Shadowless

by Hasan Ali Toptas

  He turned to glance at Nuri. Some sort of shock was passing through him. Trembling, he gulped down his tea. As if to rush back to the past he’d just escaped, almost. As if he hoped to find the path that Güvercin had taken, somewhere inside his own lost years.

  Two years he’d been gone, but during that time his children had not stopped growing. In fact, they had grown like cypresses. By now they were almost as tall as Nuri, if not taller. They had, perhaps, added his height to their own, the better to carry him. And that was why there was no way of knowing how often Nuri had wandered the village in his absence, and drunk tea in the coffeehouse or water from the public fountain and conversed with his fellow villagers. As for the child that his wife had claimed to have locked up inside her house – well, that might have been the man himself. Maybe she’d cradled him like the child she’d wished he was – kissed his forehead, even. She had, after all, been so broody of late. The deeper her sons’ voices, the hoarser their coughs, and the bolder their stride, the more she had found her husband in them, and that could be another reason why she wrapped her arms so tightly around them, to smother them with kisses. They kept her alive, these kisses. They sated her hunger. They quenched her thirst.

  She had, from time to time, read the imam’s horoscope; if it promised good tidings, she sank into a gloom. These were times of struggle. She would cry until the fountains of her eyes went dry. For a thousand and one nights, she wrapped her arms around herself and longed to be holding her husband instead. She railed against God for refusing to send him back. Day by day, her resentment grew, to the secret exasperation of the imam. Before long she was singing folk songs to drown out the call to prayer, shouting and screaming the words, or, if her voice failed, banging pots and pans, or throwing those same utensils into the road, even going so far as to roll her eyes and thrust her belly forward like a baby camel, terrorising the children who had gathered around her house.

  Following these strange outbursts, rumours spread through the village that God had changed Nuri into a bird, or a lizard, or perhaps even a hunting dog. These rumours grew and grew and the day arrived when, infused with the dust of legend, they unfurled their long tails to sail back to the woman’s front door, and strike her dumb. Raising her rheumy eyes to the heavens, she stood for a long time in silence before asking the Lord for forgiveness. Then she asked him again, and again; many hundreds of times, in fact. For hours on end, she went from one courtyard to the next, trying to get God to listen. She even talked to the birds, and the grass on the fields, and the insects, and the frolicking sheep, and the mountains and the blue-eyed babies in their cots. With every passing day she poured more regret into them all, until it had seeped into everything under the sun. But still she was sure she had not done enough. She went to the imam, asking him to guide her in her penance. Falling down on her knees, she burst into tears. The imam listened in silence; then he gazed up at the portrait of the blessed Ali, and the three ropes of prayer beads hanging from a nail, black as dungeons, like a bunch of grapes, and the thyme branches hanging from the rafters. Then, very slowly, he shook his head. Placing his hand on the woman’s knee, he quietly cleared his throat, to offer a sweet and musty string of consoling words. The woman paid no attention to his caresses as they climbed from her knees to her hips, and that was why the imam, given courage by her indifference, reached inside her robes, to guide his finger into the most intimate regions of the woman who had come to him seeking guidance. The woman came back again the next day.

  This time, her tears flowed even faster. The imam seemed to cry with her. His eyes shone, as dewdrops formed on his eyelashes. Comforted by this sight, the woman cried even harder, until even the adobe walls enclosing them had succumbed to lamentation.

  Soon the afternoon prayers had been said. By the time the sun had filtered through the branches of the plum tree to brighten their window, they had made progress. Gently, the imam tossed aside his dungeon-black prayer beads, pulling the woman on to his lap. The room trembled with her sobs – sobs that had begun to sound more forced – as he mumbled another string of comforting words and caressed her breasts. The blessed Ali on the wall closed his eyes. The faster the imam’s hands wandered, the louder the woman cried. There followed days of uninterrupted lovemaking, and uninterrupted crying. She now knew for sure that – even if God had not changed her husband into a lizard, a bird or a hunting dog – he would not be sending him back. Even if he did, he would be turned away, without so much as setting foot in the village, by the imam’s call to prayer. If Nuri returned in the guise of a bird, even, he would flap his wings and fly far away . . . Who could know? God might decide to erase him from human memory; he might even send in his creatures one night, to roam the village amidst the chirping insects, sprinkling the powder of forgetfulness over each roof, each street and courtyard . . . And when they awoke the next morning, not a soul would remember who he was.

