Pathway

BAHAR UYSAL KARAKUŞAuthor page →

There used to be a wall here. Along its three sides, other long walls stood in a row. The outer walls of this building were a pale blue. The twelve blocks around it are still standing; though the great earthquake set them all creaking, only this pale blue building collapsed. And here you are, right in front of this ill fate of yours. There are no long walls here anymore. The shell that held you, your little home, has turned to rubble. You circled that rubble like a pilgrim, hoping that a soul you knew so well would come out alive. He died. Here. Every day you woke to a wreckage that was becoming an extension of you. You couldn’t sleep. Every day you died and came back to life, again and again. After he was gone, you kept searching for a place on this earth where you could leave this wreckage. Your burden was too heavy. No one would take you in with a wreckage. You found nowhere. You were only just learning to live with debris, coming apart piece by piece. In the end you decided to let the wreckage live with you.

There used to be a wall here. You always thought the walls that made up your home were so solid. You had not yet developed that terrible distrust of the ground beneath you. Even back when you lived with your mother and father, you would sway as if in a cradle. But it never even crossed your mind that this shelter could be an unsafe place. You grew up, you moved away to other cities. You left different stories behind in grey cities. Your mother and father stayed there. Without knowing it, they went on living in a rotten place. This was your home. It was your youth, your past, everything you had ever been. Now draw near. Get used to the vast emptiness here. Don’t be afraid. Your memories are here, and like dough you can give them whatever shape you wish. See.

You will imagine it so well that his shadow will all but fall upon another wall. His. That piece of your own soul. You will be grateful for your power to imagine. From those long shadows you will try to draw out his body. But nothing will come out of them. Tangled images will drift through your head. You will piece the images together. Your brain will build you a new pathway. You will bring to life an old image you know.

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Your helpless parents will do everything they can to erase every day you have spent without them. You will lay tables together so that you can feel the way you used to; you will try to recapture the old tastes. But none of you will be as you were; the marks of cruel life have seeped into you. Those marks long ago made a place for themselves in the lines of your faces. Deep down. They have wiped out innocence. Thinking this, you will not yet know that these are no troubles at all, because you have not yet tasted greater pain. You will act out your old, innocent roles, you will talk of days gone by, you will laugh. Your hazy voices will echo off those walls. With him you will make planes out of old newspaper pages. You will race your paper planes. You will grow tired. Your father will walk calmly into the small sitting room and say, “You haven’t looked at my face this visit, my girl.” You will smile softly. It will be like a secret pact the two of you once signed coming into force amid heedless, rough-handed time. Like a shy child, your father will lay his head in your lap. With your hands you will smooth back his thick, white-streaked hair. You will tell him, “There’s more white in your hair since I was last here. Don’t think so much about everything.” And he will say, “Snow settles on high mountains, they say.” You will say, “You are the one safe mountain I can lean my back against. You are the only person who will love me and accept me just as I am, no matter what.” A feeling of trust will flow from your wide eyes toward his. There you will feel the trust you never fully found in anyone else, the trust you paid so dearly for. Then you will run your fingertips over his tired face. You will think to yourself that you took half your features from your father and the other half from your mother. In his features you will find the shadows of your own face. You will touch the small fleshy mole on his right eyelid. He will blink his brown eyes. Then he will close them. With delicate movements of your fingertips, you will give his temples a little massage. The voice that sulked, “You didn’t look at my face today,” will find its opposite answer in the room. There, in your home that has not yet fallen. He will feel your eyes moving tenderly over every part of his face. All the times he played the fussy, spoiled child whenever you came to visit them will surface in your memory. Dripping pure rosewater onto a small ball of cotton, you will wipe his sunburnt face. Slowly the scent of roses will spread through the room. Your mother will come in too, purse her lips, and ask you to promise her the same massage. Your father will fall into a deep sleep. Through the door your mother left open as she came in, the smell of food cooking in the kitchen will drift in. That smell and the scent of roses in the room will mingle. This is a crossing of scents. Just like the crossings of feeling, swinging between death and life, that you are living through right now. That mingled smell will scatter all the images. Then you will understand that your dreams, too, have been struck by a tremor. It is three in the morning. That house is gone. The shadows on the wall were wiped away long ago. Your father’s voice, which always made you all smile, will be silenced far, far away by the rumble of a quake. They will not let you look at the face of a cold body pulled from the rubble. You will wail relentlessly. “I was here three days ago, Dad, I’ve come to look at your face again,” you will cry out. You will choke on your sobs. They will wrap him in a blanket and carry him to a black pit. “Dad, I came to look at your face. Dad, I missed you so much,” you will say. After that, no power will be able to change his endless silence. And you will stay forever inside silent screams. They will not hear.

This story received an honourable mention in the Tahta Gemi International Short Story Competition (2026). Translated from the Turkish.