The Gaps
“We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
—Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
It was as though the sky had fallen in completely. In that dense fog, you couldn’t make out the guardhouse we usually glimpsed out of the corner of the yard, nor the iron-barred windows of the upper block, nor the high walls, nor the mighty floodlights flanking the prison. In their stead was just a blinding white smoke everywhere. Everything around us was trapped in The Dark Mist that had befallen this ancient, ancient world like a shroud. The sky had been torn asunder, and all the clouds had poured down to earth. Except for the occasional whistles of the guards—declaring from the South Tower to the East Tower, or from the North Tower to the West Tower, that the coast was clear—not one single sound could be heard all around. The seagulls’ shrieks had long since stopped, too. It was as if a gray, murky grime descended from the tear in the sky, sucked everything inside, absorbed all the sounds in its path, leaving behind nothing but our surprised, curious, unhappy eyes.
The crew had just woken up from the post-count nap. They all wore a familiar, humdrum, and sad morning malaise, the likes of which they’d borne countless times. The Soul Traveler tore off another leaf from the calendar and counted with the help of his fingers, since he wasn’t so good at counting. Like everyone else, he used his thumb in place of the minus sign. Every time his thumb touched his other fingers, another day would be taken off his tally and the relief on his face would increase in equal measure. Unless the subtraction on the tip of his fingers was lying, he had three years, four months and twenty-five days left until his release. The Soul Traveler began to shuffle the remaining calendar leaves as if they were a deck of cards. Then he inhaled deeply through his nose, as if he’d gotten a whiff of something.
“They can’t make time stop,” he said.
Rounding up to another stint of time served, Casper went and stuck a big fat cuss onto the end of this sentence. Laughter, groans, whoops and curses rose up from the block. I folded my hands behind my head and looked around at these pals I was destined to live out my life with here on the block.
They adored all kinds of curses. Body parts, fruits of ill repute, all things wet and sticky, things that stretch when pulled, things with holes in them—all of these they would use fiendishly in place of a curse, no matter whether it suited or not. But what they loved best, I think, were the curses about time. Time standing still, unpassing, rewinding, remembered, stuck; time that is no longer set to us anymore, but solely to the day of our release . . . Everyone on the cellblock earnestly calculated their remaining time, taking care not to make any mistakes, and then followed The Soul Traveler down the stairs and into the yard. But that morning, just as on the day prior, there was no way to take our paces. The air was so foggy you couldn’t see a thing.
“First time I’ve seen anything like this,” said The Rat.
“I saw it once,” said The Soul Traveler, hands at his waist, “a dirty fog. Sometimes doesn’t leave the ground for days.”
“Winter is coming,” said Casper, “it’ll freeze us this year for sure.”
“There was a fog like this in our village one year,” said Brother Asım, carefully running his hand along the ventilation columns, “it didn’t lift for four days.”
Uncle Reco, who yanked at the prayer beads in his hand one after another, turned to The Soul Traveler and said, “Come on, go turn on the stove and let’s have some tea. It’ll be good in this weather.”
In Taşkale Prison, everyone had a task and rank according to their crime. Petty theft and assault ranked lowest, and they did the cell’s chores. It was how things were set up. No one could change it. Inside, everyone got the esteem and generosity owed to the crime they’d committed. In fact, except for Barana, whose story we didn’t know yet, all of our crew were in for murder. So, we’d distributed duties among ourselves according to our stories, not our crimes.
The Soul Traveler had killed the woman he loved the most. The Rat was actually doing time for someone else’s crime, but there was also some larceny involved. An expert mold-maker, Brother Asım had shot his fellow villager during a farm dispute. Casper, whose only concern was passing the state education exams and getting his diploma, had come in for robbery but did his first murder in prison. Uncle Reco had killed a rakı factory manager, in his own office. For my part, until that morning I held the highest rank: twenty-four years.
But then came Barana.
The kid had gotten life. In the old days, they would have hanged him. If parliament had allowed it, they would have strung him up like a tea bag. The greatest crime of all. Whatever anyone might say, he was now the highest-ranking inmate in C-6. We couldn’t make any demands of him. With a sentence like that, he didn’t even have to move a piece of trash from one spot to another. He wouldn’t have to do anyone’s bidding, or run errands for anyone.
