by Asli Erdogan
The voice of self-control rang out once again with its metallic timbre: “He must know where his friend is hiding. You have to hurry!”
The man articulated his words one by one, as if speaking in capital letters, allowing sufficient time for each one to be heard. He emoted with the air of a lead character dutifully playing his part, even if it was rather ordinary or even boring… As if addressing the entire street, all streets, all human crowds, not just the police officer who was only two or three steps away… Untiring, he listed his lost belongings once again, giving all the details that he would no doubt be repeating who knows how many more times: passport, ID card, driver’s license, credit cards… And he must certainly have incurred losses that were too private, too real to disclose… For instance, a number not saved to his cell phone, tucked deep into the corner of his wallet instead; or a black-and-white photo from when he was three years old; a good luck charm that protected him from life’s mysteries; and a Libra pendant with a silver chain. A drop of cold sweat rolled down from his neck — who knows how long he’d had his coat unbuttoned — he realized he was shivering. That very same instant, he also acknowledged for the first time that he had been robbed; he felt helpless, used, stripped bare… It was as though, in addition to taking his wallet, they had even ripped off and stolen the pockets where he could have warmed his hands. Big, lofty words like Truth and Right, even Law, were on his side this time. Justice needed to bring the situation under control immediately.
The pickpocket was caught; the officer had his arms twisted behind his back, gripping the elbows tightly. He looked like he was twelve or thirteen. One of those kids who, though neither short nor skinny, always looked younger than they were, and who were ageless, with not a trace of childhood left in them. One of those who gave no clue about himself beyond what was demanded, and what was already apparent… His eyes were hidden, barely noticeable in his face that seemed swollen from the cold. Suddenly, he started bawling at the top of his lungs. More than a cry, his voice sounded like a slow, coarse, clumsy wail, a forced howl, a five-year-old’s bad imitation of a bloodcurdling scream meant to aggravate an adult… As if the boy was trying to reenact a childhood he didn’t really remember or believe in, to stage it before their eyes… Someone reached across his right shoulder and slapped him in the face: “Quit the act, kid!” It was simply a warning, a signal that more violent blows could follow; even so, the sound of the blow drowned out the street noise as the cop’s fingers left their imprint on his bruised temple. The boy shut up immediately; lowering his eyes to the mud puddle, he didn’t look up again. That’s when he realized he had grown up. A melancholy expression too grave for his age settled on his face. A calm, hopeless sadness particular to adults, one that required years to harden and therefore appeared much more genuine on a child’s face… A grief experienced for our sake…
“Didn’t I tell you?” The self-assured voice rose again, convinced in its righteousness, expressing an emotion for the first time: pure, unadulterated hatred. “Of course he knows where his friend is hiding. But we must hurry. He shouldn’t get away.” Probably, he wasn’t aware himself of the amount of hatred he had for this world… As if he had been waiting for a long time to avenge himself on deceit and fate, suddenly seized with so much hatred…
The cop said nothing, giving another sharp twist to the pickpocket’s arms, which were already twisted more tightly than was necessary. The boy wouldn’t have run away on a street full of curious, mocking, and contemptuous bystanders crowding the corners and sidewalks. If anything, he had to adjust his stride to keep pace with his escort. He looked as if he were exhausted, on the one hand from the hatred raining onto him from all sides, on the other, from the oversized sorrow that had swallowed his frail body… From his long struggle to erase himself and live among people as a nobody. As if he’d walked through a time tunnel, he had aged even before reaching the end of the street.
“If he makes it to Tarlabaşı, you will never find him!” he insisted impatiently. The man had caught up with the cop, and was walking beside him with firm and resounding steps, in something like a spirit of teamwork. In the rain that was quickly turning to wet snow, the makeshift trio hurried on through the night, shoulder to shoulder, without looking around, feeling the northeast wind as they approached the three-way intersection.
“Don’t worry! We’ll take care of it,” responded the cop eventually when they reached the intersection… He jostled the kid slightly as he gestured toward the dead end on the right. The last food kiosk vanished behind them; he hadn’t eaten supper yet, and there were still three hours left in his shift.
“That’s how they work. We’ll figure it out!”
“The woman spoke,” said the stones to one another.
“The kid spoke.” The kid didn’t cry.
“The woman is crying,” said the stones to one another.
“The angel died,” they said. “No, he played dead.”
“Are you here?”
“Don’t worry. We won’t stay long.” “It won’t be easy.”
“Look at him. Do you recognize him?”
“When I saw him last, his head was bowed, like it was too heavy. What frightened me the most…”
“He left his eyes with me so that I could see life as a miracle.”
“The voice that spoke to me at night, whose voice was it?”
“Then I recognized your voice, my own voice coming from you.”
“The dawn always arrives, sooner or later.”
“Take him, please. Take him from me.”
“Is this your real name?”
“Scariest of all was when he would look up and stare at me.”
“You will betray me three times before daybreak.”
“Are you ready?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve come here before!”
“All of us — didn’t we climb out of the same abyss!” “Even so… I wish we were side by side.”
“Don’t cry!”
“Look at him! Look again! Do you recognize him now?”
