.jpeg "Published in February 2026") |
| Published in February 2026 |
The characters, institutions, and events in this novel are entirely fictional. They bear no relation to real persons, institutions, or events. Any similarities that may appear to exist are the result of coincidence.
1
I remember like yesterday, the day Naci Zara's file dropped into my ultra-secure message box. Behind my back, a firm cushion decorated with Tibetan patterns; on the coffee table where I'd stretched out my swollen legs, the golden pits of the damsons I'd just devoured, wincing with each bite; in the other corner of the couch, our kitten Hundun[1] locked in a relentless battle with its own tail; on the radio, a voice left over from the nineties singing bù zhǐshì péngyǒu[2]; and in my belly, my son who would never be born. Outside, a fierce July rain had set about its heedless business of softening the city's concrete surfaces with blow after blow. Altruistic grandmothers and grandfathers who had sworn to fan their grandchildren, their legs suddenly infused with an elixir of youth, had fled to the scooter parks beneath the buildings, and the green garden in the middle of the housing complex — growing a little more ruined with every drop that fell from the sky — had been left to the patient vigil of the invasive African snails and the sluggish earthworms native to our city. Water droplets striking and bouncing off the metal roof of the security guards' outbuilding scattered shimmering, iridescent flashes and spilled in waves beyond the garden's borders. The two long metal rods we used for hanging laundry swung back and forth like a cradle and knocked against each other; the sky grumbled like an old woman snapping at a street vendor who had dared to drive a stake into her ground; mosquitoes, despite the suddenly soupy air, searched for new warm and humid quarters to spite it; and smoke-colored clouds struck momentary sparks in the middle of the sky, like mischievous children who can't give up firecrackers on a festival day…
What's the matter? Did you get bored already? Was my description too heavy for your impatient 21st-century mind — unaccustomed to difficulty, expecting action every ten seconds, swiping on to the next entertainment with a flick of a finger when you don't find what you hoped for? Did I exaggerate a simple rain? What could be more natural, more ordinary, and to some more contemptible and maddening than a torrential downpour in Shenzhen in July, floodwaters sweeping everything away, traffic thrown into complete chaos! But what can I do? If nature itself exaggerates without limits, if it endlessly chases brand-new follies, if even in its plainest form it can shake sluggish souls awake — is that my fault? I am responsible for recording what unfolds before my eyes, the sounds and images that pluck at my heartstrings, with an anxiety and a shiver as though I might never experience them again. How I wish your insides would tremble too. May this singular moment I have lived transcend time and place, and thousands of years from now stir a flutter in the hearts, a movement in the bodies, of people who have never even heard the name Shenzhen. May these images — roaming my consciousness like a vagrant virus — take up residence in other consciousnesses stationed on the unreachable shores of the universe and of history, and there become immortal, remain forever alive. Since my body cannot be what endures from this mortal life, let it be my consciousness that clings to life in the minds of others like a pearl clinging to its shell — speaking there always, murmuring, throwing off sparks that mingle with curses at the most unexpected moments like an axe blade striking stone, seeking out the paths of immortality, creating them, adorning what already exists, polishing it, brightening it, adding its strength to theirs. May people, as they read what I have written, feel a dampness at their heels, a cool relief across their shoulders, a faint itch on their lips, a spring-filled breeze against their bare chests. May they hear at their ears the patter of rain that would stir desire even in the most dormant of lovers. Would that be so bad? And besides, does literature have any other mission — one I should focus on, sharpen my talents for, improve myself toward, and when the time and place demand it, push against the customary boundaries, leap right over them, and turn up my nose at the conventions before which everyone stands at stiff, obedient attention? If Naci were beside me now, he would agree. Perhaps writing is something that can be done with fewer words, with less straining. I don't know. After all, I am a novice who has only just begun to write — a complete apprentice in this business! An apprentice who will never become a master, a servant with no eye on becoming a lord, a dreamer who prefers a rushing stream to a still pond. One might call it a kind of midlife crisis — the final destination to which boredom and material comfort have delivered me. Paper cutting[3], calligraphy, or group dancing in the park with my peers — none of that is for me! I'm giving this a try; perhaps after writing my first and last story my enthusiasm will wane and I'll be rid of this affliction. Until that day comes, there is no economizing on effort for me. Besides, isn't it common enough among beginners to go overboard, to wring something dry, and then smear that wrung-out mess all over themselves? It happens all the time — and splendidly so. If you didn't like it, consider this paragraph unread. And I, for my part, will not interrupt again, will not break the thread of the story for no good reason.
