The Stone Building and Other Places

by Asli Erdogan

  YOUR LAST PLACE OF REFUGE

  You crawl over stones grey as humans, looking for a friendly hand, for a word to grab hold of and pull yourself up, for a river to carry you away. A river to quench your terrible thirst, a word, a hand… Groaning, trembling, your teeth chattering… You leave tracks along the wall — red, winding, fragrant roses that wither as soon as they bloom… You wish that you were dead, that you could turn into a winged creature, that you had never been born. That you had a God you could call out to and ask, Why have you forsaken me! Crawling on your knees and elbows, you desert your body as if it were a dry riverbed. You close your eyes to open them on a different world. A world that hasn’t cooled, that hasn’t even been created yet… Slowly, painfully, you move through the night — always the same night — toward the window at the end of the wall, toward the strange, remote image of a face trapped in the cloudy glass… Spotty, disheveled, unmoored from time. Beyond your reflection lies the world outside, a blurry panorama. You approach it, drawn on by the ice-blue call of the pole star — it’s your star now — that lies waiting on the horizon. You grasp the window ledge and slowly raise your body up, like a new moon rising over ruins. You want to ascend all the way to the sky — climb its airy stairs — turn yourself into a pale gold light and shine down on the night, on the dark waters, on people’s long restless sleep, on the burnt forests of dreams. You can’t distinguish the stone’s darkness from the night’s, the stone’s night from the humans’. (Pegasus, created from Medusa’s severed head, was born of the most ancient blood, the veins of marble. This is why the stars belong to the dead, why the faces of the lost ones are etched in the Milky Way…) Silently, you scan the world below, the wet, glistening rooftops, the streets that bear no trace of you or your absence, the public squares, the bridges, the jumbled, wavering lights of the city… The horizons that hold no promise other than new rounds of loss. Alone, painfully, you raise your body up, you stand beyond hope and despair, beyond good and evil, your exhausted arms limp like broken wings. Your last place of refuge. The recognition hits you like a blast of cold wind, eternity in the wind that blows 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 close 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. “Don’t stand back! Jump! Jump down!” 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.

  You thanked the stars, then died alone, mercilessly alone, on a starless morning, and, when your head fell in one swift motion, you brought the night to an end. For all of us. You had spread your wings too soon — on the stairs climbing up to the sky, on the very first stone step — you opened one wing to the light, one to the darkness. You lit the last candle of your strength, perhaps with a smile, offering it to the dawn. In that moment, a star was reborn. You left your eyes with me so that I can see life as a miracle.

  The Dreams

  THE ANGEL

  We all saw the angel. At different times, in different places, on windy rooftops, in empty rooms, in corridors where no one walked… At a top floor window, calling out to the passing stars… Among the stones, having rejected his name, his fate, the ability to fly, waiting naked, helpless, ordinary… Alone, circling the abyss with his damaged smile, at the threshold of eternity… We saw him at daybreak, in the blood-red, fiery dawn hours, in a pure gold-colored light, in the sharp fluorescent light, in the raw light of a naked bulb, in impenetrable darkness… He flickered between being and not being, between the seen and the unseen, fading in and out. Some noticed only his uncombed, lion’s mane of hair, some only his eyes shining like stars in his hollow face. None of us could look at him for long. Perhaps what we saw was a dancing shaft of light, or we just experienced him as a spring breeze, full of life and heavy with the scents of the red buds. That much was enough for us. The sound of a wing fluttering, a tiny little song, a memory flowering on its own, a few drops of rain. He had heard us and descended at once from the heavens, his hands and arms, his pockets full of letters, good tidings, promises, melodies… He had come bearing raindrops, rushing rivers, the surging waves of the open seas, far-off places… To some he had returned their childhood, to others he sounded the irresistible call of eternity… To some he had brought the smell of pine trees, to others the rustle of leaves… Some said he smelled like a wild animal, like wild roses, virgin forests, or the storm-battered sea, but above all he smelled human. He embraced each one of us, calmed us with the gentlest touch of his deft wings, with just a few tears. We could not have dreamed this up ourselves, because we had exhausted our dreams long ago. Had we come together — but we never did — we could have gathered his disparate images, here is yours, here is mine, and turned him into flesh and blood. We could have completed his interrupted story by adding sentences of our own, and we could have saved him. And then maybe we couldn’t have. He was our lost one, lost forever, everything we had already lost and all that we would still yet lose.

