HISTORY OF BROKEN HEARTS
Chapter 1 – No map is complete.
Whenever he gets disappointed with the decisions he made –what else can disappoint a person other than his own wrong decisions?- he ends up at a bookstore where he can find old books and historical maps in dusty shelves. It is a kind of taking revenge from life, a way of negotiating with the fiascos to mitigate the damage they might cause. Another one might find his oblivion at a bar, chatting with a bar girl whose job is to make him talk and drink more by the help of her fading beauty in the dim light coming from the flash lights set behind the bar and a few salty peanuts in a small bowl. Some might look for a sexual encounter to forget the pain, with anyone, at anywhere… Or in most cases to increase the pain afterwards because all men know that although sex could be a great way of self-indulgence that can wipe out the memories for a few hours it can also be the source of the pain when failure repeats itself like a grasshopper hopping in a deep transparent bottle. Men fuck to take revenge from their lives, from their frustrations. When even the revenge fails, the pain multiplies by tens, hundreds. Some others look for sleeping pills or antidepressants or the best friends at the other end of the telephone line but for him, Mr. K, it is the moldy smell of the books which make him forget other smells coming from cheerful moments of his past; it is the filthy shelves which carry the scars of time along with the excrements of geckos and mice, layer on layer, time over time. K believes that the life in the books is as real as the life outside therefore it deserves the same amount of attention.
He always imagines this bookstore as a graveyard of the great writers. Here on his right one can find all those Russian Classics with their realist pictures of city people’s lives, “Anna Karenina” committed suicide on the railway but still alive on these shelves to be appreciated for her courage and to be killed again and again. Raskolnikov is right there, with an axe in his hand, ready to butcher the old lady just because he believed she is the source of all evils in the society. “The Kiss” left on the lonely soldier’s cheek in a dark doorway can still make the reader excited if he knows how to understand the great vacuum of loneliness, created in Chekhov’s stories. On the left there are French and English, sometimes boringly empiric, sometimes stubbornly enlightened. They know better than everyone else therefore they have right to teach. Emile is here, waiting to be discovered by the education enthusiasts of 21st century. Sartre and Camus are looking at the world with suspicious eyes as if the world outside is what they have foresighted a half century ago. Asian poets with their sweet descriptions of lotus flowers, glowing nights and misty mornings are ahead of him as if the pain does not belong to their rainlands. At the end of this corridor, there are Latin American writers; the illusionists like Borges who like to play all the possible tricks with the reader’s mind or the poets of rebellion like Neruda who can recite his poems as loud as possible even during his own funeral. They said what they wanted to say and went into a deep sleep. Mr. K walks around them, smiles at them, sometimes talks with them, listens to their complaints, shares their loneliness. Once he enters the shop, time gets frozen for him. The motorbike honks, the massage saloon advertisers, marijuana dealers are all forgotten once he is inside as if he pulls a black curtain over the reality of the life outside and opens up a new bottle of elixir to reconstruct his own utopia. A utopia or a labyrinth!
Like everyone else he looks for his labyrinth in which he will get lost for a while. A book is a labyrinth and the only way to get rid of its brain teasing, heartbreaking temptations is to leave it for another one. But today, Mr. K is here not to find another reading adventure for himself. Quite the contrary, he looks for a gift for his lost sweet heart with the hope that a last gift can ease the tension between them, if not to make her return to him. He walks around these dead men, listens to their whispers coming from centuries before and seeks a new labyrinth which will take him in its mouth, continue chewing him as if it cannot spit or swallow, and disintegrate his soul into pieces so that the connections which make his history alive will be wiped away indefinitely. Maybe he should go to Madame Bovary for a quick advice! Maybe he should find Esmeralda who loved Quasimodo despite his deformed body and ugly face!
At the end, he considers himself as a book –or is he a character in a novel written by God?- and he too needs to be read like others. His pages would be the days with ups and downs, his cover would be his appearance of an isolated man, his editor is the social bounds which make him behave this way or that way and his conscious reader would be his lover who caresses the pages, kisses his cover and challenges the editor to re-create him from the scratches of pure reality. Like every good reader, he too knows that books and labyrinths are the same and the one. And every labyrinth is a love story. There is determination in love, there is hatred and pleasure, and there is obsession and insanity… That is why the biggest and the most intricate labyrinth is the desert. The most dangerous and the scariest, the one which makes you see yourself as if you look at a plain mirror of sand dunes and whistling winds. It is scary because it has the infinite ways of salvation and each one of these are like the broken pieces of mirrors, reflects the sun and the image of earth truly, without leaving any space for doubt. Then one left in the desert is left to form his own labyrinth in which he will spend his life, feel safe and content and most probably will pull some others to share his unique experiences.