I had risen from where I sat, swaying like a well-fed bear cub, shut the windows and doors tight so the water pooling on the balcony wouldn't seep into the living room, and for good measure spread a few of my husband's old clothes along the threshold. Afterward, the deep silence that flooded into the apartment — the outside roar cutting off all at once and giving way to a motionless solitude — first unsettled me a little, then, to some extent, relieved me. Yes, I was alone; now, like Clark Kent stepping into a phone booth as a reporter and stepping out as Superman, or like Dr. Jekyll who by night becomes Mr. Hyde, I too could transform — I could let the spy inside me take over the housewife who was soon to become a mother. For at least two and a half hours I would not need to concern myself with anything else. The meat I had taken out of the freezer for dinner was thawing on the kitchen counter; the vegetables I had bought from the greengrocer at the entrance to the complex were being rid of their germs in soda water. My husband had three hours before he came home. Which meant I could examine the file to my heart's content, memorize every detail of my new assignment, and even look up online anything I didn't know. Half an hour before he came home, I would go into the kitchen and slip back into my identity as a warm, hardworking, beautiful, and charming wife.
Ah, my guileless husband — ah, the kindest, gentlest, most good-hearted man in the world, who doesn't harbor the slightest suspicion about what his wife does for a living... I could never blame you for seeing everyone around you as "what you see is what you get," just as you yourself are! On the contrary, there were many times I blamed myself — for not being able to be like you, for having kept a great secret from you my entire life, for having managed, despite the minor slips I made along the way, to avoid being caught by some stroke of enormous luck. And it wasn't only you who knew nothing of my second life. My family, your family, our mutual friends — everyone knew me as a smart, hardworking, enterprising woman who made small profits through modest transactions from home, who bought goods from the wholesale shops along Nanhai Boulevard and sold them to different parts of the country, who ran a small shop with the help of a young assistant. My name is Lai Zı Ran — outside, a shrewd merchant who keeps tabs on wholesale trade; at home, a capable housewife who has built a perfect life with her one and only husband.
To be frank, I was often astounded at being able to carry a second identity in my soul like a heavy guilty conscience. Many times, I told myself: climb this hill, and you'll set down your burden, spread your wings, and find your freedom — but neither did the hills to be climbed run out, nor did the weight of my load diminish. The strange thing is, sometimes on television I followed people living two entirely separate lives — men with two different families in two different cities, each unaware of the other; serial killers who raised three children on the money they made as accountants while murdering dozens of innocents; financial advisors whose real job was motorcycle repair but who collected money from people promising to make them rich; pyramid schemers who advertised Bitcoin in grand halls with glittering shows and then, a few years later, pocketed billions and vanished — I followed them for years with an envy I could barely admit even to myself. How did they feel no remorse? How did this enormous secret they carried inside them not to take over their bodies and seep outside like black vinegar through a crack? I will never know the answer to that question. Perhaps what set me apart from them was that much like a teacher, a nurse, or a soldier, I had been made to believe I was working for the welfare of my people. I was not a scheming woman cheating on her husband, a wastrel secretly gambling away his family's fortune, a wretch spending every penny he got his hands on drugs. My mission was sacred, my goal clear, my heart clean. There were times I couldn't believe that last part — but as you Turks say, even a judge's daughter has her flaws! Besides, is the past a ledger we can leaf through and erase the parts we don't like? It doesn't work that way. Every sentence you delete from earlier pages can cause all the pages that follow to go up in flames. So, I owe no one anything. From here on I can write freely — listening to every voice within me, embracing every color, without shame, without tiring — and with my whole heart believing in the dream that one day, however small the chance, Naci too will read what I have written.
