rozerin since day one, and you still want me to come back to you.”
Aysel said nothing. I’m not asking you to come back, she thought. Just don’t let your lips touch hers. Is that so much?
“You’re hooked on the feelings I give you. That’s why, whether I cheat on you or humiliate you, you’ll still take me back. Either way your brain gets its chemicals. Smoking a joint, holding me: same thing.”
The devil slipped in through the open window like a breeze. He planted a tiny kiss on the back of Aysel’s neck. A seed steeped in poisoned rage sprouted and twisted into a vine. Her mind became the Winchester House, the mansion built by the widow of an American gun magnate, driven mad by the loss of her child and by remorse, who kept building it without end: staircases that led nowhere, doors that opened onto empty air, hundreds and hundreds of rooms…
She went into the kitchen and made herself a coffee. Then she got up and started to pack. Enough to fill a small suitcase would do. She put in the Attila İlhan book, too, and zipped it shut. She rang a nearby hotel and booked a room. Right in front of Sinan, she slammed the door behind her.
Sinan felt terrible, but after a while he shrugged and muttered, “I never told her to leave.” He opened the fridge and downed what was left of the wine. Before he’d even thrown the bottle away, his head was spinning. Was it normal to get drunk this fast? He was still wondering when he hit the floor.
As dim red light seeped into his blinking eyes, the first thing he felt was pain. His head was splitting; his back, his arms, his legs, all of him ached. When he tried to move, to stretch his muscles, he found he was held fast everywhere, and his stomach clenched with fear. He thought he was paralyzed. His head was tipped back at a painful angle, and when he tried to lift it, something he couldn’t see stopped him.
Fully awake now, he understood. He was tied to a chair. A long, thin chain was wound around his arms, his legs, his body, his neck, and around his forehead, pinning his head in place. His face was turned up to the ceiling. A hand’s breadth above his nose, a funnel hung from it.
“Well, it hardly took a genius,” came Aysel’s voice. “Knock you out with a drink, drag you in here, tie you up tight, rig the funnel, and so on. But you’ve cost me a fortune, you know that? Ten meters of chain, five hundred lira. I didn’t mind a million dollars this much.”
She unscrewed the cap of the bottle full of acid and listened to it hiss as if to a symphony. “Sinan!” she called. “Do you recognize that sound?”
Aysel rubbed her face and shook her head. No. It wasn’t real. The suitcase at her feet was real; leaving the house was real, and sitting here waiting like a kitten. But the rest was a fantasy, seeping out of the reddest corners of her mind. She had not drugged the wine, or hung a funnel from the ceiling, or wound ten meters of six-millimeter chain around the body of the man she loved.
Her feet moved almost without her, and carried her to the police station to confess her crimes.
She picked up one of the two letters on the table and unfolded it.
My dear Aysel,
Like the three letters before it, I’m writing this one to ask you to forgive me.
I know I’ve lost your friendship, and it hurts. I know there’s no excuse that could make me right, but please, hear it from my side, just this once.
High school love burns out fast, like a straw fire, but it leaves a scar. Sinan was the first person I ever loved. When he held my hand I thought I would faint. In our final year he left me. He said I wasn’t enough for someone like him, that he deserved better. For a while I stopped eating altogether. I was so angry with him that I wished something terrible would happen to him, something to cut his ego down to size.
Years later we ended up at the same company. Sinan was in production; I was in administration. We never crossed paths except coming in and going out. I wasn’t angry anymore, but I pretended not to know him. One freezing winter day I went downstairs and forgot the heater I’d been using to warm my feet. The scarf hanging off my chair caught fire. It acted like a fuse and set everything else alight, one thing after another, like dominoes. Within an hour it had spread through the whole building. The heat knocked one of the machines out of alignment, and the pressurized acid hit Sinan in the face. A chain of negligence… It was a disgraceful place. Not even the fire extinguishers worked.
I was tried in court and not convicted, but I couldn’t quiet the guilt. That’s why we started the cosmetics company, you and I. I believed I could give Sinan back what I’d taken from him and finally be free of my conscience. I was the one who invited him to the shop. But when I saw him, I was so overcome I couldn’t face him or speak to him. I hid in the shadows like a coward.
I should never have written to him. When I saw him giving you hope, when I watched him soak up your love like a sponge, I should have found the strength to stay away.
Aysel slid the letter back into its envelope without reading the rest. Ever since she’d gone to prison, the letters from Rozerin had kept coming, each one scorched with remorse. But what was a conscience worth that never spoke up at the right time, in the right place? What good was pain that came too late? Her anger at her former best friend had blown away, and pity had taken its place.
The second letter was from the businessman she’d met in Cyprus. Semih had heard she was in prison and wanted to know how she was. “I could take back the favor he never deserved,” he wrote, hinting that he could see to Sinan’s face. The redheaded woman didn’t want that. Let them live, each knowing exactly what the other was made of, and what they themselves were made of. There was no punishment greater than being unable to look into the mirror of one’s own conscience.
She knew the latest news. The company was being wound up. Rozerin had turned Sinan away, and Sinan had gone abroad and vanished.
Three months, Aysel thought. Three months behind four walls for incitement to burglary. On top of that, Selçuk’s relatives, who had never lifted a finger for Devin, had suddenly turned up and started threatening her. It was all bluster, of course, but it had left its mark on her. Someone who has lived in fear long enough can’t quite believe it when she’s safe again.
And so, on a December night ten days after her release, drinking tea at midnight beneath the wall clock she had hung in the kitchen of her newly rented flat, in an old three-story building on a narrow street, she was suddenly afraid that someone would throw her from the balcony and make it look like suicide. After that sudden, irreversible feeling, she remembered there was no reason for it, and took a deep breath. On the longest night of the year, she felt something she could only describe as a cool spring running through her: free, strong, safe. She drank her chamomile tea down to the last sip, set the glass on the counter, and went to bed.