City of Asylum’s annual Freedom-to-Write keynote on Saturday, September 8 will feature two distinguished authors: Turkish novelist, journalist and human rights advocate Aslı Erdoğan (now exiled writer-in-residence in Frankfurt’s City of Refuge) in conversation with novelist Akhil Sharma.
About the author: Aslı Erdoğan worked for two years at CERN as a particle physicist before becoming a writer. Her third novel, The City in Crimson Cloak, brought her international recognition. Her literary work has now been translated into twenty languages, and in 2017 the French government awarded her the Légion d’Honneur. Her second work to be translated into English, The Stone Building and Other Places (City Lights Publishers, translated by Sevinç Türkkan), has received international acclaim.
Erdoğan also has an extensive journalistic record, publishing over 200 articles, often tackling human rights in Turkey. After being threatened by lynching campaigns, she was forced into exile and became writer-in-residence in Krakow’s City of Refuge in 2015. She subsequently returned to Turkey, and in 2016 she was again arrested on the pretext that she had been a literary adviser to a pro-Kurdish newspaper. She was tried for terrorism and imprisoned for 136 days. International pressure secured her release. She is now again in exile and writer-in-residence in Frankfurt City of Refuge.
From the Publisher: Three interconnected stories feature women whose lives have been interrupted by forces beyond their control. Exile, serious illness, or the imprisonment of one’s beloved are each met with versions of strength and daring, while there is no undoing what fate has wrought. These atmospheric, introspective tales culminate in an experimental, multi-voiced novella, whose “stone building” is a metaphor for the various oppressive institutions—prisons, police HQs, hospitals and psychiatric asylums—that dominate the lives of all of these characters. Here is a literary distillation of the alienation, helplessness, and controlled fury of exile and incarceration—both physical and mental—presented in a series of moving, allegorical portraits of lives ensnared by the structures of power.
“Now, as her fame grows, her books have been selling more, and her [Turkish] publisher has issued new printings. One volume of short stories, The Stone Building and Other Places, has become a best seller in Turkey.” —The New York Times
“Beautifully written and honestly told, as tender as the tulip gardens of Istanbul and as brave as the human heart.” —Elif Safak, author of The Forty Rules of Love
“Aslı Erdoğan is an exceptionally perceptive and sensitive writer who always produces perfect literary texts.” —Orhan Pamuk, author of The Red-Haired Woman
“The Morning Visitor”
from The Stone Building and Other Places
Dawn came at last. The night had passed slowly, arduously, like a heavy freight train climbing a steep grade. At sunrise, a patch of light quietly appeared on my attic window, deepening gradually. A sleepy sun, the shy, cautious sun of the North, announced the break of day as if fulfilling an obligation. All I could see was a bit of sky framed by the towering trees and the wet roof slanting up at almost a 90-degree angle. Thin, sad branches swaying in the wind, leaves anticipating their decay, shivering. . . like the hands of a beggar, outstretched in vain. The month was August, the season, supposedly summer. I had already surrendered to the hazy gloom of this northern country, my soul submerged in the sea, the rain, and the mossy smell of this city surrounded by water
Somewhere inside the wooden house, the phone begins to ring, and it goes on ringing for a long time. The room’s darkness is deceptive — it’s after eight o’clock, but still, it’s much too early for this place, a boardinghouse for migrants. Nothing is heard at this hour, except snores, sighs, and the wooden house breathing in its restless sleep. In the room on my right, is the Bosnian who takes particular pleasure from showing off his shrapnel wounds to the cold beauties of the North — most of us carry our wounds more privately. On my left is a Russian who makes a living acting in porn films and likes to listen all night to protest songs from a long-gone era. Further down the hall is a red-haired woman whose origin or occupation no one knows; and at the far end is the supposedly Somalian mother, who’s actually a Rumanian, one hundred percent gypsy, a freeloader and a flirt who hasn’t worked a single day in her life. She likes to brag about how her accordion can melt even the iciest heart. All of these immigrants, each one having arrived from a different land, on a different night, are lost in sleep now, with the bone-wearying fatigue of borders and frontiers. Resigned to a fate they despise, they trust nothing beyond their misfortune. In this shelter of ours, a cloud stinking of alcohol, sweat, tobacco, and filth drifts slowly, so heavy with all the world’s excesses and disappointments that on some mornings the echo of light footsteps can be heard inside of it. Maybe it’s a lonely ghost, grimy and bedraggled, taking leave of the house. Or perhaps the red-haired woman has sampled a new lover.
Before the telephone stops ringing, footsteps can be heard coming up the stairs. Slow and tired footsteps at the end of a long journey. They come closer and closer, and then stop in front of my door. After a few, heart-stopping seconds, I hear my name being spoken. Maybe it’s my mind playing tricks on me; a hoarse voice asks for me in my mother tongue.