First, I passed through the security stages: three separate passwords, facial recognition, and a fingerprint. If I pressed so much as one wrong key while entering these passwords, the system would lock me out for two hours. If I repeated a similar mistake on a second attempt, I would find myself standing before the Head of Intelligence for Shenzhen Province, giving account of myself. Fortunately, I am not a clumsy person — and besides, if I were, why would they have given me this job? I am careful, curious, and skeptical. The first thing I look for when I enter a room is where the exits are. When walking down a street I know by heart where the cameras are, where the dead ends are, where the pedestrian roads closed to vehicles are. When speaking with people I look into their eyes and proceeding from what they cannot say rather than what they do, I examine their souls with the thoroughness of a scholar studying a historic Tang Dynasty scroll retrieved from the archives. As skilled as I am at cooking, I am equally skilled at tracking. I can follow a target for hours without getting bored. So much so that sometimes, when I go out shopping with my husband or a close friend and am not following anyone, I acutely feel its discomfort. I break into a sweat all over, my mind goes foggy, and like a castaway in the middle of a boundless ocean who doesn't know which way to swim, I wait for a sign to come to me from the sky. After all, following someone is easy — you don't use your mind, you make no decisions, you are caught in no dilemmas. The only difference between you and a guided missile is that your purpose is not to destroy the target but to track it, to obtain whatever information you need, and to ensure the target remains alive. The lies I tell are so consistent, so convincing, that to keep them from getting mixed up with reality I occasionally send myself notes, reminding myself which story I constructed and for what purpose. The journal I keep is in fact a coded record of which lie I told to whom and on what date. My greatest fear as a spy is being treated like one by someone else. Ours is a profession that self-destructs when named by anyone. In one corner of our minds we carry our second identity, those secrets we hide from everyone. And at the same time, with a childlike eagerness, we forever keep alive in the most fragile corners of our minds the indulgence of wishing: "If only I could tell the people around me that I'm a spy, just to see them struck dumb, to hear a long, slow ohhhh, to see their mouths fall open." The fact that even those closest to us don't know we are walking vessels of secrets grieves us like spoiled children of wealthy families who are not allowed to show off their expensive new toys to their friends, and at moments and places where it is entirely inappropriate, it stirs the calm underground lakes in the depths of our souls into turbulence.
One way or another, we were human in the end — flesh and bone and impatience and weakness and loyalty and betrayal and even, when the occasion arose, gossip; each of us the born and bred child of a father and mother. How often I had longed to say it — on one of those winter nights when I held my husband tightly, tracing slow circles on his chest with my free thumb, my warm tongue settled in the orbit of his earlobe: "I'm going to tell you a secret, but you mustn't get angry and you mustn't tell anyone, all right? It stays between us until we die." In the early years I had even scripted his possible replies and written out a few scenarios in my head.
— I'm going to tell you a secret, but you mustn't get angry and you mustn't tell anyone, all right? It stays between us until we die.
— I'm very sleepy, please tell me in the morning.
— Oh, you can never be told anything worthwhile... I'm going to sleep.
— Don't forget, I'll ask you in the morning.
— Already forgotten!
Or:
— I'm going to tell you a secret, but you mustn't get angry and you mustn't tell anyone, all right? It stays between us until we die.
— Wait, don't tell me, let me guess. You're actually not a young woman. You've gone under the knife seven times and turned out like this thanks to a ton of successful plastic surgery...
— Don't make me laugh, I've eaten too much watermelon, I'll wet myself!
— So I'm right?
Or:
— I'm going to tell you a secret, but you mustn't get angry and you mustn't tell anyone, all right? It stays between us until we die.
— Let me go first, but no getting angry. Promise?
— What? You have a secret too?
— Of course I do
— Do you promise?
— Well, I promise! What else can I say!
— I have a mistress and she's five months pregnant...
— You animal. What kind of joke is that?
— If it's a girl we'll name her Zı Ran... Ha ha ha... Ouch! Stop pinching my arm!
This is what becomes of you when you carry a great secret inside you like a bitter poison for years — something this pickled comes out. When I was alone I always talked not to myself but to my secret. On sleepless nights lying on my back watching the play of light on the ceiling; at train stations, annoyed at the people who had pushed through the crowd to grab my place in line yet me finding it pointless to argue; in parks, spotting strangers who resembled you and falling into step behind them just for the fun of it; in the evenings walking the uneven pavements of foggy streets on your trail; and most of all when I saw you on the side of the road, dead drunk, retching into the bushes — you could never learn not to mix wine and beer! — watching helplessly from a distance, unable to slip quietly up behind you, unable to take out my hands from my warm pockets and rub them across your back, unable to lean close to your ear and say "It's over now, it's all out, all of it"...
