To the Spring, by Night
To the Spring, by Night
Seyhmus Dagtekin
Translated from the French by
by Donald Winkler
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca
English translation of À la source, la nuit
© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2013
French edition © Editions Robert Laffont, Paris 2004
ISBN 978-0-7735-4155-9
Legal deposit first quarter 2013
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free
(100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free
This book has been supported by funding from the Scott Griffin Foundation. Funding was also received from the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, as part of the translation grant program. This work has been published with the support of the French Ministry of Culture – Centre National du livre. (Ouvrage publié avec le concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture – Centre National du livre.) Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de Culturesfrance/Ministère français des Affaires étrangèrs et européennes.
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Dagtekin, Seyhmus, 1964–
To the spring, by night / Seyhmus Dagtekin ; translated from the French by Donald Winkler.
Translation of: À la source, la nuit.
ISBN 978-0-7735-4155-9
I. Winkler, DonaldII. Title.
PQ2664.A437A213 2013843’·914C2012-907580-9
Designed & set in 12.5/16 Perpetua by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital
To the Spring, by Night
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
I was small. And my village was small, I came to know that in time. But when I was small it was big for me, so big that when I had to cross it from one end to the other, I was afraid.
It was as if I had to pass through seven countries and three continents, as many seas and as many mountains. As if I were navigating the highest heavens and the earth’s depths. Every hundred metres the landscape was different, and so was I.
I was in turn the neighbour, the cousin, the stranger. I was the child of the enemy, the child of outlaws, a child gone astray, lost or almost so, who needed to be set on a homeward path or, as an act of kindness, led back to his parents. The way I walked, spoke, cried out, or wept changed with who I was, with where I was going. Between our house and the village, the merriment, the joyful cries, the games mutated into withdrawal, wary glances, disquiet and anxiety, while on the return the sequence of emotions was reversed.
Of course, there was the house of an uncle here, an aunt there, tiny oases that lit up my face with a smile, lent me confidence for a few more steps. But that was soon done, and the route went on through other realms until I arrived at the promised land that was my grandmother’s house, mother of my mother, at the far end of the village.
Friend, enemy, stranger, tame and wild, field and forest, valley and mountain spread themselves out before me in a swath four kilometres long and two wide, which I navigated with growing ease in all weathers and in every direction as the length of my stride increased.
When I was small my life unfolded within a vastness that had prevailed for countless millennia on this earth, an earth that harboured in its depths all colours and bestowed them on us according to the season or the clime. An earth whose slopes saw the coming and going of the tortoises, in whose gaze there lingered the memory of the stones that our grandfathers, at our age, must have bounced off their shells. The tortoises stretched out necks as dry, as wrinkled, as ancient as the earth, and followed us with their soft eyes, in a slow and graceful motion, unless we startled them with sudden and hostile gestures.
We are all of the earth and we return to the earth, said the grownups, and we bent down close to the tortoises, which, in their low progress, so near the ground, merged with the dust, with the pebbles, and lured us earthward to see them, and to see the earth itself at close range.
That tortoises are of the earth, we could accept. But ourselves, with our own flesh, our own blood, how could we be of the earth? We could see that grapes, figs, pears came from the earth, or at least that the vine, the fig tree, the pear tree, the almond tree were planted in the earth and that their fruits began to wither when they fell from their branches, and in rotting became earth again, dust again. The same thing happened when they passed through the belly of the tortoise or the entrails of man. But how could men, or even tortoises, be of the earth, they who walked on the earth, rose above the earth, and with each step disengaged themselves, trying to put the greatest possible distance between themselves and the earth? This remained a mystery to us. Or a half-mystery, because after a death in the village, when we went to watch the grownups dig a grave, we saw bones appear that we were told belonged to people who had died long ago. They tried, of course, to dig the grave in a spot that seemed empty, that seemed untouched, but that did not stop them from now and again stumbling on bones, which they set aside to return to the earth once more. But never a skull, and I didn’t know what had happened to the skulls that should have been there with the bones in the grave. I don’t think they hid them from our sight; on the contrary, there were those who would have taken malicious pleasure in brandishing them to frighten us. Besides, always watchful, we missed nothing of what they did, nothing of what they dug up. But the mystery within the mystery remains: I never saw skulls when I witnessed the disinterment of these remnants of elders who had preceded us on this land. And so we saw that man too could become earth again and leave only a few bones to mark his passage through the world. But man and tortoise, how could they come from the earth, flesh and bone, sweat and blood, the tortoise’s gaze and the word of man? That was the true mystery.
The mystery of a shoot so tender, so fragile, emerging from the earth but so different from the earth, the mystery of the rose crowning the stem, bringing to a halt its progress toward the light, the mystery of flesh combing every surface as though in search of a few roots, dropping at the end of its course, turning to dust again.
