by Ahmet Altan
Since in ancient Rome “ordinary people” were forbidden to touch a noble, members of nobility who were sentenced to death would be left alone in a room with a knife.
Paetus entered the room.
His mother, father, siblings and wife waited outside the door to hear his dead body fall on the floor.
From inside they could hear Paetus’ footsteps. He couldn’t bring himself to end his life.
His wife couldn’t stand this, so she opened the door and went in, took the knife and plunged it into her stomach, then took it out and gave it to her husband:
Non dolet, Paete.
“See, Paetus, it doesn’t hurt.”
So, what was I supposed to do? Should I have embarrassed the woman I love just so that I could write in comfort? Should I have turned my back on the people who needed me?
There is no easy answer to these questions.
On the one hand, you enjoy fighting and aspire to be your own hero. You were raised admiring brave souls and dread the idea of embarrassing people who love you. You cannot bear the idea of acting like Paetus. Yet you also believe bravery is an unbecoming trapping for a writer, and find it shameful to protect the writer rather than the writing. The wounds this conflict opens will never heal.
There is only one way then for your bravery to be pardoned: by struggling in the middle of the storm but at the same time continuing to write.
By snatching pages – albeit tainted by bravery – from the hands of time as they pass through this cell…
The red glow pulsates.
All night I hear the sirens of the police cars bringing new inmates to the prison.
I am in the center of a storm.
I will fight. I will be brave and I will despise myself for it. I will be injured by my inner conflicts.
I will write my own Odyssey, write it with my life in this narrowest of cells.
Like Odysseus, I will act with heroism and cowardice, with honesty and craftiness, I will know defeat and victory, my adventure will end only in death.
I will have the Penelope of my dreams.
I will write in order to be able to live, to endure, to fight, to like myself and to forgive my own failings.
The searchlight sweeps the courtyard. A ghostly glow reflects off its walls and seeps in.
A ship stands in the middle of the cell; its timbers are creaking. On its deck is a conflicted Odysseus.
What a beautiful scene to describe.
I reach for a pen with a hand that is white in the ghostly light.
I can write even in the dark.
I take the ship cracking in the storm in the palm of my hand and begin writing:
The iron door shut behind me…
The Judge’s Concern
Rather bizarre things are happening to me.
A court sentenced me to life without parole on the charge that I am a “religious putschist,” putting forward only three of my columns and a television appearance as what they call evidence.
Ten days later, the same court put me on trial again, this time on the charge that I am a “Marxist terrorist,” basing its claim on the same column that had allegedly proved I was a religious putschist.
The same court, the same column, two diametrically opposed accusations.
In the second trial (in which I was accused of being a “Marxist terrorist”), the chief judge continually interrupted my lawyers’ defense and told them to “cut it short.”
At the end, the judges said they would rule and turned off their microphones.
The three of them talked among themselves for two or three minutes.
As they were about to finish their conversation, the microphones were somehow turned back on and the last sentence spoken by the presiding judge was heard aloud in the courtroom:
“My gosh, we will miss the five o’clock!”
He was worried they would miss the service bus, which would leave at five.
Then he read the verdict against me:
“Six years in prison.”
Within three minutes, I had been sentenced to six years, and the judges had missed the service bus.
We were both upset, but I think the judge was more upset than me.
Wood Sprites
For months, I didn’t see a single book, I didn’t touch one.
It was forbidden to have books delivered from “outside.” The prison had a library, but for whatever reason it was closed.
I grew up in a house full of books. My childhood was spent among them. Books were the wood sprites in a forest the essence of which I couldn’t quite grasp, one that looked quite complex and boring to me. I liked the fairies’ bright charm, their air of mystery, their promising smiles more than the forest itself.
The first time I went missing I was five years old. After searching for hours, my parents found me in a bookstore that had recently opened in our neighborhood. I was sitting on the floor between two bookcases with a pile of books in front of me.
The small runes on the paper came alive and gleamed as soon as you laid eyes on them; they metamorphosed from one shape to another, transforming themselves into unknown cities, narrow streets, steep rocks, deserts and palaces. They sprinkled you with drops of magic water and you too were transformed. You became Peter Pan, you became Le Chevalier de Pardaillan, you became Arsène Lupin, you became Sherlock Holmes, you became Ivanhoe, you became Lancelot.
I spent the years of my childhood playing with the wood sprites. I got used to having them always around me as they slept in between pages, ready to wake and start dancing as soon as I opened a book. I loved watching them even in their sleep.
One of the things I found most difficult in prison was to live in a place where there were no books.
Finally, they gave us a list of the books in the library. The list resembled a junkyard with a few jewels strewn here and there. There were many useless books but there were also books you’d never have guessed you would find in a prison.