“He left his eyes with me. Because he had no one else.”
“Before it’s my turn…”
“Are you ready to fly?”
“Don’t be afraid!”
“Don’t hesitate! Jump! Jump off!”
“That wind… The wind.”
“In a night that even words cannot penetrate, the dawn you call upon is a dawn this world has not yet seen.”
“Take this one to the fifth floor.”
“You crawl on your belly over stones as grey as sorrow…”
“That’s when the door would open, my only passage to tomorrow, the litany of hours, of skies, of the deserts in the skies would begin.”
“I got thirsty.”
“What business did you have with them!”
“But there was nothing left of an ‘I’…”
“Even so… I wish we were side by side.”
“In the same blood, in the same night, in the same cry.”
“Is this his real name?”
“Before daybreak you will betray me three times. The first two times, you won’t even know it…”
“Sooner or later, the night will end.”
“Do what you will but do it fast.”
“They didn’t do much to me really.”
“You can’t take it!”
“Take it. Ride it out.”
“You crawl on your belly over stones grey as humans…”
“Sooner or later, the night would end, a dawn this world has not yet seen would arrive.”
“No one shows up.”
“Then who was that voice speaking to me in my night?”
“Stones grey as sorrow.”
“A scream that forces you to retreat into darkness, all the way back to the walls.”
“Then I recognized your voice, the voice of Nobody coming from you.”
“You halted the night. For all of us.”
“On ston
es grey as humans…”
“He stood still, perhaps he played dead.”
“They don’t know what they are doing.”
“What can survive, once it falls into human hands!”
“We can finish what the earth and the sky left unfinished.”
“He denied it, so it’s up to you.”
“Because he had nobody to leave them with.”
“Jump! I told you to jump off, pal!”
“That wind…”
“Recognizing his innocence with this much clarity for the first time…”
“You spread your wings much too early, one toward the light, one toward darkness.”
“Is this his real name?”
“Don’t cry!”
“Strip!”
“Didn’t you recognize the man, you lay beneath him!”
“Your eyes were like two solitary stars.”
“Then who was the voice that spoke to me? That spoke on behalf of all of us?”
“When it was my turn…”
“It is going to be difficult.”
“Slut!”
“Why are you holding back! Shout!”
“Let me go.”
“Don’t be afraid, I should’ve said to myself. Don’t be afraid, you won’t die.”
“The woman is crying.”
“LIFE. In the name of that sumptuous alphabet feast, you struggle, you tell, you’re changed, you tell.”
“Did we want to tell?”
“Otherwise, what’s the point of being human!”
“Nobody could hear, thankfully, not even him…”
“You stood still, in the middle of a sentence where the dawn never arrived…”
“He left us like this — unfinished, half-made, as we were…”
“He wanted it, I heard. Even begged for it. Kill me, he begged.”
“Let me die.”
“You left your eyes with me.”
“Please take him. Take him from me.”
“Then who was speaking for all of us?”
“The stones…”
“The wind.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Don’t cry!”
“Don’t worry.”
“We won’t stay long.”
“Who died for the sake of nobody?”
“Don’t cry.”
“When I was finished, you were already gone.”
“Are you ready to fly?”
“No, I am not.”
The Endings
THE END
We emerged like dreams in the translucent dawn, like gauzy, anxious shadows, the remains of the night. We left the stone building one by one… Like earthworms surfacing after a storm, confused, hungry, beat up. We were bursting with pain, shame, humiliation… We dispersed without speaking, without farewells, without even exchanging a glance. No one could bear to see their own eyes… To see the endless, the ever unending abyss in the other’s eyes… We wished for one thing only: that our fates would never cross again; that even if we were to meet on a street, in a stone building, in a yard or a room full of corpses, we would not recognize one another.
We left shortly after daybreak, when the pale morning light was still colorless, before the day was claimed by crowds. We were small, diminished, weary. Like wrecks that had washed up on shore overnight during a roaring storm… Under the tense winter sky — a flat canvas stretched overhead — the outside world felt harsher, more frozen than the world we remembered. We were as free as the birds, as the wind, as the dead… Some among us turned and quickly walked away, stumbling like sleepwalkers, fading into the three-way intersections of the city. Some bent over and looked for a cigarette butt, as if hoping to light it up and get on with their lives crushed under heels… Some slumped on the sidewalk, like a stabbed, torn sandbag. Some pressed their parched lips to the wet pavement. To speak with the bare stones, to murmur or to shout at the soil hidden beneath the stones, to plumb the depths with their voices, to renounce their silence… To scratch, dig, claw through the earth’s door, to hear if its giant heart was still beating…
Here we were, standing at the threshold of the new day, waiting in line at the door. Small, worn out, unwelcome. Like dark, broken halos fallen from the hands of some winged being in hurried flight to the morning star… We walked in a world that had become utterly unfamiliar to us, looking neither left nor right, our eyes turned toward the winter sun gleaming on the horizon like an ax, toward the sharp edges of all new days. Like mummies awakened after thousands of years, forced to harden up, to become human again. Time trailing from us in rags and tatters, smeared with the clay, the cold, and the nightmares from beneath. Forever one with disintegration and decay, the enigma at the world’s core, eternal accomplice to the first — and neverending — murder. One with the river of blood that still and always runs. With the neverending disintegration of life itself. Split into selves who were strangers to one another, more deaf and lost, exiled back to the world of humans. We would call out, now from this side of the abyss, now from the other, sometimes we would stay quiet among the victims, somethines among the murderers. We would walk again, and once again, in the same tight circle, each time a bit more human.
