I am on the bus. The child on the lap of the woman sitting next to me is playing with the buttons on my jacket. He doesn’t care about anything. On the one hand, he is drooling, on the other, he is flapping his arms, showing the lust of discovering the button. He stares at me with his tiny eyes. He realizes that I am the real owner of the buttons on the jacket. Even though his mother sees what her baby is doing, she doesn’t seem to notice, as if she doesn’t care. I’m sitting in the front seat to the driver’s right. The driver looks at me in the mirror. He recognizes me…
-O Abi, welcome to my bus. How’s the novel going?
-Good… I’ve slowed down a bit but I’m trying to keep going without abandoning it.
-I hope it’ll be finished one day and there will be many readers. I was having tea at home last night and I told my wife about you. “My dear author included me in the novel. And you wouldn’t believe the praise he gave me. He introduced me like a scientist. He did not mention the sadness of entering a department that I loved but could not be appointed as a civil servant, and he did not mention the system that forced me to be a driver in the municipality and made me look like a hero who was adventurous and wanted differences.” I said to the lady. She said, “He’s a good guy, I would have written you down as an incompetent who plays with his shit.”
The woman next to me laughed and looked at the driver. Women are always like that. They get amused when they see men crushing them and making fun of them. By the way, by the way, did you realize who the driver was? Of course Muiniddin!
With his medium height, stocky build, slowly graying hair and growing belly, he is a middle-aged man, but he is about to cross the middle age line. He is the only IETT driver who doesn’t ask for akbils from the back. He never forgives if you ride from the front. I asked him once why that was. “Abi, how can you take the akbili from a man who knows his job. A cunning man is a good man!” and he easily expressed the sense of morality that was rotten in him. “Well done, Muiniddin! How beautifully you express the morality rotting inside you with open-heartedness.”
You don’t know, there was a woman named Şukufe who used to take the bus to work, and this Muiniddin used to hit on her all the time. He would say, “I’ll pick you up.” He would scold her every time she pressed her akbil, saying, “Abi, I’m married, shame on me!” But he never complained to the municipality about the driver. This Muiniddin was such a rapist. Maybe she liked his compliments. Shukufe was a very strange woman. She was severely depressed. I won’t include her in my novel anyway. I spent twenty years of my life on these buses. What people I’ve seen here…
-Muiniddin, I’m going to Ankara next week.
-What’s up, brother?
-I created a psychopathic character named İzzettin in my novel. I want to visit the slums to see how I can handle him.
-Can you take that character out of one of the posh, posh neighborhoods of Ankara instead of the slums?
-No way Muiniddin! For one thing, I’ve already written him as a chestnut seller in the last episode. How can I step back from that?
-You write that the guy does it out of psychopathy. Allasen, develop your fiction skills a bit. The pen is in your hand. Be a little creative. What’s this? Almost every writer’s psychopathic character grows up somewhere in the suburbs.
-You started giving me advice too, Muiniddin! What is this, my friend? The hero of the novel gives advice, the driver gives advice, the reader gives advice. Those who give advice…
-Okay, brother, I’m sorry, but think about it. We’ve come to your stop.
-Come on, good luck Muiniddin!
I want to create a great psychopath in the novel. My favorite psychopaths are in British novels. The British create great psychopathic characters. The best known of them is “Jack the Ripper”, who was based on real life and made into novels and movies. But my current favorite psychopathic character is Dexter, who started his activities as a child by killing his neighbors’ pets. He is an unstoppable psychopath. You know Dexter is a Forensic Blood Analyst for the Miami Metro Police Department. I wonder if I should turn Izzeddin into an educated psychopath who is at the center of the system.
Is some maniac following me? Hey, Izzeddin, is that you?
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