After I go into my apartment I lock the door. I walk into the living room and look at the rug in the middle of the room. The intricate patterns go from one end to the other. I get down on my knees and, starting from the edge, begin to grope my way along the rug. Under the bright light of the chandelier I search it from top to bottom. It’s antique. A finely crafted, hand-woven rug. On the side closest to the table, I notice a pink stain blended into its faded colors. When I walk over on my knees and peer at it up close, I realize it’s a bloodstain. Did that blood drip from my foot when I cut it on the glass the other day, or is it a relic of a lost day from my old life? Questions I will never be able to answer again. As I confuse even the names on the signs I saw this morning, I am resigned to never discovering where the bloodstain on the rug came from. Holding it from the bloodstained end, I lift up the rug. I look underneath. I think of evidence of the existence of an old shelter, the remains of a corpse, or, at the very least, ropes used for trussing up victims. Folding up the whole rug, I drag it to one side. Smoldering with a rage I can’t explain, I inspect the wooden floorboards. My fingertips move from one floorboard to another. To be certain, I occasionally go back and examine the same place a second time. When I have finished in the living room, I move on to the other rooms. All the lights are on. Starting with the bedroom, I turn the whole house upside down. I can’t find anything except dust between the floorboards and behind the wardrobes and armchairs. I am sweating profusely. I think it is only now that my longest day has ended. I can have something to eat, take my medicine, and go to bed. I can place my new clock at my bedside and go to sleep to the sound of its ticking. As I close my eyes, the clock’s voice will crawl down to the bedside table like an ant. The many-legged ant, that’s white moreover, paces up and down the bedside table, from end to end. It slips into my ear and slowly advances towards the folds of my brain. The determined, white ant. It gnaws at me and causes me pain, but its sharp teeth also clear the blocked arteries in my brain. It has faith in the long night. As the night progresses, and as the ant ticks and turns inside my brain, my exhaustion is unleashed. But still I can’t sleep. Who can sleep through the rising and falling racket in the street? When the noise grows louder I get up and look out the window. A group of children are gathered by the piles of rubbish, they’re playing in a circle. The tall boy standing in the center is holding a cat by the tail and swinging it from left to right. The other children are whirling around the cat as though it’s a totem, having a wonderful time. One of the children is the barefoot child I met in the watchseller’s. He too is laughing loudly, and from time to time he prods the cat. The cat shows no signs of life. I look at the windows in the opposite buildings. Nobody comes to peer out of the curtains. Nobody is interested in the noise, the children, or the cat. Perhaps they’re listening to their new clocks, or looking under their rugs, moving their armchairs and wardrobes and searching for some unknown object. They don’t know that they’ll never find what they’re looking for. One life at home, another life outside. The children in the street are having a ball. At the end of the game, once they’ve had their fun, they toss the cat onto the pile of rubbish. They walk away without so much as turning and giving it one last look. The night is just beginning for them. Linking arms, they melt into the darkness. The cat they have just flung onto the heap slowly slides down a bag of garbage. Its emaciated body drops down beside the adjacent wall and lies there, motionless. As it slid, its body seemed to twitch for an instant, or maybe I just imagined it did.