The Soul Traveler, who was supremely sensitive to all kinds of smells, was responsible for distributing tea and food. Casper, who used his long thin fingers to enter and exit women’s bags like a ghost, was the dishwasher. Brother Asım was tall, and his job as a once-was expert molder was to tidy up the sheets we left in disarray each morning, neatly preparing the blankets, and flattening the pillows like slices of cheese. Cleaning and laundry were The Rat’s duties. Uncle Reco was younger than me, but still he used his age as an excuse not to get entangled in anything. Since he had a lot of money, he was usually the one to provide for the petty needs of the cellblock. Though there was no such distinction among us, he saw himself as the block leader. To keep him happy we didn’t say anything, so he would console himself and take care of our needs.
“Did the boy wake up yet, Teacher Mesut?” asked Uncle Reco.
We went up the stairs again, quietly, to check on Barana’s condition. He hadn’t woken up. He was still lying on his bed, exhausted, listless, like a corpse waiting to be dissected on an autopsy table. It would take time for him to recover. Maybe he’d get worse. We didn’t want to bother him. We went downstairs again so he could sleep, rest, and recover. We were all shaken up because of the kid. When we saw his condition, we remembered the first day we’d been brought in to the prison, and we swallowed silently. The kitchen felt cramped. After a moment, we ran back out into the yard.
We sat along the wall, looking up at the sky, curious, waiting for the fog to clear. At times our eyes came out of their sockets and blended into the fog, letting us see the regrets inside of us, looking around for the old, happy, peaceful days that we couldn’t bring along in our suitcases, and that we’d left at the prison gates. Every one of us had uttered one last sentence they had to leave outside. It was as if we were all dead, and everyone remembered us by that last sentence. I had no way of knowing what was going on in the minds of others, nor of hearing their last sentences, but it was always the same old sound that echoed in me, a remnant from my crime:
“We invite the bride and groom to the stage!”
I turned and looked at the lot of us, as if trying to silence the sentence that refused to disappear, droning on like a shameless drum mallet. Unable to see anything up in the sky, my blockmates were all staring down, looking extremely forlorn. They all looked distracted, hopeless, defeated.
If asked, with the exception of Uncle Reco everyone in C-6 claimed they were sorry for what they’d done, but I doubt it. The remorse on their tongues contradicted the rancor in their eyes. But they were still luckier than Barana and me. For them, there were suns yet to rise and set somewhere in the world, women to bed, pillows to sweat on, paths to walk, rakı to drink, cities to see, worldly concerns to witness, or new crimes to commit. But for Barana and me, everything was very far off. Cut off from the world and from any hope in time, a pitch-black dot had come and placed itself next to our names. In fact, Barana had two extra dots. Everyone would one day go out and chase their half-uttered sentence, but our sentences would never be completed.
Uncle Reco, who had one year and ten days left of his sentence for killing the rakı factory manager, and The Soul Traveler who, despite receiving a twenty-four year sentence, got twelve years with mitigating circumstances after killing the woman he loved in the middle of the street—they were not like us. For them, it wasn’t just years, months, days, or hours, but every passing minute that had significance. Uncle Reco was somehow still standing. But The Soul Traveler was spent. He had three years left. As soon as he got out, he would visit the grave of the woman he had killed, probably with that woman’s favorite violets in his hand. After being released, he wanted to live somewhere close to her grave if possible. To more frequently visit the grave of the woman he’d killed with that one bullet, evening out the broken scales of his fate. But there was an important truth we couldn’t tell him. Women never forget. Women seldom forgive men, even when they die. His efforts would be in vain.
Every once in a while, The Soul Traveler would submit a petition to the prison administration and ask for soil and violet seeds, just enough to fill a simple pot. He had committed no offenses against the administration. He had been a respectful inmate. His release was imminent. A handful of soil and violet seeds wouldn’t harm anyone, but the prison administration always refused such requests with the same decisiveness. With the help of the greedy guard we called Outer Canteen, we could actually procure anything we wanted, but for some reason we kept coming up short when it came to the matter of violet seeds. They just wouldn’t allow it. The warden liked cleanliness, obedience, and order. But like all wardens in the world, Taşkale’s warden was hostile to flowers.
