The Stone Building and Other Places

by Asli Erdogan

  The doorman had forgotten to leave the paper again. He never remembered the woman living by herself in the basement apartment; sniffing out vulnerability was an ancient instinct. She grabbed her hat and put it on before slamming the door behind her. She climbed up the stifling, dank staircase lined with melted candles, and like a somnambulist, she walked toward the main street, through the alley whose potholes, cracks and bumps she knew by heart.

  Shimmering drops were all that remained of the storm that had pummeled the city throughout the night. A colorless, bright spring sky stretched overhead, cold and indifferent as an empty mirror, a narrow span between temporary horizons… The city’s face, rising straight up in front of her, was wet, tired, quivering with metallic iridescence, shaking itself awake and coming to life. The last rain clouds were passing, slow and sad as a funeral procession.

  She walked without paying attention to the muddy puddles, aware of the tapping of her heels as she hurried, placing one foot in front of the other with a steely determination… Repaired, renewed, filled with energy… Raspy car horns in the distance, an engine refusing to start, a garbage truck, a drill penetrating a metal surface… The non-human voices of a world remaking itself each morning…

  Soon, an odyssey would begin to the offices, highways, workshops and schools. The city’s foot-soldiers, still drowsy with sleep, would fill the sidewalks, following a dream they wished would never end. Faces, anxious, abstract, tense, muted, angry… Bodies moving through the streets with the restlessness of bridled horses cutting trail over rocks. A tapestry of thousands, tens of thousands of destinies, ambitions, desires, dreams, struggles, crisscrossing, twining indifferently, becoming snarled into a Gordian knot… They would haggle, clash, fight without mercy to claim a role in the plot of another, to snatch a share of a world that had long ago been divided up. The only evidence left behind would be crumpled tissues blowing in the wind.

  Streets, muddy sidewalks, crowds, others… The night had finally ended; the day — even the yearning for another night — had begun, and she quickly disappeared into the city.

  She gave a start, as if whiplashed, when she caught sight of her face in the glass. Her rouged mouth resembled an open wound. Bloody, overbearing, obscene… She could not stand her reflection and moved away, walking to the window streaked with rain.Electricity was being restored to this neighborhood; the frosty, whitish, fluorescent light suddenly illuminated the café, blinding the eye like a belated winter sun. She was the only customer. The younger of the waiters, tired of watching the woman with a suspicious, condescending gaze, began covering the tables with burgundy tablecloths, securing them with clothespins on each corner. In her fussily assembled outfit, with her legs crossed, she sat as if she were in a display window. He skipped her table, leaving it without a tablecloth. The other waiter was staring absently at the TV, looking as if he’d awaked from hibernation too early and was still unable to collect himself.

  ‘I wish I’d ordered a double,’ she thought, drinking the cold, sugary last sip. ‘Look at me, just an ordinary woman sitting by herself! Didn’t they even notice I’m pregnant?’ “Could you refresh my tea, please?”

  There was nothing in the papers to occupy her mind. National politics, international politics, exchange rates, the arts and culture calendar… The LIFE section. Another new war, with its economic, political, historical causes, the usual colonialist powers, the oppressor and the oppressed, the master-slave dialectic… She was only interested in the photos of women. Stylish, attractive, as if infected by a chronic youth-beauty virus, women looking at the camera as if facing eternity. They never ate, drank, wore or said anything that wasn’t beautiful. In the flagrant comfort of a life free of tragedy or foolish mistakes, they held forth on human relationships. Fearless, never blinking, they looked directly into the lens… They, too, were retouched. One must learn to think positively; if you can’t change the world, change your attitude. You should love humans, but you need to forget about them; own this life, claim it for yourself, the dying are always the others anyway. A crossword puzzle hint: an egg-shaped instrument. Her horoscope promised a day full of social activities but she must refrain from unkind acts. A very young woman photographed doing her warm-ups — stretching her long legs on a staircase — complained that she couldn’t find true love. (Try substitutes, darling!) She grimaced and closed the paper. She was surprised to realize how spiteful she had become toward the real world — if you could call it that — which she could neither reject nor join up with.

