The Black Rose of Halfeti

by Nazli Eray

  “They might come again,” said the voice.

  “And if they don’t?”

  “So what if they don’t come? Were they here before?”

  I thought that over.

  “No, they weren’t.”

  “Then forget about it.”

  The voice had gone away.

  I felt a great emptiness and hopelessness. I felt completely alone in my room in the Zinciriye Hotel in Mardin. Not just regular loneliness, but as though a whole enormous world had slipped through my fingers.

  I was pondering whether the world I had lost was very meaningful or not. Maybe not. A world composed of a few frequencies caught in the Mardin night. But for a moment, I thought, a very beautiful, very free world.

  What had happened? Why had I suddenly lost it?

  The old doctor’s love, the four slightly senile old men attempting to go to Cebeci, Luis Buñuel, whose dream I entered, the lovely Black Rose of Halfeti, who came to my room every night. The crazy love she felt for Luis Buñuel. Our wandering around, going in and out of dream after dream, Mesopotamia stretching out to the horizon by day from the terraces, Mardin, whose lights turned into a flying saucer at night, the television that King Darius got for his place, his slave Alop, who never left his side . . .

  These were truly very colorful and beautiful things.

  Buñuel’s falling in love with the young nun in white in the Catholic hospital, that old, forgotten graveyard we ran through when we were going into his dream, Donna Elvira . . .

  I was thinking over everything. It was just as implausible that these things could suddenly appear as that they could suddenly disappear.

  What had happened?

  Maybe all of these colored dreams had been stolen from me. Someone could have taken them in the blink of an eye and hidden them in his own world.

  I couldn’t figure out what to do.

  The loneliness I felt was indescribable.

  My eyes continually searched in the corners of the room for the Black Rose of Halfeti.

  She wasn’t there.

  She was gone, vanished.

  I missed her querulous voice asking for Buñuel, full of desire.

  King Darius.

  How could he suddenly disappear like that? I’d gone back to the ruins of Dara so many times. The interior of the cavity in the wall was empty. There was no one there. A few little girls were selling wildflowers that they had collected.

  The king’s television . . . That had disappeared too.

  Plump Meserret Hanım with the voice of a nightingale. Gone as well.

  What I was really curious about was Luis Buñuel. That moist, slightly slippery snakeskin with its masculine aroma that covered the gate to his dreams . . . Where were they?

  I couldn’t enter into anyone’s dream. It was obvious that I would never get to go through that passageway again.

  I searched through my bag and found the old doctor’s love letter.

  I read it.

  It was real. He had left it one midnight in the box at Elfe’s house.

  A letter inviting love . . .

  Real.

  So they caught the old men in Cebeci. I hadn’t asked for the details.

  I didn’t know anything.

  “I allowed them to be stolen. I allowed those incomparable dreams to be stolen,” I thought.

  Mardin had lost its significance for me. I felt my loneliness more deeply there.

  Would I be able to find the world I had lost?

  I wandered through the empty streets, fruitlessly seeking those intense bits of life in the paving stones, in the silver shops with their deep, dark interiors and tiny display windows, in the pictures of Shahmeran with her kohl-dark eyes that were pasted on the walls.

  A PLUG CONNECTED TO OLD TIMES

  The seer stone was in my hand. I was clutching it, but it was just a shiny stone: it may be the only thing I have from King Darius, the only thing that proved that King Darius existed, but it had turned into a stone with nothing inside, still, as though it had been unplugged from the past.

  “What happened? What happened to all of them?” I asked in despair.

  A voice at my side said:

  “You found the answer yourself.”

  “I didn’t find anything. What answer?” I asked.

  “The plug was pulled out. You just said it, it got unplugged,” said the voice.

  In bewilderment, I asked:

  “Was the plug pulled out?”

  “Yes, the plug of the lamp that illuminated the worlds connected to all of these things was pulled out.”

  I thought for a minute.

  “Was there a lamp that lit up all these worlds?”

  “Yes. A lamp in your mind. Something like that,” said the voice.

  “It’s incomprehensible,” I murmured. “But possible. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, if I plug it in again, would that lamp or whatever it is start everything all over again?”

  “It could!” said the voice. “But can you find the plug?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “It’s not easy to find that plug, you know,” said the voice. “It might be something a person only finds once in a lifetime.”

  “How is that?” I murmured.

  “Life,” said the voice. “Life is like that, isn’t it? Can you easily find something you’ve lost?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sometimes you spend a whole lifetime looking for it.”

  “Correct,” I said. “But why did I lose those colorful worlds?”

  “You didn’t actually,” said the voice. “They just faded away. When you go back to the big city you won’t remember them.”

  “I can’t forget them!” I cried. “I’m going to look for that plug. Maybe for the rest of my life . . .”

