I Will Never See the World Again by Ahmet Altan

Author:Ahmet Altan [Altan, Ahmet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2019-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Voyage Around My Cell

When I was eight my views on literature were precise and unshakable and my confidence in myself much greater than it is now.

I had decided O. Henry was the world’s best author.

During Prohibition, the folks who bought one of Andy’s two-dollar canes and had the wit to unscrew the head of the cane by two full turns to the right and hold it to their mouth had, as a reward for their acumen, a half pint of smuggled whisky trickle down their throat.

If the man who wrote this wasn’t the world’s best author, then who was?

And how about the decision the three grifters made when things got messy, wasn’t that wonderful?

Things had come to such a fine pass that honesty was the best policy.

One day at a tea garden, I shared my judgment of O. Henry with my uncle’s fiancée.

A smile of such kindliness appeared on the young woman’s face that, along with the large parasol right behind her, the tablecloth in front of her and the pebble-stone pathway on the ground, it became stamped onto my memory like a photograph.

Even at that age I could sense that if someone smiles at you with such kindliness something has to be wrong.

“You might want to wait until you read the classics before making a final decision on that,” she told me.

But I wasn’t the kind of child who would change his mind for a kindly smile.

I stuck to it.

When I was ten, my father gave me Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room. “You might like this,” he said.

I loved it.

O. Henry ceded his throne to this mischievous aristocrat whom the king locked up in his room for dueling, and who described his life and thoughts from within the confines of that room.

To tell of a life from inside a room – now that was something interesting.

I soon discovered there was no such category as “best author.”

When they arrested me and threw me in a cell, I inevitably thought about the voyage around a single room.

I too decided to go on a journey.

The cell around which I travel is quite a bit different from de Maistre’s.

It has two iron doors; one opens onto the corridor, the other onto the courtyard. The door to the corridor is always locked, but they open the door to the courtyard at 8 a.m. and close it at 6 p.m. every day.

In the middle of the door to the corridor there is a hatch which is bolted from the other side. They serve our meals through that hatch and when they want to say something to us they speak through it. In order to answer, you have to bend halfway down.

The length of the cell is six steps, its width four.

When you enter from the courtyard, there is an antechamber with its own iron door. That is the toilet and shower, with a sink to wash your face and hands. The door doesn’t have a lock.

Next to the bathroom a steel sink is mounted on the wall.

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