by Ahmet Altan
My two high walls were built with a single sentence which prevented the mortal threats from entering and the worries accumulating in the deep corners of my mind from exiting, so that the two could not unite to crush me with fear and terror.
I realized once more that when you are faced with a reality that can turn your life upside down, that same sorry reality will sweep you away like a wild flood only if you submit to it and act as it expects you to.
As someone who has been thrown into the dirty, swelling waves of reality, I can say with certainty that its victims are those so-called smart people who believe that you have to act in accordance with it.
There are certain actions and words that are demanded by the events, the dangers and the realities that surround you. Once you refuse to play this assigned role, instead doing and saying the unexpected, reality itself is taken aback; it hits against the rebellious jetties of your mind and breaks into pieces. You then gain the power to collect the fragments together and create from them a new reality in the mind’s safe harbor.
The trick is to do the unexpected, to say the unexpected. Once you can make light of the lance of destiny pointing at your body, you can cheerfully eat the cherries you had filled your hat with, like the unforgettable lieutenant in Pushkin’s story “The Shot” who does exactly that with a gun pointing at his heart.
Like Borges, you can answer the mugger who demands, “Your money or your life,” with, “My life.”
The power you will gain is limitless.
I still don’t know how I came to utter the sentence that transformed everything that was happening to me and my perception of it, nor what its mystical source might be. What I do know is that someone in the police car, the person who was able to say he smoked only when he was nervous, is hidden inside me.
He is made of many voices, laughs, paragraphs, sentences and pain.
Had I not seen my father smile as he was taken away in a police car forty-five years ago; had I not heard from him that the envoy of Carthage, when threatened with torture, put his hand in the embers; had I not known that Seneca consoled his friends as he sat in a bath full of hot water and slit his wrists on Nero’s orders; had I not read that, on the eve of the day he was to be guillotined, Saint-Just had written in a letter that the conditions were difficult only for those who resisted entering the grave and that Epictetus had said when our bodies are enslaved our minds can remain free; had I not learned that Boethius wrote his famous book in a cell awaiting death, I would have been afraid of the reality that surrounded me in that police car. I would not have found the strength to ridicule it and shred it to pieces. Nor would I have been able to utter the sentence with secret laughter that rose from my lungs to my lips. No, I would have cowered with anxiety.
But someone whom I reckon to be made from the illuminated shadows of those magnificent dead reflected in me spoke, and thus managed to change all that was happening.
Reality could not conquer me.
Instead, I conquered reality.
In that police car speeding down the sunlit streets, I set the bag that was on my lap onto the floor with a sense of ease, and leaned back.
When we arrived at the Security Department, the car drove through a very large gate at the entrance and started down a winding road. As we descended the slope there was less and less light and the darkness deepened.
At a turn in the road, the car stopped and we got out. We walked through a door into a large underground hall.
This was an underworld completely unknown to the people milling about above. It reeked of stone, sweat and damp. It tore from the world all those who passed through its dirty yellow walls, which resembled a forest of sulphur.
In the drab raw light of the naked lamps every face bore the wax dullness of death.
Plainclothes policemen waited to greet us creatures ripped from the world. Past them, a hallway led deeper inside. Piled at the base of the walls were plastic bags that looked like the shapeless belongings of the shipwrecked swept ashore.
The policemen removed the tie from around the waist of my trousers, together with my watch and my ID.
Here in depths without light, the police, with each of their gestures and words, carved us out of life like a rotten, maggot-laced chunk from a pear, severing us from the world of “the living.”
I followed a policeman into the hallway, dragging my feet in laceless shoes. He opened an iron door and we entered a narrow corridor where an oppressive heat grasped me like the claws of a wild beast.
A row of cells behind iron bars ran along the corridor. They were congested with people lying on the floor. With their beards growing long, their eyes tired, their feet bare and their bodies coated in sweat, the boundaries of their existence had melted and they had become a moving mass of flesh.
They stared at me with curiosity and unease.
The policeman put me in a cell and locked the door behind me.
I took off my shoes and lay down like the others. In that small cell filled with people, there was no room to stand.
In a matter of hours, I had traveled across five centuries to arrive at the dungeons of the Inquisition.
I smiled at the policeman who was standing outside my cell, watching me.
Viewed from outside, I was one old, white-bearded Ahmet Hüsrev Altan lying down in an airless, lightless iron cage.
But this was only the reality of those who locked me up. For myself, I had changed it.
I was the lieutenant happily eating cherries with a gun pointing at his heart. I was Borges telling the mugger to take his life. I was Caesar building walls around Alesia.
I only smoke when I’m nervous.