Mr. K walks through the shelves to arrive at the old photos and maps. Here is where he feels extremely melancholic with the pictures of young soldiers celebrating their homecoming, happy brides with their future babies inscribed between their eyes, cheerful high school kids who do not care their future, not even their tomorrow. Here is the place where the time is replaced by frozen moments on the photos. They tell stories and Mr. K likes to look at them to extract the stories as if squeezing a weak cow’s breast to get the milk drop by drop. Here is a father and son, standing beside the Saigon river. Father has a fishing rod in his hand, trying to teach his son how to hold the rod stiffly that it will not fall into the river when a large fish pulls it. The boy might be thinking the fish in the river bigger than him, even bigger than his father. He has to be careful not to put their lives in danger. His face has the anxiety of a learner. Father looks calm, he is almost proud of his son learning how to fish, therefore how to be patient, how to stand on his own feet, how to survive and also how to feed others. Another photo shows two young girls in their ao days, waving their hands to a soldier. They might be the wife and sister of the man, or the two sisters or two wives… He smiles with his last option and walks through the old encyclopedias and all sorts of school books –Mathematics, Science, Geography, History etc…- Mr. K never pays attention to these things at this part of the shop. He also thinks no one pays attention to these books. School kids now buy new books and read nothing more than their textbooks and a few popular magic stories. As a person who dedicated his life to educate young minds, he feels the embarrassment for his students whenever he sees them sitting idle around the corridors with their flashy mobile phones or reading Japanese mangas.
He makes a left turn and sees the old maps. Then he stops, staring at them as if he stares at a beautiful horse ready for a race. Maps attract him as nothing attracts. Sometimes he thinks himself as an intricate map, drawn by a passionate cartographer and now waiting to be discovered by another passionate map lover. Every man is a map he used to say to his ex-wife, expecting her to appreciate his words, expecting her to understand him. Every man is a map because every map is a projection of real world onto a piece of paper. The closer you get, the more difficult it becomes to understand the tiny details of earth’s surface. That is why the earliest maps are dedicated to the heavenly objects. The stars and the planets were the most distant, the least dangerous and of course the most useful to find direction and to determine time.
He likes old maps because as a teacher of humanities at a prestigious high school in the city he realized that maps tell more than what many people can learn from them at first glance. They tell the cartographer’s worldview or the dominant ideology of his time. They tell how the old process of making maps –forcing a spherical surface of an apple to a plane surface of a blank paper- was intricate and painfully time-consuming. They tell the stories about the silent conquers, cruel massacres, blood-thirsty emperors, beautiful princesses, charming princes, class struggles, bourgeasian tendencies, changing middle class habits and minds… A map says more than what is written on it. Greeks believed they were in the centre of the world and world became stranger and stranger when a traveler gets away from Greece. At the edge of the earth, there were humans behave like savages. There were all the unknown monsters and wild, uncivilized people.
“Aren’t we still the same?” Mr. K sometimes asks his students in his class. “Don’t we discriminate the people whom we do not know much about?”. Despite his students’ empty faces, he continues talking as if he found the hole to exit after a long struggle in his dark cave. “Since birth, we create maps on which we are at the center. The closest cities to the center are our family members, then friends, then work or school acquaintances, then those who support the same football team or the same pop star. Those who do not qualify in one of these circles are strangers, most of the times dangerous people from whom we should stay away. That is why in medieval maps, every blank zone in the map is filled with sea serpents, monsters, freakish exotic people, dragons etc… That which we do not know troubles us in our dreams. That is why we should know more about the world and about ourselves.” Sometimes, the students clap him for his enthusiastic speech, sometimes they cannot get into his metaphoric language so they keep silent in order to pass the storm without any damage.
