To the Spring, by Night

by Seyhmus Dagtekin

  Seeing that the fires, the cries, the tears, the din and the clamour were all futile, everyone sat around the fires and watched the sun clothe itself in cold and drift off to sleep. That day they thought the sun would never emerge from the cold or wake from its sleep. They waited for the end, fed the fire with everything they had to hand, hammered sporadically on the cooking pots, but without conviction. The sun was covered over and nothing could be done about it. As the darkness grew and the light weakened, they began to feel cold and to tremble in front of their fires. They became increasingly convinced that the end was near. And once the sun was completely obscured, the darkness was total, they said. And they thought they were going to remain there with their guttering fires, their shivering bodies, and the receding commotion. The last time, the sun had come back, the grownups had told them. They had basked in its light for years, but it was inevitable that one day it would stay away. It was inevitable that there be a last day, the true sleep. You could recover from illness, danger, or famine, and as long as you recovered you remained alive, but one day there was no coming back. One day you had to stay behind, never to return. That’s the way it was with the grownups who had preceded them, and they waited for it to be the same for them when their turn came. Everyone’s turn came one day. Sooner or later. Today it could be the sun’s turn. Its turn could come before theirs, with its end precipitating their own.

  For an insect that lived only for a few hours or a few days, the life of a man might seem an eternity, just as for man the life of the sun might seem an eternity compared to his own, they told us. But what could the life of the sun, that of man, or that of the insect mean to the Eternal, who had created all of life and all of eternity?

  The sun’s turn would come, and it might have come on the very day they were around their fires, trembling with fear both for the sun and for themselves. With an end that they could only behold, could only endure. They could do nothing for those who were dear to them, for those they worked for, for those they lived for. And there was no help – not from belongings, not from flocks, not from riches. It was a moment that brought before their eyes the grandfathers who had perished eons ago, and the grandchildren who would be born in the near future. Everything was going to disappear in this instant when the sun’s face was obscured, and they could only await their own end.

  But after a time that seemed long to them, very long, they also saw the sun returning. Neither damaged nor troubled. It didn’t fall from the sky, it didn’t fly off. Nothing of the sun fell away, no flame rose up. It continued on its way as if nothing had happened. They were the only ones troubled. The sun remained in place, resumed its work. They saw it shining in all its brilliance, with heat and light. The sun’s end was not now, and they could in turn alert their children yet to be born to this night when, person or thing, nothing emerged unscathed even though life went on.

  The sun continued to rendezvous with the moon, the fine days chased away the snow, signs added to signs that were read in other signs. And every spring, with no heavy downpours expected until the following winter, we whitewashed both the outsides and the insides of the houses to signal a new beginning to these rites, and to these signs.

  We covered the floors of the houses with a coat of greyish-yellow earth that we found in an open quarry on the slopes of the mountains south-west of the village, and which we mixed with straw to make a kind of cement. We applied this coat, as we did every year, over what remained of the previous year’s coat. In this way the houses renewed their skin, freshening their interiors following the example of nature with its almond trees, sparrows, snakes, and the insects, large and small, to be found there. It was our way of waking to spring, to life.

  We lived at the very eastern end of the village, and it was like living a vast distance from everything known, from every familiar face. It was like having our own continent to ourselves, a place of exile and refuge.

  Our house was separated from the village by a stream. A dry stream, a barely perceptible depression except during the rainy season and the season of melting snows. We didn’t know exactly where it had its source, but one fine day, after a rainfall, or on a day when the sun shone down on a thick layer of snow, we saw that it had already sprung to life and had begun to wind through the village, skirting some of the houses and, below our own house, spilling into a stream larger than itself. It soaked our shoes and sometimes our feet when it caught us in our awkward crossings. Even in flood it had never carried anything off, except perhaps a few unwary sparrows that happened to be bathing there, courting under the spring sun. But the sparrows were nimble, and in any case this was not a time for them to be swept away by the stream. It was the season of love, of nests, of the hatching of eggs, the season of fruitfulness and abundance. The season when everything was starting over, when men would be busy and let them live their sparrow lives without laying traps for them, lighting fires to grill their poor flesh, and gnawing at them for meagre nourishment. It was the spring, and not a time to be abducted by running water. They were agile and strong again, and it was easy for them to fly off to a tree branch and continue their courtship, escaping the water and letting the stream flow on to other adventures.

  Because a stream didn’t lack for adventure, even if that seemed incongruous to us, even if ours seemed quiet and humble in its course below our house. After all, what did it take itself for, our stream, that it should have adventures we didn’t know about? A thread of water that swelled from time to time thanks to a thaw or a rain, only to evaporate at the first dry spell, could it have a life beyond the life we saw, as it made its way through the narrow channel that separated our house from the village, flowing between our wet feet and the sparrows’ wings?