Everything is done by petition in prison, so I immediately wrote asking to be given the books I wanted.
I didn’t hear back for a long time.
Just as I was about to give up hope, the hatch in the middle of the door opened one morning and a book fell through.
I took the book from the floor with the ecstasy of a mariner shouting, “Land ahoy!” after sailing the open seas for many months without hope.
I was reunited with the wood sprites, they who gave me such immense joy, boundless confidence and an excitement that sent shivers through my body.
It was as if life had suddenly changed; a crack from the inner depths set a continent adrift.
I wasn’t helpless, I wasn’t alone, I wasn’t lost.
I had a book in my hands.
They had given me Tolstoy’s The Cossacks.
Tolstoy, that conflicted Zeus of literature, had come to our cell.
In the most unexpected of places, I had happened on a book by a genius, one who can describe an infantry sergeant as elegantly as he would a princess; one who, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “reveals the most carefully hidden secrets of human nature” and is “able to read the minds of different people as certainly as we count the buttons on their coats.”*
It made me especially happy that the first guest in my cell was Tolstoy because this man, whom Woolf held up as an example to all writers, had been my guide to deciphering the secrets not only of people but of literature itself. Ever since I first read Tolstoy, I have sounded the depths of every statement regarding literature and writers by holding it against his image. Many a phrase and many a claim have lost their luster and dimmed in his shadow.
Tolstoy’s shadow was as great as his light, a shadow cast on eras beyond his own.
Tolstoy could capture and hold life in the palm of his hand as easily as a farmboy catches a ladybird. His m
ajestic shadow falls on twentieth-century literature.
All the great writers of the nineteenth century intimidated the writers of the twentieth, but I think the most intimidating was Tolstoy.
Like travelers seeking an alternative route around a mountain range they believe too steep to climb, writers of the twentieth century looked for other paths so they would not be compared with Tolstoy. Very few writers dare hold life in their palms in order to reshape it.
While nineteenth-century literature told us about people’s emotions in staggering depth and revealed the most carefully hidden secrets of human nature, the literature of the twentieth century veered toward ideas.
It veered toward ideas because writing about ideas is always easier than recounting emotions and reading people’s minds.
Ideas in a novel contain grave dangers, because ideas represent the author in the novel. The more ideas there are, the more present is the author. The more present the author, the more constricted the space for characters. They cannot develop and, more importantly, they cannot gain depth.
When you look at the great classics of the nineteenth century, you see that characters come before the writer. Le Père Goriot comes before Balzac, Anna Karenina supersedes Tolstoy, Madame Bovary supersedes Flaubert, the brothers Karamazov supersede Dostoyevsky. The opposite is true in the twentieth century, where writers come before their characters.
If you look at The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil, one of the most extraordinary writers in the history of literature and one who attached such importance to ideas that he said he wanted to write an autobiography of ideas, you will see that Musil takes precedence over Ulrich. The book is not Ulrich’s book, it is Musil’s book.
Similarly, Céline comes before Bardamu, Joyce before Bloom.
The major difference between the novels of these two centuries lies, I think, in the importance of the ideas and the writer within the novel.
I like to read novels in which characters’ emotions and relationships have the upper hand.
In novels, I prefer the complexity of emotions to the clarity of ideas; my beloved wood sprites become vivid with emotions, but pale when ideas dominate the text.
I believe ideas should not give birth to the novel, but that the novel should give birth to ideas.
Of course, literature is not a prescription of exact formulas, and those who assert the very opposite of what I am saying here and now, and with much more authority, may prefer another color of literature’s rainbow.
At the end of the day, we all write what we can, and then develop notions of why novels have to be written the way we write them.
Tolstoy wrote about people’s emotions because he could read people’s minds and write about how they felt.
He managed this with a miraculous sense of intuition.
I don’t know how anything but “intuition” could explain how this man who knew nothing of female sexuality was able to write Anna Karenina.
Tolstoy believed women didn’t enjoy lovemaking. Doris Lessing thought this critical delusion could be explained by the manner in which Tolstoy made love to his wife: he attacked her like a lustful bear, and when she turned him down he thought all women disliked having sex.
Yet this lustful bear created some of the most unforgettable female characters in literature.
I doubt there’s another example that can better prove that genius in literature is a result of intuition rather than ideas and knowledge.
I know that contemporary Western literature hugely underrates intuition, even to the point of treating it as “kitsch.” But when I look at Balzac, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky I cannot help but think that if they had written their novels using only their ideas and not their intuition no one would remember them today.
Taking my argument to extremes – using the infinite liberty of a man in a prison cell with no one else to debate or discuss with, no one on whom to try out his ideas – I will even go so far as to say this:
A novelist is helped not only by his intuition, but also by a certain amount of ignorance when he is giving depth to his novel.
