Night and day were plucked away as if from a branch, as the petals of the lilac tree rained down, covering all the water and people. The sky and the water’s surface merged into a mellifluous pale purple.
All of the living, the dead living on in memory, and the spectral bodies of the forgotten—all the cities, plains, mountains, valleys, swamps and garrisons—were swallowed up by the water, and they started to breathe a deep sigh of relief as they listened to that melody.
Brrrum,
brrrum,
brrrum…
Their own hearts started to beat together with the heart of the world.
Ra tata tat
Ra tata tat
Ra tata tat…
With the world’s curious bliss, their found their own peace.
There was no more wild wheat—it had all been tamed.
Unafraid, the people tamed all the long-toothed wolves that had once snapped their ribs. They ignored the reeds whistling in the wind, and they set herds of white sheep to pasture with their hollowed reed pipes.
Uncowed by bitter blizzards, in huts of ice they told each other fairy tales.
From glass made from sand they made funhouse mirrors and cackled.
When someone fell in love but wept heartbrokenly and alone in a distant field of crops, the story was inscribed on a clay tablet with a nail dug out of the side of a mountain. For the sake of oases they fell in love with deserts and wept at every sunset. They tried to understand the tribulations of elephants and wild roses.
They were cruel. They captured the fish living a thousand floors down in the sea and the birds soaring a thousand floors up in the sky and devoured them. With maces they smashed in the heads of people so viciously that their pain was felt for miles around.
They were good. If a baby was sliding towards the open mouth of a crocodile, they risked their own lives to save it.
They were naïve, rushing headlong towards massive armies, beating their chests and bellowing.
They were as beautiful as green-headed mallards and cruel enough to take money for the number of soldiers’ cocks they severed on battlefields.
They were human and they didn’t know why they were there.
They were human and they would go on destroying each other.
Because they didn’t know why there were there, they despised one another.
Even if they measured the size of the world with compasses and angle rules, even if they created anthologies of the work of all the poets written in dead languages, even if glaciologists measured the age of ice stalactites, even if oceanographers plumbed the deepest oceans, even if uranium glowed, cogs and gears followed every order, and trees were pruned and trained to fit in the palm of one’s hand, they would go on destroying each other.
Though they solved the how, they couldn’t work out the why. And so they despised each other.
Brrrum,
brrrum,
brrrum…
And the last resort—
Ra tata tat
Ra tata tat
They longed to be mechanized…
All the flowing waters of the world conjoined. All of the mountains in the world had become water.
Water ahoy, water ahoy, water ahoy.
All the people floating on their backs on the water that covered the world—side by side, hand in hand—had become a raft. On a planet with no land, their linked bodies were an undulating, drifting continent. Beneath lilac petals they murmured along with the melody that echoed from the surface of the sea to the sky and from the sky to the surface of the sea.
Those that were going to die hadn’t died. Those that were going to be born were born. The dead had returned to life.
All the people who had come into the world and all those who would come into the world in the future were undulating together on that world of water. People who had died hundreds of thousands of years earlier smiled as they stroked the faces of newborn babies with their smooth hands. Every day there were more and more of them. Everyone’s childhood, youth, old age, death and rebirth came into being alongside them. That massive human raft spread until it covered the entirety of the ocean.
The surface of the ocean-world embraced the future on the shore of humanity’s past and present and all possibilities. As the ocean-world grew heavier and heavier, it could no longer turn.
The world’s cogwheel broke.
The melody that echoed from the water to the sky and from the sky to the water fell silent.
The ocean-world started to fall.
The people were terrified.
And the more frightened they became, the faster the world fell.
The brrrum was over.
All the people who had ever breathed in the scent of the world were now falling with it as they floated, hand in hand. Together they screamed, the philosophers and scribes, gentlewomen, maharajas and captives, the inventors of fire and the splitters of atoms, the first to think of burying the dead and the looters who burned the Library of Alexandria, people who had never been cooks, virgins or travellers who died of scurvy, and hunters who went off in search of deer but never returned.
The sound of their screams shook the water and sky. The sound of their cries made them more afraid. The sound of their cries emboldened them. And they screamed even more. Their voices zigzagged between the sky and the water, traversing the world. The water began to boil. The lilac petals shrivelled into black granules and sank.
Human Race of Nothingness.
Lost Human Race.
