 |
| Published in February 2026 |
Previous Chapter: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (2)
The characters, institutions, and events in this novel are entirely fictional. They bear no relation to real persons, institutions, or events. Any similarities that may appear to exist are the result of coincidence.
3
It was in your sixth year that the true
adventure began — the half-mad escapade, shining like a winter sun without ever
truly giving warmth, would bring you closer to marriage than you had ever come,
yet from which you would ultimately turn back at the altar. You had found a
Spanish girl who matched you in height, in temperament, in spirit. Though she
wasn't entirely Spanish either — she was from the Canary Islands. She had come
to Shenzhen to do a master's degree and was for now learning Chinese. Do you remember
how her curly hair would leap out from behind her ears every so often, and how
it would drive you wild with delight? That small, shadowed hollow where her
shoulder ended and her neck began — what an abundant spring it was, one you
could never tire of looking at, one that with her every movement sent you
tumbling to the threshold of entirely new universes of pleasure. When she gazed
at you with those raw hazelnut-green eyes, when her olive-colored skin —
through which light seemed to pass effortlessly— touched yours, when the
golden-yellow quince-down on her arms caught your eye at the most unexpected
moments, you ceased to be yourself and surrendered your stricken body to the
warm river of divine pleasures at some unknown point beyond time and space. But
most of all when, after cracking salty sunflower seeds until her tongue had
gone as red as hot iron in a furnace, she slipped it into your mouth and let
you suck it — Damn slutty Europeans, they really know their business! — your
mind would shatter into pieces, the wiring in your brain would short-circuit,
and you would enter a festival mode of infinite breadth, like a chronic beggar
who has chanced upon a wealthy house he knows he hasn't deserved knocking at its
door. Canary had become your excuse to visit other cities in China — some of
them for the second time. You went to Xi'an, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou,
Xiamen, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Chengdu with her. You saw those cities through
your own eyes and also through hers. You tasted the food of those places with
your own tongue and also with hers. The passionate devotion between you was not
merely a meeting of minds — your bodies too were as impatient, as urgent, and
as unstoppable with each other as the opposite poles of a magnet. The first
year you spent together was as reckless and fiery as punching holes in social
norms, indeed to expand the existing holes to preposterous dimensions. Kisses
in the middle of the street in broad daylight, near-final physical intimacies
in the park, quick encounters in a deserted corner of a car park, making love
after midnight on the beach at Dameixia on a stretch of sand half-sheltered by
rocks, to the accompaniment of waves that gently kissed the shore — it was
unclear who was imitating whom! These were behaviors you would not have
considered becoming in yourself before you knew Canary, things you would have
disapproved of in others. For someone so shy, so conservative, so accustomed to
shaping his every move according to the answer to the question "what will
people say?" — what you were experiencing was a revolution. She had not
accepted you as you were; from the first day she had set about kneading the
dough she had been handed and giving it a new consistency and shape. And it was
precisely for this reason that you had become attached to her with a firm chain
unlike anything that had bound you to anyone before. The moment those chains
would begin to frighten you would come much later — when the fire had lost its
heat and you had entered the phase of making do with the warmth of embers.
You had told no one, but I know you
found Canary on a reasonably reputable dating site. The reader who has followed
the story carefully up to this point will already have understood there is
nothing surprising in this. I was following not only you but everyone and
everything that came into contact with your life. I called them Naci's
derivatives, and I regarded these second-order Nacis who had received their
share of you as equations to be solved. I knew that the woman who struck up a
"where did you get that coffee?" conversation with you in the lift
for no reason at all was a recently divorced widow with two little children;
that the masseuse woman on the card you picked up from the ground and put in
your pocket was working illegally in China — she was deported thanks to me;
that the physics teacher from Guangzhou who brought you a mug decorated with
kangaroo pictures from Australia had bought it not at a flea market in
Melbourne but at an ordinary shop near her home; that the upstairs neighbor who
kicked your bicycle and broke the phone holder had his scooter chain snap in
three places two days later — one might call this karma; and that the Russian
brute who got into a verbal fight with you at The Glass Cage and tried to beat
you up had an envelope delivered to his home two days after the incident, full
of photographs of him with his mistress... A person who knew all this knew
where your one and only sweetheart had been found, who her people were, her
previous relationships, her family's financial situation — there is no rule
that says a girl won't be a gold digger just because you're not rich; they'll
take everything down to your marrow and vanish without a trace — where her
siblings were studying and what she was hiding from whom, all before you went
on your first date with her. I knew all of this, approved of her the way a
grandmother approves of her grandchild's friend, and watched in silence.