We were told that the rose and its scent were of the sweat of man, the sweat of the best of men. Man was of the dust, but he was not fated to remain in the dust. Rising above the earth, he could reach the heavens by transcending what made him dust. That was where his passage was taking him, it was the purpose of his life on earth. We should admire the rose but not be content with that; the rose was only there to give us a glimpse of the final blossoming. The bud on the stem that was man would open under other skies, for other eyes, is what we were told.
This step, which frees itself and lifts only to fall again, must be of the earth, said the grownups.
They spoke to us of a valley in another time, empty of all lands and skies, a valley composed of countless small valleys inlaid one into the other. They spoke to us of two letters, one embracing half the earth, rising above the level of the horizon and going
beyond it, beyond the firmament; the other embracing the earth’s lower half, reaching down past the horizon, passing through it to the bottomless pit of the abyss. They spoke to us of a word made up of those two letters. Of a word bearing the seed of all words, a word containing the seed of all voices. They spoke of this two-letter word as of a lightning bolt sundering the dawn on the horizon. They spoke to us of a rain, of a sun, that followed on this word, and of those countless seeds that, issuing from the word, began to sprout and to grow from the rain’s moisture and the sun’s warmth. They spoke to us of a wind that rose up after the rain and the sun, of a wind that lent vigour and substance to the seeds and swept away unwanted warmth and moisture. But the wind, in its jubilance, forgot to stop in time. No creature is free of faults, the grownups reminded us, not wanting to blame the wind for its absent-mindedness. And the rush of wind, too strong, uprooted those healthy shoots, scattered them over vast spaces that became skies and lands in the wake of the two-letter word.
That is why men and tortoises constantly roam far and wide, hoping to recover their roots and replant them in their primal soil. So we were told. Because that first soil is like a first love; it is the first of loves and we hold it dear, want to find it again and trace the origins of this thing that stirred our hearts, that bound us to our surroundings and freed us from the solitude of our body, of the walls around us. And all nostalgia, all longing, issues from that first love on that first soil, the first countenance of the Friend who before all others awakened us to life. That is why man, more impetuous than the tortoise, devised new avenues and new bearings for his wanderings on this side of the earth and beyond, tracing the upward slope of one letter or the downward curl of the other, impatient to rediscover this first land, the land of first love, the native land of that face on which one’s eyes first opened. But, they told us, every meeting, every encounter, is decreed, and haste will never make it come to pass before the appointed time.
Tortoises, being strangers to haste, live for a very long time, the grownups told us. They have kept alive a memory of the first days and the secret that is theirs. And with the patience to which all living things should aspire, they have taken step after step, one after the other, along the line of time drawing us away from any plausible return to that first secret, to the origin of all our steps forward and all that drives us through the world. And so, the grownups went on, tortoises have prolonged their time on earth thanks to their slowness and a steady gaze that looks beyond the signs all beings make and sees them in the light of their earliest awakenings to the world. A gaze that has embraced those lives, enfolding them in the memory of that first love, the homeland common to them all.
On the day of decision, when the Creator identified those who were to accompany man on his earthly journey and gave each companion a number of options for making that passage, tortoises, so we were told, chose slowness and a long life to be able to savour for as long as possible what they would only see up-close for a very short time. And the Creator bestowed on them this ineffable, inimitable gaze to meet our own on the path through fields or vineyards.
This gaze that encompassed in its softness, bathed in its radiance, all that surrounded it; these steps that, in their slowness, numbered and grazed the pebbles; this jaw that, with a steady and insistent sound, chewed delicately on the vine leaves and later the newly ripened grapes. And these feet that opened like four hands despairing of all the heavens, and this wrinkled neck that stretched right and left to the breaking point, striving to touch the earth when the tortoises were turned on their backs and the curve of their shell stopped them from pulling themselves upright to continue their leisurely progress through pastures and fields.
But man sometimes found the company of tortoises useless, even bothersome, when they came to feed on bunches of grapes, on his food, on the food destined for man. How could this fruit of paradise, this heavenly fruit that man had brought to ripeness by the sweat of his brow and the heat of the sun as it passed across the sky, be profaned, ground up in the mouth of a lowly animal? Was it conceivable, after so much labour and patience and slow maturation, that this exquisite taste should be lost to the earth in the maw of a beast otherwise content with a mouthful of dirt for a meal? But they were there for the journey, side by side with man. And, accompanying us, they nourished themselves with what they found along the way, just like any other being. For even the earth, which is the source of all life, withdraws its blessings when it is not nourished. A few droughts, a few spells of heat, and its springs and trees dry up, depriving others in their turn. The tortoises were of the earth, but they were not more resistant than the earth. They could be happy with little, modestly and with resignation, but that patience had to be rewarded one day with something exceptional, even if that exceptional thing should be our clusters of grapes. They nourished themselves then, like the earth, and sometimes their steps led them close to our vines and they allowed themselves to share our food, the bunches of grapes which, in their abundance, almost touched the ground, putting themselves within reach. They did not seek elsewhere, the tortoises – did not burrow into the earth to expose what was hiding there, did not climb onto branches to make off with what was forbidden – they were content, in all humility, with what could be found at their own height.
