TRANSLATED FROM THE TURKISH BY NEIL P. DOHERTY

Dedicated to Spencer Burke

Language

You are the first person to whom I have revealed that
I am a foreigner and that I have written all my
stories in a foreign language.
But everybody knows that, I said. You people have no
written language.
So, you couldn’t have written in your mother tongue.
You had to choose a language in order to write.
And this is the language of the people who looked
down on you. You wrote stories that looked
down on them in their own language.

This must be what they call
a common language. Although there
really is no such thing as a common language.

Destroyed

The village destroyed. The people, the horses, the dogs all killed.
-Do they have no fear of God? I shouted
And waited.

My voice did not echo.
-My God what kind of a place is this! I added.
-What would God be doing here on top of this mountain? Answered the villager beside me
whose name I did not know. We take care of our own business here.

Silence.

Then far away a dog barked.

Kaf

One night, while walking through the streets of Berlin,
I saw Kafka.
Did he see you?
Yes.

What did he say?
He asked a ridiculous question.
Are you going there too? He said.
Yes, I said.
What did he say then?

If that’s the case, we cannot walk together.

From the Archives

According to a document I found in the family archives my grandfather was killed in action in the Great War. Though according to another document, he was shot for deserting the army during that same war. There was yet another document that said that my grandfather died in his own bed. The strange thing is that in all three of them, the place and time of my grandfather’s death are all the same.

My Flood

Everyman’s flood is onto himself –
Hunnic Proverb

No, I was not on his ark.
Selfish Noah took no man other than himself onto the ark.
However, before Noah and his ark I had a raft, a skiff on
the Tigris.
Noah took the animals onto the ark, but I took no animals, no people,
no body at all.
When the floods came, his ark made for the North, and
according to the legend, after a long and troublesome
voyage was washed up on
the peak of Mount Ararat.
As for my skiff, it headed South and was washed up
on sand dunes.
When the waters receded, Noah was on a mountain, and I
was in a desert.
The only creatures around me were reptiles: snakes, lizards,
centipedes and scorpions.
It is said that all the animals were on Noah’s ark.
But I believe there were no reptiles. Those he left to me.
Hence the flood has become synonymous with Noah; of me
no song, no poem, no epic or legend remains. Not even a
particle of my paltry shadow haunts Holy Scripture.
And, I, who lived through and survived the flood, spent the
rest of my days searching for water

Also, read a book review of Unbound written by Sanjukta Dasgupta, reviewed by S. Vincent and published in The Antonym:

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