Canary was beautiful, intelligent,
and chronically lonely just like you — what else would she be doing on a dating
site? Being alone for a long time and not talking to anyone didn't bother her.
In places where she felt safe she loved to laugh and to make others laugh; she
knew the measure of both humor and seriousness, and would not waste her breath
on empty words just for the sake of saying something when silence was called
for. When she spoke her intelligence sparkled like a diamond, dimming all the other
sources of light around her. This was what had affected you the most. A clever
woman finding you attractive, listening to you when the occasion called for it,
and at other times challenging you with the role of a teacher and showing you
how things really were — you liked all of this. Because she was closely
interested in philosophy, art, and especially politics, you always had
something to talk about. She even assigned you homework sometimes. After saying
"Next week we're going to discuss Afghanistan. Read the texts I've sent
you. All right? We can't understand the world without understanding
Afghanistan, let alone China" — she would kiss you on the cheek and then
immediately disappear, hopping and skipping, into the city's bright avenues,
like a smooth thin stone that after skipping countless times across the surface
of the water plunges at last into the dark waters of the lake through the
shimmer of phosphorescence — and this pleased you, stroked your pride, and made
you ask yourself "What have I done to deserve such a perfect woman?"
You had a well-balanced relationship — passionate in the right measure, calm in
the right measure, sincere and warm in the right measure. So much so that for
the first time in your life you had told your mother you had a girlfriend. How
happy the poor woman was — she had said over the phone "Infidel or not, it
doesn't matter, bring her here and we'll have the wedding!" Then she had
started calling you every day. I knitted a sweater for my daughter-in-law; what
did you eat with my daughter-in-law today; where are you going with my
daughter-in-law this weekend; send me a photo so your aunt can see her too —
she would pester you constantly with one absurd pretext after another. Things
had reached such a point that you were no longer answering two out of every
three of her calls. Despite your mother's hopes, Canary's happiness, and the
expectations of the close friends to whom you had introduced yourselves as a
couple, after a relationship that lasted one year, six months, and twenty-three
days; you separated through a stormy fight. The night Canary wiped her saliva
and tears on the cushions of your sofa, and you drank until dawn at Insomnia
and passed out under the table — I lay awake with a joy I could barely contain,
as though a baby ready to be born was moving in my belly. And that night I
understood, with the inevitable bewilderment of a prisoner who wakes to find
shackles placed on his feet while he slept, from that point on in my life I
would no longer be free — that from that day forward I would always "live compelled
to you," would "keep your name fixed in my mind like a nail,"
and of course would "always warm my insides with you"[1]...
At the root of your fight were two
main causes. The first was your habit, never got tiring of it wherever you went
and with Canary present too, of singing the praises of a life without children.
The girl was of course not saying let's get married tomorrow and as soon as
we're married let's produce three bouncing babies. She considered it pointless,
even blather, to discuss this when there wasn't yet an egg let alone a nest;
that was all. When the time came it could be thought about, discussed between
you, and decided. When the time came, that is — or if the time came! But you
had settled the matter in your head. It was not the difficulty of raising a
child, the expense of it, the weight of the responsibility, that frightened
you. It was the possibility that the child that would come might not resemble
you. In the social gatherings you attended together you would always voice
this, repeating the same things over and over like a parrot with a tongue but
no faculty of judgment: what if the child grows up to develop a passion for
football, what if he listens to pop songs, what if he doesn't like mathematics,
thinks cheap literature is a treasure, turns out to be a boor who doesn't
follow the rules of grammar... What if he prefers streets without cats to
streets with cats, what if he gets mired in drugs, what if he's stupid, what if
he doesn't like reading books, what if God forbid he turns out to be a dimwit
obsessed with postmodern art. What if he becomes a fake leftist in a green
parka with a slogan always on his lips whose real aim is to get every girl he
finds into bed; what if he becomes a counterfeit conservative of unknown
convictions with worry beads in one hand, untaxed rental income in his
accounts, and the fantasy of the neighbor's newly pubescent daughter forever in
his heart; what if he becomes a wretch who blames everyone else for all the
defeats of his life, a schemer who resorts to underhanded tricks when he can't
get what he wants... Your tactless, grinning remarks — as unnecessary as Turkish
coffee without its foam on top— had so suffocated the girl that she had taken
to mentioning the subject in her messages to her friends and had begun to voice
the possibility that separation was also an option. The last straw was the
sudden resurgence of a jealousy crises in you whose existence even I had not
previously been aware of. Messages you saw on her phone, which you understood
from them being in Spanish had come from a man, had somehow taken hold of your
mind, and without listening to a single one of the girl's explanations you had
begun to storm and rage. No matter how much the girl said "wait, let me
explain, would you just listen for a moment?" — it was no use. You laid
into her relentlessly, like an opportunist — and this opportunism will appear
before us once more at the end of our story — for whom the long-awaited excuse
had finally come to him of its own accord. So much so that even I was surprised
when I first witnessed it, wondering at the source of this fury and
stubbornness in you. What then — had you been hiding a narrow-minded, jealous,
and cruel man inside you all these years, ready to spring up the moment
conditions allowed? Canary might have thought so, but I had always been trained
to check what lay behind the scenes, to concern myself not with appearances but
with the hidden truth behind them.