And here is your file in front of me. Your great-grandfather emigrated from Sivas to Giresun at the beginning of the twentieth century; your official place of registration is Görele but you yourself are Istanbul born and bred. You studied mathematics at a good university, I see you speak fluent English. You are about to start teaching at one of Shenzhen's most prestigious high schools. Well, well, well! If only that were all. You also write. Essays, poems, stories, and so on. So you belong to the sort who knows how to keep things hidden, and you claim to be able to see the world through others' eyes as well. Our work is both very easy and very hard, I'd say. The investigation conducted on you could not arrive at a satisfactorily clear answer to the question of whether you are a nationalist, conservative, democrat, socialist, or anarchist. They could not fully determine what you believe in and what you oppose, whether you harbor negative views about our country and would work to spread them, or which side you consider to be in the right regarding the TTXT[4]. You have the potential to poison the impressionable minds of our young high school students, and there is also the possibility that you might use your position as a cover to pursue other ends. For these reasons, every step you take must be monitored; all your correspondence and conversations must be reviewed via the spyware installed on your phone; and on occasions when you set your phone down somewhere and go off, it must be recorded through physical surveillance who you meet, who you befriend, and who you quarrel with and over what. In previous assignments I had tailed a businessman from Siirt, a retired officer from Erzurum, a journalist from Kayseri, and most recently an actor whose father was from Yozgat and whose mother was German. With the exception of this last one, all of them were monotonous jobs, remote from excitement or depth — jobs I had nearly gotten myself caught on purpose just to have done with them. Their only interesting quality was that, taken together, they formed an intriguing pattern. It was as if with each assignment I was moving a little further west, drifting a little further from China. On the day your file came into my hands, that was the question I asked myself most. Would my next assignment be a sunflower merchant from Edirne? It was not to be — if there had been a next assignment perhaps I would have had the chance to test the prediction I had made and ultimately accept or reject my hypothesis, but you became my last assignment. A mission nearly 18 years long — as deep as oceans, as high as the Himalayas, as hot as the inside of a volcano, and as achingly drawn-out as the unrelenting toothache of a winter night.
Of course, during those 18 years you were not my only assignment. The whole Provincial Intelligence Directorate was hardly going to pay my salary just to have me follow one person. I had other targets too. I filed reports on a Turkmen horse trader for three years; I tracked an Uzbek businessman, who had run off with his Chinese mistress and built a new life in Singapore, for two. I gathered information from schools about young people from Türkiye who had come to Shenzhen to study, and when the occasion arose I spoke with their teachers, the directors of the dormitories where they stayed, and the friends they spent time with. I also had targets who were Azerbaijani, Cypriot, Kazakh. All of that happened — but none of these were interesting enough people to write two words about; they had no secrets, no ember burning inside them, what you saw was what you got. I could tell at a glance what they were after. When I thought about them or prepared reports on them, I was no different from the ticket inspectors on trains — relentlessly objective, stiffened to rigidity by a sense of duty, upright and unbending: a Lai Zı Ran who never leans. But you — your difference, I think, began here. Far from feeling guilt over my inability to be objective about you, I was glad that I would behave with partiality toward you. You were the one good student that an otherwise universally disliked teacher cherishes and keeps close at all times. Showing you favoritism, granting you special treatment, clearing the thorns from your path when the occasion arose and smoothing things over for you — all of this gave me pleasure, made me happy in the way of feeling one step closer to the purpose of my existence.
Ah, Naci — when I first came to know you, you were 28 years old. Just as you told that advertising girl you met at the bar, you were at the most perfect age. Seeing as you couldn't be 6 or 496! That day I thought to myself: what absurdly clumsy ways this man has of flirting. That they worked was a separate mystery — for someone like me, a woman of the old world who, even if others had come between, eventually married to her high school sweetheart. You, I had seen for the first time in the flesh right there were making plans to cycle to Beijing. I was sitting in the corner behind the door, drinking a lemon soda, while you sat at the bar with your Canadian friend — that baby-faced boy who'd turned to traditional Chinese medicine because his hair was falling out— You had jet-black, thick, curly hair. On your clean-shaven face was written the innocence and cheerfulness of a university student. You were five years younger than me. With your grin, your movements, your restless body, you were barely distinguishable from a middle schooler who finished his homework and thrown himself onto the basketball court. The distance of three or four chairs between us kept filling and emptying. When the music fell silent, I could hear every word you spoke; the rest of the time I read your lips — lips so thin I still cannot understand how they manage to function. Your fingers moved across the map like a commander preparing for conquest, and you were saying exciting things to your friend beside you like "If we go together, we can stay in twin-bed hotel rooms and keep costs down." You had finished your fifth beer and were about to order your sixth when that girl appeared at your side, her