10
The night, that squeezes into the net curtain in the bedroom, vibrates slowly when the medicines prove ineffective, turning into a bottomless, restless, pitch-covered pit of torment. This night isn’t clear like other nights. If Boratin surrenders to the thought he has been striving to banish for hours and takes a few more sleeping pills and painkillers, he will be embarking on another suicide. But it’s better first to live and find out what it is that can induce someone to turn their back on life, and then to commit suicide again, if need be. Tonight the ceiling is lower than usual. The room is stuffy. He throws off the quilt onto the floor. He stretches out his arms and legs and spreads his body, drapelike, across the bed. Which day of the week was it? Or rather, which night was it? With the darkness, as sticky as melted sugar, shrouding everything, slithering to the walls, the curtain, even to the sheet, there is no visible crack he can escape through. Yet another night lost in defeat. If outside there is still such a thing as the street, where beggars, whores, and thieves roam, in here there is a disillusionment beyond anything that any of them can comprehend. He has a throbbing headache, in addition to insomnia. Given that he can’t take any more medication, he can try one of the books he’s been attempting to read for the past few days but has never managed more than one page of. He can settle down on the sofa, take several deep breaths, and open it. It’s not the stories that wear him out, it’s the letters, the commas, the sentence endings, and the beginnings of lines. Odd looking gs that spring up all over the place, capital Fs, semicolons throw his mind into a whirl. As he links sentences, words pile on top of one another, and the debris builds up. But still he reads on. It takes him an hour to get through a page. One second per letter. He advances millimeter by millimeter. He stops at the end of the second page. He stares at the walls. Just as he now lies in bed staring at the ceiling, his eyes red. Gazing into space. There used to be another Boratin that everyone keeps talking about. That Boratin didn’t understand the world by looking, but by listening. He spoke with songs and thought with songs. Where was he, where did that blues singer that everyone praises so warmly go? He made sense of the world’s chaos with his voice. He composed music, wrote lyrics, sang songs. He coupled each smell with a voice, each color with a tune. He wasn’t interested in knowing, but in feeling. Like the enslaved Africans who carry the dust from slave plantations in their veins and the pain in their memories, he too carried the voice of the new world in his heart. Wherever it was that that man had gone, he wasn’t coming back.
He feels nauseous. A wave of heat shoots from his stomach up his windpipe. He places a hand on his chest and rubs it. Now there is only nausea in the place where his voice once sprang when he was singing. Perhaps his blues songs weren’t about Istanbul and the world, but just about him. With every tune he shaped himself, sculpted his own marble soul. Then, one night in the dark, the hammer in his soul slipped. The marble cracked. The crack that began in an invisible part of his head ran all the way down to his rib. Every song he knew seeped out of that crack and disappeared. All that remained was an odor rising from his stomach to his nasal cavity. He is going to be sick. He can’t hold on any longer. He rushes to the bathroom opposite his bedroom. He leans over the sink. He waits. His hands clutch the sides. He looks at the drops of water out of the corner of his eye. At the rust color in the grooves. At the streaks of dirt. He gets a whiff of the smell rising from the plughole. It’s the same smell as the one in his stomach. He retches. Nothing comes out. His fingers loosen their grip. He spits out the acrid taste in his mouth and straightens up. He takes off his pajama top. He touches his bare stomach. He examines his body, as though he’ll be able to see the nausea from the outside. He undresses completely. He walks a couple of paces on the cool concrete and steps into the shower. He leaves the large door of the shower cubicle open. He closes his eyes as the warm water runs down his back to his calves. He realizes how tired he is. He feels as though he could fall asleep right there. When he opens his eyes some time later his gaze remains fixed on the opposite wall. He spies his naked body in the full-length mirror. He stares at it as though he has encountered a stranger. He sticks his head out of the water to get a better view. Arms that grow longer in the mirror. Taut legs. Hands that don’t know what to do. And a face. If he called out, it would hear, if he spoke, it would answer. It’s not clear where it came from, or how it got into the mirror. Boratin puts his hands over his ears. He starts to cry, under the powerful rush of the water. At first he tries to
contain his tears, but once he sees it’s futile he lets them flow. It’s all too much for him. It will all be too much tomorrow, and the next day. He crouches down on the ground, terrified of resigning himself to this fact. Sobbing, he pleads with himself. He has no one else to plead with. He wants this torment to end. The face in the mirror! That face is the only thing that can help him. It can restore the balance of his troubled mind. The bathroom is submerged in a haze of steam. The mirror opposite disappears. Boratin wants to stay here forever. Crying is such a strange phenomenon. While his heart is pounding with terror, his body feels relaxed, in a way it has never done before. He knows there’s no one inside his body. Boratin is no one. But he also weighs the other possibility: He could also be everyone. If he doesn’t subscribe to any specific identity, he can appropriate every identity he wants. Instead of giving him peace of mind, this thought fills him with a new dread. Crying doesn’t help either. He starts to vomit. With his hands on the ground, he brings up a yellowish green liquid. His stomach tenses. All he can see is steam. He knows that somewhere in the steam is a mirror and that inside that mirror there’s someone crouching on the ground. He picks up the shampoo bottle on the floor and throws it. He hears a soft thud. Like the mirror, the thud is a lie. This house is a lie. The bridge and the sea are lies. The grocer and the watchseller are lying. The doctor and Bek are lying. Who doesn’t lie? He thinks of his sister. There are no traces of lies in her voice. Even though he can’t see her face, he knows his sister’s voice. He believes in its flawlessness. If he called her now, at this time of night, he would still believe in her.