  Obviously, a stream, our stream, must not have lacked for adventure. If, on the least pretext, it began to flow, it was because that is what made its life worthwhile. And whereas the sparrows – and more than the sparrows, the swallows – spread their wings to mount on currents of air and let themselves be borne off on a journey without end toward the far horizons of heaven and earth, where they could watch our stream’s progress and its adventures, the stream, for its part, ran headlong into a hollow in the earth, propelled on an endless journey where even the swallows had trouble tracking it and left it alone to run its long race: from incline to incline, crossing gorges and valleys, visiting lands and villages, not stopping until it died out in a lake or a sea, where it would hold itself ready for other births.

  There was no lack of witnesses to tell us about the flight of the birds and the course of the streams. When people from the villages below us came up to ours – our neighbours of the plains, those who saw the northern flight of the swallows before we did, and in whose direction our stream descended with what it carried along after its crossing of our village – they said that the stream did not lose its way, that it continued to flow beyond their village. These were the people who saw fruits appear on the branches before we did, and watched grapes ripen earlier, because the sun warmed them more than it did us, even though on the heights, on our mountains, we were nearer to the sun. We didn’t complain, but we wondered why the sun gave more warmth to what was farther off, while a fire, on the other hand, warmed first what was closer by. In any case, they told us that the stream did not get lost, that it continued to run, that it continued to flow beyond their village. And that the people from the villages even lower than theirs had given them the same information, saying that they had seen the stream flowing even farther downhill.

  It seemed that for every village there was another below it, and that our stream did not stop in a village or a ravine, or even lose itself in meadowland. That it was headstrong and ran on, joining other streams that also flowed in the same direction. And, they told us, very far down in the plain, our stream was no longer what it was in front of our house, small and weak, but it became, with this convocation of streams it had joined in its descent, a great river that could engulf our houses from top to bottom, like those flights of s
wallows that, appearing suddenly, blackened the sky over our heads, even though you could hold a single swallow in the palm of your hand. A river that you could only cross by swimming or in a boat.

  And so our stream ran on and threw itself into the great river that must have been the one the smugglers crossed with their loaded animals to pursue their journey on the other side, across the plain, toward the frontier. The same river that they could only cross thanks to those with boats fitted out for contraband. The same river that the horses sometimes swam across, they said, because there was no room for them in the boat. That fascinated us, but it was hard to imagine horses swimming. We were assured that they did swim and that, tied by their bridles to the boat, they crossed the river from one bank to the other.

  And so our stream was privy to the adventures of our smugglers. And if we had spoken its language, we could have asked it to tell us about things it had witnessed. Because the grownups told us that the earth, the water, and even the wind, preserved the traces, the memory, of what occurred in their presence. What surrounded us was like an open book the Creator made accessible to everyone, but to decipher it, to read it, you had to open your eyes and look. So, if you knew how to read the stream, if you knew how to listen, perhaps it might recount some of its memories, exposing to the light of day the truth of some of our smugglers’ words, and the conceit of others. Because, where adventures were concerned, there were often versions that differed in every respect. And we, torn between one version and another, didn’t know which to believe.

  Our modest stream, which at times almost disappeared, had its own adventures. And it was the water that made it run, we were told – this thing, this element with no colour or shape, which could not stay still. Otherwise a stream would remain where it was or would stop moving once it had found its place. It was the water that made it romp over slope and plain, through hollows and terraces. Because, the grownups said, water never wanted to stay in one spot; it had to be in movement, flowing down or up, running to its ruin or climbing to be reborn. Everything obeyed its own nature, the rules that governed it, they told us, and water’s nature was to rise and fall.

  They said it was the most unstable thing on earth. The most docile and the most obstinate at the same time. The gentlest when it became the dew on the leaves in spring, and the cruellest when, at the end of winter, in torrents, it uprooted trees and rocks, flinging them downhill. Always deepening its bed or fleeing through the tiniest gap. Binding together the sky and earth when it fell and when it rose, as if it had kept the imprint of those two letters that in the beginning linked the deeps of the sky to the deeps of the earth. As if those two letters had made it responsible for the bond between earth and sky.

  We, ourselves, had never seen it rise. It was always falling on us as rain, as snow, as sleet, drenching us to our last hair, our last piece of clothing. If it did not fall right away, it would likely fall later and take us by surprise. If it did not rise openly, in plain view, it was likely taking advantage of some noontime or night-time secret. It was just as devious when it was clinging to the roofs as an icicle and, well sharpened, falling on our heads while we played around the houses, taking pleasure in the sun. We learned not to trust it.

  Or else we raised it up ourselves, either to drink it or, filling large containers and setting them on the backs of horses and donkeys that we led to our houses, to store it for a while in skins and pails and use it for its intended purposes. Then we let it resume its wanderings, freeing it from the shapes and colours we had imposed on it in our homes so it could now take on those it desired, those that offered themselves to it once it was freed from our clutches.

