Silent House (41 page)

The dancer, as though wanting to prolong the belittling she had begun, made her way through the crowd, and taking by the hand certain ones who’d caught her eye, drew them out onto the dance floor. My God! She was forcing them to belly dance! The German men at first were jiggling slowly back and forth, their arms making incompetent little gestures, shooting flustered looks to their friends, but somehow never losing the conviction that they had the right to enjoy themselves.

Eventually, the dancer did what I most dreaded. She masterfully selected the stupidest and seemingly most pliant German and began to strip him. As the fat German removed his shirt, smiling at his friends, clumsily playing along with his version of a belly dance, I lowered my head, unable to take it anymore. At that moment, I wished my whole consciousness could be erased.
I wanted to escape from my own awareness, to wander freely in a world outside my mind, but understanding now that I would always be two people, I realized that I’d never be able to let go.

I
t’s well after midnight, but I can still hear them moving about: what could they be doing down there, why don’t they go to sleep and leave me the silent night? I get out of bed, walk over to the window, and look down: Recep’s light is still on, lighting up the garden: what are you doing there, dwarf? It’s frightening! He’s so sneaky, that one: every once in a while I catch him giving me a look, and I realize he notices everything about me, watching the smallest gesture, how I move my hands and my arms, I know he’s plotting something in that big head of his. It’s as if they now want to poison my nights too, pollute even my thoughts—it’s frightening just to think of it! I remember one night when Selâhattin had come to my room, so I couldn’t bury myself in my own thoughts, in the innocence of my childhood, and purify myself of the daily filth; it terrifies me still to think of it, I shiver as if feeling a chill: he told me that he had discovered death. Thinking about it again now, I become even more afraid and pull back from the darkness of the window; reeling in my shadow that
fell in the garden, I quickly go back to my bed, get under my quilt, and remember:

It was four months before he died: a north wind blowing outside whistled through the cracks in the window. I had gone to my room, stretched out in bed, but between the endless creaking of Selâhattin’s footsteps back and forth in his room and the storm slapping the shutter open and closed, I couldn’t sleep a wink. Then I heard footsteps approaching, and I was scared! When the door suddenly opened, my heart came into my mouth, as I realized that he had, for the first time in years, come to my room! He stood there for a while, planted on the threshold: “I can’t sleep, Fatma!” As though he weren’t drunk, as though I hadn’t seen how much he had at dinner! But I didn’t say anything. He came in swaying, his eyes blazing like fire. “I can’t sleep, Fatma, because I’ve made a terrible discovery. Tonight you’ll listen to me. I won’t give you permission to take your knitting and go into the other room. I’ve discovered something so horrifying I have to tell someone!” The dwarf is downstairs, Selâhattin, I thought, and he loves to listen to you, but I didn’t say anything, because his face looked very strange, and he suddenly whispered: “I’ve discovered death, Fatma, nobody here is aware of it, I’m the first to find it in the East! Just a short while ago, tonight.” He paused for a minute, as though truly frightened of his discovery, but he wasn’t slurring his words. “Listen, Fatma! After so many months’ delay, I finally finished with the letter
O
, and naturally having reached the letter
O
, I eventually had to write the article about
olüm
, death, as you know.” I knew only because he’d spoken of nothing else at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “But I just couldn’t write it, I’d been pacing up and down in my room for days and asking myself, Why aren’t you writing? Because I was simply going to take it like the other articles from existing articles in other languages, thinking, of course, I had nothing to add to what they thought and wrote, but still I was inexplicably unable to begin writing this article …” He laughed for a bit. “Maybe I was paralyzed by the thought of my own death approaching and how I’m nearly seventy and still I haven’t been able to finish
my encyclopedia—is that what you’re thinking?” I didn’t say anything. “No, Fatma, it’s not like that, I haven’t finished all the things I mean to do, but I am still young enough! What’s more, I feel myself completely revitalized by this discovery: there are so many things to be done in its wake that it wouldn’t be enough time even if I lived another hundred years!” He suddenly shouted: “Everything, every event, every life, has taken on a whole new meaning! After a whole week pacing up and down in my room without writing a single word, two hours ago, for the first time in the East, a pair of eyes opened to the fear of Nothingness, Fatma. I know you don’t understand but listen and you will.” I listened to him, not because I wanted to understand but because I couldn’t do anything else, and he had started walking up and down, as if he were in his own room. “For a week I’ve been pacing the floor of my room thinking about death and wondering why they give it so much space in their encyclopedias and books, even ignoring its prevalence in their works of art. In the West there are thousands of books simply about death. I was thinking, Why do they elevate such a simple subject, which I intended to deal with quite briefly in my encyclopedia. I expected to write something like this: ‘Death is the failure of an organism!’ Then, after a short medical explanation, I was going to discredit, one by one, all the notions about death in legends and sacred books, merrily showing once again how all these scriptures were cribbed from one another, and then describe the comical assortment of funeral ceremonies and traditions that had developed among the world’s different peoples. It might seem I wanted to keep things brief because of my anxiousness to finish the encyclopedia once and for all, but that’s not the real reason: I didn’t understand what death was until two hours ago, because, like a typical Easterner, I didn’t place any importance on it, Fatma. Two hours ago I noticed the thing that I had overlooked for so many years while looking at the photos of dead people in the newspaper. It’s an awful thing! Listen! I was reading that the Germans had proceeded to attack Kharkiv this time, but that isn’t important! Two hours ago, as I looked absently at the dead in the newspaper,
with the same fearlessness I had acquired looking at cadavers at the medical faculty forty years ago, a sudden flash came into my head, a pure terror, like a sledgehammer coming down on my skull, and I thought: Nothingness! There is something called Nothingness, and these poor war dead now have fallen into its dark well. It’s a terrible feeling, Fatma: since there is no such thing as God and heaven and hell, there’s only one thing after death, only what we call Nothingness. Now, I don’t expect that you’ll understand right away. Nobody in the East is aware of this. And that’s why we’ve been oppressed for hundreds, thousands of years, but let me not get ahead of myself, I’ll explain it to you very slowly, just so I don’t have to bear the burden of this discovery all by myself tonight!” He was making nervous gestures with his arms and hands the way he had done when he was young. “Because in one instant I understood why: why we are the way we are and why they are the way they are. I understood why the East is the East and why the West is the West, I swear I understand, Fatma, please, I’m begging you, please listen carefully to me now, and you’ll understand, too.” He went on speaking to me as though he didn’t realize that I hadn’t listened to him for forty years. He talked as he did in the early days, with conviction and care, in the sweet, affectionate voice of a foolish old teacher trying to reason with a small child, but he only managed to sound agitated and sinful: “Now listen carefully, Fatma! Don’t get annoyed, okay? We say there is no God, how many times have I said this, because his existence cannot be proven by experiment; so, therefore, all religions predicated on the existence of God are no more than empty poetic babbling. It follows that the heaven and hell they babble about also don’t exist. You follow me, don’t you? If there’s no life after death, the lives of those who die disappear altogether. There remains of them absolutely nothing. Now, let’s look at this situation from the dead person’s point of view: where is the person who died, the person who was alive before death? I’m not talking about the body: where at this point is his awareness, feeling, his mind? Nowhere. It doesn’t exist. You see, Fatma, it’s where there isn’t anything, buried in what I call Nothingness;
it neither sees nor is seen anymore. What a strange, horrifying thought! When I try to summon it my hair stands on end! You try it, too, Fatma, think of something with absolutely nothing inside, no sound, no color, no smell, no touch, nothing, something that had no individuality and no place of its own in the void, think of that, Fatma; you can’t possibly envision something that occupies no space in the air, remains invisible, and can’t be heard, can you? This is the thing that they call death. Are you afraid now, Fatma? While the corpses of our dead are rotting in the nauseating and icy silence of the earth, while the bodies of the war dead, with holes the size of my fist in them, their shattered skulls and brains splattered on the earth, their oozing eyes and their ripped bloody mouths decaying among the concrete ruins, what about their consciousness? Ah, that is buried in the bottomless depths of Nothingness; as they topple down an unfathomable abyss head over heels toward eternity, they are like blind men unaware of what is happening to them. And so I don’t want to die, when death comes to mind I want to fight, dear God, what an unnerving thing, to know you will just be lost in the darkness, never, ever to emerge and never to feel anything: we’ll all sink into Nothingness, Fatma. Aren’t you afraid, don’t you want to resist? I won’t leave you tonight until you’ve awakened that rebellious fear of death inside yourself! Listen: There is no heaven, there is no hell. No God, nobody watching and supporting or punishing and forgiving you; after death, you’ll descend into this lonely nothingness like a stone going to the bottom of a dark sea. As your corpse decays in the cold ground, your skull and your mouth will fill with earth just like a flowerpot, your flesh will break up into pieces and fall away like dried manure, your skeleton will become dust, like pieces of coal; you’ll enter this disgusting swamp that will make you decay down to the last strand of hair, with no right even to hope of coming back again, until you’ve completely disappeared, all alone in the pitiless icy mud of Nothingness, Fatma, do you understand?”

I lifted my head from the pillow in terror and looked around the room. The same old world, the world that still exists, only my room
and my furniture were sound asleep. I was in a sweat. I wanted to see someone, to talk to someone, to touch them. Then I heard the rattling around downstairs and I was curious. It was 3:00 a.m. I quickly got up and ran to the window: Recep’s light was still on. The sneaky dwarf, the servant’s bastard! I thought of that cold winter night, their miserable hovel, the overturned chairs, broken windows and plates, the disgusting rags. Where’s my cane? I took it and banged it on the floor, and then I banged it again. I called out.

“Recep, Recep, quick, come up here!”

I went outside my room, over to the top of the stairs.

“Recep, Recep, I’m speaking to you, where are you?”

From there I could see shadows down below, dancing on the wall: I know you’re there. I yelled again and finally saw a familiar silhouette.

“I’m coming, Madam, I’m coming,” and the shadow grew smaller until the dwarf appeared. “What’s the matter!” he said. “What do you need?”

He wasn’t coming up.

“Why aren’t you asleep at this hour?” I said. “What are you doing down there?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We’re just sitting around.”

“At this hour?” I said. “Don’t lie, I always know. What are you telling them down there?”

“I’m not telling them anything. What’s wrong? Have you been thinking about things again? Don’t think about them! If you can’t sleep, pick up your newspaper, go through your closet, see if your clothes are in order, eat some fruit, just don’t start thinking about those things all over again!”