by Ayfer Tunç
After this incident I didn’t see Mikail for a long time. We never met. But some time later I felt that he was following me. He was as silent as a professional killer wanting to perform a clean job. He never showed himself. But I always knew he was after me and felt his breath on the back of my neck. I enjoyed this so much that some nights I’d suddenly turn back along the streets I walked. Sometimes I met with the sound of feet running rapidly away so as not to be caught. Sometimes a deep silence. The nights that he didn’t follow me became boring. I could have been lost in a delightful game woven with illusions and I was curious about the conclusion.
In the beginning, he wanted to frighten me away. Then later, he wanted to kill me. All he really wanted was to regain Semiramis who had now closed her doors to him in spite of me. He thought I was the sole reason the door wouldn’t open despite his ringing the bell time and again. This was really funny, to be honest. And besides, both in Mikail’s state, and in the strange bond between us, there was a sad, weird thing like a fit of crying after laughing too much. To me, Semiramis was nothing; to him, she was everything. To Semiramis, Mikail was nothing and I was everything.
I began to go to the music hall every evening, just for the pleasure of having him follow me. This made Semiramis very happy. She mistook it for some kind of commitment. And in fact it was. But not to Semiramis. To my executioner.
I am now through with the song of darkness and reside in a distant, peaceful, humdrum town where I show a reluctant effort to join the ranks of proper people. Yet I miss not Semiramis, but the music hall that breathed with sorrowful breaths even though it is common, even though it is crude, faithless and wretched. That place was a badly sung song of darkness. Just like the flaws in the voices of singers, the plaintive place where life’s heavy blows leave deep scars on faces, the place which has taken refuge in the pretence of bright lights...
It was in the music hall one night that I came to realise that Mikail had given up scaring me and decided to kill me. Semiramis had, with one eye on me, sat down at the table of a customer whose mistress she had probably once been. I was quietly drinking with my back to the stage at the bar, that had been refurbished to make the music hall ‘with it’ and so was as much of a stranger to the interior as me.
I was staring in the cheap mirror at my expressionless face of indeterminate age. I felt as though I’d lived a thousand years, and that feeling aroused a deep sadness. I asked myself why I was such a stranger to my own life. I was going to ask myself much more, but I snapped out of myself when I heard Mikail’s name in the conversation between the barman and the waiter nearby. I didn’t know whether they knew he had at one time been Semiramis’s lover. It never interested me in the slightest how much those in the music hall knew about this skein of strange entanglements that linked the three of us together. In any case, no one but Mikail had interested me.
The barman and waiter spoke on, unaware I was listening. Mikail had sold his Anadol estate to buy a weapon. But the man who’d taken the money and said he’d get him a Parabellum had disappeared. At that moment I remembered that I hadn’t heard the sound of the tired Anadol starting with mournful screams for a long time. The barman laughed at this sad deception. ‘Who was he going to shoot with that weapon?’ he asked. The waiter said, ‘Who knows. Perhaps he is going to shoot himself…’
I didn’t meet Mikail at all until the end of the summer. He was no longer following me as frequently as he used to. Perhaps he’d gone after the man who went off with his money promising to bring him a weapon. Even so, I felt he might be following me, and some nights while walking in the streets that stretched out pitch dark, when I occasionally turned and looked behind me, I’d catch sight of a shadow sheltering in the entrances to apart -ments, a shadow that had gradually grown weaker and thinner.
Then summer came to an end. I thought he’d got tired of following me.
It was an October evening. There were signs of an early winter in the air. A filthy drizzle smothered this city, tired existing in an even worse gloom. Semiramis had gone again on one of those shitty tours. I wandered about the streets watching the death of this unfortunate city. I looked at the clouds that sank on it like a dirge. I climbed high hills to see if I could spot a vein through which perhaps clean blood still flowed, in the hope that it would excite me and spur me to go somewhere new. Nothing excited me. Not even the rain that wet my face and my hair and made me cold. The notion of going away for a new beginning seemed so difficult; impossible even. I returned to Semiramis’s house knowing I was fast growing old there.
Darkness had yet to fall when I entered the street. The rain that had fallen intermittently, forming futile puddles in the street, had ceased. The air was still heavy. The street’s futureless and hopeless children were playing ball.
I found Mikail at the entrance to Semiramis’s block of flats. He’d turned up the collar of his threadbare jacket and crouched on the paved area in front of the door. He’d leant his head against the wall and, tired of waiting for me for hours, he’d fallen asleep. I approached him and stood looking. His beard had grown. There was not a trace of his old self. He was snoring lightly. I wanted him to wake up and see me and plunge his resentful knife right into my heart. But he didn’t look like he’d wake up. I leant over and tapped his shoulder. I wanted to say, ‘Wake up. Wake up and save me from this never-ending nothingness with the knife you are going to stab into my chest!’ He didn’t wake up.
Just then a ball one of the children kicked smashed into his face. He woke up suddenly, leapt up without seeing me and walked towards the children, swearing. He caught the ball and slashed it with the knife he’d imagined in my heart. That’s when our eyes locked. Ball and knife fell from his hands.