He waits for his sobs to subside. He steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around himself. He strides into the living room. He picks up the address book on the coffee table. The water from his fingers soaks through the pages. He leafs through them. He’s hoping to come across a familiar name. He recalls hoping for the same thing on many occasions, and shutting the address book with a feeling of dejection each time. He shuts it again. He glances through the numbers on the back cover. He stops when he gets to a number written in a large hand. There is no name in front of it. Bek told him that it’s his sister’s number. He picks up the phone and dials it. Each number passes through the telephone to the cable, travels down through the walls to the damp underground, and, carving out its own path among thousands of other numbers, reaches the telephone at the other end. The phone rings. Boratin knows what he will say to his sister. He will say, help me. He will say, I’m very ill. He will say, why me? I’ll come to see you by the night train Abla. I’ll go to Haydarpaşa Station, stand in the ticket queue and tell the man in the ticket office that I want a window seat. When the train departs I’m going to rest my head against the window and let my thoughts drift as I listen to the sound that I might be able to remember from films of the train chugging along the tracks. As the metal wheels turn on the metal tracks, I’ll close my eyes and sleep until morning. I’ll go home with a longing I don’t know the meaning of. Home: A word that draws me into itself. Its walls are made of bricks, its roof of dreams. The first letter of home will invite me to come in. Its second letter will take me through a corridor hung with faded photographs. Then it will take me into a dimly lit room and put me to bed between freshly laundered sheets. My sister will be sitting beside that letter. She’ll tell me about my childhood. I’ll doze off as I listen to her. Just then the telephone will ring. Insistently. A cool breeze in the street. A faded star in the sky. Everyone ties and unties, ties and unties the knot of their own life. No one answers the telephone. Boratin hangs up. It is only then that he realizes tears are still streaming down his cheeks. He waits for his breathing to return to normal. He wipes away his tears with the back of his hand. He cradles the telephone in his lap. With trembling hands, he dials the number again. This time the ringtone sounds hopeful. After the second, then third ring someone picks up at the other end. He hears a woman’s sleepy voice. It’s not his sister’s. It belongs to someone younger. Hello, hello, says the woman on the phone. It’s clear from her husky tone that she wants to go back to sleep as soon as possible. Boratin can’t think of anything to say. His mind goes blank. It doesn’t even occur to him to put the phone down. He tries to work out why he came into the living room and what he’s doing here. He looks at himself. He’s naked. He has the towel around his waist. The red and black phone is in his lap. The receiver is at his ear. Hello, says the voice on the other end. Hello, who is it? Who am I? I’m Boratin, but there’s no point in saying it. Because Boratin is a name that can’t answer any questions. It’s a word that’s hollow inside. Hello, hello, who is it? They call me Boratin, and they show me my ID card so I’ll believe it. They think my parents’ names on the ID card, my date and place of birth are all I need to know who I am. But I don’t want to know who I am, I want to know what I am. They don’t tell me that. What am I?