The First Night in the Cage
I nodded off for a moment. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the staff colonel on the cot across from me and the submarine colonel curled up on a sheet of plastic on the floor were both asleep.
The young village teacher who had been told to sell out his friends laid his prayer rug out between two cots and began his devotions.
In the dim light of the cell I could see his figure – a dark shadow – prostrating itself on the rug.
I had not slept for nearly twenty-four hours, and I was exhausted. My bones ached.
The long black shadows of the iron bars cut through our chests, our faces, our legs and divided us into pieces.
The bare feet of the colonels shone in the cold light seeping in from the corridor, like pieces of white rock.
The colonel across from me groaned in his sleep.
I was in a cage.
In the damp dimness, in the shadows of the iron bars that cut into this dimness, in the young schoolteacher’s murmurs of prayer, in the shiny stone-like feet of the colonels, in the moans that came from across the cell, in all of these, there was something more startling than death, something that resembled the empty space between life and death, a no man’s hollow which reached neither state.
We were lost in that hollow.
No one could hear our voice. Nobody could help us.
I looked at the walls. It was as if they were coming closer.
Suddenly, I had this feeling that the walls would close in on us, crush and swallow us like carnivorous plants.
I swallowed and heard a groaning noise escape from my throat.
Something was happening.
I felt a battalion of ghosts stir within me. It was as if that famous army of terracotta warriors which the Chinese emperor had built to guard his body after death was coming alive inside me. Each carried with him a different fear, a different horror.
I sat up and leaned my back against the wall.
The heat was brushing my face like a furry animal. My forehead was sweating. I was having difficulty breathing.
This place was so narrow, airless. I wouldn’t be able to stay here.
For a moment, I had an irre
sistible urge to get up, hold the iron bars and shout, “Let me out of here. Let me out of here, I am suffocating.”
With horror I realized I was lurching forward.
I clenched my fists as if to stop myself.
I knew that with a single scream I would lose my past and my future, everything I had, but the urge to get myself out of that cage with its walls closing in on me was irresistible.
The terrifying urge to shout and the pressure of knowing that this shout would destroy my whole life were like two mountains colliding and crushing me in between.
My insides were cracking.
The young teacher stood up and put his hands together on his belly; the colonel across from me groaned and turned over onto his other side.
I tucked in my legs and put my arms around my knees.
My vision was getting blurry, the walls were moving.
I wanted to get out of here, I wanted to get out right away, and knowing this was impossible made my brain feel like it had pins and needles, as if thousands of ants were crawling in its folds.
The realization that I was about to embarrass myself intensified my fear even more.
I saw two eyes. Two eyes with a cold, cruel, almost hostile look in them, shiny as glass, like the eyes of a wolf chasing its prey in a rustling forest. Those eyes were inside me, keeping watch over my every move.
I had survived such moments in my youth, moments when I had wandered to the edge of madness. I knew I had to turn back. If I took another step, I would cross the point of no return.
My lungs were rising up to my throat, blocking my windpipe.
The young teacher had again prostrated himself on the prayer rug.
He was muttering a prayer.
He too was begging to be saved.
The colonel lying on the floor groaned in his sleep.
I took a deep breath to push my lungs back down. I gulped some warm water from the plastic bottle I had by my side.
I thought of death.
Instinctively, I was trying to hold on to the idea of death. The eternity of death has the power to trivialize even the most terrifying moments of life.
Thinking that I would die had a calming effect on me. A person who is going to die does not need to fear the things that life presents.
Like everyone else, I was insignificant, what I had been living through was insignificant, this cage, as well, was insignificant, the distress that suffocated me was insignificant, and so too was the evil I had met.
I clung firmly to my own death. It calmed me.
The teacher saluted the angels, turning his head first to the right, then to the left, and finished praying.
He turned around and looked at me.
Our eyes met.
A shy smile appeared on his face as if he were embarrassed – although about what I didn’t know.
Moving with difficulty between the two cots, he turned to lie down beside the colonel on the plastic-covered rubber that was on the floor.
His bare feet now shone alongside those of the colonel.
The shadow of an iron bar cut through his ankles like a black razor. I saw two feet attached to nothing.
I was going to die one day.
What I was living through was insignificant.
The eyes inside me were shut. The wolf was gone.
I wasn’t going to lose my mind.
During a scorching heatwave, when crops catch fire, a circle is drawn around the blaze and the grain along that circle is deliberately set alight before the flames can reach it. Once the fire arrives at the circle it stops, as there is nothing left there to burn. They use fire to put out fire.
I had surrounded and extinguished the fire of terror, which life had lit in a cage, with the fire of death.
I knew that my life from now on would be a series of opposing fires. I would surround those started by my jailers with the fires of my mind.
