Labyrinth

by Burhan Sonmez

  13

  Bek called in yesterday. He looked in the kitchen. He went to the grocery store and bought a few things. He talked about several films that are showing at the cinema, and about some of my favorite actors and directors. He suggested going out for a walk in the autumn sunshine. I don’t want to go to the cinema, or out into the street. I’ve been at home for a week, I spend the whole day in bed. I toss right, I toss left, I stare at the ceiling, I listen to the muffled conversation coming from the next apartment. I examine my nails, my fingers, the veins on my wrist. I feel there’s new blood circulating in my veins. I sweat a lot. I sit up in bed, I throw off the covers. I wipe away the sweat on my neck with my hand. When I look at the light streaming in through the window, I realize it must already be midday again. A voice inside me says, come on. I get out of bed with a gliding motion. I open the balcony door. I inhale the fresh air. The balcony is full of the leaves that the wind has been blowing about for weeks. The metal railings are rusty. Everywhere is covered in dust. No sooner have I stepped onto the faded, withered leaves than I stop. On the left, in the place where the washing line is attached to the wall, I spy a pigeon’s nest. I look at the pigeon in its nest made of weeds and twigs. I don’t know how I have managed to avoid raising my head and noticing it on the balcony where I go every single day. If I said, perhaps it’s only built its nest recently, but then the nest doesn’t look particularly recent. The pigeon is sitting on her eggs, observing the sky. She is guarding against the crows and owls hidden in the trees in the street. Or perhaps she’s waiting for her mate. When she notices me standing there she bows her head towards me. She thinks I’m a bird of prey. She stirs uneasily. I back away. I close the door. I let her have the balcony to herself. Behind the window, Istanbul once again turns into a static picture. Clusters of clouds are suspended above Beyazıt Tower. The shades of brown in the Süleymaniye district change to gray in the curve of the Golden Horn. The washed-out colors of Balat Hill fade into the mist on the western horizon.

  In the bathroom I wash my face and comb my hair. In the kitchen I glance inside the fridge. I place a piece of cheese between two slices of bread. I go to the living room window. I lean on the back of the sofa and eat my sandwich standing up. This side of the apartment looks out onto a different Istanbul panorama. Concrete walls stretch upwards as though intent on cloaking the sky. There are cats and dogs instead of birds. The inevitable pile of rubbish on the pavement reminds me of those old films that defy the passing of years. A woman is sitting on the sidewalk beside the rubbish heap, rocking her baby to sleep on her lap. They are both barefoot. One of the woman’s hands is on her baby, the other is outstretched, begging. Her voice is so loud I can hear it from here. Hunger. Disease. War. The rest of her words are in a language I don’t understand. The woman must have fled from a war (which war?), and traveled a long way before finally arriving here. Every night she curls up to sleep in a different cranny, every day she cries out on a different sidewalk. She doesn’t gaze at the sky, but at the passersby. War begins with lies, continues with lies, and ends with truths. And there are always people left behind. Neighbors. Lovers. Brothers. Sisters. The baby sleeps, oblivious to all of it. Sleeping allows it to forget both its hunger and its mother’s grief. Like Jesus who forgot by dying. I turn my head and look at the figurine on the mantelpiece. Jesus is lying on his mother’s lap. His shoulders are slumped. His right arm hangs limply onto the cloth beneath him. His face looks partly alive, partly dead, like the child outside. His despairing mother holds out her weary hand as she gazes at her son’s closed eyes. She drifts into an endless dream as she contemplates her son’s beauty. I can’t imagine what that dream might be. I wonder why the landlady didn’t take her marble figurine with her. Did she no longer need Mary and Jesus in her old age? Or did contemplating them day in, day out, month in, month out, year in, year out, wear down her faith at the end of her long life? She delivered them into the hands of a stranger, along with all her past. She left, never to return, never to sleep again in the coolness of this apartment. The old woman’s faith in them did not lighten Mary and Jesus’ suffering. Neither did my lack of faith. What, then, is the point of my having faith or not? What is the point of my having faith or not in my own past?

  I remember Hayala saying to me that night, Your apartment is full of figurines and paintings, but why haven’t you got any photos? I don’t know, I said to her. The next day I had a look in the rooms. She was right. There were no photos of anyone, including myself. No trace of my childhood, nor of any concerts. I walked through the rooms several times. I searched in the cupboards and drawers. At the bottom of a wardrobe, among my winter clothes, I found a photo album. An album that had been put away, out of sight. I turned the pages slowly. Unfamiliar places. Unknown eras. People who laughed in one photo looked grave in others. People liked posing in large groups. There was someone in the group with a childish face who looked like me. But in some photos he didn’t. He was subdued. Gloomy. Unreliable photos. Somewhere, in an unfamiliar country, there was a rising moon. In one photograph, a cat was sitting at a window. Beside it, I was embracing a half-naked woman. The woman’s face wasn’t visible. Her back looked like Hayala’s. Perhaps all women’s naked backs look like Hayala’s. The places in the photos kept changing. I could barely keep up. I shut the album. I held it between my two hands for some time. If in the past I put it away somewhere out of sight, I must have had a good reason for it. I thought that I sometimes needed to trust my old self. I took the album and returned it to the same wardrobe. I replaced the clothes on top of it. I didn’t reply to Hayala’s message asking if I had found my photographs. I didn’t reply to any of the messages she sent me that day. I replied the following day.