The Soul Traveler wasn’t giving up though. Every two or three weeks he’d put a pen and an unlined blank sheet of paper in front of me and ask me to write a new petition. He wanted me to write it in nice handwriting and appropriate language. Some soil and violet seeds. He would pay for it. He would take care of the flower pot himself: he would use empty detergent bottles or ready-made yogurt containers. Our state was a great state. The state was forgiving, like God. Besides, our Prophet apparently loved flowers too. But the State did not buy these words. The answer was always the same: Rejected.
Perhaps the simpler a person’s story is, the easier their life becomes. Brother Asım’s story wasn’t as complicated as The Soul Traveler’s was. That’s why he was probably the most carefree prisoner among us. While working on the irrigation of his new beloved farm, he had argued with the neighboring farm’s owner. The argument, which started over the water channel, suddenly turned into a fight, and after a time, Brother Asım fired the rifle he carried alongside him to keep away predators. It was all over in half an hour. The only thing he remembered was the dead man’s blood seeping into the water channel between the two farms. That was all. The field, the water, the blood flowing into the water channel—and eighteen years. There were mitigating factors in his sentence too. But Brother Asım was an exceedingly devout man. He was more afraid of the punishment he would receive in the afterlife than in this world. Morning and evening, with his translated Holy Quran in his hand, he would lean his back against the column and search in the Holy Book for a punishment for the crime he had committed. From time to time, the sounds of sheep and goats would make their way to us in the prison from the neighboring fields. This is when Brother Asım would get worse. “A person with two acres of land, twenty sheep, and fear of the afterlife is a happy person,” he would say. Then he would gorge himself on the aroma of soil from outside and, like everyone else, rewrite his story. To tell someone else, to relieve himself in the telling, to be found innocent and to be forgiven.
“So what’s the kid’s crime?” asked Brother Asım.
They’d just said “life sentence” and then the guards had left. But we wouldn’t have to wait long. He would tell us for sure when he recovered. First, he’d have to heal, accept that he wouldn’t be leaving here, and grasp that he couldn’t face his story alone. Then, he would tell it. Because no one could keep their story inside forever.
Everyone who came into Taşkale would eventually tell their story to someone. Without fail, this was the rule. One way of speeding up the interminable stretch of time was to recount what one had lived through. In fact, at times it seemed to me that everyone had come to prison just to tell their story to someone, or to find an end to their story. To be honest, we loved it, all of us. First, we would light a cigarette, sigh and look out at the seven-meter wall. Then, just for a moment, we’d put the world’s prettiest silence on our faces, ash the cigarette as if shedding all the troubles of the world, leap over the wall with our gaze, and begin to narrate. At first to everyone, and then to our cellmates after everyone else left. Clearly, slowly, reminiscing, forgetting. When there was no one left to tell our story to, we would keep on telling it: what had happened, what was left inside us, and all about those old days whose sorrow would fill our eyes as we remembered them, but this time to ourselves and our helpless hands.
There was a world of difference between telling a story to a curious crowd or to a single someone—or just to ourselves. In the first situation it wasn’t the details that got first billing so much as the grand injustices and rages, the premeditated murders. In the latter scenario though, self-defenses, self-respecting desires, extended scenes, and regrets were more prominent. In the former, spit spurting out of lips seeped into the story; in the latter, gushes of tears. As we narrated and lengthened our sentences, our stories expanded; new words, new people, new memories entered the mix, and we could never go back to the beginning. And even if we could, we could never find our way back out. By the time we gradually realized we weren’t telling our own story, but the story we found most fitting, it was too late. We often found ourselves right in the middle of a strange and uncanny tale that had nothing to do with us, that told the story of someone else’s life. The lie seemed more appealing to us anyway, and we were egged on by a prior story we’d had difficulty believing.
The Rat loved it when a prisoner or guard asked, “Why did you end up here?” As soon as the question was asked, he’d begin to tell his story with gusto, as if begging for help from his audience. As he recounted what he’d been through, it seemed to him as though his listeners would immediately want to run to him and undo the injustice he had suffered, wake the judge from his slumber and get him a new trial, get his case overturned on appeal, and grab his suitcase and head for the door, thanks to his listeners. But The Rat had a problem. Instead of summarizing his story, he would always tell us everything that had happened starting from the very beginning. Again and again, with the same turns of phrase:
“The individual named Timur and I stole the car, and we were driving around.”
