Consisting of narratives penned between 1994 and 2004, and achieving the second position in the 2010 Orhan Kemal Short Story Contest, “YAZI” ultimately saw its publication as a book in September 2014.
The journey’s conclusive stride emerges right where everything commenced. Although the crux arguably resides more within the expedition than its culmination, human inquisitiveness inevitably hungers for the result… Conversely, it holds true that the Odyssey and its conclusion can metamorphose the voyager… Thus, have you ever contemplated the extent to which “absence” can confer “gravity”? Or how the omission of a central link within a chain can amplify its weight rather than diminish it?
Allow “YAZI” itself to unravel the remainder:
I think it was at that moment that I truly felt the weight settling on my shoulders… It was not my bag, which I had stuffed with my stories, seashells, memories, swiftly sailing dream ships, bronze statues, cartoon heroes, trains, crystal islands, the past and the future, the night, the day, the dawn’s twilight, and the scarlet evenings; not even with love, hate, affection, passion, or life and death all crammed into it like Pandora’s Box, that caused this weight. On the contrary, it was “absence”…
Yes, it was the absence of something that should have been, that needed to be experienced, that weighed on me. I had never thought that the missing link in the chain could make it heavier instead of lighter… As fate would have it, our eyes met as the young man bent down and dropped all his loose change into the violin case in front of the old man. And lo and behold, the old man’s face was the same as mine. May God bless the end, but I confess, I was frightened when I saw myself like that at an overpass, holding a violin. As for the man, when our eyes met, he pointed at the money that was falling into the violin case at that moment with his eyes, and spoke:
love is like tossing a coin,
you get the heads, you go ahead,
you get the tails, you pen your tale ….’.
Then he looked at the coin that had fallen into the violin case and said, ‘Tails.’ Upon this, our guy opened his bag, took out a book, and handed it to the old man. As he took the book, it was as if I was looking at the violinist’s shoulder from above. There was an image of a mermaid on the cover. I tried to read the title of the book but in vain… The man opened the last page of the book and read the final sentence with a smile. While the man marched through the overpass, a melancholic violin sound followed him, and me too…
You can find “YAZI” at Dost, Arkadaş, and D&R bookstores. If you don’t see the book on the shelf, they will bring it upon your request. Additionally, you can obtain “YAZI” from various online retailers, including:
Furthermore, you can access “YAZI” as an e-book in different formats from the following websites, where you can also read some sections for free:
Wishing you enjoyable reading…
