by Asli Erdogan
She remembered the egg-shaped instrument: Ocarina!
“She forgot her hat,” said the young waiter.
“Who?”
“That funny woman who sat by the window for hours.”
That night she dreamed of a marsh that extended from one horizon to the other. Reeds taller than a human, scraggly plants with long tangled arms, trees that shivered like old women with brittle limbs… Giant vines, low clouds that almost touched the earth… A man is running with all his strength… Plunging through the mud, staggering, lurching, running, running away. Covered in blood and mud… The pack of barking dogs grows louder and louder, the snare tightens. Hopelessly, he lifts his head, as if praying, cursing or in vain defiance, perhaps he wants to look up at the sky for one last time. He sees the ladder descending from the clouds. A ladder made of giant, translucent raindrops like diamonds — an unexpected gift from the heavens. Climbing, he begins to crumble, disintegrating into a thousand specks of light raining down on the earth. That is when the Woman becomes visible. The Goddess of the Marsh. She emerges from among the dead, groping forward through dark waters. Buried to her hips in the mud, she lets her roots sink deeper, down into the earth’s memory; moss, dead leaves, leeches hang from her hair, her eyes become food for marsh creatures. She hides the man beneath her skirt, hides him inside the warm, soft, viscous clay. As the night presses on, the dogs and the hunters leave. A terrifying green glow of thousands of poisonous eyes — instead of stars — illuminates the swamp; the air trembles with thousands of trails suddenly lost; nothing is heard but the wheezing of the wind. No one could pass the night here. Other than the Woman… She belongs here. This is her true world, this wind, this silence, this terrifying green. The swamp night where the dead and the living call to each other, where the darkness of the earth is inseparable from the darkness of humans. The swamp night that embraces the wayward, the lost, the defeated, whispering visions of underworld rivers… Silently, under the pale moonlight, her flesh ripping, ripping, she brings the man back into the world. Smeared in mud and blood. Something has gone wrong — she has birthed a monstrosity with arms for legs and legs for arms. Shaking himself off, the man resumes his escape, trying to run on his feeble arms, falling to the ground and rising, writhing, crawling… The woman extends the ladder she has braided from her hair. “Take this road,” she tells him, pointing to the path opening across the dark waters, created by her ponderous, muddy tears …
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. Standing upright and still, like a statue of a goddess at the edge of a cliff. Exposed to all blows. Her face devoid of expression, her gaze fixed. Staring at an imaginary horizon, with eyes no longer able to see, turned into dried-up wells, clutching her purse tightly against her stomach. Her voice was lost, she could not speak. The wind blew her hair about, swaying her body as if she were a cypress tree. She could now set herself afire on the edge of the abyss, let her smoke disperse. She had turned into a defiant call, into a prayer: COME. ‘Show yourself to me even for a second, even just once! I cannot go back to that long, painful waiting. To that emptiness… I cannot bear it any longer.’
She remained like that until the prisoner was taken from the stone building and carried to the prison van. Upright, inscrutable, mute. Blown by the wind… Exposed to all kicks. She saw all of it. The brief light in the man’s eyes — bewilderment, joy, gratitude, or love, or none of these; the slight movement at the corner of his lips, the almost imperceptible farewell gesture of his hands cuffed on his chest, his thumbs bending, pointing to the ground — right then the guard pushing the man violently, swearing — his head hitting the metal frame as he and the others were shoved into the vehicle… She saw it all.
Even long after the prison van disappeared, she stood there, stock-still, rubbing her brow as if her own head had been smashed.
THE
STONE
BUILDING
The Beginning
The facts are obvious, contradictory, coarse… And blaring. I leave the facts, like a mound of giant stones, to those who busy themselves with important matters. What interests me is the murmur among them. Indistinct, obsessive… Digging through the rock pile of facts, I’m after a handful of truths — or what used to be called that, these days it doesn’t have a name. Lured on by a flickering light, what if I were to dive deeper and deeper, if I could reach the bottom and make it back — I’m after a handful of sand, the song of the sand that slips through my fingers and disappears. “Those who speak of the shadow, speak the truth.” Truth speaks through shadows. Today, I will speak of the stone building, the one that the narrative has avoided at all costs, or at least kept at a safe distance, looking out at it from behind words. Constructed long before I was born, it’s five stories tall, if we don’t count the basement, and there are steps leading up to the entrance.
One must write with the body, with the naked defenseless body beneath the skin… Yet, words only call out to other words. You take the letters “L” and “F,” a couple of vowels, “I” and “E,” and you write: LIFE. The only key is not to confuse the order. Misplace a letter and you turn the living clay into simple inert matter — as the legend goes… like in the legend… Life, as I write it, belongs to those who can grab it, with a deep sigh, not with a mere breath. Like plucking a fruit from its branch, a root from the earth… As for you, what’s left is but an echo, like the hum of waves that you hear when you hold an empty shell to your ear. Life: a word imbibed and consumed down to its very marrow; the hum of a wave of quiet grief, an oceanful of waves.
