by Ahmet Altan
I suppose the dream workers inside me are, for the time being, not interested in my prison life.
Once I asked a writer friend of mine who had lived in exile in Sweden for many years in which language he dreamed. The first five years he had dreamed in Turkish, he told me, but after that it was all in Swedish.
Perhaps more time has to elapse for me to have prison dreams.
The dream which made me ruminate on dreams in prison had nothing to do with prison. In fact, it was even too short to be considered a dream.
A woman walked through my dream, a woman I had never seen before. She had an ordinary face, an ordinary body, ordinary clothes. She appeared for a moment and then was gone. I don’t remember her face; all I remember is its ordinariness.
The light of the dream barely illuminated the woman. Instead, that mystical light fell on a tiny red spot on the woman’s wrist. The only bright thing in the dream was that spot.
I opened my eyes. As I began to stir, the question “what in the world is that red spot?” was already in my mind. I must have begun thinking about it before I awoke.
I was startled.
Like anyone else, I am used to all kinds of dreams.
Each night the unknown quarrymen who begin their work in the depths of our minds once we fall asleep use their mallets to smash into pieces the large blocks of marble that are our thoughts and feelings quarried from life and hewn by our intellect and reason.
Thoughts, desires and fears – all unchained, impossible to fit into any kind of reasoned or intellectual framework, destroying all logical coherence – invade our souls with the weight of their rebelliousness. Like the gods, they create a world that defies all rules.
Dreams are God inside us. Or a madman.
Does this insurrection by the irrational, which is unique to gods and the insane, cater to our being’s need for madness, its wish to break free of reason for a while? Or does it deprive us of our reason and keep us in the realm of madness?
I don’t know, but I do wonder about the dreams of the insane.
What does a madman see in his dreams?
While sane people go mad in their dreams by experiencing things that have broken free of reason, do the insane come to their senses at night thanks to rational dreams?
The answers to these questions are unknown to me.
People we don’t see, know or recognize live in the attics of our houses and at night they move around the belongings we have put in order during the day.
They roam and we don’t even know if it is we or they who are the true owners of the place.
We don’t control the management of our own houses; dreams are the proof of that.
Each night we are changed by what we see, and each morning we wake up as both ourselves and someone else.
This eerie division of our existence – the harboring inside us of gods and madmen – is a fact that, despite its oddity, we don’t find strange anymore; we are used to it, we welcome it as a natural thing.
Like anyone else, I am used to nightmares and happy dreams, I am used to flying, to being scared and to feeling desire.
But a tiny red spot…The light falling on that spot only…Such a tiny detail being the core of a dream.
I have never met a woman with a red spot on her arm; I don’t have a memory or an emotion or a thought that might cause me to dream of a woman with a red spot on her arm.
Until that day, no dreams had stirred such curious, even worrying thoughts in me.
I was appalled by the realization that a tenant, or perhaps a landlord, residing in the depths of my being was capable of conjuring such a tiny detail.
Did someone who could imagine such a spot, who had reason to imagine it, reside inside me without my knowledge?
What kind of details was he interested in?
What had been happening inside me as I lived for the last year and a half in a box made of iron and cement?
Was this red spot the metamorphosis of an impression the outside world had made on me without my noticing? Or was it an image that gave life to itself without any exterior perception?
The impressions the outside world can leave on you are limited in a prison cell. The material for this red spot hadn’t come from outside. This bit of ruby was inside me.
Still, this spot had to be made of some raw material.
But which raw material?
All night I surveyed my past, going to the deepest places my memory could reach. I didn’t come across a sign or a trace that could show me where that red spot had come from.
Not a sense of longing, not a desire, not a fear, not a certain memory…There were no roads in my mind that led there.
I got lost within this tiny spot.
Creating such a minute detail required a more complex imagination than it would take to dream of ghosts, abysses, exaltations, moments of lovemaking; a larger and more inventive imagination.
I sensed a creature hiding in my depths more powerful than I had presumed, and I shivered.
It was as if something had demonstrated its strength to me with a tiny spot.
I lay under the shadows of the iron bars that faded away bit by bit and looked at the ceiling till morning.
The red spot was there.
It flapped like an invader’s flag, one that belonged to either a god or a madman.
Serial Killer
The prison barbershop was next door to the prison tailor.
My turn finally came to go to the barber, and while he was trimming my beard the tailor came in to give the barber a shirt on which he had replaced a missing button.
The second time I went to the barber’s, the tailor was sitting there in his white shirt.
I hesitated by the door.
“Come in,” said the tailor. “Sit down.”
“Aren’t you the tailor?”