  The voice was silent.

  I called out:

  “Answer me. Are you there? And who are you?”

  There was no sound anywhere around me.

  They started to recite the call to prayer from the Şehidiye Mosque.

  I wandered around in the streets. I bought some soap from a soap seller in the Gül neighborhood; I got some purple almond candy.

  I went up to the Seyr-i Mardin and had a rose sherbet while looking out at Mesopotamia.

  I waited there thinking that at any moment King Darius and his slave Alop would appear beside me.

  The endless plain stretched out in front of me like an ocean made of earth and sand. I was gradually adjusting to this solitude. This was an old loneliness I was familiar with. A loneliness that often surrounded me, making up the walls of my life.

  A loneliness that came to me at night.

  It had come again. I ignored it. I got a plane ticket for Ankara.

  I walked around in the streets of Mardin a bit more until it was time for the plane. Then I went to the airport.

  THE DREAM

  . . . In the night, I saw the Black Rose of Halfeti in my dreams.

  “Come on, hurry up and get ready,” she was saying. “We’re going into Buñuel’s dream.”

  I was flabbergasted.

  “Where did you come from? How will we get into Buñuel’s dream? What happened to the nun in white?” I asked.

  “Just forget about the nun in white!” she said. She was fixing her hair in front of the mirror.

  “Come on, let’s hurry up. Let’s get into his dream before he wakes up.”

  “How did you manage to set up the dream?” I asked.

  “Donna Elvira arranged it,” she said. “Buñuel wants to make up with me.”

  “That’s fabulous!” I said.

  I knew that what I was seeing had to be a dream. I kept my eyes tightly closed to avoid waking up. I felt happy inside.

  I wonder what happened to the old men, I thought. I didn’t believe that they had been caught in Cebeci and put in an old-age home.

  The interior of the room was suddenly bright with moonlight.

  “Where did this moonlight com
e from out of nowhere?”

  “The seer stone started to work,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti.

  And truly, a white light was seeping out of my handbag and spreading out all over the room.

  I immediately opened my purse and took the stone in my hand.

  There were images appearing one after another in the stone.

  Suddenly I saw the old men. It was nighttime around them. They were standing on a street corner, peering around.

  “They’re free!” I shouted. “This must be a street in Kızılay. Nighttime . . . So that means they got there!”

  The Black Rose of Halfeti came over to me and was staring into the seer stone.

  “There are statues behind them,” she said.

  I took a look.

  “That’s Güven Park,” I said. “They got as far as Güven Park . . .”

  There were tens of lamps lit in Güven Park, and the lights coming through the trees created an eerie atmosphere. The old men were sitting on a bench and relaxing.

  There was a lot of night traffic in Güven Park. Narcotics sellers and women for rent spilled over a little into the outside world from the shadowy corners of the park. They made a dark, repulsive mosaic in the Ankara night.

  “They made it out and they got to Kızılay,” I muttered. “The pasha said to me that the four of them together would only amount to three eyes, two ears, three hands, one brain, and four legs. But see, they managed to do what they wanted . . .”

  “Did the pasha really say that?” asked the Black Rose of Halfeti. “That’s such a harsh description.”

  “It really is,” I said. “A person grows and has the fragile evanescence of a moth’s wing in his body and mind. Even a slight breeze could make his whole mind vanish and go away and his memories collapse into the darkness of his soul like a lifeless sediment.”

  “It’s so sad,” the Black Rose of Halfeti said softly. “You’re talking about old age, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’m ready,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti. She looked carefully in the mirror on the wall one last time. She was checking to see whether she had lipstick on her teeth or not.

  “Are we going?”

  “We’re going, come on . . .”

  We started to walk toward Buñuel’s dream.

  So, there we were on those roads again. Those twilight roads lined with cypresses that seemed endless, that cold, old cemetery that frightened me, a strange feeling that there was no sound and no time.

  Yes, we were moving through it all over again.

  “These roads are so difficult,” I complained. “The roads of a man . . .”

  “The roads of a man?” asked the Black Rose of Halfeti.

  “Of course, these are a man’s roads,” I said. “The roads that go to Buñuel. The paths of his soul . . .”

  “I never thought about it like that,” said the Black Rose of Halfeti. “You’re right.”

  I liked the young woman very much and didn’t want to disappoint her. Whereas I had had enough now of going into Buñuel’s soul. The road both intimidated and exhausted me. I hadn’t much of a chance of speaking to Buñuel.

  We were walking along among the aged gravestones in the shadows of the cypresses without speaking.

  Suddenly I saw him.

  He was dressed in white, very, very tall.

  I had never been so frightened in my life. For a minute I stood there frozen in place.

