by Ayfer Tunç
The Young Buck overrated this existence and suddenly came to life. Just as I’d once struggled to recognise the Notary, neither did I now recognise the Young Buck. Once he would have preferred non-existence to an existence of just a few lines, but now this person was gone. In his place was a wretched someone who accepted any type of personality just so he could exist in the story. At last we are being written! he whooped with joy, overplaying his delight.
Yet I was unhappy because I was going to exist in the same story with the Notary. The feeling that I would be captive in the same story with a person who created a weird hierarchy between us and turned our imaginary world upside down settled into my heart like a profound grief. The Rag-and-Bone-Man was aware of my unhappiness. He’d keep telling me not to lose hope until the final full stop had been placed at the end of the story. He based this on his own experience of the long years of not being written at all, and so tried to placate me But nothing he said in his pleasant voice would help to eradicate the sorrow that had coiled up inside me.
I was sitting in the front seat of the Young Buck’s expensive red car. I was in a skimpy red dress, and had painted my lips bright red. Fine black stockings wrapped my long legs. On my feet, high stilettoes; thrown around my shoulders, a fake black fur. I was cheaply smart. I was smoking a cigarette. The Young Buck’s lust for me exuded out of his skin.
It was very late at night. The houses were growing sparser, their lights long since gone out, and the people of the city had abandoned themselves to the embrace of a tired sleep. The car lapped up the tarmac road a few metres above a railway line. We’d yet to reach the Notary’s house that resembled a big black eye in a big, derelict garden. The Young Buck’s high spirits were obvious. He was drunk, just as our author wanted. He opened the window and yelled with delight as he pressed down on the accelerator.
Now I knew for certain we were serving the Notary’s story. We existed as unremarkable story characters. We’d be forgotten in just one reading, doomed to struggle to find a place in one of the most worthless corners of our supernatural world and so remain unexceptional.
I, too, was drunk. I’d opened the window. From time to time I put out my bare arm into the gently falling snow, trying to cool my skin that burnt like fire. The Young Buck was driving the car with one hand, with the other, he’d pulled my skirt up and started to stroke my leg. I pushed his hand away; he took no notice. His hands grew increasingly more boorish and indicated his delight in the part he was given. This time I pushed his hand away firmly, telling him not to touch me. He slapped me and shouted ‘Whore!’ I hit him back. Suddenly we were fighting. While I was trying to hit him he was saying he’d paid me in advance and he could do what he liked; grabbing my hair, he was banging my head against the car window, then letting go and squeezing my throat, or slapping me repeatedly.
I was hurting. I was trying to hold his powerful hand, tense with anger, in order to escape the slaps raining down on my face, but could not succeed. The car slowed down briefly when he took his foot of the accelerator; I opened the door and threw myself out. I rolled a few metres down to the railway line. I collapsed on the rails.
As the warmth of the blood flowing from my nose spread over my face, I heard the sharp whistle of a train. I wanted to get up, but couldn’t. The train rushed round the bend, speeding toward me, its gigantic headlights instantly lighting up the immediate surroundings. I shut my eyes tight and cursed my author. The train sped towards me and I was cast as an unlucky, short-lived story character who’d taste this death at every reading.
The sound of the whistle died away and then was heard no longer. I opened my eyes, confused. The harsh lights had vanished, and the place had fallen into pitch darkness. The train hadn’t left my body behind it; it had passed by on the other side of the two-way track. I struggled up, sensing my story had actually now begun. The Notary’s unlit house seemed to be calling me, a huge silhouette in the darkness of the night. I began to walk towards my destiny in tired, distraught steps.
My nose was still bleeding. My hair was a mess, my fur was caught on the brambles, and my patent leather shoes had flown off my feet. I was freezing. Covering my naked bosom with my lacerated, bare arms, I entered the Notary’s derelict garden and hammered on the iron door of the house. My author had written he’d seen everything and was now waiting for me. The Notary of the phosphorous eyes opened the door. I fainted in his skinny, bony arms. When I came round in a huge bed in the middle of a large room, at that very short moment between day and night, I saw the Notary who’d stroked my ankles all night long taking his dark suit from the wardrobe in preparation for the day.
I hadn’t died, but had become the Notary’s prisoner. This was worse than death. I wasn’t happy with my existence. But what really undid me was not this, but the Young Buck’s excessive satisfaction. Gone was the sensitive, innocent young man, whose childish features gave one an irresistible urge to stroke them. He was trying to ingratiate himself with the Notary and could barely contain his joy. I was utterly confused. We weren’t actually in this story. We weren’t instrumental in telling anything. I was a common whore, and he was a wretched young man. We were the means for the Notary’s existence. The Young Buck didn’t care about any of this. He was guffawing as he told other story characters how he slapped me, and what he felt when he was stroking my legs. He’d become so contemptible that he didn’t refrain from paying compliments to the Notary – whom he’d hated before he came into being – telling him he was the greatest story character of all time. And the Notary in turn indulged the Young Buck, virtually rewarding him with smiles.
