Endgame. Ahmet Altan

      IV

      Sitting on this bench I’m wondering how I ended up at this dead end. What’s left? Am I here because I befriended a pot-smoking restaurateur? Or was it that strange sign along the road that started it all? I marvel at how the seemingly impossible is precisely what I was dealt.

      If I had only ignored that sign, or left the restaurant without saying a word, I would now be leading another life. I might be living in a mountain village, working on a novel, my only real concern labouring over the right words for the last sentence of a chapter.

      But now I’m sitting on this old wooden bench, listening to the breathing of a slumbering town. I am watching all the dreams up in the sky and considering all my options: I could run, spend the rest of my life in jail, or I could take my life.

      What if I hadn’t seen that sign along the road? What if I hadn’t stopped at that restaurant? What if I had just finished my meal and quietly left? How believable is a story that begins with a plate of köfte and a pot-smoking restaurateur? But then consider God. His stories are beyond belief.

      I confess that I’m a little jealous of God.

      He’s killed millions but not once did he ever stop to consider the consequences. No one ever blamed him. Or at least he was never tried in court.

      Years of human history but not one of his chapters was ever truly criticised or judged, all his coincidences never challenged by the law.

      How does he get away with so much?

      By killing off the unbelievers?

      I’ve also taken a life.

      But this doesn’t make me a lesser God. I am a murderer.

      I can see the walls of the houses swell and fall with the breath of those who sleep within them, I can see the entire town as if under a thick cotton quilt. I know most of the people there but I can no longer imagine what they are dreaming. No one knows what another dreams, and even the dreamer doesn’t know what lies ahead. The hidden meanings in the dark world of dreams have always frightened me, images fluttering ceaselessly through my mind, indecipherable, only partially revealed to me in sleep, perhaps veiled to my waking eye but wandering quietly in and out of my mind, leaving behind a trail of crippling devastation that I can hardly comprehend.

      The town is silent.

      Everyone is sleeping. Sleeping together.

      Do they know that they will wake up in the morning to the news of murder?

      What will they say about me?

      What now? I should leave now. With every passing minute they’re more likely to catch me. That is if I want to get away.

      I’m paralysed.

      Exhausted.

      God must be exhausted. Killing takes so much out of you.

      But does he ever feel remorse? Regret for having brought me into this world. Or was I created expressly for this purpose? But why choose me for the crime? Why give life only to later snuff it out?

      I am alone tonight, with only God to grapple with or blame.

      What would I say to him if he came and sat down here beside me?

      ‘Why did you do it?’ I would ask. And he might say, ‘The crime is yours. You took that side road, stopped at that restaurant, settled in this town, and then you committed murder.’

      But who really took that life? Me? Or was it God?

      Why should I go to prison for his crime?

      And why worship God if he granted me the power to kill?

      It is the eternal question: ‘Why me?’

      And is the answer simply: ‘Because I had a plate of meatballs’? That’s hardly satisfying.

      Our lives are made up of moments, like seeds we choose to water and that sometimes sprout and grow. Later we’re surprised to see what they have become, and we call them God’s coincidences because we believe God scattered these moments, these seeds, over the course our lives, and that he watches to see which ones we choose to water. But then again, doesn’t he already know so much from the very beginning?

      I watered the wrong seed.

      Are you amused?

      Are you suffering beside me? Steeped in the same fear? In the same overwhelming tide of helplessness?

      But can you feel these emotions?

      Or do you only know them by observing this mortal plight?

      You created us so you could taste emotions that you would otherwise never know. To see and feel desperation, weakness and fear from your own creation.

      So here is my description of helplessness, something I now know all too well: a human face pressed against a wall by a thousand hands, fixed in place, unable to breathe, no escape and no salvation.

      But how can I convey these feelings to you? I am dying to do so but these are things you will never know.

      I am God’s teacher but this pupil of mine will make me pay with my life.

      He knows my suffering.

      And my fear.

      A fear that makes me cold, like a block of ice on my back. I am shivering from the cold.

      But it was a magnificent journey that led me to this moment of abject terror. No one would have believed it. I never would have expected so much if not for that black speck of foreboding that took shape in my heart, laying there in the shadows, and I chose not to watch it grow.

      Nobody wants to see the truth, so why should I?

      But now I was face to face with it, and it was staring me in the eye.

      God was revealing inescapable truths.

      I saw the truth.

      Horrified and full of fear, I saw the truth.