The Stone Building and Other Places

by Asli Erdogan

  Sometimes, I look through the misty windows to see what’s on the other side of the walls, the dark and somber doors. I look at the world — whoever named it so! — its veins visible beneath its wrinkled skin. My gaze lost in an ashen fog. People, more people, still others; they gather, speak, fall silent, each one lost in his own fog. Hands, faces, restless lips full of stories, decisions, judgments. Under the low, sturdy roof of their fiefdom, surrounded by posters, banners, mirrors, light bulbs, bathed in abundant light, they tell their stories at tables where they always sit hungry, though they never miss a meal. It’s as if they have faced nothing but injustice but were never crushed, never surrendered or died. They jealously guard the bloated emptiness of their hearts. Surely, they are the ones with the right to live; death always visits others. It is always “him” who dies and walks away silently into the night. A couple of gunshots are heard from the TV, a demure cry declares how easy it is to kill in the midst of life’s abundance; everything is an ordinary tale, a short film and nothing else — but I have no tales, tall or short! I watch people watching TV, their gaze is fixed, their faces are clear and untroubled; good and evil clash on a dazzling battlefield; voices, rage, ruckus, bargaining. They look at me as if they’re looking in a mirror, aching, burning to see their own likeness in every mirror. And still, most of the time, even a whole person isn’t enough to fill up their pupils. When everyone goes home — waiters empty the ashtrays, say a hasty goodbye to one another, turn off the lights — the owner of the café lets me in. I sit by the stove, the fire dies down, crackling, I finish the bitter tea left in the pot. I sit alone, silently, for hours, like the gatekeeper of a darkness that no one can enter or leave. I am forgotten here, locked inside myself. The night, already old in its first hour, approaches as if it’s reaching for my body, suckling me with its cold, pitch-black, bitter milk. Insomnia, dreams seen with eyes open, I am their watchman, waiting. Waiting for everything to begin, to end.

  Sometimes I wander among mounds of trash, among things that have been used and discarded by people, unrecognizable things, nameless, but even in this abundance, I can’t find the word that’s my share of it. In this world born of trash, of nothingness, one can find an arm, a leg, even a body, but not the word that has fallen from one’s own darkness. A word with broken arms and wings, torn in two, ringing with laughter. Even if one were to find it, oh how hard it would have been to say it! My mind can grasp many things, but life is not among them. My hands understand life better than I do, perhaps this is why they remain silent like the silent scabs that cover them. Dreaming under these scabs, they are a companion to death more than life. Most have already been forgotten anyway, washed by rains, seeping into the soil; the dead and the living dwell in the same eternal sleep now. Shoulder to shoulder they passed through the night, the murderers and the murdered.

  Still, it’s not that bad. I find a half-eaten piece of bread or a simit beside me, maybe some rice left on a plate, I call to the birds. No matter what they say, birds are better than humans. Sometimes, if a bird perches on my shoulder, keeps me company, stays overnight… If a seagull with broken feet goes to sleep on my chest, while telling me about its childhood… Then, I feel like I might have a story of my own, too.

  Shortly before dawn, there is an hour when the night is spent but the daylight hasn’t yet returned — the only hour when the city is entirely emptied out; that is Nobody’s hour. The sky is charged with signs, portents, births, it stirs restlessly in flames the color of blackberries, of pomegranates… I walk the streets alone, aimlessly — on muddy roads, on cobblestone streets of silence; the streets walk in me. I enter abandoned buildings, climb upstairs, appear in empty windows like a mugshot torn down the middle and taped back together; I climb the windy roofs. I slash my arms, my chest, my lips with a razor, not in order to feel pain — it doesn’t hurt anyway — but to hear the blood roused from its sleep, flowing from the old wounds. The untamed blood surging from the heart washed by rains. Its voice is terrifying; it screams, howls, but it never lies. It never does. First one by one, they emerge from the cracks in the earth’s crust; in ones and twos, then all together, a roar swells from the earth, rises in wave after wave. Jump, jump off, scoundrel! Don’t be afraid, you won’t die! The magnificent, incredible chorus that calls me to eternity, carries me, and escorts me on my journey. That always lies… Didn’t we, all of us humans, spring from the same abyss? Tomorrow, when the pain returns, it will have changed into something else, into life’s black-and-blue fingerprints, into a past that belongs to me. It’s good for a human being to have a past, to be able to tell his great story in the past tense.

