Labyrinth

by Burhan Sonmez

  7

  The beams streaming in through the venetian blinds cast a dim light into the doctor’s consulting room. The kilim designs on the sofa cover come to life. The scent of the cat that was wandering around just now but has since disappeared into the next room lingers on the sofa. The same scent pervades the armrests of the armchair I’m sitting on. Do I have a scent? Aware that my attention is straying, the doctor hands me a glass of water. She waits for me to drink it, then continues talking. The taxi you took was crossing over to the European side via the Bosphorus Bridge. When an accident brought the traffic to a halt, you opened your eyes in the back seat where you had dozed off, looked outside, and tried to work out where you were. According to the taxi driver. If there hadn’t been an accident the taxi would have carried on driving and you would have carried on sleeping. After a few minutes the driver got out of the taxi to find out what had caused the traffic jam; the cars were at a standstill, so he phoned a friend. While he was chatting you got out of the car and walked to the edge of the bridge. The buzz of the city. The sea shimmering with the city lights. Background noise. Apparently you stuck your head over the bridge and looked down, into the sea. But only the moment before, you had wanted to go home. That’s what you said to the driver when you got into the taxi. That night’s concert had been a great success. You had been swept along with the crowd’s excitement. Do you mind me telling you all this? We need to talk about it, even if you don’t remember. I’ve read articles about you, and interviews. You cited Kurt Cobain and Yavuz Çetin as your favorite musicians. Both of them committed suicide. The doctor looks at the glass in my hand, to try and determine whether I want more water. She watches the movements of my fingers. I’m thinking about what she said in our last session, about my mother and father both dying in a car accident. The glass is empty. It disappears in my hand. If I squeeze it just a bit harder it will break. Apparently the active ingredient in the drugs I’m taking is lithium. Lithium unburdens the mind and frees it of obsessive questions. It seems I won’t need to fret about anything anymore. If the past has abandoned me then I too can abandon the past, until it comes back of its own accord. I don’t want to think about all this. I don’t care if jumping into water is an indication of the desire to return to the mother’s womb and jumping from a height is an indication of a creative urge. My mind is on other things. Doctor, when I opened my eyes in the hospital I asked you what had happened to me. What did happen to me? But you asked me who I was. Who was I? I could hear ferries’ horns. The sound of a ferry in the midst of the commotion in the street. Did a sound that slipped away from the din and reached my ears have any significance as far as life was concerned? You were asking me my name, but I was trying to remember why I wanted to die. Knowing one didn’t make the answer to the other any easier. What brings on the desire to die? The ferries’ horns echoed inside my head. Car horns, the cries of street peddlers. But there was no sound of seagulls. It’s a special skill our mind has, to think about what isn’t there, you said. Doctor, I wish everyone forgot the past, I wish everyone went to bed at night and woke up with an empty mind and didn’t look at me with such pity. Boratin Bey, if that were the case then the world would be different, human nature would become something else. That’s what I’m saying Doctor, maybe then no one would end their life for no reason. The words fly before my eyes, floating like leaves, gliding in the air, first in one direction, then another. I catch the words nearest me, shove them into my mouth, and spout them out without chewing. This morning as I was leaving home the grocer on the corner saw me and ran up to me. He had heard what had happened to me. When he saw me alive and well, he beamed and said, You got off lightly, as though I had been in a trifling little accident. He took my hand between his two hands and squeezed it warmly. He called over his daughter, who appeared in the shop’s doorway, and told her to kiss my hand. I stopped her. She was about thirteen or fourteen. With a shy expression. She had passed her exam (which exam?). The grocer squeezed my hand again and thanked me. He said that thanks to my help the girl had passed her exam and saved her life. Did I give her lessons, or pay for her to do some course? While the grocer was reeling off long sentences starting with, Thanks to your kindness, the girl bowed her head in embarrassment. Well done, you clever girl, I said. While on the one hand the thought that I was a good person was strangely comforting, on the other hand I was anxious to get away from this conversation that left me speechless. I realized once again that I wasn’t certain of anything besides my body. Is there anyone who can be certain of anything besides their body? I take my medicine at night and wake up the next morning with fresh hope, but at the end of the day I find myself back in the same place. I sit on the edge of the bed and examine my hands, arms, and legs as though seeing them for the first time. What can be worth dying for? Was there anything that valuable in my life? I had fallen asleep in a taxi on the way home after a wonderful evening. When I woke up and found myself on the bridge I had tried to kill myself. If that is all life amounts to then maybe there’s no point in dying for it.