  When Nuri really did return, no one recognised him.

  His greying goatee was caked with dust and soil; his hair matted and wild. He might have been a scarecrow. With every step, he shook off scraps of tin and silver paper. The children tagging behind him raced to see who could pick up the most, sometimes falling to the ground to wrestle with a rival. Nuri’s goatee quivered and shook as he walked on, muttering to himself as he went. The children walked alongside him, all the way from the mill to the plane tree, pestering him with questions. Which of them would he make away with? Which of them would he be throwing into his sack? From time to time, Nuri tried to chase them away, or he would whip out a stone and make as if to throw it at them. The first time he did this, the boys took fright, scattering like chicks from a fox. But once they’d worked out he was only pretending, they joined in the game. First they’d pretend to run off, in terror, and then they’d come scrambling back over the courtyard walls to resume the chase. Until, having reached the shade of the plane tree, they were chased off by the men there.

  Nuri continued on his way, glancing over his shoulder, to check if anyone was throwing stones. Then he pulled up a chair, to sit with his fellow villagers. It struck them as sorcery, this small change in their routine. Shaken, too, by his contrary manner, they gathered around him, wide-eyed and suspicious. The shoemaker was reminded of the barber, for he, too, had arrived looking worn, wearing rags and the dust of the long road.

  The watchman kept a judicious distance, lest his brown uniform give him away. He could not decide if the arrival of this foul-smelling man merited the immediate notification of the muhtar.

  They were just about to speak when Nuri, having finished his tea, lit up a cigarette.

  Turning to the watchman, he said, ‘So, Baki. How are the children doing?’

  That took everyone by surprise, of course. The men exchanged wide-eyed glances. The scarecrow guffawed, before falling into a pained silence. As that silence deepened, the villagers exchanged more wide-eyed glances. But they didn’t say a word, perhaps just to deepen the torment of curiosity. Finally, he gestured at the barber shop he’d abandoned so many years ago. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’ he cried. ‘I’m Nuri. Nuri!’

  The villagers froze in their chairs. Stony-faced, they stared at Nuri. No, they thought. It could not be. And then, in a flash, the watchman was running off to find the muhtar. He picked up his rifle and ran through the streets, fast as the wind, and faster than a snake, until at last he came huffing and puffing into the muhtar’s courtyard.

  Faster now than a bullet from his rifle, or so it seemed to the muhtar as he pushed aside his pan of menemen and rushed off to the village square with his mouth still full. By the time he got there, Nuri was already halfway through his story.

  ‘Tell it from the start,’ the muhtar commanded. Pressing down on Nuri’s shoulder, he made his suspicions clear.

  Asked where he’d been all this time, Nuri said he didn’t know. But then, as he sat there, baking in the afternoon sun, he began, very slowly, to explain.

  That evening, he’d felt something weig
hing down on him. At once his skin had felt too tight; his hands no longer fitting his arms, or his feet his legs. His eyes could not see. But he’d known somehow that if only he could open his eyes wide enough, he’d see beyond the cliffs, and perhaps he was already doing so, without knowing it, at that very moment.

  Then suddenly his ears grew larger than soup ladles at a wedding. Suddenly he could hear all of them speaking to him. The crate in the corner, the spade handle, the earthenware jug, the broom – they were all talking. Suddenly everything under the sun, without exception, had its own voice. Some groaned, some muttered, some wailed. Some might even have laughed. Nuri, meanwhile, kept looking out of the window. It must be raining, he kept thinking. But he could not see a single drop: and when had it ever rained at this time of the year? This was the voice of the soil, he told himself, as he stood, transfixed, at his window. This was the voice of the trees, the stones, the birds. God in heaven, I can hear the entire world! My ears have been well and truly pierced!