The Rat’s story, which ended in the death of one person, always began with this same sentence. Timur was his best friend. His late beloved father had tried very hard to get him away from that good-for-nothing, but he still clung to this man like a tick. In the end it came down to his water jug breaking in the waterway. He’d tried to rob a Tekel store with Timur, but something completely unexpected happened. The man there risked his life for a few cartons of cigarettes and a couple bottles of whisky. Immediately, he was killed by Timur’s bullet. But unlike The Rat, Timur had been careful from the jump and had put on gloves. As they were leaving, he’d made The Rat fire a few shots at the guy with the same gun too, “just in case he’s not dead.” Only The Rat’s fingerprints were on the gun. So, all the blame fell on him. Perhaps this wasn’t the real story. Maybe The Rat was lying and he himself had killed the guy in cold blood. Still, it felt good to sit in that old section of the innocent train and look at the world with innocent eyes.
Like everyone else at Taşkale, The Rat had been wronged and he was looking for justice. During days of questioning and trials, he had looked for a way out as best he could. To save himself, he had attempted to use legalese in his own sentences, phrases he had heard from someone else. He had begun to refer to his best friend as “the individual named Timur.” Maybe his plan had been to defend himself with the language of his judges, just in case it saved him.
“The individual named Timur and I stole the car, and we were driving around.”
It was as if The Rat was a witness, not a defendant. His lawyer had told him several times not to use the word “individual,” calling it inappropriate. He’d told him that his credibility would diminish whenever he referred to his closest friend as an “individual” and that he should give a defense as plain and undetailed as possible. Because, according to the lawyer, just like there were some phrases that didn’t fit into a story, there were also terms that were unbecoming in certain defenses. But The Rat had ignored the lawyer. To the contrary, when the judge asked him if he had anything left to say at the final hearing, The Rat had once again tried to tell his story all over from the beginning, as he always did:
“The individual named Timur and I stole the car, and we were driving around.”
Result? 22 years.
Timur?
Poof!
Maybe The Rat was right. If a story wasn’t told from the very beginning, from its root source, from that first moment that gripped the whole of the body, it would be incomplete. That’s why he retold his experiences from the very beginning, for those who started listening in the middle or had arrived only at the end. Plus, when he told his story from the beginning, he always stumbled onto something new and—with all the additions, deletions, lies and remembrances—he would venture up steep paths that even he himself was surprised by.
According to The Rat, since the tragic end of a fated prisoner who’d descended into Taşkale was already written in the courtrooms, it no longer mattered how the story progressed, nor which ending it would come with. What was important was not the endings, but the first moments of a story. The details. The things that went overlooked. The injustices that were told over and over again. Individuals named Timur. Negligent mothers, deceased fathers, indifferent siblings, friends who never called, days that didn’t pass, unfaithful lovers, and of course, once again, the individuals named Timur.
For Uncle Reco, the most important individual in the world was the departed manager of the rakı factory. He felt no remorse at all for having killed the guy. He was the only one among us not to feel any guilt. Even if the world were turned upside down and the man came back to life and stood before him as a completely different person, he would still take him out. Every time he mentioned the name of this man he’d killed, he’d first spit on the ground and then continue talking where he’d left off. He was determined, as soon as he got out, that he would smash the man’s beautiful marble tomb. His anger was that great, that fiery, that persistent. When a guard or new inmate asked him about his crime, he’d simply say “I killed a pest” and leave it at that. He never elaborated. He didn’t see the need. That much was enough. Only we knew how he had killed “the pest.”
Uncle Reco used to sell those delicious Boğazkere grapes he’d bought from the vineyard owners in the surrounding villages to the rakı factory in the town. He would sell the grapes he bought at a quadruple mark-up, and then cruise all year with the money he’d earned in the fall. In time, though, with the new, difficult manager who came to the factory, the trade began to deteriorate. Despite promises, the new factory manager bought grapes from a merchant in another town instead of him that year. Uncle Reco’s business began to fall apart day by day. But he had four children and a wife to look after, a mistress, a bunch of men who took orders from him, villagers who expected money, vehicles he used in transportation, bills to settle at taverns and night clubs, and, worst of all, the grapes he still had left, which were growing darker every day. Finally, he took his gun and riddled the manager with bullets right in the man’s office. An acquaintance came to his aid and gave Uncle Reco some advice. Instead of immediately turning himself in he made him go into the liquor store in town and drink rakı until he got wasted. His friends took him to the police station in that drunken state. Personal grudge, unjust provocation, unpaid balances, drunkenness—finally his sentence was pared down to nothing. He didn’t have any right to, but it was Uncle Reco who complained the most about how time stood still in prison.