But something totally unexpected happened one night. The Rag-and-Bone-Man came over and said our author just couldn’t get to sleep. Sure enough: our author was tossing and turning in his bed. I looked at the Young Buck. Exhausted with delight, he was sound sleep, an idiotic expression on his face. But our author’s restlessness had attracted the Notary’s attention. Our eyes met. A transparent shadow of fear shaded his ever-open eyes. At long last our author got up, sat down at his desk and settled down to work.
At the end of a fevered bout of work of several weeks, the Notary and the Young Buck disappeared. The Notary was bewildered, devastated. He couldn’t believe he’d been sacrificed. And the Young Buck was left dumbstruck, a frozen smile on his lips, unable to understand what had happened. In time they faded, and vanished altogether when the last piece of paper was thrown away.
This incident very much surprised the other story characters too. It actually shook them all. And then they began to talk about how the Notary could have impressed them all so much; they confessed to their shame of the state into which they had fallen in their efforts to please him. The colourful, jubilant world of story characters slowly began to regain its former glory.
I was the one who remained from that unfinished story. I lived for a long period in our author’s mind as a cheap-looking woman in a red dress with red lipstick. Then one morning our author began my story. I came out of a tavern with a story character I’d never seen before. Again it was late at night. We got into the sad-eyed. Timid Young Buck’s wreck of a car, and began to drive along the same coastal road. We were both drunk. It was I who’d seduced him.
We were going to a summerhouse, where I was going to take off my fake black fur, my black silk stockings, my patent leather shoes and red dress, to introduce this shy sensitive young man to that feeling called lust. As the car travelled towards the point where I’d rolled down to the tracks, the Timid Young Man touched my legs with nervous and inexperienced fingers. Everything was as our author had written. The fickle prostitute past her prime that I was, I changed my mind about sleeping with this young man. All of a sudden, I pushed his hand away and began to insult him. I said, just because he’d paid me, he couldn’t do whatever he wanted to me. He was astonished, awkward. He was sorry, had already stopped touching me, but this time I was the one written as a different character. I was loathsome and drunk. I was swearing at him and bawling
my eyes out.
I opened the window and began to scream. The lights came on in some of the houses lining the road. The Timid Young Man was trying to calm me down. He began to beg me to be quiet; I was not quiet. My screams pierced the night. As he tried to close my mouth with his hand, the door of the old car suddenly opened and I rolled down to the same railway track, from the same place. Again the same train appeared. Its headlights illuminated the surroundings like daylight.
The train passed by on the track next to me. Again blood was seeping from my nose. I got up and walked towards the sea. I leant against a tree. I was drunk and despondent. Suddenly, I heard the young man’s screams. He thought I’d been run over by the train, and was struggling down the slope.
He looked like he’d gone berserk as he sank onto the railway track. ‘Where are you?’ he shouted several times. He was frightened and wretched. All of a sudden, a train appeared, coming in the opposite direction. The sharp whistle diffused towards the sea. The headlights lit up the surroundings. I heard the echo of his scream and his body being torn apart. A pain pierced my heart just then. I became acquainted with a bright red torment.
Thus we came into being in the world of story characters. The romantic, gentle-eyed Timid Young Man always said I was a good story friend. I replied, ‘If only our author had also written your fiancée!’ If our author had written his story differently… but he was to be married the following day. All he wanted was to spend his last bachelor night with me.
Books from the Edge
The Aziz Bey Incident come to you from ISTROS BOOKS, a boutique publisher of quality literature in translation from South East Europe. Our title are now divided into two serie
Best Balkan Books
and
Books from the Edge
Books from the Edge are novel from those countrie which lie partly outide the Balkan and partly in the fruitful borderland of 'the Edge'. Thi year' title come from Croatia and - for the first time - Turkey which i a move away from our usual literary borders.
Watch out for the other title in the 2013 series:
A Handful of Sand
a love story by Marinko Koščec
ISBN 978-1-908236-07-4
'Croatia's foremost literary stylit, Marinko Koščec produce the kind of novel that combine crafted sentence and structural experiment without ever losing their storytelling drive.' -Time Out Croatia
A Handful of Sand is a love story and an ode to lost opportunity. Written as a duet for two narrators, we hear both the male and the female voices telling us their stories. A each of them look back on the span of their lives, they offer us the sum of their histories in anticipation of the exquisite moment when they finally meet.
This is a beautifully written exploration of the roots of love and the anatomy of los. A two lovers struggle to weave a fabric between them which is durable beyond the volatility of sex and romantic intoxication, we remain acutely aware that the precious opportunity for them to be together can so easily pass through their hand like sand through their fingers.
Funny tender, full of joys and frustrations - this is love with the lights turned on!
