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just one of the bodies unearthed every spring by wild animals from the bottoms of hills following one of the PKK’s interorganizational execution festivals? If so, had he mentioned me in the self-criticism he’d given in a last hope of survival, which would now be filed away in the organization’s archive of Pre-State Bureaucracy persuasion? Perhaps he’d made it to counselor status in the expertise of confession and was busy chasing debentures in Istanbul … Or had he committed suicide? Or had he already run off to a quaint corner of the earth and sat gazing at sky-tinged seas … I doubt it … If I’ve learned anything from this disease called life, then he was sitting in Daddy’s chair, holding Aruz’s phone in his hand. It’s that simple … The new Aruz wouldn’t remember Felat any more than he remembered me or our password … I was the only one living in the past, no one else. I was alone in that mausoleum of horrors that no other living thing would set foot in. Horrified … because I’d turned into my father, too! I was Ahad! I was worse than Ahad, in fact …
    Yet on the other hand, blomma … did that not mean çiçek ? Çiçek … Cuma, then! Felat! Cuma! Against chance, Cuma! Against the predictable flow of time! Against all odds, Cuma! It’s Gaza, Felat! Cuma! Don’t kill me! Cuma!

 
    Sawdust makes me nauseated. Whenever I see sawdust on the ground, I know a life of filth has been lived there. The shed where cock fights were held three days and two nights a week, the broken-down tavern one slipped into by ducking under the shutters during Ramadan, and where I learned to knock back a couple shots and screw up my face, the police station that was open 24–7 and where I stayed for two nights, though I didn’t sleep: they all had sawdust.
    Kandalı was the town we fought one another to live in. I’d come too late to see the days it had been called Kandağlı. The letter Ğ didn’t wait for me and had long taken its leave. Seated in the middle of Kandağ, which resembled a couch more than it did a mountain, and thus not a recipient of much wind unless it one day chanced to get lost, Kandalı was a small town that everyone insisted on calling a county. Perhaps calling it a county brought them close, if only phonetically, to the possibility of living in a city. In reality Kandalı was a town-sized pit where the humidity was practically a glass curtain, so you had to part it with your hands to move forward, measure it with scales instead of a barometer. A flowerpot that couldn’t pull any more than its weight in population, where anything that overgrew would dry up and croak before long. It was a place of olive consumption, of olive tree harvesting, of downing a spoonful of olive oil to fortify oneself for rakı drinking. And sawdust was all over the place.
    Wherever I looked I saw sawdust scattered everywhere, so that whatever was about to be spilled would be easier to sweep up later. There was sawdust in all of its five town buses, four coffee houses, its one main street, and numerous small streets no one cared to count. Sawdust in the houses, sawdust in the shops, on the soles of shoes and the knees of children, everywhere. All of Kandalı was covered in sawdust like it’d rained from the heavens. So that nothing would be left of Kandalı and of us …
    It was in the back of our truck as well, of course. I scattered it on and swept it off. I did it so often it felt like it would stay in my life no matter where I went in the world. Maybe that was as it should be: the whole world should be covered in sawdust! That would make it easier to sweep up entrails spilled by knife, sword, or lead, or the blood from the rape of girls by baton, prick, or fist, everywhere in the world. Because sawdust was magic! It absorbed everything and was cleared away with the sweep of a mop. That was what sawdust did: it sucked up the shitty past and cleared the ground for an even shittier future.
    Our own sweet home was