Once, a girl in his class was crying incessantly because her boyfriend dumped her. He sat next to her and told her that “It is ok! Take this as a lesson instead of a blunder. It was a wrong map and we cannot make the perfect maps before we fail with the wrong ones. Columbus would have never had the courage to start his journey if he did not have the wrong map of Ptolemy which showed the distance between Europe and India much shorter due to the miscalculation of earth’s circumference. Now start drawing a new map and do not even include him in this map. To love someone means to draw that person’s map or find a right place for him in your own map. Once you have the skills of moving things around on your map to find the perfect place for your lover, you will be aware of his value and how indispensable he is for your map’s future. It is a skill that you need to develop, not the feelings” What did she think of his words at that time? Can a high school student understand that love is not a feeling which needs constant attention like the camp fire in a summer night but an ability which can evolve with the help of failures? Even if she understands this, can she implement it to her life without getting pounded by the bitter experiences of love? What about him? If the bald had the medicine, he would have used it for his own head first. Can he believe what he advised her? Can he get over the pain easily by rationalizing it with a few cliché analogies?
He stared at a few maps on the top of the basket. From the dust smeared on his fingers, he concluded that no one touched these maps for long time. There were some bad copies of French and Arabic maps at the top. When he removed a few of them he saw a copy of a Ptolemy’s world map, the one which accurately connected Africa to Asia and also made a good depiction of Indian Ocean but failed locating America and Antarctica. It was printed a few decades ago by a local print house so the colors were still vivid and the paper was not dampish. While looking at this map and trying to figure out how a man lived 2000 years ago could make such a beautiful map by only relying on the historical records, literary works and mathematical calculations, he heard the foot steps approaching him behind. This must be the owner of the shop he thought. He turns back slowly, not to make noise to awaken the sleeping books or the people in the photos. The owner of the shop, a 68 years old man with a genuine smile –K always thought that old people have the most genuine smiles because they have nothing to gain with the borrowed faces.- was holding a hardcover book in his hand. When he saw that K. is holding a map, he hesitated for a second.
-Did you know that original of that map was stolen from Spain’s national library in 2007. They found it in an art gallery in Sydney.
K. looked at old man’s cheerful face and wondered how he knows this weird information and why he feels the urgency to tell this to a customer. Instead answering the question with another question like his lazy students, he chose to answer it properly.
-No I didn’t. But funny, isn’t it? Sydney is not even shown on the map! Maybe it was the map who wanted to travel and see the lands which are not depicted on. A kind of executing the last wishes of Ptolemy!
-Ha ha! You might be right! It is stolen by a Uruguayan researcher and then traveled to Buones Aires, New York and London. Two of three are not on the map. Then it ended up in Sydney.
- So, you see! Map wanted to complete itself. What is the point of waiting all day in a library and showing its face to the ignorant young crowds? Only mapmakers and historians can appreciate its beauty. Now it knows the new continent and Australia as well. I believe it will be stolen again and somehow will travel to Antarctica to complete the continents.
- You are a funny man! You can be a good writer, do you know that? Why don’t you write the story of a map which travels around the world just to see what is missing on it and complete itself after discovering new lands? Like, Escher’s two hands drawing each other! Anyway, I came to show you this book.
K. wanted to say a lot at that moment. He wanted to erupt like a volcano and rain on old man’s head like dark ashes. He wanted to scream like a little child who lost his favorite toy. He wanted to say that “I am a map and I complete myself with every new experience, I re-draw myself with new loves and new frustrations. I am an incomplete map who knows that no map is complete. Let someone else write the story! I am not patient enough to be a writer. But I am smart enough to find original ideas for new stories.” But he didn’t. He did not want to make things more complicated with this sweet old man who only wants his customers smile and gets the best he can offer. K opened his eyes widely and looked at the book.