  Whenever I think of Hayala, my hand automatically goes to the right side of my chest. I can feel Hayala’s fingers beneath my hand. As those fingers explore my body, my breath breaks away and floats into the distance. My body is no longer the body I know. I crash into a wave and come to a halt. Hayala, I say, I can’t keep up with you, slow down. I can’t recognize the sounds pouring out of my throat. I’ve lost my memory, all I have left is my body, and now I’m afraid of losing that too. Stop, I say, stop. You’re hurting me. Lights flash on and off before my eyes. The books I read said the body is the home of the soul. My soul left a long time ago, now that my tragedy has ended and all I have left is a crushed body, Hayala is now plucking that too away from me. I submit to her. I surrender my body. Dim light covers the ceiling. The nocturnal wind flows in through the open window. The whole city and the whole of time gather on my body. Hayala! Am I alive? Yes you are, don’t worry, you can’t be considered dead just because you’re older than me. Am I older? Yes, four years older, I’ve only just turned twenty-four. What sort of an age is twenty-four, are all ages alike? Probably, I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it. All right, does time always flow at the same pace, did your twenty-four years pass quickly or slowly? Boratin, my time flows at low speed, it passes slowly. And I hope it goes on flowing just as slowly until I go to New York. Are you going to New York, when? Not yet. You haven’t asked me, but I have a dream too. In a way, you’re the one who put it into my head. Hayala, speak slowly, I’m having trouble understanding you, did I ever go to New York? You went to a lot of places Boratin. One night in the tavern when you were talking to me about the cities you’d visited, you said: People should spend their twenties in New York, their thirties in London, and their forties in Paris. Did I say that? Yes you did, and I believed you. Besides, I want to get away from here. I dream of settling in New York before I’m thirty. What will you do there? The same as I do here. I’ll play the guitar, I’ll sing. I’ll mop the floor in bars if need be, but I’ll never come back to this city again. Istanbul holds no promise of anything to anyone anymore. This city has suffocated under the dark cover of its old charm. Hayala, when you go there, you’ll be like I am now. You’ll have no past. Because you’ll leave it on this side of the seas. I’m prepared to do tha
t Boratin. Okay, while I was commenting on other cities, did I say anything about Istanbul, which decade of our lives should we spend here? You didn’t mention that Boratin. You could live in Istanbul at any age, you transmit that in your songs, sometimes with melancholy, but also with a strange kind of joy. You create happiness for yourself out of the melancholic joy here. Much as I love our blues, you and our group, I don’t think this city is capable of carrying our dream. That’s why my mind is always far away. I wish you would come to New York as well. Okay, did I ever consider going back there, did I ever say anything about that? Boratin, you dropped out of university and went abroad, traveling from one continent to another. When the slaves were freed, after not having set foot outside the sugar, rice, and cotton plantations for centuries, they began to roam aimlessly, spreading blues far and wide. You were like them. You even worked on a cargo ship. But when you came back to Istanbul your ideas had changed. You said it wasn’t the road we needed to focus on, but time, that that was what our souls needed. You said we should join the past and the future together in the present time. We should be able to vent melancholy, joy, and rage all at the same time. According to you, Istanbul was the best place for that. Hayala, I can understand melancholy and joy, but why rage? You used to say that if we left rage out of our music we wouldn’t be able to understand this city and its people, and you convinced us too. From then on you were anchored to Istanbul, you stopped talking about going to New York, or to any other city. All right then, what about Nehirce? You mean where you were born and grew up? Boratin, you talked about Nehirce a lot, but as far as I know, you haven’t been there recently. You were working on a song about it. For some reason it took ages, somehow you never managed to finish it. You said you were going to write the song in the classic blues, three-line, twelve-bar structure. When they heard that, the band members all had a dig at you, shouting out the name of their hometowns and commissioning a song about it. But you gave as good as you got. That was last year. You stood in the center of the stage where we rehearsed and said, listen to me you note-scribblers. Hayala, you used that expression before, what does note-scribblers mean? Ah yes, we all grew up studying music. We all rely on notes and solfège. But you didn’t know any notes, you said blues wasn’t born from notes but from our souls. Did I really not know any notes? Boratin, if even you have your doubts, then maybe our band members are right. They said that you did know notes really, but you thought it jarred with the blues spirit and so you tried to forget all your notes and pretend you didn’t know any. You used to laugh off all their jibes. And that day you held out your arms and cried, Listen to me: The west is not the west, note-scribblers, you said, and it’s a lie that the east is the east. God is not God, and it’s a lie that man is man. Istanbul is not Istanbul, note-scribblers, and it’s a lie that Nehirce is Nehirce. You loved getting all dramatic on us.