  Tired, depleted, he had taken on the ashen color of hunger, thirst, and isolation. He had his head on his knees, his hair hanging over his face. And yet, I thought I saw — if only for a moment — his eyes, incomparable, mysterious… He was made of an essence different from ours, made of the migrant moon and dreams, of silvery wings formed by the Milky Way, of verses not yet uttered, of a heaven the color of the heart. Of the deepest and most authentic Hell. His gaze, fixed on a point in the void, obliterated the void and replaced it with an entirely different, an altogether new universe. A universe yet unseen, yet uncooled. A universe I knew existed — alive, real, a universe that everything called forth, in which everything was made whole.

  Bent double, seemingly in pain, he was shriveled, as if he no longer filled out his body. His clothes were torn, caked with soot and mud. The raindrops running down his drenched wings had formed puddles around his feet. From the heavens, from a place near the human heart, he had come rushing across this world’s night from one end to the other, like he had started out too late… He had wandered in darkness, visiting our world, unsure whether he was hearing the living or the dead. He had come to live among us, stayed on with us, and he had been depleted. He had seen much, secrets, crimes, miracles, murders, the countless forks along the paths of being human. He had seen everything, seen himself in everything. He found less and less meaning in our world of voices and definitions; which is why he kept silent.

  Suddenly lifting his head, like a puppet on a string, he jerked it back with a force almost enough to break his neck. His hair flung about, a ferocious laughter rang out. It was a terrifying laugh that came from the depths of the night, from the very depths, echoing, shattering against the walls. Savage, dazzling, free. This is how he revealed his mortal wounds. The cuts, bruises, burns — the crimson blossoms on our bodies — the dense forest of scars, the aimless river of blood frothing, brimming over, blood drying like wild roses… The wings he could no longer move… In that fleeting moment, unmeasurable by any measure of time, I saw that his face was covered in sweat — his face riven by the deep scar — a mask emptying itself out… Then his head hung down again, as if heavy with deaths — yours and mine — falling on
to his knees. His vision splintered like old withered branches. The universe torn in two, streaming down like giant drapes to cloak his eyes, which he left with us. There, defeated and proud, with an extraordinary, superhuman exertion, he mustered the last traces of his strength and plunged into dreams.

  A.