It is perfectly possible that I am arguing this in an attempt to have my own ignorance tolerated; nonetheless, I haven’t given up my belief in the importance of ignorance to literature.
A novelist keeps the knowledge he truly needs deep down in his mind, in a secret repository not far from where his intuition resides – a repository so well hidden that even the novelist himself doesn’t know what has been accumulating there.
In order to access this hidden intuition when writing, the novelist cracks his own mind as if breaking the hard shell of an exotic fruit with the sweep of a heavy broadsword to reach the nectar at its core. He must dismantle his own being in order to reach the bedrock and attain the secret knowledge that will astonish even himself.
Once he strikes this blow against himself, the more the broadsword chafes against the ideas and information accumulated on the surface, the more difficult it will be to reach the nectar.
Surface knowledge is not much use to the novelist. He needs the truths that have seeped through life to the very bottom. With the knowledge that astonishes even himself, he writes his novel.
Flaubert said, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” for a reason. He came across Emma Bovary’s emotions not on the surface but in that deep-down repository. There was the knowledge he had accumulated unwittingly.
There is something animal-like in writing a novel, something that relies purely on instinct and intuition. It is indeed why that “ignorant and lustful bear” could write Anna Karenina; he could arrive at such precision only by way of a primal beastliness.
The first book that I managed to get my hands on after months without drove me crazy. I pressed the book against my chest and paced up and down the courtyard, sensing the ideas rushing into my mind and colliding with one another.
I savored the joy of possessing a book.
Only after I had calmed down a bit did I come in, sit on a plastic chair and begin to read.
The young Olenin, bored with the superficiality of Moscow, he who is so full of admiration for the natural ways of the Cossacks; the beautiful Maryanka who sits on her bed and watches with indifference as life goes by; the selfish Daddy Eroshka; the peasants who take pride in stealing; Tatars and Cossacks killing each other just for fun; jugs full of wine drunk with a cup of honey, the gardens separated by wooden fences, the scents of herbs and flowers, the neighing horses, the crowing roosters, romances, battles, the sounds of gunshot…
Truth be told, this is one of the weakest of Tolstoy’s books. The young Tolstoy was so eager to tell his readers about the different culture and the different nature he had encountered that he wrote the novel from the pieces of knowledge that sit on the surface, and in this loosely woven book the writer takes precedence over his protagonist.
The book had become not Olenin’s but Tolstoy’s book.
The novel was the victim of an excess of knowledge.
Like Pushkin in The Captain’s Daughter, Tolstoy had fallen into the trap of facts and pushed his plot and characters to the background in order to relate more of what he had seen.
Young Tolstoy’s ideas and knowledge had shaped the novel, not his intuitions.
I saw all that, but frankly I didn’t care.
I surrendered myself to the alluring mystery of the wood sprites who took me to riversides and village gardens, to battlegrounds and innocent love affairs, all the while dancing on the gleaming sentences and vivid descriptions scattered here and there in the text that foretold Tolstoy’s brilliant future.
I was reunited with books and with my sprites.
The forest had once again become a place of joy.
* Translator’s note: This quote is taken from the Times Literary Supplement (https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/unsurpassable-tolstoy/).
T
he Notice
In prison, you worry about the people you love. How are they doing on the outside, are they all right, how is their health, do they have enough money? All sorts of questions run through your mind.
News from the outside reaches you only after it has undergone several transformations and traveled through the narrowest of channels, like the tapered glass piping in a chemistry lab.
Your visitors keep things from you if they think you will be sad to hear them. You draw conclusions from their voices, their gazes, their unfinished sentences and the half-truths they let slip without meaning to.
One day, I saw an obituary notice in the newspaper.
My uncle-in-law had died. I felt a chill through my spine.
I had known my uncle-in-law since childhood. We had been neighbors in the same building for thirty-five years and he was the doctor to whom I would take my problems before seeing anyone else. Now he was gone from this world.
Because they thought I would be sad to learn this, they kept it from me.
I didn’t tell them that I had found out about his passing because I thought they would be sad to think the news had made me sad.
My uncle-in-law is still alive in those slender communication channels I have with the outside.
He will live on until I get out of prison.
I will bid him farewell when I am out.
Until then, we keep him alive through our mutual silence.
Handcuffs
With each movement of your arms the iron handcuffs tighten. That’s how the mechanism works. Even if the gendarme doesn’t make them tight as he cuffs you, after a while the iron rings begin rubbing into your flesh. They leave red marks on your wrists. It hurts.
When you walk handcuffed, you realize you don’t only need your legs to walk, you also need your arms. It is difficult to keep your balance without moving your arms. You move them unavoidably when you walk. This tightens the cuffs.