  But before beginning its sojourn among us, it was said, water fell from the sky’s deeps in quantities that would bring life to the dry earth and to those who dwelt there. It was a blessing longed for by humankind to ease the passage leading it to its first patch of ground, and to make the journey more tolerable. But like every companion, water had moments of distraction, of aberrant behaviour. Because, we were told, man had been created from muddy earth, from earth mixed with water, and without a continuous supply of water the mud would dry rapidly in the heat of the sun, in the breath of the wind, leaving only a pile of dust where there had been a man.

  When it wanted to be beneficent, water came down to us as rain and snow. Hail was like anger, a scourge that, fortunately for the earth and its occupants, was a guise rarely assumed by water in its descent. Once on the ground, it offered drink to the earth and all the living things that grew out of it. When the earth and its living things had drunk their fill, and the mountains had stored up enough for the dry seasons, the streams took the remaining water and directed it toward the meeting place of all streams, the confluence of all the drops of water fallen to earth, and there formed vast expanses, wider and more infinite than our lands and our mountains here where we dwell. Expanses that you could not cross by swimming, and that it took months, if not years, to cross, we were told, on the backs of ships, the mounts for these expanses. It was the ships as well that carried the burdens impossible to load onto the backs of donkeys, horses, and even camels. Ships that could transport hundreds of camels with their load. The strength of these vessels matched the vastness of those domains. Domains for a new purpose, and for the repose of water on earth, from which it would depart again for the skies, to continue its cycle.

  In that respect, the journey of water, the journey of the drop of water across the earth, was not unlike that of man, of humankind, they said. Like water, man fell alone, in drops upon the earth. A single drop without the support of other drops would dry up quickly, would disappear into arid ground or onto a thirsty rock. In small numbers, the drops could only become swamps where they would first decay, then disappear. But if there was a constant supply of drops and the first ones were not lost, they became springs, streams, rivers, and continued their journey to the meeting place for all water. So it was for the drop that was a man. Alone, he would have been disoriented and would have dried up where he stood, falling victim to the weaknesses of his nature. It is only thanks to his coming together with his fellow creatures that his life could continue in houses, villages, and cities, and that he could complete his journey.

  And there were great cities far across the plain, we heard, greater than the river down below, which could swallow up our houses. Cities broader than the lakes, more infinite than the expanses of water. Houses, villages, cities, like so many waterways, streams, rivers, which would enable man to live his life on earth in the company of other men, each with his own experience, his own helping hand to offer the other. And when his hour had come, man would take his place in the cemeteries that were his lakes, seas, and oceans, from which, like water, he would find his way back to the primordial ground.

  But, unlike water, man would never come back down to earth, they said. He would make the passage one time only, know only once the departure and the return. It was a test made easier for him by the companionship of other men, in order that he not lose himself in forgetfulness. That was his lot in this trial, to descend once, and then to go back. As for water, it would continue to serve as an example and a companion, as long as there was life on earth, as long as there were men.

  At the end of its journey, each stream and river, at the designated place, emptied itself of the water it carried, putting an end to its life of adventure amid the slopes and hollows of the earth. From there the water returned to the sky to devise new adventures and astound other eyes with its rising and falling, its gentleness and its wrath.

  And so the sparrows let the stream flow on toward its destined goal, let it run on, to fulfil the destiny of water.

  The houses and the village were surrounded by the known, the less known, and the unknown. They were overflown by sparrows, by swallows, traversed by the running stream, all invested in their turn with our dreams and fears. We passed from one to the other, from the known to the unknown, in the blink of an eye, in a single stride, going from one room to an
other, from one house to another, or from a terrace to the forest.

  We would have preferred always to remain in the known world of the houses, the village, the sparrows. It is all very well for our bodies to be inhabited by water, the grownups said, but unlike the stream, we would not go off to explore unknown lands. It was not for lack of desire, but the unknown was difficult to define, difficult to contend with. It was like finding our way in the darkness, without knowing what we might bump into with our feet or knock over with our hands. But we were of the earth, so we groped our way forward as one unit, step by step and with caution, like the mud as it slid down. We only continued on once the new step had been duly taken and the next was within range. Also, we clung to our little patch of familiar land. It was hard for us to allow our curiosity to take us any farther. We would have preferred to keep one foot in the realm of the known before we dared, hanging on to swallows’ wings, to venture far from home, beyond our houses, beyond the village, preferably with children our age, with our brothers and sisters or our parents, in the full light of day. We did not want to come face to face with the unknown. We didn’t want our beds to be on the east side of the terrace, which looked out onto the woods whose every tree, whose every blade of grass we knew by heart, but which became strange to us as soon as dusk began to encroach on the trees and terraces.