SEX OFFENDERS

### CHAPTER 1: "Would Anyone Do This to a Man Like Me?"

Durmaz had woken up at six in the morning, staring at the ceiling from his bunk, lost in thought. *"Why do I keep thinking about the same thing?"* he asked himself. In two months, he would complete his fourth year in this prison—specifically, in this very ward.

He had never felt comfortable in this ward. During those first nightmare-like days when he was newly incarcerated, what wouldn't he have given just to be a senior inmate with at least a year under his belt... But now, he was entering his fourth year with nothing but a massive disappointment. There was no one left in the ward whom he hadn't told, or made memorize, the grudge he harbored inside and the bloody revenge he would exact once he was released. The place he was staying was a sexual offenses ward; yet, Durmaz kept telling everyone that the moment he stepped foot outside that door, he would gun down at least four people.

No one in the ward knew exactly what crime he had committed, nor could anyone throw it in his face. However, the executions he planned to carry out upon his release had become a chant that all the inmates knew by heart. The slogan he used the most, wearing it almost like a shield, was: *"Would anyone do this to a man like me?"*

Sometimes in the courtyard, sometimes in the corridor, and even while looking at his own pale reflection in the mirror, he would shout the same words:

"They threw me into prison when I was only twenty-five! So many people intervened, we begged so much, but they didn’t withdraw their complaints. I’m an honest man; I’m not saying I didn’t do it, but is this fair to a twenty-five-year-old man?"

It was highly likely for anyone passing by him during the day to witness a few of these sentences. Looking at what he said, he admitted between the lines that he had committed a crime, yet he placed his young age ahead of that crime. To him, it was a greater injustice for a twenty-five-year-old youth to rot within four walls than the crime he had actually committed. For years, he had harbored a terrible hatred toward those who had filed complaints against him and ruined his life.

No matter what Durmaz told them, the other inmates in the ward would nod in agreement. And Durmaz would nod back at them with the same fake empathy while listening to their stories. There was only one absolute truth they agreed upon, reaching an unshakable consensus: Everyone inside had been framed! Especially those serving time for incest clung to this lie the most. Some complained about the severity of their sentences, while others didn't even see what they did as a crime. As Durmaz listened to them and breathed in that filthy air, he grew even more resentful. While his anger multiplied over the course of four years, he alienated himself from his own crime just as much. He no longer believed he was innocent; he had simply started to believe he was "unlucky."

Still, he was suffocating in this ward. He wanted to transfer to another ward, to stop seeing these faces. However, he didn't have the nerve to start a fight just so the administration would exile him to another ward; he couldn't predict how trouble-makers were treated where he would be exiled, or what might happen to him. Despite this, he never backed down from his plans to shoot those victim relatives whom he considered his adversaries after his release. Every time he looked in the mirror, he saw only one victim: himself. Yet, he still had nine long years left before his release.

It was half an hour after the morning roll call. The cold iron hatch of the ward door opened with a loud clatter. The duty guard called out inside:

"Durmaz! What are you doing, did I wake you up?"

Durmaz had gone straight back to bed after the roll call. "The guard is at the door, waiting for you, hurry up!" he was nudged awake. Quickly shaking off his sleepiness, he gave the smartest, most submissive answer one could give inside:

"Thank you, brother, I drifted off... How are you doing?"

Ignoring this attempt at intimacy, the guard got straight to the point:

"You were a barber, right?"

"Yes, brother, I'm a barber."

"Would you work in the prison barbershop?"

"I'd love to, brother, absolutely!"

"Go, get dressed. I’m taking you to talk to the Chief Officer!"

Durmaz had no trouble choosing his clothes as he went to his cubicle between the bunks. He was always mentally prepared for situations like this. He always felt that one day he would be noticed inside, that someone would pull him out of this swamp; maybe today was that day. He put on a clean, white shirt over his jeans. When he covertly opened his cubicle mate's locker and threw his black wool coat over his shoulders, he suddenly assumed a semi-formal, solemn look.

