The Stone Building and Other Places by Asli Erdogan

Author:Asli Erdogan [Erdogan, Asli]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

When I saw A. again, he had grown dark, a man darker than dark. It was a summer day, in the early hours when daylight hadn’t yet taken on any color. Hunched in front of the stone building, he was sitting on the worn-out sidewalk wet with morning dew. It was as if the night, in its hasty departure, had left behind this odd-looking, half-blind bird, perched there on the sidewalk, alone and completely ignored, for he was too strange for anyone with human senses to notice. Even the daylight seemed oblivious to him, leaving him in the shadows as it lit up everything else. He spoke in a slow monotone, never raising his eyes from the ground. Every so often he’d shake his head, insistently repeating something over and over; then he’d look uncertain, puzzled, as if he’d lost his place, only to go back and start over. Now seized by a fear of words, now soothed by the sound of his own voice, he spoke nonstop. His purple veins stood out, his face, a dense, impenetrable forest, was completely still, as was his body aside from a soft swaying from side to side. But his fingers were in constant motion, pointing, folding, unfolding, endlessly kneading an invisible ball of clay. Words were like tiny loaves of stolen bread, he hid them in his hands, kept them warm, breaking off large chunks, giving them form one by one. It was a rambling speech, now rising now falling, never quite finding an endpoint, fitful, circuitous, full of dead ends. It was more of a story or a fable than a grievance or a discourse. A tale about the precarious human condition… Maybe he was writing a letter to life with invisible ink, or merely adding footnotes. Taking up the most shunned, the most battered words, he was trying to pull together the scattered pieces of his being, patching the gaps with newspaper, replacing what had been lost forever with random castoffs, stitching together a soul for himself — or something others would call a “soul” — from the world’s trash. A. was speaking with the stones, with the sidewalks saturated with the night’s chill and desolation, with the soil buried under the pavement… The roots of trees twining with the dead — victims with their assassins — the memory of the soil, of fire, iron and ash, woven through the painful labor of rebirth… He was exhausted, too exhausted to even take one step toward our common world spinning in its orbit. He seemed to have shrunk inside of his loose, sagging jacket, with his baggy pants falling from his waist, and yet, even this emaciated body was too heavy for him to carry along. His shoestrings were missing; his arms and legs, which he couldn’t move, hung from his torso like dead branches. The streets belonged to him, but he went nowhere. There he stood, in front of the stone building, swaying unconsciously, like an eyelid closing, opening, then closing again.

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