Captive of Kadar

‘My village is gone.’

Spider legs of dread crawled down her spine. She thought about the scars on his back. The scars of someone who’d suffered flames, or even worse. ‘Fireworks,’ she said on a leaden breath.

He didn’t say yes or no, just kept sweeping the palm and the fingers of his hands along her side. It should have been soothing—in any other circumstances it would have been soothing—but instead she could feel the weight of the world hovering above his fingertips. The weight of loss. And so she didn’t press. She let him take his own time.

‘Most of the village was employed in the industry,’ he said at length. ‘It was illegal, of course, and poorly managed, but it brought a poor village employment and money, hard currency that some insisted be used for health services and schools for the community before improvements in safety. Safety was the responsibility of the owners, some said.

‘And it did bring money, for a time, but then it brought death and destruction. Nobody knows what happened—it could have been anything to cause a spark—but they had fireworks stockpiled high for a celebration and something set off a chain reaction. An explosion ripped through the factory, and once started there was no stopping the fire, and no chance for those caught inside, even if they had survived the initial blast.

‘My family. My father and mother, my three brothers and my infant sister all perished.’

His hand stopped moving as his words petered out.

‘But you, you made it out.’

He took his hand away, looked at her with eyes that stared at her, both bottomless and empty. ‘I had argued with my father that morning. I had pleaded with him that I wanted to go to the new school and learn for a proper job, not go to work in a factory.

‘He told me I must work in the factory, alongside my brothers.’

‘You shouldn’t feel guilty,’ she said, ‘because you argued. Because you survived. They would not want that.’

‘It wasn’t that I survived.’

‘Then what?’

‘It was because I wasn’t there.’

‘But your burns...’

‘I wasn’t burnt trying to escape.’ He shook his head, his jaw set hard. His eyes weren’t empty now. They were filled with pain. Of betrayal. Of loss. Of hurt beyond what was humanly endurable. ‘I was trying to get in. To save them.’

She shuddered, her voice a whisper. ‘How old were you?’

‘Six.’

She swallowed as she attempted to picture it. To imagine. A scene of conflagration, where the world in which you lived had turned into hell, with people trying to escape the fire, to flee, and a small boy running the other way to try to save those he loved.

He turned his gaze towards the constellation of stars built into the ceiling over the bed. ‘My mother was upset that morning with the argument I had with my father, the baby crying. I should not argue with my father, she told me, even when I had discussed it with her and she thought one of her children should have a chance at a life in the city. So I pretended to go along with them all and I went to the factory with them, but then, when my father’s back was turned, I sneaked away to the school. I was in my second class when I heard the explosion, when the ground and walls shook and the windows of the new school blew in. And I knew then, that I should be with them.’

Silence surrounded them. A silence hung with sorrow and the horrors of the past.

‘Who saved you?’ she asked at last.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t get far. I couldn’t. All I felt was heat and then something fell on me and then nothing, and the next thing I knew, I woke in a hospital in Istanbul and it hurt so much, I wished I was dead.

‘Mehmet found me. He saw the reports in the paper, of a village that had been wiped off the face of the earth, of a child with no family, not expected to live. He called for the best doctors, the best experts. Somehow they brought me back from the brink of death and kept me alive, though there were many times I wished they hadn’t bothered. I lost count of the number of operations and skin grafts.’

She shuddered. It would have been excruciating for anyone to bear, let alone a small boy with no family around to support him.

‘Mehmet is a good man.’

He rolled onto his stomach, his head on his crossed arms, exposing the tangled scar tissue that was his back in a way that he’d never done before, and it warmed her that he was relaxed enough to do it in front of her now, even while his story chilled. ‘The best of men. He schooled me himself until I was strong enough to go. He guided my footsteps. I was lucky.’