The Stone Building and Other Places

by Asli Erdogan

  You listen to the sounds, whispers, footsteps, screams, the calls of the world outside, its endless drone… The world outside that has had you erased from all its pictures for a long time now. The sounds and echoes carried generously by the stones — are they real, are they memory or illusion, you cannot tell… Heels tapping along, doors slamming, a telephone insistently ringing somewhere, and no one answers… A scream, it stops, turns into a moan, starts again. This time, it persists. A scream that builds like an avalanche, forcing you to retreat into darkness, all the way back to the walls. Does it belong to a woman or a man, human or a creature much more innocent, you cannot tell. Is it coming from the body or the soul itself? From the unfathomable past that you mean when you say ‘my body’ or ‘my soul,’ or from the future lost to you in an instant? Maybe it’s the cry of the Sphinx hurling itself into the abyss. And you prepare yourself too, as much as you can… You decide which of your you’s to send to the battlefront, which ones to call back. One of you will most certainly be terrified. You weigh what you can give up and what you can’t, close whatever accounts you can close. Like an aspen leaf, another body trembles in the recesses of your body, and the walls of the stone building tremble along with it; and the vast world and the stars that encircle it tremble along with it, too. You embrace your best possible you, bidding a hasty farewell. Are you ready? it asks with a quiet, nocturnal smile, are you ready to turn into a winged creature, into a fern forest, into a stone? A stone as ancient as this world, resilient, mute, pocked… If you wish to be reborn, you must be buried with a mirror and a heart. But your heart has become a gauzy membrane around a void. If you wish to see your own face, you must cry a river. A muddy, subterranean river that will show you in whose image you were made. Are you ready to fly? I don’t know. Take this one to the fifth floor!

  Alone, you straighten up in your body, your exhausted arms hang limp like broken wings. You stand beyond hope and despair, beyond good and evil. Your last place of refuge. The awareness hits you like a blast of cold air, eternity is on the wind blowing through your hair as if to make you whole again, piecing you back together, returning your face to you. Fingers of moonlight caress your eyes thirsty for sleep, showing you life as a miracle, then gently lower your eyelids. Your body, immune to wounds now, quivers like a taut bowstring, standing at the earth’s gate, awaiting its final banishment. It only takes two heartbeats, your journey from one horizon to the other; the morning star, your star, lets down the rope for you to climb all the way up to it; for the first time, acutely aware of your innocence, you lay your head down on the thorny night. Alone, defeated and proud, you lay claim to all the fates that converge here. Swaying quietly in the wind, standing fast in the middle of your own disappearance, you take responsibility for the lies of life and death. One more time, one last time, the magnificent song of the chorus is heard. It begins gently, expands, wave upon wave, rising beyond all the world’s sounds and silences, beyond its skies and nights. Calling out to you, calling out to you and your solitude in your most authentic voice — that remote, improbably magnificent chorus, drums of victory or defeat, that wind… The wind.