The guard unlocked the iron door and shouted loudly: "Durmaz, let's go!" Though he felt a momentary panic from this shout, the sheer happiness of getting to meet the Chief Officer eclipsed everything else. As they walked down the corridor toward the Chief's office, the duty guard leaned into Durmaz’s ear:

"Instead of suffocating in the living ward, you’ll trim people's beards in the barbershop; it's much better. You’ll earn a wage and benefit from the advantages of the working inmates' ward. The discipline over there is different."

By the time Durmaz arrived in front of the Chief Officer, he had gathered all the tips and information he could from the guard and stood there with excitement. The Chief Officer was sitting on his plastic chair in front of the barbershop, barking orders at the staff around him. Seeing Durmaz in a shirt and coat, he eyed him up and down:

"Look, son, you’ve been serving time here for how many years now, and I haven't heard anything bad about you. We’re thinking of putting you in the barbershop, what do you say?"

"I’ll work, Director, I’ll work like a lion!"

"Alright then, don't embarrass me. Go and stand by your post."

The Chief Officer turned to the guard who had brought Durmaz:

"Get his paperwork sorted out, let him start tomorrow morning then."

### CHAPTER 2: The New Domain

As the guard escorted Durmaz back to his old ward to pack his belongings, he uttered that familiar, clichéd prison line:

"Pack your things, I’ll be back for you in less than half an hour. Don't leave anything behind, and don't make me hunt you down later."

When Durmaz stepped into the ward, his feet were practically floating off the ground. Seeing his cellmates staring at him with eyes full of jealousy and curiosity, he quickly pulled himself together and squared his shoulders. He was finally leaving this cell, this place he had called home for four years. To those who asked what was happening and where he was going, he sold the Chief Officer's words by embellishing them forty times over in his head:

"The Chief Officer called me in... He said, 'Durmaz, you’ve been serving your time here like a lion, with dignity, for so long. The barbershop needs an honest, responsible man like you.' So, I just couldn't refuse the Director himself."

He hugged his friends one by one and patted their backs. He told them that they would definitely see each other when they came to the barbershop for a shave, promising he’d hook them up with special treatment. He then piled his belongings, stuffed into large bags, right by the doorway.

As they walked down the corridor toward his new home—the working inmates' ward—the duty guard continued to explain the rules:

"Everyone works in the working ward. You’ll see some running the canteen, some making tea, some distributing food, and some working as waiters. We don't tolerate fighting or noise over there. If you behave, you'll have an easy time."

Durmaz attributed the guard's unexpected understanding and attention entirely to his own barbering skills and his status as an indispensable man. After all, this was what he wanted most in life: to be the center of attention and to feel like someone important.

The guard unlocked the heavy iron door of the working ward and shouted inside:

"Tayyar! Come here and take care of the new guy!"

As Tayyar, the ward attendant, walked toward Durmaz with heavy steps, the guard slammed the door shut behind him with a loud crash, saying, "May God release you." The sound of the lock echoing through the corridor was deafening. Tayyar looked at this newcomer wearing a jacket:

"Do you drink tea?"

"That’d be great, chief. I'll take some, if it’s no trouble..."

"Go sit on that chair and drink your tea. You can talk to the President when he arrives."

As Durmaz took his first sip of tea, the ward door opened again, and two inmates carried in the rest of his belongings. They exchanged greetings and pleasantries. He learned their names were Bülent and Serkan; they worked as waiters in the infirmary and the administration office. After a few minutes of small talk, they retreated to their own cubicles.

Seeing Tayyar pull a cigarette from his pocket and light it, Durmaz immediately reached for his own pack. Smoking rules varied wildly from ward to ward; in some, they wouldn't say a word even if you smoked right on your bunk, while in others, they wouldn't let you catch your breath even out in the open common area. He pulled his chair over to the window with iron bars and sat down. Staring at that seven-meter-high grey concrete wall as if he were admiring the most beautiful view in the world, he began to fantasize about the new empire he would establish in the barbershop.

