This is a history of forgetting, of my father’s unravelling mind, the memories blanketed by a fog of emptiness, but also of the willed forgetting that each generation of Turkish Cypriots have enacted, erasing and retelling the path as they attempt to forge a new identity that will enable them to survive as a community.
Alev Adil
For over a year I took photographs of all the empty beds I slept in, alone.
Here, at the End of the World, the end of her world, a woman disappeared. She hid in her library, then she slipped through the pages of a book and then she wasn’t there at all.
Before breakfast, I walked back to last night’s perfumed bush. It wasn’t fragrant now: I must have smelt a night flower.
‘You’ve been highly recommended’, the caller said before going on to identify herself as the personal assistant of a certain Professor Y, who pending the results of the investigation, preferred to remain anonymous.
A vision of a city that was the place I was born in, and sometimes the fugitive corners of all the other streets I’d ever wandered down, called to me insistently night after night. I walk the deserted routes of my childhood at dawn towards something unnamed. Then there is darkness and a full moon, a bright neon moon.
It was my last night in that city. I’d been looking for her all day, dodging the traffic, the beggars, the rumours of war. Life is beautiful but cheap there. Even the poor buy flowers, they are a necessity.