  “I had asked for tea,” she said in a voice that was louder, more jarring and demanding than she had intended…

  (Again, she had managed to be ignored.)

  “Yes, abla, once the water boils!”

  Unable to wait any longer, she opened the package and ate the fresh cheese pastries and buttered buns hastily, as if stuffing them into a trash bin. This was the only way she could subdue the emptiness that gnawed at her like a wild animal hidden in the deep recesses of her body.

  A noxious smell saturated the dirty yellow walls, the tiled floor, the stained drapery. Under the “No Gambling” sign was an algae-ridden, bone-dry fish tank. Two or three empty porcelain vases, framed newspaper clips, a painting with a view of the sea, a console radio — probably vintage sixties — covered with lace had rendered this dull, spiritless space more human than her own house. She felt gloomy. Her gaze settled on the model ship; the best ones used to be made in prison. Gunshots on the TV startled her.

  Suddenly she wanted to bolt from the table, to get outside and run away. Since she’d become pregnant, she had been visited with increasing frequency by an urge to walk away without looking back. Once, transferring from one bus to another, staying no more than a night in any one place, she had traveled for five days and five nights. In fact, she had intended to go back to her hometown, to see her mother; she wouldn’t have mentioned the baby, since she planned to have an abortion as soon as she returned to Istanbul. Instead she had found herself stuck at the bus terminal with her ticket in hand, unable to take “that first step” that initiated every journey. For hours… Double tea, another double tea, missed buses — there was always another bus — a Nescafé with milk — no milk, then with cream, another cigarette… Five days and five nights like this, crossing each city from end to end, drawing circles around cities she passed by and quickly forgot about; noisy, stinking terminals, announcements, tea cups and ashtrays being filled and emptied time and again; sunless, whitewashed, empty motel rooms… Until the onset of nausea.

  Now it was almost over, that horrible, simply horrible nausea, the retching that emptied her guts out every morning… Her oversensitivity to smell, her sore nipples… She was hungry more often and never actually felt full; she tired in an instant. But her skin was flawless, fresh, a youthful blush colored her cheeks, making her sharp features, her severe expression, agreeable. This winter, she felt the cold less than she had in previous years. A sense of dedication, holiness, and responsibility that she’d never experienced before. But then again, she’d gone back to smoking.

  The waiter approached with slow, haughty steps, his eyes fixed on her lips. As if he wanted to ask her something, but didn’t have the courage. Or maybe he was involved in his own private game. She remembered the Chinese box inlaid with swallows, the stamped envelopes, the letters that went on for pages and pages, declaring a war on silence. Airless letters scented with dust, ash, mold, dried blood… As if those traces of ink on paper — carefully chosen words, declarations, exclamation marks, semicolons, et ceteras — hadn’t been painstakingly drawn, one by one, with a ballpoint pen, but rather, as if it had all emerged spontaneously, through some fissure. How detached they were, those letters, in spite of their sincere, eloquent, message of love! How calm and ordinary in the context of so much pain, loss, and tragedy! As if they were reaching out not to her, but to unhearing multitudes, to vacant mirrors on the horizons. And yet she, above all, was someone willing to hear, to listen, to take it all on… What
stayed with her after reading and almost committing them to memory, was an oppressive heaviness, a sense of suffocation… And beyond that, the heartache! Their relations were rooted in words crossed out by prison censors, words she labored to exhume one by one, like a gravedigger. In what hadn’t been said more than what had, under the censor’s thick, coal-black stripes… The waiter grabbed her empty glass and walked even more haughtily back to the tea stand.