Time passed, and the ward sank into a dull silence. Unable to sit still, Durmaz went out to the courtyard. He began to pace back and forth on the concrete floor, waiting for the ward representative—or the "President," as he was called inside—to arrive. Hours later, the inmates who had been at their work posts started returning to the ward one by one. Every time the door opened, those walking in would size Durmaz up, say "Get well soon," and move on.

Durmaz went back inside and settled into his strategic spot by the window. Suddenly, the ward door swung open with a massive thud, and *he* walked in: Sait, the ward representative.

Tayyar, the attendant, deliberately shouted at the top of his lungs so that Durmaz would realize who this newcomer was and who ran the place:

"Welcome, my President!"

Sait immediately caught the underlying message beneath this loud welcome. To display his power and put on a show of strength, he walked over and shook Tayyar’s hand first, acting as if he hadn't seen him in ages. Then, he approached two inmates watching television in the lounge from behind, placing his hands on their shoulders like claws:

"What are you up to, my lions?"

This sentence was, in fact, the first subtle threat directed at Durmaz sitting in the corner: *"The real lion of this ward is me!"*

Sait then walked slowly toward the window, as if he had only just noticed Durmaz cowering there and watching him. While squeezing Durmaz’s hand like a vise, he called out to the attendant in a commanding tone:

"Give our friend a cup of tea. I’m going upstairs to change in the meantime."

Then, he looked straight into Durmaz’s eyes again:

"Drink your tea. We’ll talk."

As he climbed the stairs, he whispered into the attendant's ear:

"When our friend finishes his tea, send him up to my cubicle."

Another one of those infamous, insidious prison theatrical plays was about to begin. And Durmaz, completely oblivious to what was about to happen to him on this new stage, took another large gulp of his tea...

### CHAPTER 3: The Chameleon's Order

Following a gesture from Tayyar, the ward attendant, Durmaz parted the curtain of the representative’s upper-floor cubicle and stepped inside. Sait was lounging on his bed, dressed in freshly washed clothes. Durmaz initiated the conversation with the submissive tone he had rehearsed so well:

"The Chief Officer sent me here, my President. He told me..."

However, Sait cut him off like a knife, refusing to let him waste any more of that energy:

"I know! The Chief Officer already briefed me."

Sait leaned back. Shifting his voice into a paternal yet threatening tone, he began to explain the unwritten laws of the ward. He claimed that everyone in this ward was a "prisoner of fate" and that, unlike the courthouses on the outside, the majority inside were serving time for crimes they didn't commit. Until that moment, Durmaz had been cursing the world simply because his own youth had been wasted. Now, looking at this representative who claimed all sexual offenders could be innocent and treated them like saints, he was utterly spellbound. It was as if he had found the paradise he was looking for.

Toward the end of his speech, President Sait logged his eyes onto Durmaz and abruptly asked:

"Do you perform your ritual prayers?"

Durmaz was caught off guard. He had never anticipated the strike coming from this direction—from the sacred ground of religion. His mind raced: if he said "No," he would fall from the representative’s grace and face ostracization; if he said "Yes," he would be forced to put on an act, bowing and prostrating right under the man's nose for at least a month. To strike a middle ground, he stammered:

"I’m thinking of starting, my President, God willing..."

"Did you pray before, then?"

"Before my military service... I prayed for about two years, brother."

He provided a concrete figure—two years—just to save his skin and prevent a third question on Islamic jurisprudence. Sait nodded with satisfaction, stamping his final piece of advice like a seal:

"Pray, pray... Prayer is good; it protects a man."

He stood up to signal the end of the conversation. Just then, the attendant opened the curtain, and Sait pointed out the empty bunk where Durmaz would sleep. Durmaz asked for the representative’s leave, stepped out, and settled into his new bed. His new life inside had officially begun.