“When the barber is on leave, I tend his patch.”
I sat in the chair.
The tailor shaved my face.
He was a chatty man. “There’s nothing we haven’t seen here,” he said as he told me stories about the prisoners he had known. I sat and listened on tenterhooks, afraid that he might mistakenly cut my ear or put his scissors up my nose.
He had shaved a serial killer who had been caught after killing four people.
“On visiting days, he used to sit by his mother, knees pressed together like a well-behaved boy.”
“Did you ever speak to him?”
“Did I ever!”
“Did you ask him why he had killed those men?”
Of course he had. “How come you killed those men just for your pleasure?” he had asked him.
“What did he say?”
The tailor gave me the killer’s answer with a smile on his face.
The answer this well-behaved killer who had cold-bloodedly butchered four people gave to the question How come you killed those men just for your pleasure? was far more memorable than the scene in which a tailor shaved an author’s face:
He said, “That’s just the way it was, then.”
Meryem
There are three of us in the cell: two devoutly religious men and one nonbeliever.
We are together every moment of every day in these cramped conditions.
From completely different families, completely different educational backgrounds, completely different cultures, with completely different habits and completely different tastes, we collide with each other in something resembling a train crash in a thirteen-foot-long cell.
It is not only our culture and beliefs that are different, so too are our ages.
It is as though we had been brought together by a playwright and not by the prison administration, since our identities embody enough conflict and tension to see an entire play through to its climactic end.
Our youngest
is thirty-eight years old.
He was born into an extremely pious family. Religion is not merely a set of beliefs for him, it has, since birth, been an indivisible and natural part of his body and soul. I have never seen anyone who wore his faith as simply and comfortably as he does.
He studied cinematic arts. He is familiar with the lifestyle of nonbelievers. Although he has remained in a religious milieu his whole life, he is well aware that people who don’t share his beliefs also roam the earth.
He sees prison as an opportunity to cultivate himself and uses that opportunity well. He reads Ibn al-’Arabi and Al-Ghazali as well as Plato, Tolstoy and Murakami.
His family lives far from Istanbul; no one has visited him for a year.
Yet he never complains, because “Everything is God’s doing and it is a sin to complain about His deeds.” He doesn’t commit that sin.
He carries each burden life puts on his shoulders with the same strength and confidence.
He is certain that all problems will be solved by God one day.
The middle member of our family is fifty-three years old. He has been replaced in our cell a few times.
The strange coincidence is that each of these new inmates has been the same age. Their profession, their physical appearance and their place of birth have varied, but when it came to religion they were all the same. Even their dispositions and emotions were exactly the same. They were like a single person who had many disguises.
Sometimes, in the kaleidoscope of my memory, they multiply and assume different faces. At other times, they unify to become a single man. On the subject of religion in particular, my memory doesn’t distinguish one from the other.
My mind, like an illusionist, would first show me playing cards with different faces, then shout, “Religion!” and all the cards would turn into the same face.
That “single face” is that of the son of a middle-class family that wasn’t overly religious.
His intense relationship with religion began in his youth. He fell in love with religion. His is more than a faith, it is a passion that occupies his entire soul and leaves almost no room for any other kind of emotion or desire.
After adolescence, he spent all his life among people as pious as himself.
Talking about religion gives him an enormous amount of pleasure – no other subject interests him as much.
He spends most of his time reading religious books and performing his devotions.
I am sixty-eight years old.
I don’t believe in God but I find the idea of God quite interesting.
We inhabit a planet where living things prey on other living things. Human beings regularly kill not just other creatures but also one another. Fire spurts out of mountains, the earth cracks and devours living creatures, waters run wild and destroy everything in their path and thunderbolts rain down from the heavens.
That humankind can conceive that so dreadful a place was created by a force representing “absolute goodness” and that, despite the violence at the foundations of their being, they still possess such an optimistic imagination seems to me the strangest of human paradoxes.
They believe all this was created by a “force,” yet they don’t reproach that “force.” On the contrary, they worship it with gratitude.
Religion, as the consequence of people’s ability to see “goodness” in this terrifying planet of ours, has interested me ever since I was young.
God is a magnificent metaphor.
Like many writers, I enjoy ruminating upon him. The helplessness of human beings, suffocating in their own violence, dreading their own evil, and therefore imagining a focal point of goodness outside themselves as a remedy for their afflictions; this vain effort of theirs seems to me like a sad quest in the human adventure.
First they find a God who tells them to be good and then they kill one another in his name. It sends chills up my spine. What’s more, they believe that this very God owns a torture facility called hell.
I suspect that hell takes up more space than heaven in the believers’ souls.