Non-Existent Human Race.
Surrender Human Race.
Give up.
Just one time the sun rose in the west. The mountains, valleys, meadows, seas and rivers were just where they should be. Just one time everyone in the world awoke at once. When they opened their eyes, the earth began to spin and circle around the sun.
Sahir, Celal, Jean and Céline awoke on the floor of the power station. Slowly they sat up and Céline started whistling the melody she’d heard in her dream. As the others got to their feet, they began to whistle the same melody. Céline walked down the corridor and went out through the door, which was still open, and continued walking. One by one the people living near the power station stretched and yawned as they stirred themselves from sleep. They were all whistling the same melody.
As Céline walked, she passed by people looking at each other in amazement as they explained the dream they’d had. In every corner of the world, everyone was whistling the same melody at the same time, bewildered that they had all had the same dream. Céline walked on and on, whistling. Like a ghost she wandered streets, alleys and dead ends, until at last she found her way.
She arrived at the building in the rue de Vaugirard where Sahir lived. She opened the door to the flat with her key and went into Sahir’s study. She wound up the phonograph on the mahogany table and, after meticulously cleaning the recording cylinder, she clicked it into place. When she was sure that it was recording, she leant in towards the horn and said, “My name is Céline and last night I had a dream.”
PUSHKIN PRESS
Pushkin Press was founded in 1997, and publishes novels, essays, memoirs, children’s books—everything from timeless classics to the urgent and contemporary.
Our books represent exciting, high-quality writing from around the world: we publish some of the twentieth century’s most widely acclaimed, brilliant authors such as Stefan Zweig, Marcel Aymé, Teffi, Antal Szerb, Gaito Gazdanov and Yasushi Inoue, as well as compelling and award-winning contemporary writers, including Andrés Neuman, Edith Pearlman, Eka Kurniawan, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Chigozie Obioma.
Pushkin Press publishes the world’s best stories, to be read and read again. To discover more, visit www.pushkinpress.com.
THE SPECTRE OF ALEXANDER WOLF
GAITO GAZDANOV
‘A mesmerising work of literature’ Antony Beevor
SUMMER BEFORE THE DARK
VOLKER WEIDERMANN
‘For such a slim book to con
vey with such poignancy the extinction of a generation of “Great Europeans” is a triumph’ Sunday Telegraph
MESSAGES FROM A LOST WORLD
STEFAN ZWEIG
‘At a time of monetary crisis and political disorder… Zweig’s celebration of the brotherhood of peoples reminds us that there is another way’ The Nation
THE EVENINGS
GERARD REVE
‘Not only a masterpiece but a cornerstone manqué of modern European literature’ Tim Parks, Guardian
BINOCULAR VISION
EDITH PEARLMAN
‘A genius of the short story’ Mark Lawson, Guardian
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SEA
TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ
‘Smoothly intriguing narrative, with its touches of sinister, Patricia Highsmith-like menace’ Irish Times
BEWARE OF PITY
STEFAN ZWEIG
‘Zweig’s fictional masterpiece’ Guardian
THE ENCOUNTER
PETRU POPESCU
‘A book that suggests new ways of looking at the world and our place within it’ Sunday Telegraph
WAKE UP, SIR!
JONATHAN AMES
‘The novel is extremely funny but it is also sad and poignant, and almost incredibly clever’ Guardian
THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY
STEFAN ZWEIG
‘The World of Yesterday is one of the greatest memoirs of the twentieth century, as perfect in its evocation of the world Zweig loved, as it is in its portrayal of how that world was destroyed’ David Hare
WAKING LIONS
AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN
‘A literary thriller that is used as a vehicle to explore big moral issues. I loved everything about it’ Daily Mail
FOR A LITTLE WHILE
RICK BASS
‘Bass is, hands down, a master of the short form, creating in a few pages a natural world of mythic proportions’ New York Times Book Review
Copyright
Pushkin Press
71–75 Shelton Street
London, WC2H 9JQ
Original text © Özgür Mumcu / Kalem Agency 2016
English translation © Mark David Wyers 2018
The Peace Machine was first published as Barış makinesi in Istanbul, 2016
First published by Pushkin Press in 2018
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
ISBN 13: 978 1 78227 397 4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from Pushkin Press
www.pushkinpress.com
The Peace Machine Page 16