More: A Novel by Hakan Günday

I placed in front of him and read only the first item before he asked:
    “What is this?”
    I had to stay calm. If he saw my eagerness, he would figure it all out. He always did. He figured out even the nonexistent. He was like a primitive animal with the ability to sense an impending earthquake. Right behind those dead blue eyes was a radar tuned to my inner world. My father was a weapon created for the sole purpose of ruining me. A technological wonder! An unmanned aircraft of sorts! Or whatever, just anything without a person inside. Yet still I was prepared! I myself had a few tricks up my sleeve …
    “You know how you mentioned that there’ll be more people coming in this year and we should enlarge the reservoir? I think that instead we might install all this. Now, the real issue isn’t the numbers. Because some way or another, they can squeeze in. That’s not the problem. Plus until now the most we got was, what, a hundred people at the same time. And the reservoir handles that, easy. The actual problem is: when the numbers go up, it’s out of the question to do daily errands. Especially when there’s a baby or an old person or whatever, I can’t get anything else done. And you know how they sometimes get into fights with one another …”
    I was doing perfectly well up until this point. In fact, just a few months ago, I had been two strides away when a Lebanese man attempted to suffocate another Lebanese man with a plastic bag over his head. It was later revealed that they had both come from Beirut. One was a Shiite and the other Sunni. Sunnis had blown up the marketplace in the neighborhood of the Shiite, while Shiites had blown up the mosque on the Sunni’s street. Two madmen at least as unfit to be near each other as an Ulster Volunteer Force militant and an IRA militant, and somehow they’d escaped notice and were put in the same group. Of course we’d only been able to find all this out through Aruz’s translation over the phone. It was decided after impromptu tele-trial that both were to have their hands tied until they reached their final destination. They were more than welcome to strangle each other once they got to wherever it was they were going. Besides, even if they didn’t, their children would keep on strangling one another. Sectarian wars were like fashion trends. They repeated themselves every twenty years. In the Middle East, at least.
    Since people in the West had long known to dress for their shape, they only spilled blood for the sake of the acidic colors of things like fossil fuels. But since it was especially difficult to get bloodstains out of the carpets of the European Parliament and the White House, they didn’t let the fighting inside their homes. Still, they were also only human, and like all humans were itching to war with their peers. And so they whispered to each other, “Meet me outside after class!” and as soon as they set foot outside the Western civilization, saw no harm in grappling inside other people’s houses.
    Though of course it was different with Israel who, believing itself to be the Greenwich of politics, wanted not only clocks but even the seasons to be tuned to its liking and expected everyone to wear the clothes suited to the ensuing climates. For Israel was a neurotic, black-robed desert ninja that emerged from its own mist and flung Stars of David this way and that.
    And finally there was Turkey, a bulimic, depressed girl that saw herself as fat in her mirror to the East and emaciated in her mirror to the West. For two decades she ate without pausing for breath, got fat, and, stricken with guilt, made herself vomit for another two decades until her throat bled so she could start eating again.
    I was aware that generalizations were a pathological inclination, but then a people generalized itself the day it founded its state. We were living in too organized a world to avoid generalizations. It was too late! We preferred to be bought and sold in bulk. If