Chapter 18 – the Dark Void
I went to see the building one afternoon after many years. l'd walked along
that perpetually crowded street so very often, on those same sidewalks
where during their midday break necktied but slovenly high-school students
toting their school bags shove each other around, and where husbands
pass on their way home from werk and housewives from their gettogethers,
but l'd never gone back after all these years just to Iook at that
building again, the apartment building which had once meant so much to
lt was an evening in winter. Darkness had fallen early and smoke from
the chimneys had descended on the narrow avenue like a foggy night.
Lights were on in two floors only: dim, dispirited lights in two business offices
where people worked late. Otherwise, the façade of the building was in
Dark curtains had been closed in dark apartments; the windows
were as empty and frightening as the eyes of a blind person. What I
saw was a cold, insipid, and unprepossessing sight when compared to its
past. One could not even imagine that once an extended family had lived
here, on top of each other, in each other's hair, and in a hubbub.
I enjoyed the rack and ruin which had pervaded the building like the
punishment for the sins of youth. I knew that I was seized by this feeling
only because I could never get my share of sinful bliss, and that seeing the
decay gave me a taste of revenge, but at that moment I had something else
on my mind: "I wonder what happened to the mystery hidden in the pit
which became the airshaft. And what happened to the pit as weil as what
I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless
pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors. lt seethed
with bats, poisonous snakes, rats, and scorpions like a weil in a tale of fantasy.
I had a feeling it was the very pit described in Seyh Galip's Beauty and
Love and mentioned in Rumi's Mathnawi. lt so happened that sometimes
when a pail was lowered into the pit, its rope was cut, and sometimes they
said that there was a black ogre down there who was as big as a house.
Don't you kids go anywhere near it! we were told. One time when the doorman
was dangled down from a rope that was tied to his belt, he returned
from the zero-gravity journey he made into the infinite darkness of time
with tears in his eyes and lungs blackened with cigarette tar for all eternity. I
was aware of the fact that the desert witch who guarded the pit could also
assume the shape of the doorman's moonfaced wife, and that the pit was
closely related to a secret that lay deep in the inhabitants' memories. They
were afraid of the secret inside themselves as if fearful of a past sin that
could not stay buried in the past for all eternity. Eventually they forgot about
the pit, its memories and secrets as weil as what it contained, like instinctive
animals who scratch some dirt to conceal their disgrace.
One morning, waking up from a black nightmare that seethed with human faces, I discovered
that the pit had been covered over. lt was then that I understood with
horror, gripped by the same nightmarish feeling, that the pit had been
turned inside out, and it now rose out of the site that was once called the
pit. They had a new way of referring to this new space that brought mystery and death up to our very windows; they called this darkweil the air shaft.
ln reality, the new space the inhabitants called the air shaft in disgust
and disgruntlement (unlike other lstanbulites who termed this kind of
space a light weil), was neither an air shaft nor a light weil. When the place
was first built, there were vacant lots on either side; it was not one of the
ugly apartment buildings which later lined the street like a solid dirty wall.
When the Iot next to it was sold to a builder, the kitchen windows, the windows
of the narrow and long inner corridor, and the windows of the little
room that was used for different purposes on each floor (storage room,
maid's room, nursery, poor relation's room, ironing room, a distant aunt's
room), all of which had a view of the mosque and the tram tracks, the girls'
lycee, Aladdin's store, and the pit now faced the windows of the tall
row-house style apartment building next door, only three yards away. That
was how a lightless and oppressive space without a breath of air, which was
reminiscent of an infinite weil, was formed in between the dirty nondescript
concrete walls and the windows that reflected each other and the floors