The truth of the matter is that he was unlucky enough to drive someone to suicide.
From that day onward he definitely stopped following me. We still met from time to time. Whenever he saw me he would quickly turn his back and walk away with hasty steps. He had become very thin, as though this defeat had finished him off. He didn’t pass the streets I did and never visited the places where I might be. One day, we met in a neighbourhood market. He’d arranged a few dozen Paşabahçe glasses on a small stand. To attract the attention of the passers-by he was juggling three glasses in the air and calling out to the women who looked at him as they passed. When he spotted me, he failed to catch the glasses.
I heard his circumstances deteriorated even more, and he aged a lot after our encounter. Presumably he had thought at length about it all, and deciding that luck was with me, had given up. Now, because he didn’t follow me, I left off going to the music hall. I killed time thinking about life, about people and about Mikail, and things that were not at all funny, and I drank. The absence of the man whom I’d destroyed by stealing his greatest love and frittering away the love that I stole had shaken me badly. I used to laugh when I thought about him. Until I no longer could. I realised this was akin to cutting my wrists in hot water. While I was cutting my wrists I felt no pain, but now my spirit was smarting.
I was drinking so much that one night I realised I’d drunk the house dry. It was very late and there wasn’t anything open. I had no choice but set out for the music hall. It was a snowy night and the streets were covered with ice. I wandered along the very back alleys where the dirtiest blood of the city was shed. I walked among the street urchins warming their dirty hands over fires they lit in tin barrels; the homeless preparing to lie down on the cardboard that they spread out in sheltered corners; the juvenile glue sniffers cuddling thin street cats; transvestites in the middle of a fight or recovering from one; street dogs howling from cold and hunger, all fear of humans long since forgotten. And while I walked through all this, I noticed I was following a black, sagging overcoat.
He’d sat down in the most deserted corner of a bar, and was drinking beer, his head bent forward. Silently I came and sat beside him. He didn’t move at all, nor did he lift his head to look. Just as I was thinking he hadn’t
recognised me, he said in a shaky voice, his eyes fixed on his beer glass, ‘I used to have a glass and china shop. I used to sell glassware. She wanted lots of things; I used to buy them. Then you came along. Now I have nothing…’
He drained the glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his shaking hand. In a voice that was not indignant, not hostile, not angry but harrowing, he said, ‘If only you had loved her. You didn’t love her and you destroyed me.’
He got up and left. I could not get up. Much later, when I noticed I was crying and went outside, I saw him in the feeble light thrown from the burning tin barrel at the end of the street; he was walking, trailing his black overcoat and merging into the deep darkness of the night.
That was the night Mikail’s heart stopped.
RED TORMENT
We were three story characters in our author’s mind straining at the leash for our destinies to be written: the Notary, the Young Buck and I. Although we were yet to be written, we had an inkling we would be characters in the same story, and tried to guess what kind of connection our author would establish between us. But there wasn’t even a single sentence written to bring the three of us together. That’s why we were unable to get close and had to make do with watching one another from afar.
Our story still lacked a definite plot and still kept churning round in our author’s head. It wasn’t certain what we would be, what we would do, or even whether we would exist at all. We weren’t developed enough to form a connection between our existence and what was going through his mind. We knew very little about ourselves. We just wandered aimlessly, heroes as yet unwritten in the supernatural world of story characters. We were on edge, and felt very much alone.
From time to time, our author took notes we thought were related to our story, and which excited us, as he scribbled down the first sentences on sheets of rough paper with his black ink fountain pen. Then he’d crumple it all up and throw it away, thus dragging us into deep obscurity. He couldn’t be said to be working on us at any length, or set much of his time to create us. True, he did, from time to time, occupy himself with the Notary, but he usually forgot about the Young Buck and me, and never wrote a single word that would concern me in particular. As he delayed committing me to paper, my hopes about existing rapidly dissolved.
Because I wasn’t yet on familiar terms with the characters of other stories, I had focused all my attention on our author. To know that my existence was in his hands gave me an indescribably agreeable feeling. As if there was a divine balance between us. I, and the other story characters, were the ones who gave meaning to our author’s life. If he were to create me, I would contribute to his existence. This relationship between the author and the character he wrote about whipped up my desire to exist, exciting me tremendously.
I learnt from the Rag-and-Bone-Man that our author spent a very long time on his stories, that he’d carry the characters in his head for a long time prior to beginning to write, and that there were story characters he’d yet to finish and was still working on. The Rag-and-Bone-Man was the main character of a story that our author had been working on for years. In spite of constant writing, he’d never been able to take his final form, or perhaps deliberately avoided it. I always felt the Rag-and-Bone-Man’s comforting presence beside me throughout our story’s writing process, when I was at my most desperate.
The Notary, the Young Buck and I had been created separately in our writer’s mind. I don’t know when and how this started. Once, when we were sitting together, I looked at them both out of the corner of my eye, and had an inkling that we would be in the same story. That’s how silent, cold and distant – and even thought-provoking – our beginning was.