  So this is the place they assigned to me, I have finally found the place I can call mine, where I can take root. Bare walls, a locked door that waits tensely, silently, this hollowed-out world of stone… This spacious void, this abundant emptiness, is my exile. They say that if you stare at the ceiling long enough without blinking, your entire past will appear there. A one-seat cinema where you can watch a film in which you are the main character. You can take it out of the canister, wipe off the dust, rewind it, and watch it over and over. Not because you love your life so much, certainly not the life that has been squeezed and squeezed in order to fit into this, the one that would spurt out if you stepped on it… But because you have nothing better to do. Is it easy to love a life that has been hollowed out? Especially when that life doesn’t love me either, doesn’t find me worthy of itself. Random gunfire, empty blanks; it’s always someone else who dies, someone else who plays the part; curses, blows, insults come to an end, then start up again… dragging on like this. What past? I have no past! A soft flick and I free the bug that had lost its way among the shadows when it caught a whiff of human, the strange, bitter smell of a human… My gaze cuts through stones, layer upon layer of stones, it pierces through the roof, through the atmosphere, and, now free, it soars among the folds of darkness. It steals the night of the world. A new moon, groping its way forward, climbs in a spiral just beyond the horizon, searching distant corners for someone to call, to confide in, someone to console, to explain life’s infinite vastness… But it calls to this world, not to us. I throw myself to the sky, my arms twine around the stars like ivy, I glide across The Archer, Leo with his mane, The Dragon, Pegasus with his broad wings, in this light, on this luminous trajectory, I become a comet dizzy with the fullness of infinity, chasing one dream after another, now The Hunter now The Argos, I grab hold of Libra’s scales and, swinging, I leap from galaxy to galaxy, dissolving, dispersing in all directions… The Milky Way traces death’s face, everchanging, deepening, flowering, in a tangle of branches… I stare for so long that my eyes become an ethereal, wayward light that loses its way and turns into the sky itself. It swells with rain clouds. The wind picks up, the storm begins, a star slips and falls. As if it had come to live among us and then lost its way back. Like a gift from God — I understand many things, but God is not among them. I pick up the star that has fallen from my night; wiping off the mud, I caress it gently, dress its wounds. But I cannot stop it from fading, from dying in terror. It crumbles like a twig in my battered hands — my fingernails have fallen off, my hands only know wounds, scabs, rope burns… They bind the hands of men like me so that we won’t call out to death. Little beetle, how I wish that you hadn’t come from the dark, or at least, for once, that you hadn’t come for me! It did not move, perhaps it was playing dead. What can survive, once it falls into human hands! We finish what the earth and the sky have left unfinished… The club hurts, it burns wherever it lands but leaves no mark, deprives us even of a bruise. The strap is worse, it feels like a lightning bolt striking from within, tearing through your flesh. And the cane, it topples you like a tree, the shock quickly numbs you. But the next day, and the days that follow, the pain returns as if it had always been there, from the beginning. It returns with the southern winds, with the scent of the sea, melting snow, but the bones — time’s white sharer of secrets — the bones endure. No one gets off easy, even an ounce of fate has its price. Pain is not as harrowing as they say, getting past it is almost a matter of arithmetic, you can’t explain it or share it with anyone, not even with yourself, but once it’s over, you forget it. Sooner or later you get some water or soup, a mattress, a stove, even watch a TV that still tells the same old story. I wish there was a blade of grass or a leaf between my teeth, the rush of a stream, rain falling on the sea… The world is what it is, but, hollowed out by the winds, it withers away, in time, it turns into a howl. Thankfully, no one notices. There is the asphalt that keeps you from seeing the earth, the earth and its dead. Walls, rooftops, ceilings, blind doors stretch like a curtain between the night’s darkness and your own; streetlights illuminate hope’s deceptions; legions of well-kept buildings, bridges, monuments rise between the stones’ resolve and that of humans. Shortly before dawn, there is an hour when the night is over but daylight hasn’t yet returned — the only hour when the city is entirely empty and quiet. The lights fade, everything hushes, even the pupils fall still under closed eyelids. And that is my hour. Alone, aimless, I walk the desolate streets, walk the pavements, the cobblestone roads of silence. The streets walk in me. Something calls to me, draws me out of myself, casts me far away; I shout with joy, sing, unfold my arms, whirl and whirl in the rain. Drops flow down my hair, my cheeks, from my eyes, rolling down my back, cleansing my heart, washing away the mud and the grime. Laughing, I bid farewell to everything. And if, just then, a tiny, wet, shivering bird were to perch on my shoulder, to tell of… the mischiefs and looting, of the other shores, the luminous sunrises of your childhood… Now this is a gift from God. I am thirsty but the door is opening, my only portal to tomorrow; soon the parade of hours and colors across the skies will begin. That’s when they will take me upstairs, to the fifth floor.

