We are in the seventies of the last century, not yet twenty years old Leila arrives in Istanbul. “How strange, that it came immediately after childhood memories, but human memory resembles someone who celebrated until late at night and raised his elbow a little too much: however much he tries, he cannot follow a straight line”.
For a young woman who came from an inland country, the big city offered the chance to survive, in humble and degraded conditions. ” Leila was seventeen when she was taken on that road … it had happened about three years before, even if it seemed like a different life now. She never spoke of those days, as she never told why she ran away from home or how she arrived in Istanbul without a place to stay and only five lire and twenty kurush in her pocket “.
In Istanbul, Leila befriends five other people who are marked by a desire to get out of the condition they seem destined for. Nalan, a trans, whom Leila called Nostalgica, “not because she pined for the past, who was actually happy to have left behind, but because in the city she always thought of her land. She lacked the countryside and its abundance of smells, she would have liked to fall asleep outdoors under a generous sky; there he should not have looked over his shoulder at all times ”. Sinan, his classmate in primary school, fatherless, with his pharmacist mother in town, “he, as far as he was concerned, always felt at ease with those who were imperfect, in any way”. Jamila, of Somali nationality, adapts to doing the most humble jobs: “Turkish families appreciated the domestic workers” of her country “. Zaynab, from northern Lebanon, who, due to his short stature, had to “buy clothes in girl sizes”, and Leila had called UnoVentidue. Last of the five, Humeyra, the singer, who “knew by heart the most beautiful ballads of Mesopotamia, and whose life resembled the stories that many of them told”.
The knowledge of the young D / Ali, artist and communist activist, seems to mark a turning point in the life of the protagonist. The dream that society could be changed by a revolutionary political movement is broken when the comrade dies killed by the police during the May Day demonstration.
Then, not long after, one night, Leila was killed on the street by two men, and left lifeless next to the heaps of garbage. The news is reported the following day by the city newspapers, but nothing more than a crime story. After investigations by the police to establish the causes of death, Leila’s body is buried in the Abandoned Cemetery, where all those, who die without the comfort of any family, are buried.
The five friends, however, go to unearth the body at night. Because Leila, in life, had always expressed the desire that her body be welcomed by the deep waters of the sea, where she could finally wander.
The novel ends with references to the life that the five friends will lead after Leila’s death. They will remain on the margins of a society that excludes them when they do not accept their rules, starting in the family, then in school, then in work, then in all social fields. A burial in the Abandoned Cemetery does not frighten them, because they are not afraid of freedom.
Virgilio Iandiorio