I thought about it for a long time,
focused on the texts you had written before the separation, on the events that
had unfolded at the school where you worked, on the subjects you discussed with
the handful of friends you corresponded with outside of Canary. And finally,
with the great joy and pride of a stubborn detective solving a skillfully
committed crime, I arrived at the following conclusion. You never touched on
this subject in your journal, but in a short story you had written and finished
a few months before the separation you had grazed obliquely, in veiled fashion,
the storm brewing inside you. There was a man in the story who wanted to become
a Buddhist monk and distance himself from all expectations of life. With your
characteristic cunning, on the day the man decides to withdraw from the world
after reading a few books on Buddhism, you arrange for a puppy to cross his
path. On a cold and rainy day, thrown outside, its black eyes shining like a
candle behind frosted glass under the pale street lamp, making itself known
from among the bushes with a whimpering sound because it couldn't even manage
to bark properly — the man who takes this wretched little dog home goes on,
after that day, to live the three most beautiful, most happy, most peaceful
years of his life. After these magnificent three years, one day out of nowhere,
for no apparent reason, he begins to claim that this relationship of mutual
love and loyalty between himself and the dog actually constitutes an obstacle
before the great goals he has set for himself — that the dog is distracting him
with a false happiness, preventing him, through the genuine friendship it
offers, from seeing the true face of life filled with sorrow and grief — and
starts looking for ways to be rid of the dog. After a few clumsy attempts,
using the excuse that he has developed an allergy to dog hair that makes
breathing difficult and that the doctor has told him to get rid of it —
ignoring the dog's devoted and moist gaze — he gives the dog away to the first
man who responds to the notice he posts online. You cannot know how frightened
I was when I first read the story, thinking you were going to kill this
beautiful dog just as you had killed that bird!
This story, whose depth I had failed
to grasp on a first reading, came back to life for me like dry soil finding
water again after repeated readings once you and Canary had separated — it
opened my eyes, untangled the knots in my understanding. It turned out there
had been a great prison behind it all, made up of fears and anxieties, and I
hadn't seen it. You are someone who is afraid of attachment, who shrinks from
being sought by others, who is terrified of being pointed at, who quickly tires
of and begins to hate the things that bind you — even when those things have
introduced your body and your mind to unparalleled pleasures you have never
before tasted. When the time comes to free yourself from these objects of
captivity that you have turned into objects of resentment, you manufacture all
manner of excuses, prepare the ground for those excuses to come to light, and
when the ground is ripe you don't miss the opportunity and deliver the final
blow. A clumsy lover in your place would have retreated to the cliché "You
deserve a better man than me." Since you did not stoop to such flippancy,
you came up with a far more intricate, far more convoluted plan — you
outwitted, with your cunning and guile, the woman whose intelligence you
admired. Much later, when this incident came back to my mind, I also thought
that the problem in you was not only an inability to attach. Just as the man in
the story blamed the dog, you showed a tendency to blame everything that
provided you with comfort. In the bluntest of terms, it was a case of comfort
getting on your nerves. This was a subject you returned to frequently in your
journal. For you, the writer — man or woman — was a being who had a quarrel
with the world, whose fist was always clenched, who could not be happy even
when they wanted to, who moved through their brain among scorpions,
half-mystical and half-real, half-worldly and half-otherworldly, like Pegasus.