  At that point, he had placed his palms on the wall, and the wall had shivered at his touch.

  It has a voice. My God, this wall lives, too; it is as alive as all the creatures and plants on this earth . . . He took his hands off the wall, and as darkness descended, the voices now cutting through his ears, his skin and his mind grew ever louder.

  While Nuri sat voicelessly on the divan, he was assaulted, from within and without, by the voices of all creation. They were calling on him, these voices. They were telling him to go forth. His eyes passed over each and every object in the house. One by one, his eyes passed over them. He wondered how much they would remember – if he were to leave, what might they retain of his shape, his manner, his voice? Would they remember him at all? If he himself were an object (a candle, for example, or a broom, or tobacco pouch), what of him would remain in the mind of another (say, his wife)? Just the thought was more than he could bear. He left the house, leaving behind a wife cooking spicy tarhana soup, and three children, and his hat.

  For hours and hours, he’d walked, but without any hope of leaving. He’d imagined dying – freezing and burning, sated and starving – as he walked away from the village, as far as his legs could take him. It was almost as if the voices inside him were pushing him there. Unless it was something else, a faraway something else, pulling him by the ear. It had surprised him, all this, and at the same time it had sent his spirits soaring. How could it be otherwise? Like it or not, something inside him needed distance. With every step, this something had diminished: drop by drop, it had wasted away. Butterflies had fluttered before his eyes, darkening the world with their tiny, silent wings. All was lost, each was a shiny scale. . . . Each was faceless, each was an eye . . . Each pointed in a different direction . . . Then suddenly there were lights flying towards him, faster than light itself. Hidden behind them were the secrets, the things that had been calling him. As he walked on, lights were lights no longer, but bulls spouting fire. No longer bulls, but camels carrying beaded cradles on their backs. No longer camels but sweaty horses, or herds of goats, or flocks of birds, bearing mirrors aloft. At first the bulls had frightened him and sent him scurrying for cover in a field of thorns. But then, when he’d gone after the birds – the birds bearing mirrors aloft – his heart had begun to beat with theirs. Only to see that the bulls were actually horses. That was when he’d decided to turn back. Even so, he was still glad to have attempted escape. Even though it had weakened his legs somewhat. It had sometimes seemed to him that he’d grown forelegs, and more legs, just in front of them, and in front of those, even more . . .

  And it had seemed as if, beyond these legs, there were yet more legs, invisibly pushing him along. Behind all these, there was the faint spectre he left behind. Unless he was imagining himself in front of himself, and beyond that, and at the same time, behind it . . .

  Nuri paused to take a breath. He could have carried on with those horses. He could have mounted them there and then, to gallop off into the mountains, never to be seen again . . . But a hand had held him back. Whose hand it was, he could not say. And neither could he say whose mind controlled it. It would be years before he was at last able to solve the mystery of this hand: it was his own. But it was caught between two other hands. If they were in fact hands: at the time he wasn’t even sure of that.

  He’d not ridden off with the horses, of course. Instead, he’d continued on foot. The village was far behind him by now. Looking over his shoulder, he could no longer see its candles flickering. The soil under his feet was slipping away fast, very fast. So fast, in fact, that he’d found himself back on the plain – though what plain that was, he couldn’t say. All he could say was that the silence there was as deep as the darkness. There he had sat, listening to the drumbeat of his heart. That was when he had seen a shooting star. When it had vanished, to parts unknown, Nuri had stood up again, and off he had gone, padding into the heart of the night. Later still, he had grasped the truth of the matter; he was neither walking nor standing still. He had been walking on the spot, and standing still while walking. As in a dream, almost . . . However fast he ran, he would never arrive; the longer he walked, the greater his hope of arriving.

