Excerpt from Penumbra

Merlin Ural Rivera 

Saim, the boarder who lived in the room above Havadis, was as quiet as a ghost. Havadis never heard him move around, and his door always clicked in such a gentle way that it was impossible to track his movements. Saim’s broad childish face, with its perpetually pink cheeks and big soft eyes, reflected his docile nature. He was forty-seven, but looked not a day over thirty-five. His body was slender, and he still had the tender voice of a shy young man. The only thing that gave away Saim’s age was his receding hairline, left ash blonde on the back and sides of his head and in a few wispy strands on top of it. As a child, he had looked different than his peers, most of whom had dark hair and olive skin. When a film producer had spotted him on the street, holding his mother’s hand and looking around with his dove-like hazel eyes, he had thought Saim was German—such a fair skin he had. This was in the beginning of the 60s, the period in which Turkish films were sometimes made in less than a month, and the producer had decided to try this boy in a few of them. At the age of eight, “Little Alihan,” as was his stage name, had acted in eight films, and had been doing just fine until the shooting of “The Good, the Poor and the Crook,” in which he was the son of the poor man, and had to die at the end, since his father couldn’t afford the bone-marrow transplant he needed. Saim had never been the same after the scene where he had to lie down still, his face whitened with cheap powder, while three big men cried their hearts out over his dead body, and the director yelled “Don’t move your eyes! I can see your eyelids twitching!” Everything could have been fine if it hadn’t been for the eleven-year-old coffeehouse apprentice who had been bringing the film crew tea on his suspended tray from the coffeehouse nearby. A few days before they shot the death scene, the apprentice was killed in a stage accident. Saim saw the boy turn pale under the heavy camera that fell on him and broke his neck. Impersonating a dead boy a few days later—as sensitive as Saim was—had left a mark on his soul, and even after years spent away from the cinema business and mostly in the psychiatrist’s office, the impact was still visible. Saim had become a lonely and secretive man selling furniture in the same store for the last ten years, refusing to watch Turkish films, avoiding funerals, never wearing black, and having a medical check-up every two months. He had moved to Karameshe House as a boarder seven years ago, and had almost become an official member of the family when he and Hasret got close three years later. Havadis was surprised but pleased by her aunt’s choice. He felt there was a special bond between Saim and him, even though the two of them had never really talked about the deaths—real and unreal—that invaded their daily lives. Saim and Hasret’s engagement had also made Mrs. Parlak very happy. She liked Saim so much that even after they—or to be more precise, Hasret—had broken it for reasons that were not very clear to anybody, Mrs. Parlak had insisted that Saim should stay in the house and keep paying his rent.

Saim occupied the bedroom on the third floor where Havadis’ parents had stayed for the first few years of their marriage. The other two bedrooms on the same floor had been empty since the deaths of the Karameshe brothers, Mehdi and Ramazan. But three years ago, during the ’98 economic crisis, the Karameshe family had found out that their financial situation wasn’t as stable as they had thought. At first, Mrs. Parlak had had a hard time imagining strangers sleeping in the beds of her dear sons. Nor had anyone in the family wanted the intrusion. However, times were tight: the savings from Mr. Iskender’s engineering days had run out, his and Mrs. Parlak’s pensions were pitiful, Hasret couldn’t find a job, and the cutlery shop didn’t bring much profit. Something had to be done if they wanted to send Havadis to college and eat meat at least once a week. That’s how this man called Sheref, whom their real estate agent had introduced as a non-smoking, dapper and well-accomplished sales representative, became their boarder. He had arrived at the house in a clean white shirt which he rarely changed in the following weeks. His hair, reeking of cigarette smoke, said enough about his non-smoking habit. As for his job, it was exactly as Mrs. Parlak put it once: “He sure sells something, if only I knew what.” He went in and out of the house at different hours, sometimes carrying a black suitcase, at other times big trash bags full of cables, jacks, screwdrivers, drill bits that made a chinkling sound as he dragged them down the stairs, and always said that he was “up to a new project,” although no one knew what the old one had been. What he did for a living, though, was the only mystery of Sheref’s life. Otherwise, he was an open book. “Ask me anything you want to know about women,” he often urged Havadis. “There are some things that neither your thick books nor experience itself would teach you. You come to the master for this,” he had said, pointing at himself. Havadis hadn’t believed that this man who was forty, very hairy, and short to boot, was a master of anything, but he changed his mind soon enough after seeing Sheref with numerous women, which proved to be his first lesson. “Looks don’t matter, boy. If you have at least one attractive part in your body, use the hell out of it. But if you have none, don’t worry. Just make them believe that you have it,” Sheref had winked.

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Merlin Ural Rivera was born in Bulgaria and raised in Turkey. Her work was published in Ping Pong, Warscapes, Hot Street and Umbrella Factory. She holds an MFA from the Creative Writing program of The New School and she is teaching literature and writing at The School of Visual Arts in New York.