And companionship, all the same, is worth a few bunches of grapes, even if the one who is accompanied finds it a burden. Especially when this companionship lasts no longer than one’s passage through this world. The tortoise is limited to life on earth, we were told; it was not going to rise with man toward his final destination. And since the tortoise, unlike man, would not find this fruit in another life, it could well chew a few seeds, spoil a few grapes while it might, and we were not going to hold such a small thing against him.
It should be said that tortoises were not the only companions to give themselves the luxury of sharing the food man wanted to keep for himself. The fox, the snake, the partridge came to treat themselves to that same nourishment, the best of our grapes. It was painful to discover, one bright morning, the most cherished, the most lovingly cultivated clusters stripped of their fruit, while we ourselves dared not touch them, saving them for a special occasion. Sometimes, finding them still sour and wanting to let them ripen, we let time pass before revisiting them. But there were those who knew the grapes as well as we did, who in their wanderings were more attentive to them than we were. When we returned, all we found were dangling twigs.
Those creatures were never caught in the act and were adept at quickly putting themselves out of the reach of humans, while the tortoises, slower to escape, and with no means of attack or much by way of defence, were most at our mercy. And where mercy was concerned, man did not set the best example, especially when the harm inflicted was so visible – there was nothing more clear to the eye than the twigs left bare – and when the guilty party was so glaringly weak. When the tortoises were taken by surprise, they drew in their head and feet under their shell, and braced themselves for the blows that were sure to come. To withstand the blows without their shell giving way, that was their wager – a courageous gamble that we had to admire once the assault was over. If their shells were cracked open, they fell prey to ants and other insects that in short order swarmed over the exposed flesh, regaling themselves beneath the tortoise’s staved-in casing.
After a few days we sometimes found the empty shell, and regretted having massacred a poor animal, cutting short the course of a life that had flowed peacefully in parallel with ours, bearing a part of our life along with its own.
But we forgot how precious each life was when we set out to stone a tortoise whose path had crossed ours, even if, after the fact, we were troubled. An empty shell was a bit like a grave exposed to view, a life we had overturned, a grave for which we were responsible, and that we didn’t know how to fill. It lay there before us and stared up at us with its empty gaze.
Not knowing what to do, we smashed the shell to bits with a few more stones, re-enacting th
e execution. At other times, when the injury was not too serious, the tortoises were able to take shelter and heal. A little while or some years later, when we encountered a tortoise with a scarred shell, we didn’t know if it was the one we had tortured or another, whose marks had been inflicted by our older brothers or our fathers.
Tortoises lived for a very long time, we were told, and they had long memories, memories that were beyond our reach, beyond the reach of our stones and the harm we could cause. They knew how to leave their injuries behind them and continue on with a measured pace, continue on toward their homecoming and the ever-welcoming ground.
They lived close to the earth, the tortoises. They lived in the earth, were of the earth; and the earth was charged with the responsibility of passing on to them a small portion of its eternity, which was tiny compared with the eternity of stone, which in turn was minute next to the eternity of the sky or the eternity of water – water which, we were told, was the source of all living beings, their starting point and their ultimate destination, once they had passed through the earth.
The earth on which we trod each day, where our feet communed with time and memory, and our heads with the promises of the heavens. The earth that sheltered our village, so small when I picture it from afar, perched in time amid the mountains; our village, which among those mountains was of such little consequence, disappearing behind the merest rock, lost from sight around the mildest curve. And it was from this smallness that living beings and things eked out their entire lives on earth, before returning to the water. But it seems very big – vast even – when I see myself as a child in its streets, a child upon its rocks, when I see my life unfold again, dwarfed by this immensity that has known so many millennia.
The village houses were lined up as if on a thread held taut, from east to west, like the beads of a rosary told to the rhythm of our footsteps as we passed along. They were on a slope facing south, with flat roofs and terraces that were sometimes more spacious than the interiors. At certain points the thread of houses doubled, tripled, and in the summer the roofs on the lower levels became terraces that the residents of the higher houses used for their meals, their rest, or their sleep.
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