Cemil Ağacıkoğlu
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An Excerpt from A Place on Your Face
December 1, 2009
Translator: Suna Kafadar
Author: Sema Kaygusuz
Synopsis
Ortadan Yarısından, Sema Kaygusuz’ first collection of short stories, was published in 1997 by Can Publishing House. Sandık Lekesi (2000, Can), second collection of short stories won the prestigious Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize and received a wide public acclaim. Doyma Noktası (2002, Can) and Esir Sözler Kuyusu and (2004, Doğan Kitap) are the last two collections of short stories published by the author.
Her first novel, Yere Düşen Dualar (Prayers Falling on Earth), was published in March 2006 by Doğan Kitap Publishing House. In 2006, Sema Kaygusuz co-authored a movie script titled Pandora’s Box, together with Yeşim Ustaoğlu, an internationally acclaimed Turkish director known for her feature films Journey to the Sun and Waiting for the Clouds. Pandora’s Box won the Golden Shell for Best Film award at the Sebastian film Festival in 2008.
Following extensive research on the cults, rituals and popular beliefs prevailing in Turkey, she published Öbür Yanım (My Other Side), a documentary book that features, along with Sema Kaygusuz’ observations, works by renowned photographers with whom she collaborated on this project. In September 2008, Kaygusuz was invited to Berlin as part of the project Yakın Bakış (Close Glance), which is an exchange writers program between Germany and Turkey. Her observations on Berlin were published as part of this initiative.
After receiving the Marguerite Yourcenar Scholarship, she spent two months (May/June 2009) in Saint-Jans-Cappel at Marguerite Yourcenar villa to finish writing her latest novel A Place on Your Face, which came out in September 2009.
Sema Kaygusuz will spend 2010 in Berlin as part of an artist-in-residency program funded by DAAD, one of the most distinguished institutions in Germany. She holds various positions at respected institutions such as PEN (Association of Writers in Turkey) where she has been a board member; at Bilgi University and Aralık Foundation she has been holding literary workshops on ‘creative reading and writing’ since 2000; and she has been a freelance writer for Notos and Milliyet Sanat.
Story
Think of an army. Soldiers, some wearing leather and some sheepskin, splattering blood wherever they pass. As the soldiers move, they age, and as they age they resemble one another, when instead they’re supposed to invoke their fathers. Most of them have lost their teeth since leaving their homes. As they leave behind bastards to be born in the stackyards of the villages they ravage, they warm the world to a feeling of orphanage. Their wounds have changed them a great deal. Blind, maimed, and crippled, toppling over one another like a giant creature, they become a specter adorned with spoils, forging ahead to the east. As they spill blood for the sake of finding the elixir of life, they taste Earth’s every element by drinking from each river they conquer, each lake and waterfall they envelop. Between two loots and a massacre they learn to tell sulfur from sodium, and head off into the lands of darkness to get a taste of magnesium. These men solve the mysteries of stone and element and discover different types of water. Before they even reach the wise man, they rip out hearts of whole peoples. Infecting everyone around with plague and all manner of ills, step by step they disseminate pain on Earth. On plains they have crossed with leaden storms, they don’t spare a second thought for the minstrel whose heart never beat for the elixir of life but who lived only for the purpose of collecting live words hanging in the air, and the dervish who does not rule over anything other than his rod, a carpenter attempting to grasp the ways of plane trees, an explorer devoted to mapping the borders of empires. And never do they think of the type of water these men drank before hitting the road alone, as the shaman did, dressed in eagle-owl feathers, heading off toward the kernel of universal substance. Convinced that the elixir of life springing out of an anonymous rock is destined only for Zülkarneyn, they are not concerned with the spiritual source of those recluses whose only interest is to delve into their own being. With an unprecedented grandeur, leading his soldiers on his raven black horse, Zülkarneyn is certainly unaware of the fact that the only man to get a taste of the elixir of life will be Hızır, Zülkarneyn’s god-brother, on his grizzly horse.
Do you think Zülkarneyn is mistaken or deceived? Or a captive of a tale that was written for him long before he was born? Perhaps he is just an ordinary man whose only passion is to hunt quail and wrestle, but instead he is forced to lead military expeditions at the expense of being ruined by his gnawing obsession with eternity. He is chained to the other Zülkarneyn, who enters his dreams with mature horns and a curly dark beard that reaches down to his chest. And perhaps he has already found eternity but is unaware of it.
Do you remember the tale that your grandmother told you about Zülkarneyn? As Zülkarneyn was galloping ahead with his fearless army toward the gloomy lands upon which the sun never dawns, he halted at the door of a grand mansion and knocked three times.From behind the door rose a sonorous voice:
“Who are you?”
I am Zülkarneyn!”
The wooden door slowly opened on its steel hinges. Your eyes would grow big at this point in the story. You held your breath and heard the creak of the rusty metal tearing the silence.