  The Stones

  THE CHORUS

  I think I was talking. As if I would have collapsed to the ground if I stopped for a moment, and then even the stone surface would not have kept me from falling deeper. Outside, the sun must have been setting. I was still quiet, calm, collected — yet there was no longer a subject to which I could attach these adjectives. The experiences weren’t mine. I wasn’t there, inside my own life. We are human, I was saying between the lines. You know, like the honest man that Diogenes went in search of, lamp in hand, street after street, the very last one that some wanted to summon, others — if they were to find him — would keep him alive, or kill him. It’s an unfortunate twist of fate that we find ourselves on the opposite sides of desks, papers, locked doors, of light and darkness; it's an unlucky twist of fate. Otherwise, we’re essentially the same, each of us a victim. And maybe I wasn’t saying these things, but stating my address, place and date of birth. Suddenly, in the middle of my sentence, as if someone had called my name, I turned around and noticed the outside door was ajar — and no matter how much I tried to figure it out, I couldn’t recall when it had been opened. Seized with terror, I closed my eyes for the duration of a brief but infinite fall — and I wish I had kept them closed for much longer. They materialized as if in a dream, surrounded by tall wire mesh fences, bare walls, stones, in dimly lit underground corridors… Half-concealed in the shadows, they seemed even more dreamlike. Leaning on one another, they walked slowly, ponderously… Pausing, stumbling, shuffling along… As silently as if they were under water. As silently as their elongated shadows dragging along the floor behind them, breaking at sharp angles on the stones. Their souls were saturated with this silence. Even from a distance, I could see the agony in every step they took, almost with superhuman effort, like they were walking over broken glass. The insuperable agony contorting their childlike faces, bending their backs and spreading cell by cell through their limbs… Their bodies bore the marks — chalky, ash colored, ruby-red, deep purple — left by the blows, by thirst, by cold. They were too exhausted to take a single step. They had emerged from windowless rooms, underground cells that sunlight never reached, from among shadows and that kept the secret of screams. Rising through the seven layers of the earth… They had emerged at the border of the seen and the unseen, young, silent silhouettes carved from darkness. Step after excruciating step, they walked slowly, arduously, as if shackled and dragging an immense burden. All of them had wounded feet. The oldest among them — he was sixteen or seventeen years old — had a broken leg, clumsily wrapped with a filthy cloth from the knee down. Without a cane to lean on, he held onto a boy who was close in height. As if caught in some cruel, endless game of hopscotch, with the stone being placed forever farther and farther ahead, he hopped along in agony — his teeth clenched, his face twisted, his cheeks quivering like feeble wings. The procession passed by without uttering a word, heads bowed, gaze frozen. For a moment I forgot where I was. I thought I was in a field hospital behind the battle line, among soldiers returning from combat. A battalion of the wounded, approaching slowly, shouldering their dead and trailing loose gauze and bandages. Covered in mud, in defeat, in the congealed, black blood of waiting in ambush, these were the children of the stone building. Emaciated, weak, if not yet beaten to death then beaten black and blue again. Guilty children who had taken over the crimes committed for generations, who were more accustomed to cold and degradation than we were, whose bones heal faster… They were the children of ruthless streets, of deserted marketplaces, of cell beds, of mugshots impossible to tell apart, children who didn’t die off easily, whom tragedy deemed unworthy, a few of whom we could perhaps ‘reform’… They had come from desolate valleys, from swamps, from the dark dreams of the underworld, quietly appearing at the border of the unseen. From a distant solitude, like the middle of a desert. It was as if they had been walking for months, for years, and would be walking for months and years to come, on a loop longer than a human life, on cobblestone roads of silence, along life’s edges, its dark nights. In the Gordian knots, at the crossroads of our human existence… Shouldering our humanity as they carried the corpses of their own youth. The spirit of our times hung from them in tatters — our haphazardly mummified collective spirit — trailing gauze and leaving deep, dark tracks behind. Their limbs entangled like branches in springtime, their gaze frozen, the throng advanced without uttering a single word. Perhaps exchanging a silent nod, a secret, a curse, maybe a reassuring “hang on” at times, then a “let it go”… And as they passed by, the world exhaled and grew altogether quiet, still and silent as a mirror, watching its crippled children, those it could not bear to look in the eye. Out of the blue, one of them began to sing, his voice barely audible. The tune was familiar but I couldn’t understand the words, and perhaps they had no equivalents in the world of words. It was as if he wa
s sharing a morsel of bread, a morsel he had hidden among the crumbs in his pockets. They joined him immediately — one taking up the simple, steady refrain where the other left off, voices gradually rising. They were singing to live, passionately singing in the name of life, giving it their all, whatever they still had left… A momentary gleam in their eyes — youth’s pure, dazzling flare, still coming through, despite everything… An artless song catching fire in the dark and quickly turning into a blaze — the last candle of their strength. An unintelligible, relentless, spellbinding song… Rising from the earth, from a place they had barely known existed before, from the earth’s most desolate, inaccessible place — a heart gripped in ice — the song swelled up, overflowing, renewing itself in all things, re-creating the skies even among the stones. Wave after wave it spread, filling every heart in its path with the melancholy of night, the pull of infinity. Such joy — at being alive — unlike happiness or hope, such unfettered love… The song kept rising and rising, with every person who heard it, extending beyond the last yellow line of sunset on the horizon. To the place it had been calling out to all along, to an unclaimed heart, Nobody’s heart, in the nether regions of the sky. Along a path where everyone, everything is lost… Like a shooting star vanishing into its own night.

