The Last Island by Zülfü Livaneli

Author:Zülfü Livaneli [Livaneli, Zülfü]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2022-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

AT THE END of that melancholy day, we were sitting glumly in our garden, sipping our wine in sorrow amid the scent of geraniums, feeling that the night was our protective shelter. I kept thinking, “Why is this man so evil?”—over and over.

The Writer was with us as well, having been released from the woodshed behind the grocery with the efforts of the President’s wife that afternoon. He had earned the distinction of becoming the first person on the island to be arrested. Though he never spoke of his past, we suspected that this wasn’t the first time something of this nature had happened to him. “I’ve managed to get arrested even here,” he said, smiling bitterly. His head must have been throbbing like crazy from the blow of the shotgun butt, because he’d asked for a painkiller as soon as we got home.

Lara asked the same question that had been going through my mind a short while earlier, but almost as if she were talking to herself. These types of coincidences had been taking place on a frequent basis lately. It must have been some peculiar form of telepathy that had come about from living together.

After saying nothing for a moment, she murmured again:

“Why is this man so evil?”

None of us said a word. The night was still, with no sound of the seagulls’ cries, the island deathly silent. Could it have been possible that the President was successful in carrying out his plan and had driven all the seagulls from the island? Why hadn’t we seen a single seagull in flight that afternoon or evening? Where had they gone? We’d never spent a day on the island without seeing the seagulls, or hearing their cries, and for us, that made the silence surrounding us a frightening one. It was as though we were on a foreign planet rather than on the same island we’d always known.

After taking another sip from his wine, the Writer broke the silence.

“This man is scared out of his wits, and there’s your explanation for his evil: the immense fear inside him! The murders he’s committed are going to haunt him for the rest of his life, descending on him like a curse. Even on this distant island he’s escaped to.”

Revealing again her fondness for poetry, Lara then said, “The rabbit doesn’t run away because it’s scared; it gets scared because it runs away!”

The Writer and Lara seemed to be lost in conversation. As for myself, I was thinking that these two people whom I so loved would never be able to make any sense of humankind’s tendency to violence, because they could never feel it in their hearts. To me, the matter was simple. In this world there were two kinds of people—those who were good and those who were bad. I couldn’t say what it was in relation to that they were good or bad, but there it was all the same. It was clear to me. Meanwhile, as far as I could make out, Lara and the Writer were lost deeper in conversation than ever.

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