  Otherwise, what is a human being! Just futile laughter.

  Epilogue

  Somehow, what frightened me most was that he might cry, beg, collapse. He did none of these. When I saw him last, his head was bowed as if weighed down with all the deaths, he sat like a statue that had been watching the desert with its worn-out gaze for thousands of years, utterly alone, abandoned. Bent double as if in pain, he was a shriveled mass, shrunken inside his clothes. His hair fell over his face, covering the old scythe-shaped scar he secretly cherished. I don’t know whether he saw me or not; he didn’t raise his head to look at me. (How I wanted him to look deep into my eyes, to look into those depths where my true self had hidden, but this was also what terrified me most…) Perhaps he sensed my presence like a breeze that lightly ruffled his hair and caressed his forehead, like a timid ghost, a short dream, a memory. Years had to pass for the truth — which I wouldn’t have recognized in that moment’s icy claws — to dissolve and seep into my consciousness. That this was a farewell that would last a lifetime, final and irrevocable, one that would shield me from everything… The other me he saw — more alive, more genuine, more imaginative, that once-and-never-again self, defined by the range of his gaze and his lifetime — vanished forever with him. I, on the other hand, went on living, diminished, weary, carrying my dead self inside.

  He believed that murderers were trapped forever in the icy stare of their victims. Like flies trapped in amber, unchanging over millions of years. Caught in their own murder. Like a two-dimensional, still, frozen image in a universe whose light is swiftly dying out… Like a speck, steadily diminishing, in that last stare ascending to the sky, wrapping the earth in its vast universe, in the endless infinitude of time. Perhaps this is how he leaves his eyes with me, returns me back to life, drawing me out from that dark, absolute, eternal unchanging universe. L-I-F-E. Didn’t we stay alive for the sake of this magnificent feast of letters!

  For the sake of that magnificent feast you struggle, speak, change, you achieve. Taking on the strength of another, of another you, you overcome this world’s night. You survive on strength borrowed from the future; you keep moving toward the new day, toward the sharp edges of all new days. But your night makes it to the other side of the horizon long before you do. Up and down, you pace your memory’s endless, shadowy hallways, you climb up and down its stone stairs, enter empty rooms, wait and listen. Sometimes, in the silence of a stone or a human face, by a noose hanging in the forest or on the gallows, you trace circles that expand and contract. Like a voiceless scream, like a word denied its syllables, like a half-erased verse, you wander on life’s worn-out trails, its dark shores. There is the asphalt, you can’t see the soil or the bodies beneath it; walls, ceilings, blind doors stretch like curtains between the night’s darkness and yours; streetlights illuminate the deceptions of hope; immense flawless structures, buildings, bridges, monuments, stretch to the cliffs of your solitude. Splitting into a multitude of selves — more distant, more deaf and lost to each other — you begin the same exile again and again, each time a bit more human. You circle the abyss, calling from cliff to cliff, falling silent now among the dead now among the living. You are the mugshot torn in two and taped back together, crowned with the stars of your own night, you search for the path that will take you back to yourself, where you came from. Far from the secrets, the crimes
and confessions, you search for the pathways of your blood, the door of your heart. There is a graveyard steadily expanding inside of you; you visit less and less, each time quicker to turn back and leave in defeat. You hold a spent word in your hand, shake off its dust, press it to your ear. You call to it, you yell through it, you fling it into the air like a dead bird. You climb to the rooftops of the round, drowsy world of humans, look out at the streets, horizons, the distances that carry no trace of you. This is the entirety of your final place of refuge! A frosty wind against your face, a faraway sky, an emptiness with a few stars, a small precipice. The sound of a wing. You are still alive. There, just like that, suspended, waiting, swinging back and forth like a needle between the earth and the sky, almost like being suspended between being and nothingness… You sense that your two selves — the alive and the dead — call hopelessly to each other; each one a victim of the other’s abyss, calling out, always calling out without ever being heard…