11
Theodora’s Tavern is on a pedestrian street, sandwiched inside a row of restaurants. It’s easy to recognize by the tables overrunning the sidewalk and the large, bustling crowd. At the long table where the young friends are sitting, Boratin tries to respond to his companions’ fussing. Have you tried the hummus Boratin? It’s noisy over there, would you rather sit here Boratin? How about another ice cube in your rakı Boratin? Boratin chooses to follow Bek’s example and drink rakı rather than join the end of the table that’s drinking wine. Hayala, who is sitting opposite him, raises her glass and says, Cheers. The entire table does the same. The tension in the air is soon dispersed, helped by the rapidly emptied and filled glasses. Platters of mezes are passed up and down the table. Boratin tries, on the one hand, to match his friends’ names to their faces and save them in his memory, and, on the other, to keep track of Bek’s conversation, which keeps jumping from one subject to another. Beauty is more alluring than kindness, says Bek, pointing at a group of women sitting at the table opposite them. (They watch the happy young women drinking.) Which one grabs you, asks Bek, the kind-looking one sitting in the middle, or the beautiful one next to her? (The woman in the middle is respected by all the others. They listen to what she says and value her opinion. Whereas the woman on her right stands out because she’s beautiful.) Don’t tell me beauty doesn’t last. Kindness doesn’t either. Kindness expects to be repaid with kindness, and besides, kindness is limited. Can we say the same of beauty? (As Bek takes a sip of rakı and helps himself to a piece of cheese, they all seize the opportunity to sneak a better look at the woman’s eyes, nose, and lips.) Beauty doesn’t demand anything in return and neither is it out for what it can get. It’s faithful. What you see is what you get. (The woman is wearing a delicate necklace around her bare neck. One of the straps of her dress has slipped off her shoulder. She is holding a glass of wine. The smile that plays on her lips as she listens to the woman beside her makes her look even more beautiful.) I beg the pardon of the women among us, says Bek. (There are four women and six men at the table.) Don’t worry Bek, we would never dream of competing with her, says Hayala. She caught our eye and we were all pointing her out to each other way before you were. The only person in this tavern tonight who could have competed with her, if he’d been a girl, is Boratin. (They’re treating Boratin like they did in the old days. And he is trying to feel at ease amid their familiarity.) If the balcony above that table collapsed and the women were crushed under it, which one would you feel saddest about? asks Bek. Don’t say all of them. I don’t want to hear all the usual clichés. You’re musicians, you turn language upside down. Come on! (It’s obvious that they like being at this table, that they tease and wind each other up as they argue over every subject that enters their heads.) They raise their glasses again. Boratin goes easy, taking only tiny sips. When he got to this street as the sun was setting, he thought he would be upset about not remembering a place that was this lively and busy. But two hours have passed and he doesn’t feel upset. He doesn’t feel anything.
The friend on his right, whom everyone calls Effendi, says, I’m
just nipping out for some cigarettes, do you want to come with me? Boratin turns to Bek, like a child who can’t decide what to do. It will do you good, says Bek, it will give you a chance to have a look around. They leave the table. They head towards the end of the street. It’s clear that everyone in this street knows them. They nod their heads in response to all the greetings from everyone they pass. Once they turn the corner and reach the main road, they are finally free of all those eyes that know them. The street is heaving. It’s full of young people. And brightly lit. Here it’s easy to be a part of the young people and the lights. They don’t even glance at the liquor stores they pass. They look intent on walking to wherever it is that the street ends. They give the impression of having been up and down that street countless times. Once they have passed the large shop windows, they turn onto a quaint old passage. It’s quiet. And cool. They stop in front of a billboard pasted with movie posters. As they examine them, each waits for the other to speak. Effendi breaks the silence. People have one intellectual age and another emotional age, he says. As one develops it’s possible that the other may fall behind. For example, the intellectual age of all the people at our table is quite advanced, but their emotions are still adolescent. You were the only one who managed to strike a balance between the two, who was able to demonstrate the perfect harmony that exists between intellectual and emotional ages. Boratin, what happened to you? Alcohol has untied Boratin’s tongue. He doesn’t hesitate to voice what he’s thinking. You’re