eyes fixed on the crooked little map the two of you had sketched on a napkin. Her excuse too was to refresh her beer, but her real intention was plain. "See me, speak to me, hunt me, so that I may be hard-won prey and you may be proud of yourself," said the body of a woman starved for attention, in a language that required little interpretation. I, meanwhile, was offering prayers in my heart to gods I didn't believe in — please keep him away from that woman, please don't let him fall into this trap. But my prayers didn't hold; most likely because there were no gods to hear my prayers, or because there were some, but they didn't find me sincere enough. Though in the end I got what I wanted. You had lunch with the girl twice, and gone to the cinema with her once. The lunch dates were one thing, but what on earth was that ridiculous film! I already know from the movement signals from your phone that you were out cold by the fourteenth minute and woke at the final scene. Given that I know this, your would-be sweetheart, who had consumed an enormous bag of popcorn all on her own, had surely figured it out too. And afterward you never met again. You were a little sad — not about the girl not replying to your messages but about having become so attached to a relationship that was doomed from the start. For days you wrote brief self-criticisms in your notebook along the lines of "Why am I like this, why can't I resist sweet poisons," blaming yourself for weakness of will and spiraling into small bouts of despair. I had known all along it would end this way, which is why I had thrashed about silently where I stood. Fortunately, this parting didn't shake you too deeply. Though at that time I didn't yet know that the things that would truly shake you were not the endings of shallow relationships like this. In matters of the heart as in so many others, there were mountains of difference between us. Not differences to be overcome, but differences to be understood. It would have been unfair to expect someone like me — an old-world soul who, if not the first flower in the garden then the second, plucked it and pinned it to her hair and thereafter closed her eyes to all other plant life — to understand you at a glance. But I did not give up, don't worry. I neither gave up nor grew tired nor complained. I kept struggling on, in the middle of a desert where the sand dunes were forever shifting, trying to find my bearings and reach, however late, the oasis that would cool my insides...
And still it came to nothing, Naci. Nothing but mirages awaited me in the endless curves of the long thin line you left behind. While I crawled along those curves on my knees, my belly, my elbows, I called out your name in delirium, I made your union my obsession. In the rough caverns of my womanhood, I made room even for your shadow — but you could never cross that wide threshold inside. Into the narrow passages of my mind, where no one else could fit, you managed to squeeze your childlike frame — yet you could not take a single step toward the body that shattered like glass each night and gathered itself back together with glue each morning. On the wet pavements softened by moonlight I always saw your silhouette — but on those same pavements, rough as tree bark, you never once saw me, never noticed I was there; you never shared with me even once the bashful smile you handed out freely to those small, slight girls at the school where you worked, girls whose names you never bothered to learn despite years of working on the same floor. It was just like the mother of my unborn child — of my son, lost a few weeks before birth — never being able to see his face, not even once. The tide that ebbed and flowed between us was just like that. I was close to you; you were far even from yourself. I was a world buzzing with life; you were a desolate, pitch-dark moon. I was the expectant mother gazing at a belly round as a pot and dreaming rose-colored dreams; you were the blessed arrival, heralded. Yes — I had waited for him too, for months; I had dreamed of the day he would look at me and smile; I had longed with every cell in my body for the moment he would call me "mother." Neither he could look at my face, nor could you. Neither he could love me, nor could you. What remained of him was a companion I carry with me always — a child of seven who never grows older, whose plump cheeks flush red as a tomato in the cold, whose eyes shine bright. What remained of you was a derelict city, a cold planet, and a terrifying desert night crawling with scorpions and snakes. You were both lame young rabbits left on the far bank of the Yangtze River. While following you I ran downstream along the river, pushing aside with the back of my hand the brambles and brush that rose up before me full of hope and longing, paying no heed to the thorns that tore my skin and drew blood, sometimes marveling at how close you both were to me, sometimes taking heart as the riverbed narrowed — but in the end I could not change the wretched fate of my adventure, which ended in the East China Sea. And do you know what hurt most, Naci, my dear teacher? On sleepless nights, the silky face of that seven year old merging with the stubble on your face; his eyes appearing in your face, your lips appearing in his; my mind leaving me entirely; and all that confusion ending with me finding myself standing at three in the morning, elbows resting on the cold iron of the balcony railing, weeping in silence...
[1] Chaos, Muddled Confusion. In Chinese mythology, it is known as “being of primordial chaos, known for his six feet, four wings, and featureless face.”
[2] You are so much more to me than just a friend.
[3] Jiǎnzhǐ is the traditional Chinese art of paper cutting. It involves cutting intricate designs from paper, often using scissors or a blade, and is typically used for decoration during festivals and celebrations, such as the Lunar New Year or weddings.
[4] Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tiananmen
The Second chapter can be read here: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (2)