  THE HEART OF THE LABYRINTH

  Through the eerie twists and turns of the stone building, down secret corridors wrapped in a bluish haze, through one-way doors that open and close quickly, like turnstiles, you arrive at the heart of the labyrinth — impressive, real, hard as a fist… Here is a cold, empty room, white as a gravestone, no different from any of the countless locked rooms of the mind. This is where the voice comes from, the voice you hear in the deepest recesses of your being, the voice that speaks to you, hopelessly calls out to you… The place that you arrive each time you’re swept along by that distant song, your solitude’s companion, the song that weaves the roar of the wind and the humming of waves in seashells, the sailors’ whistles and the spray of the ocean, farewell chanties and the beating of wings. After so many nights, so many dawns, so many lives you’ve left behind along the roads of this earth — sometimes overjoyed, taking in everything that came your way and adding it to your destiny, sometimes exhausted and falling apart, giving yourself over to everything that came your way, adding to its destiny — this is where you have arrived. No pillars, no statues, no echoes, the last room, silent through and through… The center of the labyrinth, its hollowed-out heart, where the Sphinx that falls into man’s abyss will borrow your voice… The heart that beats in everything that has vanished or is not yet born, in everything lost or to be lost… Enveloped in this silence, you, too, can remain silent forever, waiting, watching over your death. You can invoke your most sincere prayer, your confession; you can freely shed the tears you’ve been holding back. In a room that has become your reflection, you stand still, turn your back and wait. Here you speak only the language of your blood, you scream, rebel, cry in despair. No one comes. All that’s left is you the executioner and you the victim, face to face; and, maybe just to ward off the cold, you embrace and look into each other’s eyes, like looking into the distance. Your tears fall, mingling, becoming a stream that follows its route to the soil, where, at the heart of the earth, it flows into its riverbed. Nine times it circles the world of the living, and then it, too, disappears.

  When I saw him last, his head was bowed, as if he couldn’t bear its weight. His hair covered his forehead and eyes. What frightened me most was that he might lift his head and look at me… What frightened me most… And what I most wanted: for him to look up, see me, murmur a word. A sign, a reproach, a farewell… He did none of these. This is how he left his eyes with me. Since he had no one else to leave them with.

  ME?

  Wha
t 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 could we wait for daybreak if not at night? Before daybreak you will betray me three times. I was trapped in an unbroken, eternal Now — the hour-hand had fallen off while the minute-hand circled endlessly. Hours, drenched in blood from endless whipping, could no longer pull their heavy load, neither a step forward nor backward, they could not budge Time. Didn’t I already know that the world was filled to bursting with injustice, with tyranny? The world was miserable and dreadful enough even without these stones, these filthy, shameless cells, these doors opening to who knows where. Yet it was only here that the wire mesh fence around the courtyard was taller than a human being. Before daybreak you will betray me three times. The first two times, you won’t even know it… The walls came closer and closer, becoming dark and alive, they closed in on me from all sides, trapping me in a body. The border between myself and my being hardened, even my voice could not pass through. My head on my knees, I waited to become a darkness indistinguishable from the night, or a dream woven from pure light… To take on wings, to turn into stone. I caught a whiff of my hair, the sudden sensation made me feel as if I had once been alive. Before I fell into pieces, into countless irreconcilable “I”s, from the savage terror that loomed like a sharp bone in the middle of my consciousness… As if I had lived once, before the earth’s sleepless, exhausted cheeks collapsed into its ruined face. In this two-by-two and twenty-years-deep granite universe of mine, there was not even a corner left where I could curl up and breathe! A darkness closing in, taking shape and coming to life. A cold numbing my limbs cell by cell. Shadows, long dispossessed, thick as vapor. The tattered pillow of my lonely night. Voices, voices, voices… The taste of salt, of ash, lime, permeating the words. I began to braid my hair into thin plaits, pulling at my unruly mop, unable to divide it into three equal parts, twisting, weaving them together — like mooring myself in a secret internal harbor with flimsy ropes that unravel before doing their work — starting over, one more time, a second me, a third, patiently, as if weaving a basket where I can put flowers, on which I can rest my head and sleep…