  The doctor takes the glass out of my hand. She realizes I’m looking at the mirror on the wall instead of at her. She waits for me to speak. After a long silence she asks, What can you see there? I see a mirror. Reflecting beams of light. The kilim designs on the sofa changing direction. The cat’s scent pervading the mirror’s interior. A drop of water on the edge of the empty glass. The din from the street drowning out the doctor’s voice. Boratin Bey, will you tell me what you can see? I see a mirror. I don’t mean that, I’m asking what you can see in the mirror, your face. My face? Yes, weren’t you examining your face? Half this city would give their eyeteeth for such a handsome face. Instead of asking, what about the other half? I say, Are you really a doctor? She smiles. The journalists who praise you by likening your music to your face have a point. Those good looks alone are enough to live for. I turn back to the mirror. Just as I do every morning, I look without blinking. The image in the mirror doesn’t blink either. I wait to see which of us will grow tired and give in. Whoever blinks first is me. When I stand in front of a mirror for a long time I get confused about which side I’m on. I think of the tale of the forty-leg centipede. The doctor reaches out and points at my fingers, as though she is going to touch them. These are the best guitar-playing fingers of recent years, she says. There are values in life that are worth living for Boratin Bey. If you say your body is the only thing you’re certain of, that will do for a start. I look at my fingers. They’re bony. Thin-veined. Why am I me? Why am I Boratin, and not a doctor, or a grocer? The answer to that isn’t written on my ID or credit card. Why did my parents die in a car accident? An accident caused a bottleneck on the Bosphorus Bridge. Apparently I woke up and looked out the taxi window. It seems I thought my parents had died in the accident farther ahead. The years and the distance in between don’t matter. The dead can always die again, at any time, in any place. And I can be born again (can I?). When I opened my eyes in the hospital you could have told me I was someone else, someone whose parents were still alive. You could have spared me my orphaned childhood. Words, words. Letters, numbers, but mostly question marks flutter before my eyes. I want to put a question mark even after the word yes. Yes? My whole life will pass like this. Do you know doctor, once there was a forty-leg centipede, with a perfect figure that no one could take their eyes off. He had a graceful walk, he was a good dancer. One day they asked him: Which leg do you use to take such elegant steps? Do you use your seventh right leg first, followed by your fourteenth left leg? And do you then raise your twenty-first right leg and place your thirty-second left leg on the ground? The forty-leg centipede realized that to that day he had never given a moment’s thought to the steps he took. Intrigued, he started to walk, trying to work out which leg he raised, on which side. All his legs became entangled. Never mind dancing, he couldn’t even manage to walk on a straight road. In my previous life, I too was bound by my habits, just like everyone else. When I lost my memory I was forced to
think about details. The obligation to recall a time I don’t remember. I stumble. I bump into people when I’m walking in the street. The calendar inside my head is all mixed up. I think we’re living the old times now and that distant places are within easy reach. In my apartment there’s a figurine of the statue of Mary and Jesus in Rome. When I look at it I see Rome inside the map of Istanbul. Jesus has just died. Mary, mourning in the dark streets, is begging for bread with the migrants. The speed of light has been calculated. All the continents have been discovered. Now the world is waiting for someone to discover a new habitable planet. I’m tired of remembering these details, of doubting every single one, then slotting each of them into the appropriate place, one by one. I’m incapable of walking in the street. I want to go home, lock the door, and be by myself. I’m afraid of myself. What if I am not me…. While I was in the hospital I watched a news report on television about a man who had escaped from prison. He used to lock people in a chamber under his house in Istanbul, tie their hands and feet behind them with rope, torture them, bury their bodies in the soil, then go up one floor and live an ordinary life with his wife and children. I wasn’t amazed by how the man could have done all those things, but by how others could have lived with such a person, how they could have sat at the same table as him and slept in the same bed. After the man was captured he showed no remorse and said he had done it all in the name of God. Fifteen years. In prison terms, that’s a long time. Perhaps the years taught him remorse. Then he escaped from prison. He thought the false ID in his pocket would allow him to escape from his past too. The outside world seemed foreign to him. It wasn’t his old world. He woke up in the middle of the night, in a taxi stuck halfway across a bridge, with the urge to kill himself. He climbed up to the bridge’s railings and held out his arms. He leapt up like a bird, his wings carried him down, to a sea beyond everyone’s reach. Wasn’t there a song about that? In my sick bed I thought, what if I’m that man. Your words and the reporter’s words were the same distance away, Doctor. Everything was the same distance from my body. It was later on that I got to know the crowds in the city. I’m trying to get used to the noise. I have trouble getting words out. When I repeat a word too many times it loses its meaning. When I say I should sleep, the word sleep melts away. When I say my childhood, the word child crumbles, letter by letter. And when the letters join together again, their order changes and they become a new word. I don’t understand that new word. Songs come to my mind. I decide to follow notes instead of letters. I hum a tune. But then the notes become scattered too. Each note that changes place appears in the wrong position. The song on my lips turns into a deafening racket.