  He slowly took a step toward me.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  A human voice.

  I felt relieved when I heard it.

  “Don’t be afraid of me.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am Sheikh Ahmet Mardini,” he said. “I came to tell you something.”

  “Sheikh Ahmet Mardini,” I whispered. “What did you come to tell us?”

  “Your period of meditation is over,” said Sheikh Ahmet. “I wanted to tell you,” he said. “Your meditation is over.”

  “What meditation?” I asked.

  The Black Rose of Halfeti was also staring at this man dressed in white.

  “Meditation,” said Sheikh Ahmet. “Introspection. Withdrawal into your own world. Being one with yourself. Withdrawal . . .”

  “Meditation . . .”

  “Yes, you were meditating, and it’s over,” he said.

  “So the meditation has finished . . .”

  “It’s over.”

  He was silently looking at me.

  I was thinking over what he had said.

  The Black Rose of Halfeti, standing next to me, said:

  “Come on, let’s move. We’re late. Luis will wake up.”

  “We can’t go anymore,” I said.

  She was confused.

  “Why can’t we go?”

  “The thought is finished.”

  “The thought is finished?”

  She was bewildered.

  “Yes,” I said. “Over.”

  Sheikh Ahmet slowly nodded his head.

  “I’ll go with you as far as Mardin,” he said.

  “We can go by ourselves . . .”

  “I know, but let me come with you.”

  “Fine.”

  The three of us went back. The cemetery, the old, confused roads, and the dark-colored cypress trees were all behind us.

  Someone called out to me. The wind carried a voice to my ear.

  It was Donna Elvira! Her voice. I recognized her. It was like a voice coming from childhood.

  I couldn’t hear what she said because of the rustling of the trees. It got mixed with the wind and disappeared.

  “The fall is dark here,” said Sheikh Ahmet. “It seems winter will come early this year.”

  Halfeti’s black rose was softly weeping.

  “I’ll never see him again.”

  “Who?”

  “Buñuel.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s over. The thought is just over,” she said.

  She understood.

  We came into Mardin with Sheikh Ahmet. It was afternoon. Everywhere was peaceful and quiet.

  I took a look at Mesopotamia.

  It was unique. It seemed to extend into eternity.

  Sheikh Ahmet Mardini said:

  “I’m leaving. I brought you here safe and sound.”

  “Thank you.”

  He became lighter and then transparent in a corner of the room, like a sheer curtain, and then finally vanished.

  I sat on my bed. I wondered how long it had been since I came here.

  What time was it?

  What day was it?

  It was as though I were slowly returning to life.

  I was half asleep like a babe in the womb, exhausted like a woman who had just given birth. I slowly lay down on the bed.

  The girl had gone.

  I looked at the seer stone; it wasn’t working.

  I rested a little.

  I ordered a rose sherbet. The waiter brought it. I drank it, sip by sip.

  I waited, thinking maybe the meditation would begin again.

  It didn’t.

  I realized that it wouldn’t start again. I was like an unplugged television.

  Burned out. Getting cold.

  I carefully folded the airplane ticket for tomorrow for Ankara that I had bought and put it in my purse.

  RETURN

  The plane took off. I was leaning back, thinking of all the unbelievable things that had happened to me in this short slice of time in Mardin.

  So I had gone into some kind of meditation. This city had turned me inward and made me experience all kinds of incredible things.

  They started the service on the plane. I took a sip of my coffee.

  I suddenly thought of something. I got so excited I almost spilled the coffee in the little plastic cup in my hand.

  Sheikh Ahmet Mardini.

  He couldn’t have been a real sheikh. Where did he suddenly pop up from just at the edge of the d
ream? Like a movie character.

  All of a sudden I thought how he looked like the priests in Buñuel’s films. Long white robe, a pale face, those piercing eyes.

  It could have been someone sent by Buñuel, this Sheikh Ahmet Mardini.

  There was a strong possibility that he sent the sheikh to avoid seeing the Black Rose of Halfeti.

  This last explanation started to seem very logical. It couldn’t have been anything else. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

  Buñuel’s idea of a little joke!

  That meant that everything I had experienced really did exist, that it was real and that world still went on.

  I drank down my coffee. I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all.

  I felt like I had come out of anesthesia.

  I would wait.

  Patiently.

  As I had waited for everything all my life.

  I had fallen in love with a city of stone, and it had made me experience unbelievable things.

  I would wait.

  A voice.

  A shadow.

  A breeze passing softly by my ear.

  A whisper of love . . .

  The evening sun.

  A hand on my shoulder.

  I would wait.

  A letter . . .

  14 NOVEMBER 2011

  Ljubljana, St. Petersburg

  Ankara-Elysian Pastry Shop

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