Walking on the Ceiling: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ayşegül Savaş grew up in Turkey and Denmark. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Guernica, and elsewhere, and was shortlisted for the Glimmer Train Fiction Prize and the Graywolf Emerging Writers Award. She has an MFA from the University of San Francisco. She teaches at the Sorbonne and lives in Paris.

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1.

For a short time when I lived in Paris, I was friends with the writer M. He was a foreigner to the city, too, which may have been one reason for our friendship. We went on walks around the city and we wrote to each other.
What remains of that time is a photograph of M. standing in front of a marble wall, looking at me with bewildered eyes. Above his raised eyebrow, a pale and jagged scar rises, deepens, disappears.
Actually, this may not be a scar at all, but a trick of the shadows, or the author's face folded with age. I do not recall a scar from our walks, but I often walked alongside him with my head down. And I'm not sure whether his eyes are really cast up in surprise, as I said, and not simply with impatience at having his photo taken.
Still, I remember M. as always a bit bewildered, and with the scar on his eyebrow-a sign illuminated in that brief moment of documentation when he looked me straight in the eyes.
But here, too, my account is faulty, since between my eyes and his stood the comforting length of the camera lens. As far as I can remember, I never looked M. in the eyes, even when we were seated across from each other at a café.
Some days, it's difficult to believe that this friendship really existed-with its particular logic, its detachment from the world. What I remember has the texture of a dream, an invention, a strange and weightless suspension, like walking on the ceiling.
In my childhood, I would hold a square mirror up to the ceiling. I examined every inch of this flat, white expanse, entirely removed from the jagged world on the opposite pole where people lived in shadows, weighed down by troubles. I understood that all anyone can do in the midst of darkness is retreat to their own, bright landscapes.

I think more and more these days that I should set down some of the facts of my friendship with M., to keep something of this time intact. But stories are reckless things, blind to everything but their own shape. When you tell a story, you set out to leave so much behind. And I have to admit that there is no shape in those long walks and conversations, even if I think of them often.
Let me place the photograph here, as the tangible remains of our friendship.
What follows is an incomplete inventory.

2.

I met M. some months after I moved to Paris from Istanbul. I arrived in the city without a job or a place to live. I was enrolled in a literature program in order to obtain a visa, but I knew even before I came that I would not attend any of the classes.
I had enrolled in the same program once before, a few years after I graduated from university in England. I had a different vision of myself then, and I worked steadily to achieve it. I was living in London with my boyfriend, Luke, and putting together my life piece by piece. I imagined that Luke and I would move to Paris, become its natives, and lead the kind of creative life attributed to the residents of the city. We even spoke to each other in French while we cooked dinner, in preparation for our new life.
On the phone, my mother had urged me to go to Paris. I hadn't been back to Istanbul for several years and she always found a way to make this sound natural.
"Of course you should go, Nunu," she said. "What's there for you in Istanbul, anyway?"
I hadn't proposed returning home as an alternative.
It wasn't from my mother but from her aunts that I found out she was sick. I went back to Istanbul soon after this, canceling my Paris plans.
The second time I decided to go to Paris, my mother's aunts, Asuman and Saniye, warned me that it was foolish to live a life without roots. It was the type of thing they might have told my mother as well, the type of thing that would have made her silent. The aunts said I should be wise and build myself a life in Istanbul, as if building a life were a matter of simple engineering, as I, too, used to believe. A steady job, an easy commute, a reliable husband.
"Your poor mother never managed," the aunts said.
To build my life, I should have them nearby to make sure everything was done the right way. They wouldn't allow anyone to think that I led the drifting life of an orphan. When the time came, they would arrange for wedding presents, bed linens, tablecloths, dinners.
They even offered to help renovate my mother's apartment.
"We can make it just the way you want," they said, and told me about their plans. We would paint my mother's bedroom and change all the furniture. We would move my bedroom to my mother's study, where she had kept all my father's books. Once we took down the bookshelves, they assured me, the room would actually be very spacious.
My childhood bedroom would serve as a guest room for now.
"And later," Saniye said, "who knows."
They also said, on the afternoon when we went to the notary to finalize the sale of the apartment, that it was a waste. I had already told them I would use some of the money to go to Paris and pay for the program and my living expenses.
They said it again after I signed the papers. "What a waste. Your poor mother's home."
This was a name they gave her afterwards-my poor mother.

3.

In Paris, I moved into a studio apartment close to the Gare du Nord train station, where frequent arrivals and departures gathered and dispersed people at every moment like a beating heart. I liked to think that I could board a train and leave the city anytime I wanted. The neighborhood disassembled itself and came back together several times a day and was an entirely different place at night. I did not feel in those first weeks that I was living in the city, but in the residues of many places.
I was renting the studio from a man who owned the CafŽ du Coin at the entrance to the building. After our brief meeting at the cafŽ, he carried my single suitcase up the uneven wooden stairs and unlocked the door.
"If you need anything . . . ," he said at the threshold. Then he seemed to change his mind and went back downstairs.
My room was bare but not neat, as if someone had moved out and left behind belongings no longer needed in their new life. There was a mattress, a square table, a stove with a kettle, and four mismatched chairs. I had brought photographs, a small vase, and two porcelain statues from Istanbul and I put them around the room for decoration when I arrived. They seemed tiny and pathetic, and after several days, I put them back into my suitcase.
From my window, I saw a new pile of abandoned furniture on the sidewalk each day, for a municipal truck to pick up. Men in long and colorful tunic shirts would stop by to examine the pieces before walking up the road to congregate around the station to watch the new arrivals to the city.
In the afternoons, I walked down to boulevard de SŽbastopol, where I stopped at a grocery store called Istanbul-Grill-Foods to buy a pack of roasted chickpeas. I followed the boulevard south, to the Seine, with the thought that I would walk to the neighborhoods of the Left Bank, or along the river to the gilded monuments-all the places that appeared in postcards of Paris and defined the city for those who didn't live there. But when I reached the river, I felt overwhelmed by the thought of everything that lay ahead.
One evening, I stood watching the brown water, panic rising up my throat. I found a bench and sat down, and I thought that I would not be able to get back home because I was so tired. After a while, I got up and started walking slowly, recovering my energy. By the time I approached my neighborhood and could see the turn to my street, I was thinking that I should have walked farther, and told myself that I would explore more the following day.
Some days, I sat at the Café du Coin at the entrance to my building. I often came there at lunchtime, though I did not eat, just sipped coffee, and was ushered to a small table by the...