That the stories you wrote while you were with Canary were all feeble,
inconsequential things — and I was not the only one who noticed. You too knew
very well that what you were writing fell far, far short of your real talent.
Your body was ablaze but in the
recesses of your consciousness an ice age was underway. To melt these glaciers
you needed to bring yourself to your senses with controlled pain, to inject by
shock treatment whatever portion of the world's sorrow was yours into your
veins, to return — before long — to the bed of nails you had prepared for
yourself, without prolonging your small escapes beyond what was necessary. In
the end, you were a 21st century dervish who could not stop fixating on things,
who when he could not find something to fixate on fixated on not being able to
find something to fixate on, and who flogged his own bare back with the guilt
created by the sterility of this cycle. Isn't that so — am I wrong, Naci Bey?
If I'm wrong, say I'm wrong! You can't, can you? You never will. By the way,
while it occurs to me — let me also say this. You were not afraid of a possible
child failing to resemble you — on the contrary, you were afraid of the child
resembling you. I deduced this too from the story with the dog. Ah, those
stories of yours! If your journals reported from the ten percent of the iceberg
above the surface, the stories broke off pieces from the ninety percent below
and, after dressing them up beyond recognition, hurled them to the surface of the
water. The real Naci who carried and bore the real weight, existing quietly at
a depth no human eye could reach, was there — swimming stealthily in those dark
waters. Nobody knew this; I knew. I, who was as close to you as your own
subconscious... The main character in that story was noticing that the dog's
habits were coming to resemble his own more and more, and this disturbed him
deeply. You too were anxious that a child you might have would, like you, turn
its back on reality and live in a world of fantasy; you were worried that it
might be unable to form direct, honest, and sincere relationships with people;
you were terrified it might prefer narrow lichen-covered pavements to wide
avenues, dark mold-smelling rooms to airy well-lit homes, the bleak world of
books to the buzzing world outside. That was why you didn't want a child — the
possibility that the work produced might turn out to be a freak of nature
frightened you, robbed you of sleep...
Despite having arrived at all these
conclusions, I could not nourish the slightest ill feeling toward you inside
me. These were actions your mind and the other defense mechanisms you had
developed against life had made you commit. But was there not, behind these
actions, a cowardly child — needy of love and attention, incapable of
contributing anything to the world beyond writing — this too a deficiency if
you think about it carefully! — who had convinced himself that even by writing
he was good for nothing, a child of weak will? You only wanted to be loved and
admired, but from a distance, like polar bears — preferably through
binoculars... The beautiful things you and Canary had shared coming to an end
so suddenly had of course saddened you — what habit, when torn from our
constitution, fails to leave a bleeding wound behind it? You were aware of the
inevitability of pain, but if the last resort for a throbbing rotten tooth is
to pull it, there isn't much you can do about it. The thought of putting the
extracted tooth back in its place would itself have been a piece of dreaming.
You tried, actually — a few times you said let's start over, let's rebuild our
love without repeating the mistakes we made in the past, let's return to those
beautiful days. But you couldn't manage it. Even if you repair a shattered vase
with the finest glue in the world, it is still a broken vase. This you knew,
Canary knew, and of course I knew too. The question was not whether the vase
would be as good as before once repaired — the question was that both of you
were certain the vase would fall and shatter again. The thing your mother said
when she heard of the separation — "A bum unused to clothing won't keep
its knickers on" — was probably the most apt summary of the situation. Who
can know a son better than his mother? Except perhaps the spy who carries him
in her mind as though he were her own son, who worries for him, who rejoices
when the occasion calls for it and grieves when it calls for that, who follows
his every step like a shadow...
Yes, Naci, my dear teacher! You were
an olive-eyed, snow-white polar bear with a muddled head and a warm heart, and
I was your documentarian — positioned hundreds of meters ahead of you inside a
well-designed, sturdy camouflage, using every technological means available,
watching your every movement and extracting meaning from those movements.
