(...)
That year rains, rains and how! A rotten stench of damp disquiet on the velvet curtains, on the massive engraved armchairs and the stored bedsheets – martial law has been declared in the country. Innocence has been too much to bear for the country.
After a pitch black March and backward come the winter, the autumn and the summer. They really do shoot and kill, they really do corner and capture, no one can believe.
And then the schools are closed, the schools are never opened again. Rains later, the spirits are low, hearts broken. For everyone, the state has now acquired a human shape, with hands and feet, with eyes, guns and bullets.
The sun scorches the tin roofs in one of the most wretched quarters in town, it thickens and stinks up the sewer that heedlessly runs downhill from the middle of the soil road, it licks warmly the backs of those who have been dragged down into the city as in a vanquished army, and it tempts the barefoot children towards the faraway hills that it brightens like a dream.
The colors become too pastel, the films too black and white.
Everyone is so struck down by the machines, the bosses, the doctors and the births that the crippled and the insane are no longer marginal, they are the very people in this quarter.
The women’s hips and breasts no longer fit into this quarter, for instance. There are small, dark boys whose favorite game is aiming the branches as crooked as themselves at the city that lies beneath, shouting “bang, bang”.
As for the men who hurl children around gripping them by their ears, women by their hair, and each other by their veins, they have such outraged and distorted faces that they would burst into tears if one touched their spot, they walk in the streets with such a ridiculous swagger in their puny bodies that they would fall apart with just a little flip. Each night, at least one or two of those who have gone down to the city come back either dead or mad. And each night a house in the quarter is lifted up to the sky and then dropped down to earth by shrill elegies.
And yet the inhabitants of that quarter have, in the midst of a sloping and barren landscape, houses that cry out in colored speckles, and their houses have wide gardens. In those gardens big and small women comfortably settled into felt cushions flatten dough on white boards, bake pastries on black metal sheets, the smell wreathes the city. In spite of all their poverty, they have fried vegetables, buttered noodles, ravioli with garlic yoghurt, fire-baked eggplants and peppers, and children’s happiness, men’s small rakı’s, and much more, to mourn the dead…
They forget death and the dead ones by eating, by eating ceaselessly, by thinking about eating all the time. But the next day they remember death once again and rush to the rolling pins. Looking at the abundance of food in the houses of the dead, children wish their grandmother who moans in bed all day long dies too.
The people living in this quarter no longer want to live in fear and die.
In just a few years, they will know neither fear nor life.
(...)
Translated from the Turkish by Serhad Uyurkulak
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