“What is that?” K. asks with a low voice, pretending not knowing what it might be. The old man, his sparkling eyes can be seen even when the large square-shaped glasses cover almost one quarter of his face, shows the book to K and keeps talking about it. “It is 1902, Maxim Gorky, from London.” K. stares at the dirty cover with a little bit disgust, thinking on what might cause the stains on it. But the name Gorky excites him. He imagines his wife reading this book and thanking him. He imagines his wife taking the book to one of the youth meetings and reading to them loudly. He imagines her hugging him after receiving the book and putting a soft kiss on his cheek. He imagines they read passages from it together until their eyes get tired. He imagines they make love right after closing the book while the smell of a-century-old odors fills the room. He imagines all and wakes up with old man’s voice. “There is no single name written on it. Just a stamp from a bookshop called Spids in Paris.” K notices the interesting geometric figure at the middle of the cover. The same figure is also inscribed at the spine of the book. “Look, there is a small signature here but I think it is written by the bookshop owner in May 1958.” The book seemed old, even older than those from Victorian period. “It says V. H., like Victor Hugo, ha ha! You know Victor Hugo, right? Les Miserables is written for the people like you.” The cover has some white stains and a few small patches at the corners. The entire picture of the cover was like this:
(There is the picture of the book's cover here but I don't know how I could post it to the blog) - This book came a few days ago. I kept it behind my desk because I knew you will be coming this weekend.
- Thanks for that. It looks pretty good. I hope you won’t ask a fortune for this.
- No, no! Let this be my treat… It is only $100.
- What? You are kidding, right? I can buy more than ten books with that money.
- Yes, but you cannot buy a 1902, Maxim Gorky with nothing written in it. This book challenged time, denied the men’s carelessness and arrived at my bookstore as one piece. You have to adore it, instead of complaining.
- I am not complaining about the book. It is just too much. Make it $50! I will buy it.
- No, no! You can negotiate for the other books, the used ones. For this, I cannot go down. It is already cheap.
- Come on old man! Do I look like a rich book dealer? I am a history teacher! I will buy it as a gift for my ex-wife. I think this book will make her happy.
- For your ex-wife? You are really insane! If you give it to her, you accept that you will not see the book again. Buy something else for her, flowers or pillow case… Women appreciate those things more.
- Look, I know my wife. I mean my ex-wife. She loves books and flowers will make her think I am trying to reconsolidate with her. I am actually not sure what I will expect her to do after I give her the book. The book itself is not important to me. I read almost all stories of Gorky. I just like its dirty cover and moldy smell. As you said it seems like it denied the existence of time. Like eternal loves! Sell it to me! $70. I cannot give more than that.
- $80 is the lowest I can make. Please do not ask! Buy it or leave it. I have some other customers coming this evening to look for old books. I can sell them even for more than $100. I make it cheap for you because I know you.
- Ok, ok! Just wait then! I will go to an ATM and come back quickly. I have a flight to Hanoi tonight. I don’t have much time.
- Alright young man! Hurry up! What time is your flight?
K did not hear old man’s question because when he looked at his watch while telling him about his flight, he realized that absence of time in a bookstore can be deadly for a man who has a scheduled flight a few hours later. He ran to the nearest ATM but all he found was the message on the screen saying it is out of order. He cursed to his bad luck. Whenever he needed money so urgently all he found was broken ATMs. He asked one of the xe om drivers in front of a shopping center. The driver accepted to take him to another ATM. When he arrived, he saw that the machine is working. Or maybe he only saw that the lady before him got her money and left. Or he just saw a lady leaving the machine with her hand in her purse. Or most probably he only saw a lady just passed in front of the ATM without even noticing its existence. He inserted his card, entered his password and wrote the amount a bit more than he needs for the book. Then the machine started to grumble, then mutter and at the end a long beep came which sounded like a car on reverse gear. Although he heard that the banknotes were counted in the machine and he got his card back, nothing came out from the slot. He waited for a while but still nothing. The screen was saying “Please take your money” but there was no money. He thought it was a joke! He looked for another slot but there was none. If the machine claims that it gave the money out how could he possible deny it? Or maybe he took the money but forgot it after a few seconds…What about the lady before him? Who was she? Did she really get …? He got disappointed but tried to control himself without knowing what to do next. There were people around and there was nothing he can do. Being lonely and helpless in crowds, he thought his ex-wife, her white cheek leaning on a window when she watches the rain, her lively lips which resembled the coolness of a beach where dryness and wetness are at the edge of amalgamation.