  The chorus I had been dimly hearing was nearby, at my door, within sight. Coming closer, more real, more grounded, more me. They were singing the Human song, in its utter desperation and splendor; and the very moment that I recognized its melody — we all do, what we don’t recognize is our own voice within it — is when I slipped through life’s fingers. Like an ‘E,’ insignificant by itself, I slipped and fell through the L’s, the I’s, and the F’s. I broke apart beyond repair. Countless I’s, distant, lost, deaf to one another… I would never be leaving the stone building.

  A guard had lined up the kidnappers, pickpockets, carjackers, the juvies, all the petty criminals who had tasted the bastinado, and he was walking them to the latrines. One of them suddenly started a song in a language I didn’t understand, and soon the rest joined in. The voices grew louder and louder then stopped. They disappeared into the dark hallways as quickly as they had appeared, swept into an eternity of bare walls, stones, wire mesh fences taller than a man. Shadows, young, mute, dark — the chorus singing that extraordinary, enchanted song that I still can hear, that I still seek…

  You crawl on your belly over the stones grey as sorrow, in the desolate, cold hallways of memory, from one end of the wall to the other, then back… You crawl between the endless nights and days of limbo, between sky and earth, between flames and ice… In narrow rivulets of blood, dried-up or still flowing, silenced or never silent… The distance between two horizons is the span of a wall. You wander among the ruins, stumbling like a ghost whose eye sockets are packed with dust; your body hangs like tattered rags from your bones; time, its very essence disguised as nothingness, ascends your spine; your jaws chatter. You bite your tongue until you tear away the last word. You crawl on your knees and elbows toward the invisible river beyond the rocks, doubled over with thirst, your lips parched and bleeding… Dreaming of waking up in the open sea, of having been long dead… By now you must have figured out the meaning of the song that comes through the walls, from the depths, the very depths. “Let me go,” chants the chorus of young dead, chanting it over and over, and nothing else… It’s unbearable; you bang your head against the walls like you’re knocking at the door of the earth’s heart… At least the stones are merciful; they spare you your own image. You’ve discarded your half-naked body — as if you ever owned it — left it behind like a shell that’s been cracked open. Word by word, you’ve dripped out of your own story; clot by clot, like a used placenta you’ve been strewn across the endless stony night. You have no place else to go. These stones, this wind arriving from quiet corners, carrying in the screams, wails, prayers; the howling of the stormy darkness; dispossessed shadows that cling to each other in fear; a song, unappeasable, unrelenting… In a night that even words cannot penetrate, the dawn you call upon is a dawn this world has not yet seen.

  What was I doing there? But there was nothing left of an “I”… No part of me could assume this pronoun, no part could face another and become one, not one part could shoulder a destiny or carry out a story to its end. I opened my eyes, found myself in a world of stone. The color of ash, of smoke, as gray as sorrow… I closed my eyes, opened them again: I was still in the same place, in the same otherworldly truth. It was a nightmare and I was tumbling down, tumbling into its depths, trying to stop the freefall by grasping at whatever I could find, at times managing to stand on my feet, scars and bruises and all, but then falling down again. Whatever it was that had kept me on my feet, on this earth, in this body until this day had suddenly released me from its grip. In this desolate, entirely alien abyss, there was nothing, not even a single word, that I could hang on to, that I could sink my teeth or dig my nails into, to pull myself up and climb out. Even if I found something, could I hang onto it with these bare, dry hands, these broken teeth? My gums were still bleeding; I rolled the warm, bright fluid around my tongue. It oozed from the corner of my mouth, filled the back of my throat. If it just couldn’t bear being stuck inside a frail, wasted body, the blood would have simply shot from my veins, but the way it was, it couldn’t bring itself to desert me altogether. How long it took for blood to congeal… I wasn’t in pain, nor did it taste as salty as they claim, but I just couldn't stop my jaws from chattering. Nothing is as bad as you fear, they say, those who don’t know much about humankind, those who believe pain has a beginning and an end… Those who only circle the edge of a familiar abyss and are therefore never snared in the eternal noose of Horror… “Sooner or later, the sun rises,” they say. And, besides, where else would we wait for daybreak if not at night? Before daybreak you will betray me three times.