In The Divine Comedy, Dante’s depiction of the Inferno is more intense and dramatic than his narrative on Paradise. Dante cannot help but imagine himself torturing the dwellers of hell. Here are the literary grounds for my suspicion that what we expect from God is not so much that he accept us into his heaven but that he send our enemies to hell.
A God that created Satan and hell…Evidently, humankind is unable even to imagine “pure and absolute goodness”!
In spite of it all, that pious search for goodness and morality arouses in me a reluctant sympathy. The religious look for something to help them be good and moral and resist evil.
But because they think they can only find goodness and morality with the help of God, they can never bring themselves to accept that nonbelievers can also be good and moral people. For them a nonbeliever is in principle amoral and bad. I suppose they accept unwittingly that a person cannot have goodness in himself, that he can become a good person only with outside help.
Our ending up together in the same cell has been quite a baffling experience for all three of us.
Never had I lived with people who prayed so intensely; nor had they ever spent so much time in the presence of a nonbeliever.
Because religion finds the solution to all problems in the afterlife, seeing things through the prism of faith inevitably invokes an image of death.
When my cellmates look through that prism, they see the afterlife, but I only see death.
A loud reciting of the Qur’an, whisperings of prayers, turning off the TV at a certain time all gave me the sense that someone had died. During the first weeks, I lived with the feeling that I would soon see a dead body covered with white sheets in a corner of the cell.
My cellmates, in their turn, were troubled by my gaze – the gaze of an outsider.
Like thorny plants entangled within an iron taw we prickled each other.
We were trying to create some space for ourselves without hurting one another. Our middle one, who had been suddenly extracted from a life of religion and pious people to be confronted with a nonbeliever, could not fathom how a person could still lack faith when presented with the clear and unequivocal facts of God and religion.
He hoped to save me from hell.
For a long time, we talked about religion.
We discussed age-old questions such as why God in his “absolute goodness” created Evil, or who was responsible for a person’s deeds.
The middle one was easily offended in matters of religion. Although I knew this, I sometimes couldn’t stop myself from teasing him like a teenager.
Then he would be cross and stop talking to me for precisely three days.
Because Prophet Muhammad said, “It is not permissible for a man to forsake his Muslim brother for more than three days…” he would make peace at the end of the third day.
But what really angered him was my behavior.
He wanted to lead a pious life, to watch religious discussions on TV.
I, on the other hand, had discovered among the limited number of channels the prison TV offered one that catered to the urban poor, where female singers whom no one had heard of sang and danced in revealing dresses. I liked watching that channel.
He disapproved both of my watching of that channel and of my keeping up a regular exercise regimen.
“You’re old,” he said to me one day. “You will die soon. Why do you busy yourself with such things?”
“You think I should start performing my devotions because I will die soon?”
“Of course!”
I laughed.
“I am a disciple of Abu Talib,” I said.
Abu Talib was the uncle of Prophet Muhammad. He never became a Muslim himself but helped Muslims a great deal.
The first Musli
ms liked him very much and prayed that he too would accept their faith and go to heaven.
When Abu Talib became ill and took to his bed, they visited and told him this: “You will die soon. Accept Islam and be saved in the afterlife.”
“No,” said the prophet’s uncle, “I won’t do anything that will make people say I became a Muslim because I feared death.”
It was the middle one who told me this story in the first place.
He laughed when I said, “I am Abu Talib’s disciple.”
“You will still die,” he said. “You are wasting your life away.”
Then he brought up that famous theory.
“If you spend the final few years of your life having faith and doing your devotions you will not lose anything. But if you don’t believe, you will lose a glorious afterlife. Is it worth it?”
The middle one was very surprised to hear that Pascal was the first to say this.
He took to philosophy.
One evening we were talking about religion again when I told him about Spinoza and then asked: “Does God have any boundaries?”
“May God forgive me,” he said, “of course he doesn’t.”
“Then God embodies everything on earth.”
“Of course!”
“Then God’s existence doesn’t end where my body begins. He embodies me also. Me, you, all of us…we are a part of God. Then there is nothing I can call ‘I.’ Because if I exist separately, there is no God, and if there is God then there isn’t a separate me.”
He pondered. He would hold back at such instances for he feared saying the wrong thing and committing a sin. “One has to ask religious scholars such a question,” he said.
After a while the three of us got used to each other.
It didn’t make the middle one so angry that I watched women on TV.
And I had accepted their never-ending acts of devotion as part of life.
On visiting days, the middle one and I went together to the visiting room, where we talked to our families on the phone as they sat on the other side of a thick glass window.