asking me about someone I don’t know, he says. You’re the one who remembers the person you’re asking about, not me. You tell me, what happened to him? Effendi grabs Boratin by the wrist. He squeezes it tightly. He stares at him hard and waits. Don’t you remember this either Boratin? he asks. What, I don’t understand, what don’t I remember? Boratin, you don’t remember us coming to this passage about a year ago and standing in front of this billboard and you grabbing me by the wrist like this when I told you I wanted to commit suicide, do you? Boratin looks sheepish. It’s the first time it has occurred to him that others too might want to die. You were always lucky, continues Effendi, and your good luck came to the rescue again. Dozens of people jump off the Bosphorus Bridge every year. It’s like leaping off a tower and landing on concrete. To this day there have only ever been a couple of people who have escaped death, and even they ended up disabled. But you got let off with just a broken rib and the loss of your memory. There was a knot in your mind that none of us could feel. Instead of by dying, you freed yourself of it by forgetting. I used to envy you Boratin, you were good looking and talented, you were everyone’s darling. But those aren’t the things I envy anymore, now I envy the loss of your memory. Why are you trying to find your past? Let that knot be, let it lie there buried. They say you mix up the times of things that happened hundreds, thousands of years ago and think some of them happened today. Without going back that far, let me tell you about last year. One night after we’d had a few drinks at Theodora’s Tavern, you and I left and came here. I was quite tipsy. I gazed at the posters on here and poured my heart out to you. I told you I was planning on committing suicide and that I was on the point of taking the final step. You took me home. You washed my face. You put me to bed. You stayed with me. You didn’t leave my bedside for days. You ate your meals with me, you played your guitar with me. It was at that time that you composed one of your best songs. Eventually, death slowly withdrew from me, in the end it was just a word in songs. Whereas before, death used to find me everywhere. On the balcony it used to say, jump. On windy days it would summon me to the sea. Whenever I went into the kitchen it would show me the knife. At night it would wake me up with the smell of the medicines in the cabinet. It was hard to control myself. I told you then why I wanted to commit suicide, this time I’m not going to. As you’ve forgotten the past, then my reason for wanting to die can stay forgotten too. Thanks to you I pulled myself together. Otherwise I thought I would achieve some sublime goal by dying. Apparently, two thousand years ago, they used to display the corpses of soldiers who committed suicide on crosses, they would drag the bodies of women through the streets with the same ropes they had used to hang themselves. Then times changed, suicide acquired a noble status, it was as though it represented immortality. Particularly among musicians and writers. Because death was tragic, suicide was ranked with greatness. But those times have passed too. There’s nothing tragic left in life anymore. Death has lost all meaning and suicide has become farcical. The root of suicide lay in our past, I went to that limit and came back again. Boratin, you have freed yourself of your past, losing your memory has set you free. That’s a miracle beyond anyone’s reach…. As Effendi goes on with his passionate speech, Boratin takes a step back. He slips his wrist out of Effendi’s loosened grip. He realizes it hurts and rubs it with his hand. Are we going to buy those cigarettes? he asks. Effendi pauses. He holds his breath. He hesitates for a moment, then bursts out laughing. His voice echoes in the passage. Of course we are, he says. We can have one on the way back to the tavern. They exit the passage. They blend into the swelling crowd in the street. They buy cigarettes from the kiosk on the first corner. They light up and walk back to the tavern in silence. They join their friends. Raising their glasses in response to the glasses raised to toast their return, they sip their drinks. Effendi answers Bek when he asks, What have you two been up to? Boratin told me a great story, he says. Did he? Yes. A young man gets lost in the woods. Several days later he meets an old man. The old man has been lost for a long time too and suggests to the young man that they look for the way out together. No, says the young man, I can’t waste my time with you, if you knew the way out you’d have found it by now. But, says the old man, I know which roads don’t lead out of the wood. That was how the story went, wasn’t it Boratin? Boratin stares at him without replying. He takes a large gulp of rakı. He turns back to his plate and dips a piece of bread in his meze. When silence descends on the table, Bek raises his glass. Come on, he says, this time let’s drink to Boratin’s story.
Labyrinth Page 6