* * * Early the next morning, they were awakened by the clanking of iron doors. The duty guards entered the ward to gather the workers and escorted Durmaz to the barbershop. As he walked, Durmaz dreaded making a fool of himself due to the clumsiness of not holding scissors or a razor for four years. However, once he stepped into the shop and took his place at the chair, he learned through bitter experience that prison barbering was nothing like the outside world. No one cut trendy styles here; the goal was to shave the inmates perfunctorily and as fast as possible, like shearing sheep, and get them out of the chair. The guards managed the queue anyway, so the barbers didn't have to deal with fights over whose turn it was.

In the afternoon, a mustachioed, dark-skinned inmate sat in Durmaz’s chair. Just as Durmaz was tying the apron around his neck, the inmate reached out from under the cloth and pressed something hard into Durmaz’s palm: a pack of luxury cigarettes.

Durmaz froze in surprise. His eyes instantly darted to the experienced barber next to him. The senior barber gave a slight nod, signaling: *"Take it, throw it in the drawer."* Durmaz quickly hid the pack in the apron drawer. As the days passed, this routine fell into place; some days five or six packs of cigarettes would drop into the drawer, other times phone cards. The guards saw this trade but turned a blind eye; in fact, some senior officers explicitly encouraged these under-the-table bribes.

Of course, this "gift" came with an unwritten rule: you had to pay special attention to the haircut of the inmate who gave you the cigarettes. The inmates' philosophy was simple: *"If you take the cigarettes, you cut my hair right."* Although some younger guards were bothered by this situation, they kept quiet—both to avoid ruining relations with their older colleagues and because they themselves got free shaves from the very same barbers.

Durmaz quickly became fully integrated into the gears of the barbershop. Thanks to the steady flow of cigarettes, he began to live like a king in the ward. He distributed the cigarettes to the ward's freeloaders and the destitute; in return, he had them buy the most luxurious food and drinks for him from the canteen. His miserable, broke days in the regular ward, along with his financial struggles, were cut short.

After a while, senior guards and even the newly appointed Personnel Manager started specifically sitting in Durmaz’s chair. For Durmaz, this was the pinnacle of his profession and prestige. If the Personnel Manager dropped a few casual words about the outside or the administration just to make small talk while in the chair, Durmaz categorized these words in his mind as golden "cosmic information." Upon returning to the ward after the manager left his chair, he would peddle those rumored amnesty stories and backstage gossip to the other inmates with immense arrogance, saying, *"The Manager whispered it directly into my ear, it's absolute fact!"*

By the time he completed his first year in the working ward, Durmaz had become a master of the system. His penniless days were over, and the prison had shrunk in his eyes. Right around this time, one of the old barbers in the shop was transferred to an open prison. In his place, an insidious inmate named Cemil was brought in from the regular wards. Cemil was a dangerous man. Within a short time, he offered such sycophancy and groveling service to the staff that he managed to draw most of the guards coming to the barbershop to his own chair. An internal war of *"Which guard gets shaved by whom?"* silently began among the barbers.

* * * The conditions for staying in the working ward were clear: you had to be a sexual offender, do the assigned work without a peep, and cause no trouble. But occasionally, exceptions that bent these rules could descend upon the ward. For security reasons, certain heavy convicts who had not committed sexual offenses were also locked up here. If an inmate’s case had leaked to the media on the outside and televisions had broadcasted him for days, the administration would place him in the working ward for protection, lest he be shivved inside by a rival coming out of nowhere. These types of men were not made to work; they were merely hidden away in the ward.

As Durmaz was completing his nineteenth month in the working ward, they assigned exactly such a man to their ward: Şahin, a human smuggler whom the media had written about for days.