Sometimes death will be the source of the latter; sometimes the stories I write in my mind; sometimes the pride that won’t let me leave behind a name stained by cowardice; sometimes it will be sex releasing the wildest fantasies; sometimes peaceful reveries; sometimes the schizophrenia unique to writers who twist and tweak the truth in their red-hot hands to create new truths; sometimes it will be hope.
My life will pass fighting invisible battles between two walls; I will survive by hanging on to the branches of my own mind, at the very edge of the abyss, and not giving in to the disorientating inebriety of weakness, even for a moment.
I had seen the monstrous face of reality.
From now on I would live like a man clinging to a single branch.
I didn’t have the right to be scared or depressed or terrified for a single moment, nor to give in to the desire to be saved, to have a moment of madness, nor to surrender to any of these all-too-human weaknesses.
A momentary weakness would destroy my entire past and future – my very being.
If I were to tire and let go of the branch I was holding, it would be fatal; I would fall to the bottom of the abyss and become a mess of blood and bones.
Would I be able to endure the days, weeks, months and years of swinging in the air unable to let go of the branch for even an instant?
If I were to let go and break to pieces in the abyss of weakness, I would lose not only my past and future but also the strength that enables me to write.
Because the prospect of being cut off from the precious lode of writing scared me more than anything; that fear would suppress all other fears and give me the ability to endure. Courage would be born of fear.
Now that the fear of losing my mind which had momentarily licked my insides had passed, together with the distress caused by the heavy feeling of suffocation, a tense fatigue took hold of my body.
The teacher, like the colonel, was fast asleep now. The restless movement of those feet cut off from the ankles had stopped.
Though tired enough to pass out, I couldn’t sleep. It was as if even sleep itself was too exhausted to come and take me.
When the police had taken me from my apartment, I had thrown in my bag a book I had recently ordered on medieval Christian philosophers, thinking it would have entertaining and diverting stories about their lives.
To escape what I was living through, to rest and relax a little, I would take refuge in what they had endured.
These philosophers struggled to resolve the secrets of their personal lives while still daring to unravel the mysteries of the universe. They experienced an innocent helplessness before the question “what is life?,” even though they had written thousands of pages on the subject. This, it had always seemed to me, was an amusing summary of the human condition.
In that dim light, as my cagemates moaned and groaned, I opened the book.
I had hoped reading would calm me and put me to sleep. I was wrong.
The book did not consist of entertaining biographies. Instead, it recounted the philosophers’ rather compelling views.
And Saint Augustine, of course, was the first one to greet me.
This bear of a man prays sincerely to be rid of the burden of sexuality, yet begs God not to be in a hurry because he is having a good time. He persists in trying to find a reasonable explanation for why God, being “absolutely good,” would create such grave evil. Augustine wakens in me a sense of tenderness that contrasts with his stature and significance.
I began to read.
That a man locked in a cage would find himself with no alternative but to read about why God created evil seems part of life’s unfathomable facetiousness.
This time, reading Augustine angered me. He says that God had reason to create torture, persecution, sorrow, murder and the cage they locked me up in, along with the men who locked me up in it: all this evil, says Augustine, was the result of Adam acting with “free will”
and eating the apple.
I was in a cage because a man had eaten an apple.
The man who ate the apple was God’s own Adam, made by his own hands; the man who was locked in the cage was me.
And Augustine was asking me to be thankful for this?
I grumbled as if he stood before me, shoddily dressed, with his big balding head, long beard and charming smile.
“Tell me,” I said, “what is the bigger sin – a man eating an apple or punishing all of humanity with torture because a man ate an apple?”
I added furiously, “Your God is a sinner.”
The colonel across from me turned to his side, groaning; the shadow of the bar cut off half his face.
“I am paying for your God’s sins.”
My eyes were burning from fatigue, from lack of sleep. A stupor-like slumber was dragging me down.
The colonel across the room moaned.
I looked up and saw that he was awake, and crying.
While he was in jail, his three-year-old child was in hospital, grappling with death.
I turned and faced the wall so he wouldn’t know I had seen him cry.
I was never going to let the branch go. Not even for a moment.
As I fell asleep I thought of that little girl grappling with death.
“Is an apple worth all of this?” I wondered.
The Mirror and the Doctor
Has your face ever suddenly disappeared?
The face you see dozens of times a day in mirrors and shop windows, on shiny surfaces and the screen of your phone, every curve and wrinkle of which you are so familiar with; has this face ever been erased from life?
I don’t suppose even a single day passes without you seeing your own face.
You see it so often that you forget how the sight of it, how making eye contact with yourself, is a small miracle.
On my first morning in the cage, I woke up to the rattling of a shopping trolley.