  Perched on the edge of the world of humans, sitting there in her dark brown coat, she looked like a pleasant but not very well-executed painting, as if she belonged to a bygone era, a long-forgotten time. Her gaze — aggrieved, inaccessible, clouded — had lost the capacity to see, gaining in its place a faculty much sharper, much darker. She examined her yellowish, swollen fingers and unpolished nails. Her acquired identity had taken over, altered her posture, her manner of sitting, her expression. She held her back straighter, smoking her cigarette by pressing her lips out elegantly to inhale, relaxing them to blow the smoke away. But the transformation only served to reveal the woman hiding behind it, deepening the melancholy coiled like a black snake in the hollows of her eyes. In her outdated clothes from ten years prior, a skirt that was much too short, and her fuzzy curls, she presented an odd, touching, cheerless figure. Her face — made up in its blotchy paints — was completely naked, altogether broken. Her chapped, nervous lips quivered now and then.

  Hers was a deep, dark, agonizing loneliness. It always attacked from the most unexpected place, from what she thought of as the most inaccessible part of herself: her memory. She had watched over her loneliness, tended to it, nursed it with her own blood, and in times of despair, it would feed her in turn. She was like the wrapping that protects a mummy from disintegration, but she couldn’t keep love, no matter how tightly she bound it, from rotting from within. Love was nothing more than a collective unknown. An echo she couldn’t be sure if she heard in the spreading silence of her ability to remember. Love was replaced by memories, memories that were refined, repaired, and perfected; memories that consumed her, down to the very marrow of her bones… Reignited over and over by the weary breath blown over their ashes, until they were memories no more… A crystalized anguish and longing, a desire that burned in the most remote parts of her body.

  “What’s that movie called?” the drowsy waiter asked half-heartedly.

  “I forget!”

  “Was it good?”

  She looked distracted, pensive. Smoking cigarette after cigarette, scribbling on the pages of the newspaper… Her eyes fixed on her blurry reflection on the tabletop as she gazed inward… This outward appearance was a lie, a sleight of hand, a temporary effect, a fragile shell to keep her from being scattered far and wide when the inner eruptions occurred. Without it, her true self would have collapsed to the floor, leaving black streaks behind as it crawled on its knees to escape. (“But, to where?”)

  Outside were trees, streets, forgotten seas. Crowds, shadows fell into one another: the others… The stone building stood there, like a mountain. Solid, colorless, deaf, dark. Shuttered windows, soot-covered ventilation ducts… As if dozens of eyes were looking down through lids sealed shut, weighing the world of humans. She felt sick to her stomach — her stomach, her heart, her soul… She bit her lips. As the taste of lipstick reached her tongue, her eyes began to burn.

  A dizzying tug of war had taken hold over her body: between what was lost and gone forever and what hadn’t yet begun, what belonged to her completely and what did not. Something she couldn’t name was growing insistently, unstoppable — a wild, savage, magnificent something; as if she were being forced to grow along with the baby. Kicking out its independence and giving away none of its secrets, the baby wanted to be, and wanted it more with each day that passed. To be somebody, to be itself, to be everything… As soon as this being saw daylight, all on its own, it would take the irreversible leap into a world where it could fill its lungs to bursting. In a bloody pool of its own making, it would be born.

  She had condemned someone else, her own child, to life, knowing too well she would be unable to protect it, either from the truths of life and death, or from their lies… Who could protect anyone anyway? She was handing down her tragedy — her own creation of thirty-two years, and passed from generation to generation. Hadn’t she refused, in the end, to abort the baby in order to connect to the world of humans with a thin, immortal, unbreakable cord? In order to let loose a triumphant cry against loneliness, to cast the long chain of her anchor as far as she could toward the unknowable harbors of the future? So that, in time, she could exist in her own story? She tailored a heart for the unborn child from her defeated, wounded heart; a brand-new face from her own intolerable face… Now no one could knock her down, trample her, destroy her. Perhaps this was her message in a bottle, sent to the mirror on the horizons; to everything she had lost, to everything she was going to lose, to experience, past and future… A child. A decision deferred; an irreversible light that seeped through her skin, into her womb; hope and regret, a fluke. Its hands had even taken shape, perfectly formed, a miraculous stain in the shape of a human. Very soon, ‘I am alive,’ it would say, ‘I am not a mummy… I want life itself.’