  8

  Clutching a simit, I head into the center of the park and sit down on a bench. People chatting under trees, dozing in the shade. People lying on their backs, contemplating the sky. I raise my head to see where the seagulls are flying. In Istanbul it’s customary to feed the seagulls simit; was it a custom I used to observe? I, I, I. In the old days (how old?) there was no I in the language people spoke. They didn’t say, who am I, they asked, who is Boratin? Instead of saying, I’m hungry, they said, Boratin is hungry. Boratin is sitting in the park. Boratin is contemplating the sky. Boratin is thinking, but he doesn’t want to think. He doesn’t want to get up. He doesn’t want to leave. But he doesn’t know what he does want either. Now he is chewing slowly. He remembers this taste, even though it’s the first time he’s eating simit. The brain works in strange ways. It’s got me in the palm of its hand, without saying a single word to me. Who belongs to whom, do I own my brain, or does my brain own me? The sound of a ferry’s horn. If I stand up I’ll be able to see the ferry. If I walk towards it I won’t have to go to the sea, if I wave to the ferry from a distance. If I wave to the ferry, as is customary in Istanbul. If I whistle to the seagulls. Every ferry has its own flock of seagulls that follows it. When it’s choppy, when it’s windy. The passengers throw up pieces of simit, the seagulls cut through the air like knives and catch every morsel. While I sit on the bench, my brain has wandered off to the shore and is gazing at the ferry. It’s tossing simit to the seagulls. I know that my brain lives by thinking. But I am not it. I am sitting in the park eating simit.