A young boy once said, “Better to outdare life before it outdares you.” He was a reckless soul, a cross of one kind of darkness with another, he had come to know the stone building too early in life. He was never afraid again, either because he remembered that first fear forever or because he forgot it altogether… Ever since, they say, he laughs for no apparent reason.
Suppose, on the street leading to the stone building, there’s a coffeehouse, and in front of it, winter or summer, a man. (Inside the building, a vast courtyard, surrounding the courtyard, staircases with wire mesh reaching high overhead… To keep people from jumping. Because for the past century or two, human life has become too precious to be hurled against the stones. And outside the building, spiraling up to the fifth floor, is a fire escape. At night, under the pale moonlight, shadows appear, climbing up the stairs, but, to this day, no one has been seen climbing down.) The man, like a relic from some forgotten era, is always there, on the sidewalk… When he can find them, he sits on newspapers, cartons, cardboard boxes. Around him, you can see empty bottles, food scraps, vomit, puddles of piss. His face, divided into uneven halves by a deep scar, as pitted as the surface of the moon, reveals nothing, not even his age. Still, if you follow the scar like a mountain path over his battered skull, you will arrive at the melancholy hollows of his eyes and find yourself standing at the edge of an abyss. One that speaks not in a human tongue but in that of the wind, moonlight, and rocks. Because you cannot dare ask for his name, you assign to him the first letter of the alphabet: A.
The coffeehouse regulars lead such simple, ordinary lives that any attempt to describe them ends up sounding artificial, forced, exaggerated. In any case, no one here talks about himself much, and even if he did, nobody would listen. Although they’ve had more than their share of calamity, failure, and humiliation, the regulars still believe that humans are naturally good, though they can’t quite explain why there is so much evil on this earth. Each one, in his own way, has come to grips with life — with poverty, with privations, with disappointments called “life.” By clenching their fists, by cursing, by humoring each other, by stealing, struggling, and above all, simply by making do… Truth be told, they don’t have many options. Still, even Hell isn’t so bad all the time — even in Hell there’s a cup of tea, a corner one can claim as one’s own, a friendly gesture, a smile, a familiar song.
Suppose there’s a nameless bar across from the coffehouse where only an excl
usive few are allowed entry, where experienced bouncers stand at the door until dawn, showing the drunks and troublemakers to their taxicabs. For the bar’s regulars, the lives across the street are stories they’d like to tell one day. Each time they begin inventing a human story… (isn’t the art of story-telling, in a way, the art of stirring coals without burning your fingers?)… it leaves behind the bitter taste of death. When they grow weary of this rotten system — the heap of filth that passes for a system — and of the clockwork labyrinths of their souls, they look outward with one final hope. Past their own reflection on the bright window, to the shadowy, silent, indistinct alleyways… the courtyards, coal cellars, tunnels, secret passageways where the ghost of freedom roams, rattling its chains… They walk as if the streets belong to them, with noisy footsteps, leaving deep footprints, going up and down stairwells swept clean by others. Sometimes they feel entitled to what they desire; at other times, they enjoy the privilege of cruelty, so long as it’s not overdone. After all, who would turn down a life of adventure and strife? Besides, they’ve paid a princely sum, endured plenty of loss. They’ve never hesitated before coming to blows, fighting the fight, looking danger in the eye. They’ve spoken out — with giant capital-letter words in which they could see their own reflection — yet they’ve expected nothing in return from the indifferent world. When they’ve had their fill of despair, of stories, crimes, sins, confessions — each one the same as any other — they leave the back alleys behind and revert to their destiny, picking up where they left off. To invent the hell of human freedom — moving beyond good and evil… far from absolute good and absolute evil, in the comforting safety of mediocrity… After all, every human life is a defeat, but some defeats are more spectacular than others.
Those at the coffeehouse know this hell intimately, even if they don’t give it a name… “Freedom” reminds them of a yard fenced with wire mesh. As for being “human”… Isn’t one born a “human” with the sound of the very first cry? Still, it’s difficult to bear being human, even more difficult to be no more than that.
As for A… No one notices him. He lies in front of the window like an empty sack, as he does in front of every door the world slams in his face. The streets belong to him, but he goes nowhere. As if he’s captivated by something inside — maybe the stove, or the TV… Something he has worn out by staring at it… The dirty window reflects back a picture of his existence. Tainted, very tainted… His existence is a long poem about being human.