“Yes, it’s me. Come in.”
The door opens with its usual creak, a moan like the sound of a violin. A short, swarthy man comes in, along with a rush of bitter cold air that quickly permeates the entire room. His sagging shoulders and wide back fill up the room; the door is already closed, as if it had never been opened. My visitor stands still for a moment and then, with the sudden, mechanical moves of a marionette, he turns toward me, his spindly legs barely able to support his body. His face looks like it’s been molded from plaster that hardened before the artist could finish his clumsy job. His large nose seems like it has melted and run down between his hollow cheeks, his eyes are nearly invisible in their deep sockets. His wrinkled, saggy, dark-colored suit is far too big for him and looks as if he never takes it off. He quit shaving and wearing neckties long ago. His once thick, receding black hair still bore the scent of the cool, dark night. I was sure I had seen him before.
After a moment he spoke, “I found out you live here so I thought I’d stop by.”
Perhaps I should have mumbled a greeting, should have shaken his freezing-cold hand. Maybe I should have been afraid. But there was nothing to fear in this quiet port city. . . Not even death, it seemed. It, too, would arrive exactly on time, just like the trams, neither early nor late. . .
Clutching his topcoat in his pale hands, he scans my room, squinting. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, his gaze settles at first on the bed squeezed under the slanted ceiling. The scrawny mattress thrown atop a woven iron bedframe looks battered by a struggle with dark nightmares that has only just ended. On the table covered with books, glass jars, dirty cups and overflowing ashtrays, a candle stuck in a beer bottle is still burning. My room, dark at all hours of the day, is spacious and almost empty. In the morning, when I stand under the small window and look up, I feel like I’m in a submarine, surfacing and rushing toward the sky. Random artifacts of everyday life are scattered around the room. These underappreciated, unassuming, faithful objects, witnesses of my unbroken solitude, bear the traces of depressing gloom. Everything, whatever I touch, is scarred and bruised. The clothes spilling out of the suitcase are torn and stained, the books heaped on the table are tattered. The water glasses have become cloudy, the pencils and moldy pieces of bread bear tooth marks, like the nicks and holes on the dreary walls. A small mirror hangs above a sink filled with a foul liquid. So much of the mirror’s silvering has fallen off that none of these battered objects can see their own reflections, dissolving instead into the murky haze. For my part, I see myself on the bruised surfaces of these objects. My own bruised skin. . . The thin, gauzy membrane between me and the void, both within and without, bruised and wounded. . .
“These are cold climes, aren’t they?” He smiled, his eyes fixed on the electric heater. He had a compassionate smile. “And it’s only August.”
I looked at his face without speaking. I could see nothing more than a pair of eyes, a pair of endless, pitch-black tunnels.
“Won’t be even two months before it starts snowing. First it’s a bitter wind that burns the lungs, blowing in from the sea. The layer of ice on the mud puddles gradually thickens, and one morning you wake up to find yourself in a completely white world. Everything is frozen. Buried alive and dreaming of the day when they’ll rise up from their coffin of ice.”
He walked to the center of the room, toward the rectangular splash of daylight that resembled a startled eye gazing at the ceiling. In his movement, I recognized the restraint of someone who has always lived in cramped spaces; even in this empty room it seemed like he was afraid of bumping into something. Or maybe he didn’t want to leave any trace of himself behind. A wan bouquet of light played over his face. And suddenly, I remembered him. His pale skin the yellow of earth, the purple bags under those eyes whose whites were webbed by red capillaries. . . He, too, was among those whom sleep didn’t visit.
“But the darkness is more unbearable than the cold. That sun. . . ”
He paused and looked at the bright shape on the floor. As if, should he reach down and open that trapdoor, sunlight would burst forth, filling the room. I turned to the window. Green, quivering branches, silvery drops on the leaves; the soft, dreamy dance of shadows on the window. . . The infinite blue that contains and restricts my vision. . . In those rare moments when the northern sun shines, the entire world is transformed, glowing, smiling. But then the clouds return, and the room seems even darker than before.
“You’ll see that sun for an hour, maybe two, each day. Around noon, it will appear like a sickly white stain on the horizon and then, before it can climb, it’ll tire out. In fact, the real sun will never rise. Its derelict ghost, an imposter, will spread blank canvases instead of days. The earth’s light and dark halves will split off, sliced in two.”
He stared at the walls, and I did too, scanning those dingy walls that I knew by heart. There, among the electrical cords dangling like strands of hair, among pipes and water stains resembling scabbed-over wounds, a shadow that had lost its human shape looked back at me. His shadow — bigger, and more terrifying than he was, another shadow among shadows. . .
“And that’s when your life will consist of one single night. Only ghosts can endure such a night. Albino people, albino trees, a city where ghosts wander. . . That’s when the long night of the mind will begin.”
