Daughter of Anatolia

Daughter of Anatolia

A Short Story by C. M. Oguz

***

It’s a cold winter’s evening in Istanbul. A dockworker waiting for the nightshift rests his forearms against the rusty black railings of the Eminönü waterfront, gazing idly across the inlet. Karaköy looms up ahead, streaks of color illuminating its glass vertices. Large edifices of concrete pierce the urban glow, muted by the approaching storm clouds preparing to deliver an arc of snowflakes to certain death. Nothing survives for long, he mutters, coughing up a lump of something from his lungs and presenting it to the sea. Waves immeaditely lap it up. The dead of winter scowls back at him through the eyes of a nearby seagull.

He peers further into the distance, through the metropolitan mantle of smog, well beyond the pale haze of pollution and memory, to a point where constellations of human light disappear along the curvature of a darkening horizon. His fingers are cold. He habitually extracts a cigarette from his coat pocket, still cross-eyed and transfixed by the blurry skyline. A cyclone of smoke enters his lungs, whirling around like a small child in a dilapidated playground. Broken tire-swings and a grimy, plastic slide sit in each of his alveoli, from where thousands of five-year-olds smile at the world, innocent and oblivious. He sighs. The city is wide awake. Everyone is out, everyone is enjoying something. Everyone except him, he is certain.

To his left he can make out the silhouette of several fishermen standing on the Galata Bridge like statues, their slender rods dangling into the tarry waters of the Golden Horn. He glimpses their faces only in the glow of an occasional, passing headlight. They reflect a script of regret, a massive assembly aimed solely and exclusively at him. The feeling drags him down. Somewhere far below playgrounds and horizons, in the unbroken darkness squirming underneath the city, a subterranean mass murmurs his name. He can hear it only in the split-second when the wind changes direction. Time to go; the nightshift begins. He turns around, slowly, his willpower buoyed only by duty; a burning commitment to present a better life to his daughter. Better than his.

The following morning, a tired workman yawns at the nebulous sun hovering like a blade over the inlet. He is overwhelmed with exhaustion. All he wants is to sleep, preferably forever. But the traffic is terrible, as usual. Nothing survives for long, scream his vacant eyes. Throngs of passengers avoid sitting next to him on the bus, his filth too much for them to handle. He shambles home, viscous and sticky like a ball of goo, greased and muddied all at once. He is eventually greeted by his daughter on the front doorstep, her five-year-old heart brimming with excitement. And love. Her vascular little heart pulses with an unconditional, burning affection.

Inside the house, an exuberant child gazes up into her father’s engorged eyes, bloodshot with the burden of duty. He used to smile, play with her, laugh with her. Now, his vacuous pupils are framed by a corona of darkness. Inside, she can see the dying embers of what used to be an engine of luminescence. She whispers into his ear. Softly at first, barely audible, asking about his day. Then again, a little louder, growing frustrated. But he cannot communicate, not anymore. Throat cancer makes it too painful. His giant hands place her down softly before reaching for a large heap of painkillers, medical and otherwise, splayed out in a cabinet out of her reach. She senses that he’s slipping away, but blocks the thought with all her heart, unaware of how rapidly her life will be violated; orphaned at five and spat out on to the streets by six.

***

A year passes in the city, a slow and viscous year. The following winter, one cold February afternoon, hundreds of little fish cheerfully dart about the base of the Galata Bridge, where the rusty remnants of a giant chain guard the secrets of an abandoned civilization. Above them, a lone fisherman slowly gyrates a metal rod, sending the occasional glint of sunlight downstream, past dozens of rickety shallops, and into a makeshift shack on the back streets of Karaköy. Inside the shack, a small child is quietly crying, her breath rattling in her chest. Sparkling rivulets of distress bleed out of her pupils, crystalline distillations luminous with hope and naivety. She’s confused. The remnants of a lost childhood drip out of her eyes, but she’s unable to discern what it is.

Her abdomen hurts. It’s been hurting for weeks. She has no idea why, but wishes it would stop, so she cries. No one hears her, except for all those who choose not to. Hundreds of people pass by, all caught up in the humdrum of daily concerns. No one looks directly at her, but waves of peripheral vision contionuously sweep under the dusty blue tarp where she’s curled up and shivering. She’s too upsetting to acknowledge.

Balancing intense hunger with juvenile innocence, she eventually steps out onto the crowded street, surveying her surroundings, inhaling the urban smog. The air resonates with human energy. Fumes of diesel gently caress the tattered hem of her green dress, a dress which had once been so beautiful. A ceaseless cacophony rings in her little ears, still young and sensitive, mismatched call to prayers drilling her eardrums every few hours. Several streets down, she can see the port of Karaköy leaning against the horizon. Scores of people spill out of the ships periodically docking at its small jetties. Nearby cafés bustle with activity. Hundreds of faces bask in the last rays of a fading twilight, staring vacantly into the enveloping night. The city is electrifying.