A man who looked like a man, wearing a white shirt with a lily complexion, looked condescendingly into Zülkarneyn’s eyes. “O Zülkarneyn! Are the lands you conquered not enough, so that you are pounding at my door?”
Gesturing with his empty hands, Zülkarneyn said, “I don’t own a thing. Everything I possessed I gave away to my soldiers.”
Well, the apocalypse is near, and possessions have no significance anymore,” replied the young man at the door. “I am Israfel with the trumpet, and when I receive the order to blow the horn, everyone will hear a high-pitched sound and this place will turn into the scene of judgment.” Then he reached in his pocket for a stone that looked like a stone and handed it to Zülkarneyn. “Take this and gauge yourself.”
This part reminded you of the stones you collected at the beach and on the hillside. You didn’t know why you liked stones then. I suppose you recognized a mysterious perfection on each surface wrapped with a soul. A mathematical perfection. I remember it like it was yesterday: We were strolling in the Sarıkamış pine forest, and you found a piece of obsidian. You deemed it a shard from a pitch-black planet, with its smooth slippery surface. You didn’t believe that it came from the earth, and instead thought it fell from the sky. You imagined this coarse stone was vivified by a part of your soul that you breathed into it.
But the stone that Israfel handed to Zülkarneyn felt very light to him. For days, passing it between his hands, Zülkarneyn strove to gauge its weight. He carried it under his helmet, on his chest, and in his pockets. He warmed up the stone by rubbing it in his hands and observed how long it took to cool down. When he failed to figure out the proportions of the stone in relation to his body, he presumptuously dared to compare it with other stones.
To gauge a stone by comparison with other stones became Zülkarneyn’s chief predicament. Granite, quartz, amethyst—one with rough edges, one wide and flat, another slippery… Come to think of it, how is it possible to extract the essence and grasp the mystery of a stone by undertaking such a comparison?
Finally realizing the futility of his attempt, Zülkarneyn decided to compare the weights of the stones rather than their physical appearances. When he placed his stone and another on each side of his scale, even you listening to your grandmother’s mellifluous voice could speculate that the stone Israfel gave would weigh more than any stone in the world. And in fact that’s exactly what happened. Even when Zülkarneyn piled all the stones on top of each other, weighing who knows how many kilos, Israfel’s stone proved heavier. Zülkarneyn was crestfallen, like a worn-out commander who has lost all the battles he has waged. He struggled valiantly yet was unable to solve the mystery of this gem.
What you call “heart” is a bottomless container, a dark place in which you lose your balance when you try to grasp it with the intellect, in which you dissolve in its infinite vortex. Upon entering that dark room and finding himself footling with this stone, Zülkarneyn felt a deep resentment. He mistook the time he had wasted on a stone for worldly time. When he couldn’t figure his way out of it, he ran to Hızır to salvage the piece of his soul trapped in the stone. Hızır, with his enticing and persistent calmness, took the stone from Zülkarneyn’s hand, raised it to the light and peered at it for a long time, as if he saw something in it.
You had narrowed your eyes then. Every word coming out of your grandmother’s mouth was finding a place of its own on your face. You existed at the time of the storytelling on a different plane. As you were experiencing the tale, you were also remembering another experience from the past. Everything unfolded and developed within the frame of the story as you listened. Hızır placed the stone on one side of Zülkarneyn’s scale and put a handful of earth in the other. Then he showed Zülkarneyn how the scale was perfectly balanced. Surely, Zülkarneyn did not expect such a plain answer. Elegant simplicity has been a dazzling light that reveals the banality of undistinguished thinking since those times.
All right, but how did you think of comparing the stone to earth? Explain it to me right away!” said Zülkarneyn.
Hızır threw the stone on the ground and said, “I don’t know how I knew. I just recalled something I already knew when I saw the stone.
Zülkarneyn wasn’t convinced. “So this is the secret of the stone: Its weight is equal to a handful of earth?”
Hızır took umbrage at his comment. “Don’t you understand?” he roared. “This stone is not a measure of weight. It’s a symbol, a representation of the intimacy between the two of us—or the lack thereof. It is the medium that compares me to you and you to me.”
Published Works
Novels:
Yüzünde Bir Yer (A Place on Your Face) / October 2009 / Dogan Kitap
Yere Düşen Dualar (Prayers Falling on Earth) / March 2006 / Dogan Kitap
Wein und gold (Prayers Falling on Earth) / October 2008 / Suhrkamp
La Chute des prières (Prayers Falling on Earth) / February 2009 / Actes Sud
Short Story Collections:
Esir Sözler Kuyusu / May 2004 / Dogan Kitap
Doyma Noktası / March 2002 / Can Publishing House
Ortadan Yarısından / 1997 / Can Publishing House
Sandık Lekesi / 2000 / Can Publishing House
Üşüyen/Efsirî / < November 2007 / Lis Publishing House (selection of short stories published in Turkish and Kurdish)
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