This voice. . . This eerie, familiar, mournful voice had spoken to me before, many times. . . Door after door began to open in my soul; I rushed to close them, shivering from the frigid draft pushing its way in. . .
“At any rate, we don’t have much time. You have to decide.”
I reached for my pack of cigarettes and the candle.
“Decide and be done with it. That’s how life is, plain and simple. Breathe in, breathe out. . . Plain and simple.”
He cast a sharp, intense, disapproving look toward the mirror, but all he saw was a blurry, mottled reflection.
“I’ll tell you a story that happened thousands of years ago,” he began, his eyelids closing slowly like the lid of a coffin.
“I won’t listen. You always take me back there. (I was speaking for the first time. Was I really speaking?) You come to remind me that I have never left that place. That dark cell, it follows me wherever I go. In fact, it lives inside of me. It grows like the roots of a tree at night. It spreads and spreads, tearing through my skin to get out, and then it takes shape, finding its outline in the emptiness.”
I pointed to my room.
“You can see for yourself, it’s as if I keep building the same three-dimensional scene and then locking myself up inside of it. My life is the infinite palimpsest of the same picture. Trees, horizon, sky. . . Wherever I look, inside or outside, I see only a wall. Whatever direction I take, the past or the future, a stone wall confronts me. Maybe it’s because I can’t face the emptiness that I hide among walls. The void, its endless echo. . .”
“Once upon a time there was a man,” he went on impatiently. “He was a good man, in fact. You know, everybody is a good person. But this man would change at night. Become bad. Do you understand? Words often fail us. This man would turn into his shadow cast on the wall. Maybe it was his wife who caused him to change, since the worse he became, the more she would indulge him.
“In that faraway land, there was a building that cloaked itself in darkness as soon as the sun fell below the horizon. One of the stone buildings that are found everywhere. . . Do you recall? When darkness fell, so did a deep, immeasurable silence. Those who aren’t familiar with nightmares worse than death call it the silence of death. But that’s because they can’t hear the voices inside the silence, the sound of emptiness breathing.
“And when that dreadful darkness descended, the moonlight caressed the iron bars with its white fingers in satin gloves. The moon has a big heart of white gold, flawless. But that kind of heart can’t cope with the darkness. Besides, didn’t people invent the iron bars to keep their inner darkness from escaping?
“And there were birds on the roof of that dark building. Birds carrying dry twigs to the roof for hundreds of years without rest. Thinking that, one day, they would have finally piled up enough twigs that the stone building would collapse under the weight, crumble to dust. But when night came, a cruel wind would blow, scattering the twigs. Still, the birds would get back to work each morning. . . Are you crying. Why?
“And when that long night arrived, the man would get ready. He would eat his meal always at the same time, wear the suit his wife had ironed, leaving home always at the same time. No one knew where he went. . . He would walk slowly at first, then build up speed — his footsteps feverish, precise, unwavering. On seeing him, the birds would signal one another, sounding warning calls from one end of the city to the other. The pale, tenderhearted moonlight would hide behind the clouds, hoping that maybe the man would lose his way in the pitch-black darkness. But no man would forget the path he follows at night, would he? Listen, it’s not over yet.
“And when that shadow man reached the stone building, the screams would be heard. Bone-chilling screams that wouldn’t cease till daybreak. . . It was the birds screaming, the moon screaming. . . As a whirlpool of black flames filled the sky, the night itself would turn into a scream, endless, unrelenting. It would quiver like a gossamer-thin membrane over the expanding abyss, raw and bloodied, torn, ripped, slashed, covered in horrible wounds, which the thirsty lips of emptiness would suck. In the end, it would smash into pieces, strewn across the four corners of the earth. Nightmares and curses raining down on people like stones from the dark sky, wandering like shadows among the sleepers, covering their bodies with black snow, filling the deepest trenches, oozing into the most secret arteries, pouncing like a blind tiger, seizing sleep. . . And then would begin the single, long, endless night of the mind.”
When I looked up, he had already gone. His letter lay on the table. I opened my drawer and placed it among the others. No matter where I went, they found me. The dead wrote to me, to recount things I could no longer remember, calling me to a place I would return to sooner or later. They cautioned me against life, for the sake of which I had been running away from my story. They knew that the future, my elusive refuge, was nothing but the past, recounted time and time again. The only visitor who came to my cell — the dark, eternal cell inside me — was the exiled ghost of the past that awaited me. . . I have not opened even one of the envelopes, but I knew. Inside were dry twigs, pale gold moonlight, and one last, still unclaimed scream. . .
The Stone Building and Other Places is copyright © 2018 Aslı Erdoğan. This excerpt is published here courtesy of the author and the publisher, City Lights Books, and should not be reprinted without permission.
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