  14

  Early one evening, when the city is girdled by the southwestern wind, I go out. I walk along the long, narrow streets. I sit down on a stool in a sidewalk café and have something to eat. I drink tea in a tea garden. I realize how similar some streets look. Footsteps on cracked cobblestones. Restricted sidewalks, buildings with washed-out plaster. I put my hands in my pockets against the cool weather, and observe the streetlamps. On a corner, where it dawns on me that I’m lost, I ask a man selling chestnuts for directions and buy some chestnuts from him. After a long walk I reach the street full of old buildings that houses The Golden Horn Bar. I see the name “Submarine” and a photo of myself on the poster at the entrance. I look at it from a distance. I wait by the wall for the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. It’s finished before I know it. I duck my head, go down the side street, and find the staff entrance at the back. I open the small, metal door. There is a dim light at the far end of the dark corridor. The distinctive smell of smoke and damp. There is no one around. I walk up the side staircase to the second floor. I find myself before occupied tables. Everyone is engrossed in conversation. I pull my black beret down over my forehead and adjust my dark glasses. I notice an empty table by the wall, shielded from the light. I hurry over to it. No one pays any attention to me as I weave around the chairs. I’m both one of them and a stranger. Once I am seated, I remove my glasses in the darkness. I look down. There is a big crowd around the stage. The front of the bar is packed. New people replace the ones who have bought drinks and returned to their tables. Shadows glide from one spot to another in the dim haze. They communicate by looking into each others’ faces and smiling. The voices coming out of the moving lips all sound the same, half affectionate, half lustful. Hands caress hands, shoulders lean on shoulders. The night is just beginning. Young people with long hair and glasses. They are totally at home, as though they were born here and will eventually die here. Perhaps humankind’s third great invention consists of a single question. They learn that question at home or at school, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to forget it. A burning caress, a moist sip. What exists after death, they ask. Does everything end after someone dies, or does a new life begin? The third greatest invention is a question like that one. No one knows the answer. Some people find an answer and believe it, but believing is one thing and knowing is another. What will become of me after I’m dead? The difference between me and the pigeon lies in that question. The pigeon knows what exists and lives within that limit. I think of what doesn’t exist, and try to exceed that limit. I get myself into trouble. Even if I go over the limit and see everything, I forget what I’ve seen once I return to life. I fancy a beer. I want someone who doesn’t know me and who’s looking for someone to chat with to arrive holding a beer, to sit beside me and share it with me. I want to lean on the wall, and for someone at my side to talk to me. Otherwise everyone will think I’m miserable sitting here all by myself. I’m neither miserable nor happy. I make do with being aware that I exist, like the pigeon.

  The stage lights up. First Bek, then Hayala, then the others come on. Who played what? They fiddle with cables and microphones, they sit on high chairs. They wave at some people standing by the bar. The yellow stage light gradually fades out and is replaced by a dim red light. Bek, who is sitting at the drums, looks at the band members and hits his drumsticks together. Hayala starts playing her guitar. She’s wearing a short skirt today. And a hairband on her forehead. She slides her guitar pick over the strings as she plays the soft beat of the introduction. She sways gently. In the place where I stood and raised my hand when I got all dramatic on my friends. Did the world look different from up there? Given that I laughed and joked with them, I must have been happy with my friends. I believed in them. I devoted my whole life to them. Up to what point? Perhaps there was a question eating away at me and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I would go to the limit and kill myself. Perhaps I didn’t know what I was looking for either. I was removing the distance between life and death. There was nothing else for it but to save my mind from whatever had snatched it away. Now I am sitting in The Golden Horn Bar as someone else. I observe the stage from a table out of the light. Hayala takes two steps towards the microphone and starts singing: You’re a drifter all alone in the street of night / You cried as you were born / No one asked you ’bout being born / You’re a drifter all alone in the street of night / You were wrong ’bout people / No one asked you ’bout people / You’re a drifter all alone in the street of night / You got hungry, you got homeless / No one asked you ’bout hunger, ’bout homelessness / You’re a drifter all alone in the street of night / If they’d asked ya you wouldn’t’ve been born into this world / If they’d asked ya you wouldn’t’ve been born into this world / You’re a drifter all alone in the street of night / You’re a drifter all alone in the street of night.