But there was no new beginning in store for us, nor any consolation of starting over. No magic wand would want to touch our forehead; blood-sharpened knives would not cease to wound; in the future, there would be no doors opening to tomorrow, no one eager to listen… Betraying, we were betrayed by fate, by staying alive, by living; by winning the sole, the one terrible victory we had been defeated forever. Nothing compared to what we had been through, neither on earth nor in the sky. We didn’t even have a language to tell the story, to give it meaning. Did we want to tell it? In these burnt ruins, where the ashes of guilt and innocence were mixed long ago, which cry could find its echo, an answer, an ending? Like a scratch that heals unnoticed, our cry had already faded from the scabby hands of time. In a world wrapped head to toe in whys and becauses and there-fores, no sentence, no equation, no comparison had room enough for us, either. Like fallen letters from a word defeated by humans, it was as if each one of us was an ‘E,’ meaningless even side by side. Left behind by L-I-F-E when it fell from the highwire and broke into pieces, crashing on the rocks… Perhaps it was another word… One that clears its own way out of the night, laughing, singing, a word over which the day breaks.
Still… Had we been side by side. In the same night, in the same blood, in the same cry… Maybe we could have strung the letters together to express what had happened. Described the labyrinth, the labyrinth’s empty, hollowed-out, heart, and the angel that appeared there, in a blurry mirror. We could have told the story, made it real by telling it. Real and immortal. We could have gathered up its wind-scattered images, joining them into a whole; with this from you, that from me, we could have given it flesh and blood. We could have completed his interrupted tale with sentences from ours, we could have saved him. A handful of hair, a huge nocturnal smile, a fragile body composed of all of us. A head bowed as if heavy. A humming song, a flowering memory, a few drops of rain, an ever distant sky… A handful of a starry void, a muted story. We could have found him a new word, a new name, a destiny with wings to fly. An entirely different end, beginnings that have yet to be invented… He could have echoed with our most silent cry; we could have become our most magnificent song. The song of Sirens pulling the human world onto the rocks… And perhaps we couldn’t. Perhaps he was everything we had lost long ago, in the very abyss that we have become; perhaps we had lost everything from the beginning.
We couldn’t do it. We each stood alone. In a different world, one that was more real or more imaginary, a different world yet unborn or long gone, we could have become the song… Shouldering the gravestones left behind by the night, we scattered into the visible world. No sooner had we arrived than we disappeared along the forking roads of the city, along the forked paths of the human soul, in its labyrinthine circles… We vanished, erased one by one
in the daylight, like a dream no one saw, nor remembered or wanted…
In other parts of the world, in other continents, the night is just beginning, doors are being locked, shutters pulled down; alarms, whistles, and sirens warn the people of the dangers of the night.
A.’S END
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.
I look old and bedraggled, ancient as the world don’t I? I’m past thirty now. I’ve been wandering alone, aimlessly, among ruins, on muddy roads, in deserted tunnels, on the cobblestone streets of life… I enter abandoned buildings, climb upstairs, appear in empty windows like a mugshot torn down the middle and taped back together, I climb the fire escapes, attics, roofs. I climb the vast emptiness of the sky, step by step, higher and higher each night, to the cliffs of human solitude… You need to be someone to keep on living; this is much easier on windy rooftops than among the stones. I look out over the earth’s expanse to my heart’s content, as if it were a resting place. I lift my head to the clouds, beyond the stratosphere, beyond reality, and embrace the wind. Quietly, I alight among the dead who whisper among themselves, far away from us. Fingers of vagabond moonlight linger avidly on my lips. Stars shine like a scream, dogs howl along the city walls, thousands of seagulls take flight, tracing circles. All things under the sky, those overlapping songs, played by a hollow reed, songs born anew of all that is or once was, all that lives and is yet to live… I heard him once, it’s true, I heard him for the first time there; he was calling to the stars, to different worlds, all night long — talking to himself. I think I was jealous of him. The angel had shown me his wounds, laughing his strident laugh, dark as the night, he had shown me his mortal wounds. Perhaps he saw me, too. He had come to live among us, but then he left. And the song on everyone’s lips had abandoned us, leaving us broken, diminished, weary, dissolving into all the voices, truths, and rages; only traces remained, like random feathers from birds in flight… We should gather it all together so that we don’t lose him forever. This is the humans’ task, to complete what the earth and the sky left unfinished. First one by one, then all together, it begins like a roar, crowds swell from the earth, rise steadily, rise in wave after wave. Jump, jump off! Don’t be afraid! The cry wrests me from myself, hurls me into the air; I swing from one horizon to the other like a needle on a dial; like a feral dog on a chain, I hang suspended between earth and sky… But all things, even the heaviest, fly away in due time, as if on wings.