  I see someone shuffling in my direction. I can tell by his face that he’s coming towards me. He’s around my age. With a thin mustache. Long legs. A raised shirt collar. Rolled-up sleeves. Hello, he says. Hello, I say. He sits beside me. He leans back on the bench. He takes a deep breath, puffs up his chest, then exhales. As though he has been carrying the entire burden of life on his shoulders. He casts his eyes around him, at the growing crowd. You can’t trust these people, he says. I’m human too, right, but no one gives a damn about my troubles. Look at them. They’re all sitting in their little groups. Don’t imagine that just because they’re sitting together they know each other. Most of them are strangers. If they got up and sat next to someone else, no one would care, they’d just pick up their conversation from where they had left off. It’s just me they avoid. Anyone would think I was out to borrow money; I sit next to them, say a couple of words, and they get up and leave. The man falls silent. He raises his head. He seems more anxious and tense than I am. I realize he doesn’t recognize me. How are you, I say, how’s life? His expression becomes more gentle. He smiles. Life is the same as ever, he says, but I’ve made up my mind to change it. I’ve bought myself an engagement ring. Now I’m looking for the girl who’s going to be my fiancée. Look. He holds out his hand and shows me his ring. It looks too big for his bony finger. His hand’s shadow trembles along with his hand. We fit comfortably on the bench. Me, him, and our shadows. Was it the doctor who said our past is like a shadow, or did I think of it myself in my previous life? Our past is always with us, apparently. No matter how many years pass, it’s always the same distance away from us, like a shadow. I introduce myself and ask his name. He says, Serka. How will you find the girl who’s going to be your fiancée, Serka? I say. I go to that shopping center opposite the park, he says. He points. I see the building beyond the trees, on the other side of the road. I go there every day, he says, to search the shops and cafés for my fiancée. Then I come here. The park gets crowded in the afternoons. Yesterday I thought a woman I saw here looked like her. I sat down beside her and asked politely, are you my fiancée? Instead of answering yes or no, she just ran off. Perhaps she didn’t know the answer either. The right time for her to know it hadn’t come yet. But if she had just said one word to me I would have known if she was the one. I hope I’ll be able to see her again today. This time I’ll be more of a gentleman. I’ll show her she has nothing to fear from me. I’ll ask her to say just one word. I’ll say, words aren’t important, I only want to hear your voice, to inhale its fragrance. Voices don’t just contain the smell of the past, but of the future too. Am I the only one in this city who knows that? When I hear her voice, when I find my fiancée I mean, I’m going to forgive everyone. I’m going to forgive everyone who’s done me wrong. Do you know who those people are? I think Serka asks everyone he sits next to that question. He stops and waits for me to reply. I shake my head. In that case, listen, he says. He reels off the names of all the people who have done him wrong. He articulates each name carefully, as though he wants me to memorize it. He stops when he gets to the end of the list. He scrutinizes all the women who walk past us. He is searching for a familiar face. He turns to me and starts listing the same names all over again. This time with exonerating adjectives. Uneducated, he says, ingenuous, poor, orphaned, he says. Faded leaves. The footsteps of the ants that have crawled up my fingers. No one in the park turns to look at us. Under each tree there is a separate island. Everyone is marooned on their own one. This is the shore where life has washed me up. I’m sitting on a bench with a man I’ve never met before. I accept his loneliness along with my own. I’m so lonely that if someone called my name I wouldn’t turn and look, I wouldn’t believe it was my name. Why would anyone call out to me? I am trying to find a l
ife for myself. I want to find my past with the same perseverance as the ants, who crawl up from the grass to the metal bench legs and from there to my wrist, I want to find it by myself, in the silence. When people have a past they don’t give it much thought, it’s only once they lose it that they can’t get it out of their minds. But I needn’t despair, apparently. That’s the doctor’s advice. Morning, noon, and night I tell myself comforting lies. In each lie I search for a shred of truth. I study my perceptions as well as my mind. I go wherever my feet carry me. I wander the streets. I sit in the park. Suddenly a piercing scream rips the air. Somewhere in the middle of the park, a teenage boy has snatched a woman’s handbag and is running off with it. Everyone is shouting at one another. One of the people chasing the boy crashes into a stroller. The stroller topples over and the baby inside falls to the ground. The baby’s mother screams. Half of the people running give up the chase and rush over to the baby. The people dozing under the trees sit up. People wondering what’s going on stand on tiptoe and peer into the distance. We stand up too. Serka walks off without so much as a goodbye. He heads towards the baby on the ground. I go in the opposite direction. I slip away from the commotion of the crowd. I leave the park through the small gate. I weave my way through the unmoving traffic and go into the shopping center across the road.