Sometimes, what little life is left in him, that tiny spark, blazes unexpectedly, and turns into an outburst of dark laughter. Wave after wave of uncontrollable laughter making him keel over in convulsions; he manages to raise himself, but, unable to stop, keeps on laughing. The hazy halo of madness can’t protect him from cold, pain, hard knocks, but it does protect him from the earliest memories of the stone building. He is known to laugh even when he gets a beating, as if he hasn’t cried since the day he was born. (After all, sadness is a luxury not everyone can afford.) He makes no attempt to understand the world — I think I try to do that for him. He doesn’t get angry either… He is in the world like a sponge thrown into dirty water. And the world is in him… Caught in his gaze, it wastes away, is hollowed out, turns to simple clay. Well, what is this thing called “life,” other than a murky image on the windowpane! Tainted, very tainted, a long poem on nothingness. Speak a little A., withhold your shadow from the words. Give them enough shadow, make them speak the whole truth with the weight of shadows!
I will now defer my laughter and take you to the stone building. When you turn the corner, you’ll think you have come to a dead end but the path curves left just in front of the stairs. You will stop there and bid farewell to the world of humans. The path that brings you here will never take you back. Inside, lights are on, day and night; in the stark, ruthless light, all forms — inanimate or human — and their shadows become equal. A fate summarized in a few sentences ends up being the succinct answer one gives to all possible questions. A confession. A confession extracted every hour on the hour. Human: the oldest riddle, matter that speaks.
I loved somebody once. He left his eyes with me. Since he had no one else to leave them with. Love. A word I found by digging through what spills over from the heart, through so much darkness. Nobody had told me “Everyone kills the one they love”! We were together at the stone building. I listened to the voices, listened and waited. When it was my turn, the sun had not yet risen.
You don’t believe me, you think I saw the stone building in my dreams, don’t you? But aren’t we all created from the yeast of dreams? Sooner or later, the day breaks, blood-red streaks appear on the eastern horizon… Stars harden in the taut, motionless sky, dispersing one by one into the unseen. The last star lets a rope down, toward us, so that the silent night, the slit and bloodied words, the dispossessed shadows, the impassioned, unwanted dreams, the winged dead, might grab onto it and climb up… so that all the dreams that came to live among us and left without goodbyes, might climb to the furthest reaches of the sky where everyone and everything disappears…
You don’t hear me, do you? Perhaps I shouldn’t have told this story in the past tense. I began the song in the wrong place again, and in the wrong key.
The Humans
A. never managed to finish his story — the rings of hell are more tangled up than a human life… Days passed, seasons changed, but he kept his orbit around the stone building, drawing circles that waxed and waned. He walked and walked, and walked again, till he collapsed from exhaustion on the sidewalks, on life’s worn-out paths, on its dusky edges… His twisted form coiled in front of unyielding doors; shivering in puddles of mud and piss, he told and retold his story. Laughing in the wrong places, laughing more and more… He couldn’t find even one person to listen to him. That’s why A. learned to speak with the dead, with the birds, with the wind…
When I saw him last, his head was bowed, as if he couldn’t bear its weight. His hair covered his forehead and eyes. What frightened me most was that he might lift his head and look at me… What frightened me most… And what I most wanted: for him to look up, see me, murmur a word. A sign, a reproach, a farewell… He did none of these. This is how he left his eyes with me. Since he had no one else to leave them with.
Then, I recognized your voice, my own voice coming from you. How strange! What frightened me most was that you might cry, beg, collapse. You did none of these. As if death were some kind overly dramatic end — a literary device kept on reserve for me. But you stood fast, suspended in the middle of a sentence where the dawn never arrives. The glow of your eyes the color of ash… You lit the last candle of your strength and offered it to the break of day.
Your head had fallen. Covered in the wads of tissue they had plastered to your wounds, it was as if you had arrived at some strange blossoming. Your eyes were like two solitary stars concealed among the branches. You left them with me. I parted the branches one by one. Parted them for days and nights, for years. By the time I had finished, you were already long gone.
FROM THIS SIDE OF THE WALL
The wall that separates you from yourself is cold and wet, riddled with holes and covered with words carved by thousands of hands, erased by time and by another thousand hands. Fingerprints the color of dried roses. Keepsake roses, faded and pressed after their brief season of bloom, that shower of crimson buds, twisting vines and thorns. Your own voice speaks to you from the other side of the stone wall. “Are you there?” it calls to you. “Don’t you worry, we won’t stay long,” it says, consoling, calming. The voice reminds you of the lullabies your mother used to sing, but it sings them now like a supplication, or maybe an elegy. It wrests words from the prison of language, words to lean on and stand tall, words to light like a candle in the darkness, words to hold in your palm and caress. The thicker the walls, the wider the reach of your dreams. You walk the skies, the meadows, the seashore, the waters, you walk and walk and walk. Your imagination, a pack of wild ho
rses, must gallop, in a frenzy, faster than the whirlwind that had sucked you up and flung you out against the rocks. It turns an ominous stain into the eyes of someone once beloved, into a tree heavy with fruit, into unspoiled forests, continents. Into deserts and oceans, into caravans, into ships whose sails fill with the breath of your soul… Into endless stories — color after color, image after image… Stories that won’t reach the far shore, won’t make it through the night… It is your imagination that finds a vast universe, molds it from nothingness, only to return it back to its birthplace, nothingness, as the day begins to dawn. A world the color of pure light meets your eyes. If you want to open them. Later, when that voice that calls to you — consoles you, cries in your name, seeps into your night — when that voice, too, goes quiet, then, even solitude vanishes into thin air.