He turned his back to the ATM and looked at the people around. Everyone was busy with something to do; everyone was having a healthy mental life… No one seems broken hearted or suffering from extreme guilt of being apart from their lovers. No one except for him is in excruciating pain of having done something very wrong which caused an ultimate separation… Or is this just a cruel method he applies to himself to increase the intensity of his pain? Everybody is happy but I am … Everybody loves someone but I am … Everybody is satisfied with their lives but I am … Don’t they have any troubles in their lives? He was sure that he could be easily happier than that old beggar on the pavement. However, even that old lady seemed happy, or at least content with what she had. She was smiling to the people –to warm their hearts, perhaps!- and somehow making a few thousands dong a day to make her life endurable. He felt like an undiscovered island at the middle of the Indian Ocean. An island with no name, no coordinates, no geography, no climate… No human has ever set foot on it, only the birds that lost their flock or a small fish that was chased by the big ones and somehow arrived at the shores of this unknown island. A lonely island waiting to be discovered, waiting to have a name, waiting to be recognized as an island! A little boy –or a little fish- crashed him while he was escaping from his mother, he woke up from his daydreaming.
He looked at his watch again. “Take me back to the … road” he shouted angrily to the same guy who brought him. The xe om driver smiled without knowing what made his passenger so upset. The driver drove the bike against the traffic in busy streets, crossed a junction like a running chicken and whenever the red light stopped him, he jumped over the pavement to pretend as pedestrian. In less than 5 minutes, he was again at the bookstore. He told the old man that he could not get the cash now but when he returns from Hanoi, he will come to his shop directly from the airport and buy the book. He asked the old man to keep the book for him. Then he paid him $10 as deposit so that the hope just emerged in his heart will not slip like a cube of ice melts and drips through fingers. He ran out the bookstore and picked another xe om to go home to get his bag. Two hours later, he was at the airport as the last passenger boarding to the airplane. He sat on his seat and gave a big breath out. He tried to read during the flight but somehow his eyes were forcing him down. The music in his ears slowed his heart beat; the soft turbulences of the airplane made him feel he is not on this earth any more. Then without giving notice to anyone, he took his second flight towards his dreamland where the poisonous scorpions crawled in his head.
He flied in a wide-open book, like he was one of the characters from One Thousand One Nights Tales, sitting on a flying carpet and discovering new kingdoms which are known to many with their rich cultures and prosperous merchants. He looked down from the book’s edge and saw the rivers, lakes, mountains and even the villages. The book was Gorky’s Tales –he knew that intuitively- but he could not read the letters in the pages. It was Russian perhaps or another language that he has never studied before. While he was enjoying the scene, suddenly he saw a dirty hand pulling the pages under his body one by one, ripping them off, and causing the flight having disturbing turbulences. He realized that with the missing pages he is losing the altitude very quickly. Then the announcement came from the inner pages of the book that they have to make an emergency landing to somewhere in the ocean. He was scared as he does not even know how to swim. Water made him panic and idea of being in water without any earth to step on was quite difficult to adapt. He tried to keep the ripped pages on the book, using his both hands to hold them, to keep the book as intact as possible. But as it was impossible to hold the gears of time, the pages were flying away and disappearing in the twilight of the sky so quickly. Landing was unavoidable. “Those falling from the sky are the ones which have wings.” he thought and chuckled as if someone reminded him this stupid fact in the worst time ever. The wings were getting weaker and weaker so he prepared himself for the crash, closed his eyes, held his breath and thought about good things happened in his life, all the half loves he lived so far or all the flowers he has given to the girls in the name of love, all the beers he drank with his good friends… He was ready now, ready to die happily, ready to end at the bottom of the sea and being forgotten as if he has never lived. But the book crashed to a piece of land, not to the water. It was a small island, one that is unknown to anyone, one which is not shown on maps. That is all I needed he thought and smiled by himself! He was safe, uninjured. He exhaled after the landing as if he deserved it now, opened his eyes and looked around more carefully. He heard the voice coming from above his head that the temperature in Hanoi was 29 centigrade degrees and time was … He saw people walking beside him towards the exit door. The mp3 player was singing a song with a very melancholic voice… Love is an exile to us. The vaporized water was being pumped inside the airplane as if the whole plane was burning and the fire extinguishing system was on alert. He changed his position on his seat, tried to figure out where he is and how he came there. Once he understood that he is no more wanted in the book –or at least in this chapter-, he grabbed his bag and walked out…
Chapter 2 – Mappaemundi is a map for sinners, not for navigators.