Casper, who dropped out of school young and tried to take the exams in prison to get a diploma, and planned to get his driver’s license one day, had great talent as an enterprising pickpocket who could adapt himself to the changing times. One thing had led to another and thanks to the mobile phone craze that had recently taken the nation by storm, Casper’s business was coming up like roses. With his thin, long fingers, he would coax out people’s phones from the cases at their waists. After a while, he even opened a shop where he was planning to put the stolen phones back into circulation. Luck smiled upon him, and one day he fell in love with a girl whose phone he’d stolen. No longer a thief, he stood rather before this girl as if he were a hero who took the phone back from the thieves. Later on, he married the girl in a fairy tale wedding. His wedding was attended by renowned thieves, pickpockets, gamblers, mavericks, and storied mafia bosses of the city. Necklaces, braided golden bracelets, clasps, earrings, and gold coins stolen the night before adorned the wedding gown of his wife. Dollars and deutschmarks on either side of Casper’s groom’s jacket were in rows of two, draping all the way to the ground. But theft was such a pesky habit that Casper stole even at his own wedding, forgetting that the money had been gifted to him. He even stole from the jewelry pinned to the bride’s wedding gown . . .
After all, everyone had a profession and his was thievery. According to him, the thin, long fingers that God had given him were for thievery, and he had tried hard for years to do right by them. However, his real misfortune was not that he was caught one day and put in prison. While in Elazığ Prison, he had skewered another prisoner who had stolen his prayer beads. The beads were actually worthless to him, he explained, because he had also stolen them from someone else.
But stealing a thief’s property was unforgivable.
He couldn’t stomach the hurt of his goods being stolen after years of stealing from others and hadn’t seen any issue in skewering the guy. So, the sentence he received for theft had swelled up like a halo and increased to eighteen years. For now, he had one dream. To finish school remotely, get a diploma of some sort, and use that diploma to finally get his license so that he could rev the engine of a white Doğan on the streets. And he wanted to slip through walls, like the cartoon character he watched as a child and named himself after. Sometimes he really believed he could do it. He would run very fast and then of course slam into the wall and fall down. Although I prepared him for exams from time to time, he wasn’t good at any subject. It was as if Casper had come to this world only to steal and dream.
These were the stories of the crew. Neither long nor short. Frankly, the things they went through were not very important. Maybe all of them were just sideshows compared to what we’d done. Because sometimes all the stories faded from importance and only one story remained. It was simply unfair. But life, which really wasn’t all that complicated, simply worked this way. Every once in a while, life would just stand up and politely erase all those unimportant, told just because, or just as well untold stories from the blackboard, leaving only one story behind. Just like Barana’s strange, silent, and sad story.
When I met him, I still had a hefty twelve years before I could pick up my suitcase and leave, raising my head to look up at the sky as if looking at an infinite emptiness. If I count the years I spent in prison, that’s a third of a human life. Maybe more. Who could know how long they’ll live, how many days they have left in this world, how many of these days would be happy, how many would be filled with sorrow, or what their end will be? Perhaps out of despair, or perhaps because I was slowly surrendering my body to old age, I had stopped counting the days long ago. Every once in a while, when I heard the blaring horns of the wedding processions speeding down the highway surrounding the prison, I’d count how many years I still had to go, would find some numbers in my hands, and then erase all that time I calculated. There was only one thing I was sure of: I would get out when I was sixty-nine. In other words, at an age where everything would be already finished. I wanted to forget. I wanted to stop remembering anything. I wanted not to go back to that damned night. Not to get depressed in that wedding hall and go out into the garden. Not to run into that woman. Perhaps, more than forgetting people, we had to forget time itself to survive, to not collapse, to not go crazy. Barana and I needed this the most.
He was still lying upstairs covered in bruises. From the block window, I could hear the occasional groaning sounds. He was not moaning to make others hear his pain, but because he was truly in pain. The kid’s state got to me. I could smell the infection inside him. I stood up and slowly went upstairs. I wet a towel and went to him. I started gently wiping the blood off his face.
Because some people recognize each other from their pain. And only those who’ve been injured know how to patch up those wounds.
