More: A Novel Read Online Free

wanted to beat me up. They weren’t quite sure if they could, though. For they’d heard some small, nauseating tidbits. About me and my life and my close and far circles. In any case, the fluctuating bouts of violence, during which I, as the target, would just sit there cross-legged, didn’t take long to abate. For one day Harmin and Dordor came to pick me up from school and showed off their four-meter height, and the juvenile hate I was besieged by folded in on itself and sank into definite silence.
    The only one talking now was Ender. Only he told me things and asked questions he wouldn’t be able to get replies to, and kept chortling to himself. His father was a gendarme. A sergeant. I knew him. Uncle Yadigar. Every time he showed up when school let out, he’d take a chocolate bar out of his pocket and give it to Ender, saying, “Break it in half, son, give some to Gaza.” Then as I munched away, he would bide me, “Why don’t you come to our place, look, your aunt Salime made meatballs,” to which I’d shake my head and walk away.
    He knew I was Ahad’s son, obviously, but I was sure he couldn’t figure out what the hell Ahad was. Maybe that’s why he kept inviting me to his home. To get words out of me in exchange for meatballs. But I had no mother and I could make meatballs on my own. For the past two years, no less …
    Uncle Yadigar the Heroic Sergeant! He really was. He’d grabbed up and saved two children from the midst of a forest fire two years earlier, and his right cheek had been completely burned; he’d been awarded a medal. Ender had even worn that medal to school one day, and all the kids whose fathers were olive growers, grocers, tailors, picklers, stationery sellers, butchers, patrol policemen, guardians, restaurateurs, furnishers, or dead gnawed off the jealousy coating their lips, collected it at the edge of their tongues, and spat it onto the ground. Ender, who was already an outcast because he talked to me, was ostracized even more—and this meant out as out could be—leaving the son of the smuggler and the son of the gendarme to their own in a class of forty-seven. But Ender was so stunted he failed to register all this and continued to chortle to himself. As for me, I was sure it was my insides, rather than my face, that were breaking out in spots. For slowly but surely the immigrants were beginning to make me nauseated.
    Whenever I saw those people; who clung to one another and made microscopic squeals at the smallest noise, or whose pupils quivered as if they had some mysterious strain of Parkinson’s, or who kept trying to smell the forthcoming moment with their broken, sunken-pen noses, who emitted nothing other than the word “More!” even though they never stopped talking, who were buried in seventeen layers of sweat- and then soot-stained fabric and stuck their heads out of their textile tombs only to ask for something; I would say: “Fuck off already!” To their faces, in fact. It wasn’t like they understood. Even if they did, they’d just sit and thrust their chins into their chests.
    When Ender asked me, “What are you doing this weekend?” I couldn’t very well say, “I’m going to smuggle people, is what I’m going to fucking do!”
    And when I said, “I’m helping my dad,” he’d rattle off all the places I always wanted to visit, saying, “I wish you could come too”: the movie theater in the city, the amusement park in the neighboring town, the game hall in the shopping mall of the city, one of the two Internet cafés in our own town …
    Ender had nothing he had to do! All he had to do was homework, and eat his mother’s meatballs, and maybe go to Koran class! I worked like a dog! I collected the plastic bags immigrants shit into and buried the shit behind the warehouse, bought bottles of water in twos and loaves of bread in threes from all the stores in town so that our shopping wouldn’t attract attention, emptied bins of immigrant piss, ran