  As for me… Each time, I explained myself incompletely, incorrectly. In the wrong place, at the wrong time. Resorting to a language that was either too dry or too tragic… I strung together four, five hollow words, as dreadful as a skeleton, speaking in unyielding silences, in words more muted than spoken. Or, as if life was suddenly demanding to be narrated, described, expressed, I spouted lifeless metaphors, verbs stretched tight as a bowstring, images in search of their true forms. Until I had no strength left. I wandered among the walls of words, row after row, groping my way forward; like an apparition in the moonlight, I entered my story uninvited. A story that is no less unfamiliar even to me — my makeshift, formless story… Hollowed-out, worn away by winds, covered in sand and rainwater at birth… There, among the rugged stones piled one atop another, in a place where no one would approach me, I stood alone — naked, lost, defeated to the end. Far beyond tragedies, beyond crime and mercy, my fate unraveled, thread by thread, letter by letter; I dissolved in the churning muck. Unable to find the word that could bring me back to myself and free me from him. A word that had survived the blows of thousands of years, still intact, its limbs unbroken, a word that emerges from darkness able to usher in a new day. I spoke behind masks that sometimes smiled, sometimes cried; I spoke of what became unspeakable as I spoke; like a shadow, I followed their whispers, tears, and screams. I sent some of them to the streets, some to the stars, some to silence. The only one who could have brought my story to an end — my story that even truth no longer claimed — the only person who could make it mine and return it to LIFE, where it really belonged, had vanished long ago. Only life could confirm, lay claim to, and bear up what had transpired. There was not a single word that remained, no word that didn’t crumble like a dry twig in my hands, that wasn’t a witness to my darkness, that didn’t bleed in my silence.

  But sometimes, very rarely, I hear a voice inside myself that doesn’t resemble mine — a voice that is neither human, nor does it speak to humans. I hear my blood awakening, flowing through the old wounds, bursting from open veins… And the screams roused by the oldest, truest fears, I hear them, I remember how they were screamed in order to stay alive. My wounds speak very rarely and never lie. But even their incoherent, dreadful sound shatters against the inscrutable walls of the human face and speech, turning into lies and falling to the ground like rain. That voice loses its way among the circles, detours, cul-de-sacs of a labyrinth, dissolving into thin air without meeting a single heart.

  I think I call to the dead sometimes, sometimes to life itself. Which one answers or will answer, I don’t know. But sometimes, when a song that one of my scabbed-over selves begins to hum for no reason reaches all the way to my heart, in all its clarity and wholeness, I recognize this voice that comes from the depths of the earth or the sky, I remember once thinking it was mine. That song born of nothingness and reborn in everything, the one that steadily grows and spreads wave after wave, I understand that I still hear it, always hear it. A song that grows louder with every human being on its path, crosses beyond horizons, reaching for its intended destination, an unclaimed heart, the heart of Nobody. Toward the pit where all disappear… Born from an interminable cry as it was from an angelic, dark laughter, as much from life as from what was not lived… A song of what has been lost and will be lost, of sunlight and stardust, of dreams the color of the human heart, of first and last glances, of distances and of the nearby, of farewells that last a lifetime, of gallows, winds, rocks, elegies; of rain that falls on water, runs through the soil, fills the eyes; a song of everything unsaid even when said… But of course, I always join the song in the wrong place and in the wrong key.

  Your head had fallen. You seemed to be achieving a strange blossoming amidst the wads of tissue they had applied to your wounds. 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.