  There, before him, were the shining lights. Then, overcome by desire, his arms stretched as far as they could go . . . To be left with nothing. The nothing that turned thoughts into dreams . . . Step by step, Nuri had lost himself in darkness; the light that had promised him horses, camels, birds and mirrors was still far off. Now he was surrounded by creatures he could not see. But he could hear them panting as they paced around him without rest, jingling their bells as they went. It was almost as if they were trying to break him – force his surrender – release them to burrow into his eyes, feet and hands. At this point, Nuri had felt himself surrounded by rustling of fabrics, and the beating of drums and moans of uncertain meaning. But the moment Nuri had stopped walking, those sounds stopped, too. And then, when Nuri resumed his journey, the cries of joy returned, until, with a great yawn, he’d swallowed them all. Perhaps he’d died, Nuri thought, and was among the musicians of hell. Who could know where this journey had taken him? Who could know what traces it would leave in his memory? Would his arms thicken like handles of a sharp-edged spade, or was this body of his destined to become nothing more than a ripple in the soil, and in the history of the village? He could not – could never – know. Just as he could never know what had pulled him back. He recalled a yellow sea, as bright as it was dark, a red sea, as red as blood, a joyless sea, bereft of laughter, bobbing with houses, and rubbish, and oil, and the stinking skeletons of humankind and fish . . . Together they had crossed that sea, but how many years had it taken and by what means had they achieved this feat?

  Then, in a patch of shade, in the middle of the desert, they had met a barber. With him were two men waiting to be shaved. One was fingering his prayer beads, which were as black as dungeons. The man next to him was short and frail, and not quite there. Indeed, the second man seemed almost not to exist and perhaps he actually didn’t. He could have been an empty space and nothing more, an empty space occupying the chair next to the man with the prayer beads, and shaped like a man. So what Nuri had done next was to occupy that space. And there he’d sat, in silence, under the barber’s gaze . . . And soon that empty space (though shaped by another) had come to feel like his own.

  But then another man – a tall man – had come striding into his patch of shade. The barber had raised his scissors high in the air, as if to stab it. ‘Welcome, my good sir,’ he greeted him. Then, five minutes later, he asked, ‘Are you still writing a novel?’ ‘I am,’ the man had said. He’d then fallen silent, to stare at the picture of the dove above the mirror. And who could have thought it? The longer this man kept his eyes on that picture, the more Nuri’s goatee had grown. And this might be why the barber had passed over the man with the dungeon beads, and called Nuri to the chair first. At once, Nuri had settled himself inside the mirror. For days on end, the barber had gone on
clicking his scissors, as he and his apprentice danced around Nuri’s chair. And then, a drum had sounded in the distance; rustling fabric had piled up under his feet. How hot it was suddenly. How very hot! They’d come closer to the sun, no doubt – there were no birds in this sky, which was no longer blue. It was almost as if the very idea of blue was a rare memory, held only in the minds of those who still dared to look up at the firmament, as all creation went plunging into blackest night.

  God only knew what the time was, but finally the barber had tired. Because as fast as he cut Nuri’s hair, it kept growing back. He, too, had tired of the barber’s endless clipping. Seeing no point in staying, he had jumped to his feet and left.

  Emerging from the mirror, he had found himself back in the sea again: that same yellow sea. It could have been the desert, dreaming of a sea, or the sea, dreaming of a desert – there was no knowing, either way. He was walking, of course. Walking towards the blinking lights – towards that mirror, held aloft by the birds – for those lights still called out to him. The waters now came up to his chin – came up to his chin in waves – and there were people, standing at the windows of their sea shacks. Silence had wiped their mouths from their faces, which were far away and dark as night, and shaped like eyes. Nuri, meanwhile, was left to make his way through the waves – they were red as blood and he didn’t even know how to swim. With all his strength, he fought the urge to swallow the whole sea. Then suddenly night had fallen; and with it had come a shower of silver, moonlit sparks . . .

  He could smell the blood in the sea now, just as he could chart its calm depths. It seemed to him now that everything under the sun was in the sea with him: the trees, the mountains, the grasslands, and all the sky’s stars . . . And Nuri. He was in the water, too. And he was tired. He let himself drift, as the water grew ever thicker. It had, in his sleep, taken on the consistency of gum. It was the deep and deathly sleep of legends.