  “Here’s your tea. I apologize, but it just finished brewing…” The young waiter was standing right next to her, too close; she couldn’t tell if he was being polite or mocking her. The smell of soap emanated from his hands. There was a lure, a provocation in his notably swarthy, thick, rough wrists. He wasn’t fond of words — he rounded them as if chewing cud, spitting them from the corner of his mouth.

  “I don’t want it anymore,” she said, raising her eyes from her reflection on the table full of fingerprints…

  “I’m sorry, what? Well, but… ”

  “I don’t want it anymore. Please bring me the check.” She looked up at him, her hands folded on the table. The waiter hesitated for a moment, looking at the dark, wet shadows under her eyes. Had she been crying? He turned his back to her, a back too young, strong and attractive to be worried about such caprices.

  She leaned back, taking a deep breath. She looked out at the street like an actress observing the stage she was about to enter. The buses were running busily, the bus stops filling and emptying in turn, lines forming in front of ATMs. The city’s day of social activities was about to begin. Everyone seemed to be sufficiently content. With themselves, with everything…

  Now the streets were filled with women peering at display windows with shrewd, calculating eyes… Masters of bargaining, they determined the fate of this noisy, angry world. They had talented fingers; their breasts were firm under their bras. They gave birth, they breastfed, raised children; they kept their houses stocked with all kinds of cheeses, they had framed pictures, porcelain vases for their flowers; they never hesitated in showing their claws to waiters, doormen, and above all, other women. Authentic tragedies, losses, humiliations, they bore them silently as if keeping a secret, convincing themselves that their suffering was not in vain. They held on to life with long, colorful fingernails that concealed their defeats. With a saint’s patience they scraped and scraped, then licked the stardust smeared on their hands with the impatience of a goddess. (While she, all she wanted was an opportunity to prosecute life — if only she could find a single witness …) Were they really happy, these women? She folded the paper — she had filled its margins and corners with kites, arrows and clumsily drawn female faces — gathered her belongings and closed her purse. She wiped her eyes, leaned down to adjust her nylons and straighten her skirt. She looked at the stone building. Massive, gloomy, solemn, it stood there waiting. It hadn’t dissolved into the night or oozed into the darkness like tar. Unshakeable, untouchable, unassailable. Still, like anyone who takes it upon himself to be God’s messenger, it couldn’t hide its worldliness. Which made its commands all the more unbearable. To read a death verdict from a drawn straw…

  In the yard trampled by countless footsteps, but with not a human trace to be seen, a
bitter wind was swirling. Ominous, accursed, haunted… It made the trees shiver, scattering papers, plastic bottles, men and women who were hard to tell apart. The crowd, subject to an inexorable, relentless will, rushed toward the building as if caught up in a fishnet being suddenly pulled from the water, then quickly fell into line before being swallowed up by the doors in twos and threes. Now, let them struggle, leap, climb onto each other’s back as much as they wanted! The stone building simply ground up everyone trapped in its net. Countless lives, years, seasons, hours, dreams and disappointments, hopes and regrets… The time was up. Not yet! No. Now.

  She left a good tip and headed for the door. It was as if time, dammed up by a logjam all night long, had finally burst through, and now its rushing floodwaters dragged along everything in its path. The clock’s second hand had switched sides and was on the attack, forging ahead. ‘Calm down, girl,’ she said to herself, ‘calm down, my baby! Don’t abandon me!’ She felt as though her entire body was trying to roll itself into a ball; as if she could not get a breath through her parched throat. In front of the stone building, grinning and baring its gums, she felt vulnerable, like a lone bug that had just sprung out from the safety of its shelter. She rubbed her eyes, adjusted her skirt, and walked slowly, gracelessly. As if she were dragging along a massive tail.