Şahin was forty-seven years old. He was of medium height with a bland, unremarkable appearance—the kind of guy you wouldn't look back at if you saw him on the street. But from the moment he entered the ward, he began telling a completely different story to the inmates he gathered around him. According to him, he appeared as a "human smuggler" on paper, but in reality, he was one of the most critical, influential men of the deep state and intelligence! The fact that his name was launched this way in the news was entirely a "policy" of the higher-ups. He never dropped the word "policy" from his mouth.

Since Durmaz was now an old-timer in the ward, he presented himself as a fiery nationalist, hanging photos of his favorite political party leader inside his locker. Upon hearing Şahin’s stories of a "patriotic deep state," he immediately entered his orbit. Before long, they grew close and began staying in the same cubicle. At night on the bunk, Durmaz would pour his heart out to Şahin:

"Şahin brother, they threw a brave, patriotic lad like me in here for a sexual crime... Look at the state they reduced me to! Do you think I'll let the people who did this get away with it when I get out? I'm going to shoot them all!"

Meanwhile, Şahin would smile under his mustache. Toying with Durmaz’s naive Anatolian youth as if manipulating a puppet, he would recount the European countries he had traveled and seen. According to Şahin, the sexual offense Durmaz was serving time for wasn't even a crime in Scandinavian countries; everyone did it there, and in fact, everyone did it in Turkey too, it's just that our people were good at hiding it!

Şahin spoke particularly about Norway and Sweden:

"You just have to make it over there, Durmaz... You don't even need to work. The state gives you a house and grants you a monthly salary. Even if you do work, it's just three or four hours a day. Getting there is easy too; you either hop on a smuggling vessel or go as a tourist, rip up your ID, and throw it in the trash. You go to the authorities, tell them a plausible lie, and that’s it. You’re in."

Hearing these words, Durmaz felt as though he were being reborn. What was the point of getting out of prison, shooting all those people, and taking revenge? It was stupidity! With these tips from his big brother Şahin, he built a brand-new, rosy world in his head. He had already begun to look down on his other old friends in the ward, those wretched sexual offenders, viewing them with disdain.

He was so deeply influenced that during his weekly phone call, he shouted to his waiting mother in an ice-cold voice:

"Mother, don't you dare wait for me when I get out! I’m completely done with these places!"

Şahin had this naive Anatolian youth entirely in the palm of his hand. Every day, Durmaz would ask Şahin the exact same questions—questions to which he already knew the answers by heart—with a childlike excitement. If even the slightest news about Scandinavian countries appeared on the television or in the newspaper, he would turn to the inmate next to him and flaunt it as if they were talking about the neighborhood where he was born and raised: *"Look, that's our neck of the woods..."*

Inwardly, he had also begun to feel jealous of Şahin around the other inmates. He believed only he should fill that final vacancy in the Scandinavian paradise! He would resent other inmates who sat next to Şahin and made small talk with him, starting fights with them in the ward over trivial matters.

But there was one thing he forgot: the slightest friction in the working ward would instantly reach the administration's ears, carried by the other inmates who went to their work posts in the morning and gossiped to the guards. And the Chief Officer wouldn't shed a tear for a man who disrupted the order in the ward; he would cut his line instantly.

Durmaz, however, was oblivious to the danger. He spent all day in the barbershop thinking about Norway, carrying tea and coffee to Şahin's cubicle like a slave. He imagined Scandinavia as a massive nightclub where twenty-four-hour non-stop sex parties took place.

Every evening, Şahin would pat Durmaz on the back and continue to inject his poison:

"The state throws poor provincial boys like you inside for these sexual crimes just to put on a show for the public, my boy. This is all policy... It's Anatolian lads like you who bear the brunt of it."

Durmaz would clench his fist on the bunk, making oaths while considering himself a sacrificed scapegoat:

"I’m going, brother... The moment I get out, I’m heading to Norway. I’ll exact the price of this wasted youth from the women over there!"

Yet, the insidious balances of the prison had already set in motion to shatter the fantasy world these two men had built—all in a single night...