She is still hungry. A void gnaws through her tender stomach. She heads to the busy intersection on the Galata ramp, near the underpass leading to the Tünel funicular, and approaches the large trash container on the edge of the road. But she isn’t quite tall enough to reach into it. So, she climbs onto a nearby wall and hurls herself inside, unfazed by the acidic, lemony smell of trash left stewing for days. Perhaps a discarded piece of bread will alight her little face. She searches inside the container, scuffling about in a pool of junk, desperately scanning the darkness with pupils as big as the sun, soldering a spectacular canvas of human waste straight onto her defenseless retina. The hopes and dreams of a small child are entombed in the nucleus of a paper wrapper, where an assortment of semi-dissolved sustenance waits for her little hands; food she cannot afford to skip.

Outside of the container, hurried footsteps keep the air abuzz. A ferry arriving from Kadıköy deposits a fresh crowd of people at the nearby port. Its white mass undulates in the water as people clamber off in a hurry. The waves it generates encounter the city and quietly die. Many of the arrivers shuffle towards the Galata intersection, each one a prism of concerns and worries echoing the city. Meanwhile, just a few meters from the trash container, a well-dressed young couple lean against the railings of the bridge, observing the flickering city lights tracing ripples in the water; the dancing reflection of a metropolis turned necropolis. They argue about something that will be forgotten in a week. One of them cries, the other storms off. A few of the nearby fishermen shake their heads in response.

***

The city thrums with entropy. Nighttime is when it gets to shine at the stars, when its anthropic miasma gets to bellow into the sky. But the stars can no longer shine back εις την πόλιν. The city is too bright. It glares out into Anatolia, where distant woodlands and snowy meadows lie in slumber. Two and a half thousand years grin back through the fluttering leaves of an ancient conifer forest.

In a stuffy room overlooking the mayhem in Karaköy, an ambitious young student wraps up a ten-hour cramming session, bleeding away his desire to live. The prospects of a university degree mock him from the safety of his dreams. He will amount to nothing but needs another decade to realize it; killing himself on his birthday is the best thing he will do for his parents. Outside his unglazed window, vendors lining the underpass can be heard, continuously shouting out to customers. Many are on the tail end of twelve-hour shifts, agitated and tired, eyes burning in the fluorescent white lights that flicker above them in all angles. Hundreds of plastic commodities glare out from overstuffed shelves, bright and meaningless household items, cheap electronics, and sad toys. Almost everyone ignores this urban void and shuffles through a tunnel of human meat, except for those who brave the intersection above, where car horns continuously pollute the air with the ripples of pandemonium. The city is disintegrating. The underpass is falling apart, its walls are full of cracks, some much deeper than others. Several of them are home to rats, locked in a macabre dance with the alley cats that are currently perched on a wall outside, observing a small kid fall asleep in a large trash container.

Triangulating a lack of energy with dehydration and late-stage liver failure, the small girl slowly succumbs to the city. She is unaware of her ailment, unaware that this was not the life she deserved. This was not the life her mother had envisioned as she gave birth to a bubbly baby with gleaming obsidian eyes and the sweetest smile. This was not what her father had worked for through all those long nights. Her eyelids slowly sweep the pain away, drifting shut as the stench of human trash rocks her olfactory core like a lullaby. Her head rests against an empty five-litre bottle of water, having created a minuscule head-shaped caving in its plastic surface. It’s a small head after all; she’s only six years old. She falls asleep, a hauntingly conclusive sleep, where she dreams of people she never met and of things she never got to see.

***

Her body is not discovered until it nearly blocks the intake chute of a garbage disposal truck the next morning. No one mourns her. No one even knows her name. But somewhere distant, far away from the cold asphalt of the city, a gust of wind embroiders her name across a golden mountain crest. And eventually, solar winds will carry her beyond this world.

Next morning, it’s bright and bubbly in the city. The winter sun bounces off windshields, billboards, and a million other screens and reflectors, a ricochet of starlight whizzing through the streets. Scores of people mill about the glowing megapolis, stimulated by its endless appetite, mistaking it as inanimate, thinking it their property. The dead child is quickly replaced in form and function by others, much like a rapidly healing patch of scar tissue. The city is frothing with human energy, an integer overflow clogging its lungs with the vox populi. Millions of talking creatures keep it in constant flux, every sound they make bouncing back twice as lonely. They are molecules of subservience swallowed up by a vast and ravenous entity. An amorphous mass with an insatiable appetite. The city will consume.

A couple of months later, one April’s afternoon, an orange sun looms over an inner-city slum. An unmarked patch of soil in a pauper’s grave lies beneath a nearby highway ramp. It’s such a small patch. She is so small. The integrity of her soft body has been violated by the passage of time. Chemical weathering has taken its toll. She has become the freshest and purest necrosol, an anthropic soil germinating new life. But something beautiful eventually rears its head, and over time, tens of others join it. An element-rich soil continuously fertilizes the free-form flowers that slowly pop up within it. Within her. She is a tiny reservoir of life, rich in nitrogen, phosphorous and carbon, gently morphing into new shapes. All the while, to the east, across the Bosphorus, twenty million hectares of forest undulate in the wind. Anatolia is awake. She’s calling her daughter back.

***

Cover Image: Chiaroscuro illustration by M. G. Kellermeyer