When I saw A. again, he had grown dark, a man darker than dark. It was a summer day, in the early hours when daylight hadn’t yet taken on any color. Hunched in front of the stone building, he was sitting on the worn-out sidewalk wet with morning dew. It was as if the night, in its hasty departure, had left behind this odd-looking, half-blind bird, perched there on the sidewalk, alone and completely ignored, for he was too strange for anyone with human senses to notice. Even the daylight seemed oblivious to him, leaving him in the shadows as it lit up everything else. He spoke in a slow monotone, never raising his eyes from the ground. Every so often he’d shake his head, insistently repeating something over and over; then he’d look uncertain, puzzled, as if he’d lost his place, only to go back and start over. Now seized by a fear of words, now soothed by the sound of his own voice, he spoke nonstop. His purple veins stood out, his face, a dense, impenetrable forest, was completely still, as was his body aside from a soft swaying from side to side. But his fingers were in constant motion, pointing, folding, unfolding, endlessly kneading an invisible ball of clay. Words were like tiny loaves of stolen bread, he hid them in his hands, kept them warm, breaking off large chunks, giving them form one by one. It was a rambling speech, now rising now falling, never quite finding an endpoint, fitful, circuitous, full of dead ends. It was more of a story or a fable than a grievance or a discourse. A tale about the precarious human condition… Maybe he was writing a letter to life with invisible ink, or merely adding footnotes. Taking up the most shunned, the most battered words, he was trying to pull together the scattered pieces of his being, patching the gaps with newspaper, replacing what had been lost forever with random castoffs, stitching together a soul for himself — or something others would call a “soul” — from the world’s trash. A. was speaking with the stones, with the sidewalks saturated with the night’s chill and desolation, with the soil buried under the pavement… The roots of trees twining with the dead — victims with their assassins — the memory of the soil, of fire, iron and ash, woven through the painful labor of rebirth… He was exhausted, too exhausted to even take one step toward our common world spinning in its orbit. He seemed to have shrunk inside of his loose, sagging jacket, with his baggy pants falling from his waist, and yet, even this emaciated body was too heavy for him to carry along. His shoestrings were missing; his arms and legs, which he couldn’t move, hung from his torso like dead branches. The streets belonged to him, but he went nowhere. There he stood, in front of the stone building, swaying unconsciously, like an eyelid closing, opening, then closing again. Like a scar from an old burn on the earth’s skin, like a birth mark. Like a wax seal — proof of authenticity — bleeding out along the edges when pressure is applied and then hardening into its final shape, its human shape. He was amazingly calm — he had understood everything, forgiven everything. His brows were knit, his eyes intense, his placid voice was serious, almost emotionless, except, in rare instances, when a nervous tremor convulsed his muscles, his body shaking as if burning with fever, and a dark wave swept through his face, wiping away any trace of life, his eyes going dark, like two burnt-out stars. As if he was pulling out a nail, or tightening a screw into his heart, he managed to make himself whole in his story, to give birth to a seedling, achieve an arduous flowering. And then he would fall silent, lifting his arms as if to say, “This is how life is,” like a hopeless, sullen jester at the end of his act, waiting for the crowd to applaud. Still, it was the language of wounds that spoke in him, of wounds and desolation, of deserted marketplaces, streets, beds in a jail cell, of stories with no protagonist… A language that no one wants and no one hears, made of words wrested from silence, wrapped in an aura of inscrutability, and returned to silence. If it could have been heard, it might have called to the human world like the Siren’s song, luring it in and smashing it against the walls of the stone building. If someone had been there to look into his eyes — eyes that had long ago given up on seeing — they would have seen mirrors reflecting the world’s deluge back at the empty mirrors of their own vacant stare, receding all the way back to the moment of their own creation from simple clay. But these days A. spoke only to the stones, to the soil — its silence — hidden beneath the stone… He wrote his letter to the wounded dove that had settled on his shoulder and fallen asleep. To the wind and to the dead… A. spoke through empty hands that held his life, divided by a scar into two unequal halves. He expected no response. At the end, he began to laugh with an unbridled terrifying cackle, as he retreated from his own story. He extracted his name from the alloy called life. Dredging himself from that colossal, unintelligible tableau, he set the world free, floating like a blank sheet of paper in the dawn of a new day.