Despite all those warnings of leave the natural world to its own chaos, don't
interfere, don't disturb the balance — hasn't it been seen that a wildlife
observer develops compassion for the animals he or she observes, becomes
emotionally attached to them, even on occasion crosses the line and shows them
favoritism, protects and watches over them against others, and on generous days
leaves food here and there? It has been seen, of course! Hasn't it?
After Canary left you couldn't find
yourself for a while. I thought you would lose control like a motorcycle with a
blown rear tire and crash into a roadside tree and be written off — but you,
like a bicycle with a slowly deflating front tire, wobbled on but continued
your journey. You got back on your feet far more quickly than I had expected —
but it was most likely precisely for this reason, because you got up too
quickly, that your head began to spin, you began to see your surroundings in a
blur, and like the hapless who reach for any branch when they fall, you began
to look for hope in the thorniest of branches. I expected you to fill the void
left by Canary with one-night stands, death-defying escapades, or weekends
spent drunk. Instead, in a move that surprised even me, you became obsessed
with pornography. For a long time I could not understand what a man who in his
first seven years in China had not watched a single pornographic film found in
videos that were all beginnings and endings known in advance, all identical to
each other, artificial and contrived — their artificiality derivable not so
much from the actors' incompetence as from their not even deigning to pretend.
I didn't want to understand it, frankly! I accepted the situation as one of men's
perennial weaknesses. A few months and it'll pass, I thought — but this time I
was wrong. Like a sparrow that has dived in through an open window, every time
you tried to leave you would collide with one wall or another, injuring your
wing, your beak, your feet, and gradually losing hope that any way out existed.
What were you looking for? The eyes of Canary that shone transparent as glass
in the mornings yet toward evening, perhaps under the weight of all the
concrete masses she had seen, darkened to a deeper shade? Or her hands, soft as
a cat's belly; her honey-colored elbows; her long thin fingers; the trace of a
smallpox vaccination she wore on her thin arms like a battle scar; the tortoise
tattoo positioned where her back ended and her buttocks began, that seemed to
cry out "slow down, mister!"... Your adventure, which began with
simple romantic videos, was gradually increasing in intensity, hardening,
becoming steeped in violence and pain, taking on a form that would come close
to dragging human dignity through the mud. You were spending almost all the
time left over from the school where you worked in front of the computer,
before one wretched film after another. While eating, while drinking beer at
home — you had even stopped going out to bars with friends — on sleepless
nights while trying to sleep, your eyes were always on the screen. Accompanied
by the guilt that was piling up inside you and becoming increasingly sticky,
you would sink further into the armchair where you sat, shrinking like a drying
mushroom, growing smaller and smaller and embedding yourself into the depths of
the fabric. So much so that I could no longer recognize you. You were not this
kind of person, my dear Naci — you were a wise figure, loved and respected by
those around you, whose knowledge and refinement were heeded even if you were
not understood at the level you deserved. Did this vile, this wretched, this
degrading situation suit you in the least? Like a wretch sinking into quicksand
in the desert, the more you struggled the deeper you sank into that bottomless silent
pit. As you stared with a glazed mind at the simulated expressions of pleasure
on the faces on the screen, as you fixed your gaze with the eyes of a derelict
building's windows on those noisy coupling scenes, as you filled the final
moments of the daily quota each time with films featuring, by different routes,
large-breasted, narrow-hipped, blonde European women — what were you dreaming
of, I wonder? What kinds of satisfaction that I could never understand were you
reaching? What missing part were you deluding yourself into thinking you were
completing with what incompatible piece?
Days turned into weeks, weeks into
months. Just as I had almost given up on you and was about to switch to minimum-effort
mode in following you, you went with a teacher friend's invitation to a boxing
gym near your home. That day you took your first step on the road to being rid
of the curse of pornography. It turned out yours was a salvation story — or a
story of failing to be saved — in the manner of one who, having fallen into the
sea, clings to a snake. What do I know about the thousands of different methods
men store in their arsenals to cover up their weaknesses, to punish themselves,
worst of all to turn the life they're living into a cesspit? Why don't you
solve your problems by being silent and crying, the way we women do! But no —
you have to fight, have to thrash about inside it, have to bare your teeth at a
life that doesn't give a damn about your obsessions. And in the end, you will
spend your lives crushed under a pride that you let no one else trample but
which tramples you!