What were we going to be? What was going to happen to us? In what kind of existence were we going to blossom? With what kind of personality were we going to enter the minds of our future readers? Which feelings of theirs were we going to touch, and which of their thoughts were we going to ease the birth of? We knew nothing, and the longer our story failed to begin, the more worried we got. Enveloped by the fear we might never exist. Fresh hope filled us every morning when our author went to his table. As our story turned over in his mind we grew excited. Sometimes, just as we were about to appear and just as we were preparing to smile at our existence, our author put down his pen. Then we resumed our long, boring and silent wait.
But this situation didn’t last long. Soon after we sensed we were characters in the same story, the Notary grew much more discernible. The Young Buck and I were neglected; not properly described, and without even a couple of words jotted down about us. Our author’s indifference brought us closer to each other and distanced us completely from the Notary.
The Notary had now become someone else. The timid man, worried about the game that his uncertain destiny would play on him, was gone; in his place was someone with a cold and arrogant manner, apparently as insensitive as a dead branch. We no longer shared our worries, emotions or expectations. He strutted like an actor who’d landed a glitzy starring role, smiling smugly. A disturbing look had settled in his eyes. He’d also developed insomnia. His huge eyes never closed, shining – even in the deepest dark of the night – like the phosphorus on an accursed watch face that would take us to a tragic annihilation. Even in the moments we slept we felt his presence penetrating our marrow, as a dark shadow.
Our author was always working on him. He’d planned his passions, his foibles, his habits, his strange desires and even the place where he lived. According to our author’s notes and the chapters he’d written, the Notary lived alone in an eerie, large, dilapidated house, quite a way from the city, facing a railway line. Every morning he left his house, walked to the station and boarded a train, and he returned by the same route in the evenings. He may not have yet been written completely, but he clearly was set to be an interesting story character. Night and day altered the chemistry of his body. During the day he lived as an ordinary person like everyone else, approved the proper observance of life’s infinite details, was overly meticulous in his work while in his dark suit, and became a dedicated part of the established order, one that would remain as such for his whole life. But once the sun disappeared behind the mountains, and the darkness of the night descended upon the earth, a sick, disturbed side claimed his soul, and so the Notary sat in front of the window not blinking an eye until morning, carried away by a profound, sickly loneliness, aflame with longing for emotions he considered forbidden by day.
Even such scant attention had been enough for the other story characters to talk about him. They were whispering to one another, pointing at him, and fussing around him, half admiring, half shy. The Notary too was aware of the situation. That’s why he grew increasingly arrogant, scornful of both the Young Buck and me, observing us with eyes full of contempt. So sure he was that he would be the protagonist, that he only deigned to speak to the main characters of the stories already written by our author. He’d altered rapidly and, as the details of his character became clearer, his arrogance increased.
And he didn’t stop there. He spread around the conviction in his superiority to such an extent that even talking to a story character virtually became a favour. He began to discriminate between characters and to insult some. The more he did this, the more minor characters flocked around him with flattery, showing more interest than was necessary, and idolising a story character whose existence would be limited to what the author had written.
In the face of all this theatrical interest the Notary grew so grim to appear ridiculous in our supernatural world. Yet ours was an aimless world without rules. In the free zone in our author’s mind we lived far from all natural and social laws. The Notary influenced the story characters with his manner and bearing, making it clear he wanted our unconditional surrender. It was plain he’d brought a weird hierarchy to our ungoverned, motley world. The Young Buck, on the other hand, was deeply concerned with the uncertainty of his own destiny. He’d almost lost all interest in his surroundings. Ev
en his sleep was anxious and full of fear. The fear of being non-existent had made him highly irritable. The Rag-and-Bone-Man and I were aware of the dreadfulness of all this, but there was nothing we could do about it.
I got to know the Rag-and-Bone-Man at the time when the Notary was rapidly becoming clearer and our despair increasingly grew. He could have become a permanent fixture in our author’s mind. He couldn’t remember how many years he had lived in his mind, and how many stories had been started in which he was the main character. He was such a non-written character that he’d virtually become our author’s conscience and critic, the inspector of his progress as an author. He’d grown old, and had almost grown into a person in the author’s mind.
Throughout the time he remained yet to be written, the Rag-and-Bone-Man had seen so many story characters that to be written or not to be written had lost its importance. He was the only one amongst us who wasn’t concerned about existing. I never told him, but I sensed that when our author wrote him the adventure would end, and he’d close his writer’s book.
All the story characters were aware of the Rag-and-Bone-Man’s importance. They may have flocked to the Notary, but the Rag-and-Bone-Man intimidated them; they made no secret of their deep respect for him.
At the time when the Notary believed with all his heart that he was the greatest story character our author had ever created, he wanted to draw the Rag-and-Bone-Man too into his sphere of influence. But he was flummoxed to see that his forceful manner, that easily manipulated the other story characters, had no effect on the Rag-and-Bone-Man. That’s when I felt the Notary had also begun to harbour doubts about his own fate.
One morning, when I was about to give up hope of existing, our author sat down at his desk, and after putting down on paper the Notary-driven plot he’d formed in his mind, he began to write us in. I was in a red dress. The Young Man had a very flashy, bright red car. The Notary was perched like an owl, brooding at the window of his tumbledown house.
