More: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

ring three times at most, then get bored and hang up anyway. But the ringing didn’t stop. Four, five, six … We weren’t home, damn it! Why didn’t he just give up and call father’s cell? Was it that he’d already called father, wasn’t able to reach him, and was now trying the house? But father would always have his phone at hand. Had something happened to him? Had the police caught my father? The gendarmerie?
“Hello, uncle Aruz?”
I’d gone deaf with anxiety.
“It’s me, Felat!”
“What?”
Aruz’s son, Felat. He was my age but for some reason older than me.
“Gaza, it’s Felat!”
“Felat? Are you all right?”
    “Fine, fine. What are you up to?”
    “Never mind that, talk to me! Where’ve you been. What’s happened?”
    “What can I say, father beat me up and all that, and then sent me to my uncle’s. They stuck me in a room. I just sat there …”
Upon finding out that the village they had vacated years ago on the state’s orders was now, again by instruction of the state, habitable again, Aruz and the elders of his 260-person following had gotten together for a family meeting, during which Felat, who wanted nothing to do with this reverse migration and didn’t want to leave the city, and a few nutjobs in his leadership, had gone out to the fields and torched the houses of their great-grandfathers.
Since these fanciful arsonists whose ages ranged from nine to fourteen hadn’t been as meticulous as those who, in their time, had burned similar villages with so much precision they could have been following a “Village Burning Directive,” the fire grew and they were collared before nightfall. The gendarmerie even prepared a report stating that the incident was in no way connected to any state institution, official or unofficial, and had Aruz sign it, and the fire took its exceptional place in the smoky history of the region. I hadn’t heard Felat’s voice in four months. Now he was talking about running away.
I remembered so clearly. It was the holy night of Berat. Father was at me again, nagging, “Get up and call your uncle Aruz, wish him a blessed night!”
“I’m running away, man! I’m going to get the fuck out of here!”
    “Hey, you ran away just last year! Where’re you going now?”
So I had been forced to call him. When the phone rang a few times and I was about to say, “No luck, Dad, he’s not picking up,” a child’s voice came from the other end:
“Brother?” he was saying. “Is that you?”
    “I’m Gaza,” I said. “Who’re you?” I asked, and he hung up on me.
    “That should be Felat … Aruz’s little boy,” said my father. “Whatever then, you can call him tomorrow,” he said and left. For the mosque.
“How should I know, man, should I maybe come over to yours?”
    “What’re you going to do over here, kid?”
Half an hour later in the same evening, Felat had called us back and his first question had been:
    “Is my brother there?”
    “No,” I had said. “Who’s your brother anyway?”
    “Ahlat …”
    “There’s no such person here …”
    Then we were silent …
    “You’re Felat, right? Uncle Aruz’s son.”
    “Yeah … who’re you ?”
    “I told you, I’m Gaza … My dad works with your dad. That’s why I called him, for the holy night …”
“Or should I go to Istanbul? The nephews live there. But they’re even bigger dopes!”
“Is your dad there?”
    “No, he’s out.”
    He had begun to cry. Abruptly. As if he’d collapsed to the ground …
    “Felat? What’s wrong?”
    “I’ve run away from home …”
    I didn’t catch this because the words were tangling up in his sobs.
    “What?”
“I’ve run away from home!”
    If I’d been an adult, I’d have asked him where he was right then, but I wasn’t.
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know, I just did …”
    “So what’re you going to do?”
    “I’m going to sell the phone … then I’m going to go someplace …”
    That’s how I knew how Felat happened to have