Boxing had made you notice one of
life's greatest paradoxes. You can only forget one pain with a greater pain;
only by living for a long time near the uppermost level of suffering your body
can bear, you learn to control pain, to have authority over it. Teaching pain
who is slave and who is master comes not from running away from it but from
confronting it, taking it inside you and growing accustomed to living with it
while in every circumstance not allowing it to take possession of your body.
However much you tried to embellish it with such grand-sounding words, what you
were doing would amount to nothing more than a form of masochism. Naci the
teacher, who while watching pornography had liked to look down sadistic slopes,
was continuing — once again surprising everyone, the Provincial Intelligence
Director had even reacted with an "Oh my goodness!" — to pass the
time with the most unlikely solutions. You were the individually reduced proof of
Adorno's phrase "Extremes meet." It was a situation like socialists
who promise equality and fascists who promise peace meeting in dictatorship
once they have seized power. You didn't have much to do with the middle ground.
Those who were middling — the ordinary — you either looked down on or didn't
see at all. Your business was always with the extremes — you either shivered at
the peaks of pleasure or burned in the depths of pain.
At first you had loved the pain the
punching bag left in your fingers, wrists, arms, and shoulders. For someone
whose idea of sport was running and hiking, and who knew what knee and back
pain were, this had been a sudden and dramatic leap. Even when you came home
late at night without the strength to write two sentences in your journal,
passing out on the living room couch with the beers you'd drunk on an empty
stomach — you never neglected to leave yourself voice notes on your phone!
Happiness was hidden in exhaustion, apparently — because the tired person
doesn't ask themselves whether they are happy or not! The nobility of life lay
in the courage to punish oneself. Everyone could punish others, judge others.
What mattered — what would elevate a person above the average — was the
attitude one would adopt in the face of pain. A person who could not manage to
torture their own body and mind would be of not a pinhead's worth of use to
those around them, to their country, to the world. Of course, your love of
boxing did not remain at the level of punching bags. After six months of
intensive training, pushed on by the Serbian coach, you found yourself one day
in the middle of the ring. The man was of course going to goad you into
competing. He was doing it so you would come to the gym more, pay him more
money, and as you took part in matches he could pocket tens of thousands of
yuan in extra income. How did you not see through this game, ah my naive and sentimental
writer! Let alone the man making money from this bothering you — you are
Turkish; how did you believe a Serb would work for your good, how did you fall
for it, how did you get taken in? The strange thing was that in nearly two
years of matches you had managed to win almost none of them. And still you
didn't stop. Your mouth and nose got bent out of shape in those matches, a
tooth broke, an eyebrow split, your lip burst in three separate places, your
shoulders turned purple with bruising... And yet each time you left the ring
happier, more hopeful, more cheerful. Being beaten, losing yourself in the
succession of blows, sometimes holding your loosely clenched fists up to
protect your face or throwing a couple of punches into the air just to look as
though you were fighting — all of this was more than enough for you. You had
not managed to make anyone happy through writing or through loving, but you
could make hundreds of spectators and your trainer happy by taking a beating.
Your opponent was happy, those who had bet their money on your opponent were
happy, the gym owner was happy... Only the few adventurers who had placed their
money on you in hopes of a win, intoxicated by the prospect of ten-to-one odds,
were losing. And they were wretches who resembled you, and they deserved to
lose!
Did you know I came to a few of those
matches? I was the woman sitting quietly at the back, feeling every blow that
landed on your body in her own belly, chest, and temples. Each time I had left
before being able to see the end of the match. Each time making wishes that
this would be the last, making my way through the crowd, stepping on people's
feet and bumping their shoulders, apologizing, please forgive me, let this be
the last, I won't come again...
In the end, after this pointless
beating phase lasting slightly more than two years, you emerged a wiser man —
one who had come to his senses, covered the surface of his pain with hard
shells, and matured. At least you convinced yourself you had arrived at such a
state — or, as was always your way, you gave up boxing because some new divine
voice happened to cross your path and you followed it instead. You were now thirty-eight; your thoughts had been refined along with your body, and your
fundamental thoughts about life had taken their place in the ground as
unshakeable principles. You could not spend another ten years taking beatings.
Besides, the memory of Canary by now was like the image of a bird forgotten in
the middle of a city destroyed by an earthquake, its status — alive or dead —
unclear. It had become just any canary, covered in dust, having lost its
colors, singing the melodies of songs you could no longer understand when it
sang. And so, it would always remain from that point on.
