IN GARAMDAL, I lived in an apartment on a quiet, under-trafficked street, tucked away in an interstitial part of the city near the university, and my room had a balcony with an iron railing that faced the sun in the mornings. It was four floors up, and from the height of my balcony I could see the pink domes of the temples. When it rained, I used to leave the door of my balcony open, and listen to sound of the falling raindrops, watch as the water pooled in the clay tiles of the balcony, bubbles floating on the surface, as the clouds shrouded the city’s hills.
As the seasons changed, a torrential rain announced the end of the summer. In the autumn, the rains were torrential, but this was the period that was most memorable to me, and when I think back to that time, I think of drenched streets, gushing rain gutters, of fountains overflowing with rainwater. Each day seemed to be organized around the anticipation of the rain, which when it fell, would last a short time, an hour, two, but which would transform the city. The rain, when it fell, was eschatological: torrents of water that would make the streets into sloshing, turbid rivers, and I would watch fascinated as rills and streams guttered into the sewer openings that opened off the stone streets. I was pleased to discover that having travelled across space, I could achieve an effect akin to that of travelling across time. Hadn’t I come to the east, precisely for this effect?, which was to seek out the past?
In my apartment, I used to pass the time reading novels. Amarguese novels, Varrenian novels, Garamdi novels, anything that I could get my hands on. The rain outside lent a symphonic aural texture to my otherwise quiet readings. The apartment had come completely furnished and the landlord had installed rose-colored curtains across the doorway of the balcony, so that on sunny days, or when the sun was out, the light would filter through and give the entire room a rosy hue, as if I were in the chambers of a seraglio. Once Iriánè had opened the wooden door to the balcony to watch the rain fall outside. “What miserable weather,” I’d said apologetically.
“No, I love it this way.”
“But come back inside, you’ll catch a cold.”
She’d turned to me, smiling. “And will you warm me up?”
I carried this memory of her for a very long time after, and returned to it for the warmth that it brought to me. I learned from Yeylan who was still speaking with her that she and her professor were living together. She was too embarrassed, Yeylan told me, intending to <let me down gently>, to speak to me, but she wanted me to know that she was sorry if she had hurt my feelings. The endless apology that characterized her communications with me made speaking with her seem impossible.
*
In the evenings, I wandered the city. When I first came to the city, I’d walked around with my mouth agape. I saw the rounded, spired, cardioid domes of the old imperial palace, and these were painted a blue that often shone finer than the blue of the sky above it. The ancient black-wooden mansions — the summer houses of the old Garamdi nobility — that rimmed the upper parts of the bay. The long stone stretch of the city walls, which had never succumbed. One evening, I’d walked down from the University Hill and the city was laid out before me, the haze from the sea, the glow of street lights lighting up, of the dim lights of the empty offices of the skyscrapers in the city’s business district, of the headlights and brake lights that snaked down the city’s boulevards, and I realized that I was living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
I still dreamed of being a writer, would sail through the city streets, light with dreams, with poems, with words that I was composing in my mind. I had the idea that I would write down my experiences as disconnected scenes: moments that I had passed with Nesla, and Iriane, and with Yeylan and Mahmiin, and even of my time in Varrenia. But how to explain the project to the people I met? Could a novel be collected from this assortment of experiences? Could a life?
In no period of my life was I filled with more creative feeling than during this time, my final year in Garamdal. Having lived abroad for years now, I was overcome by reminiscence. Words, phrases, sentences burned in my mind like incandescent filaments. And these remained long enough for me to scribble them down when I returned to my flat in the evenings.
I understood that in my writing, I was undertaking an apprenticeship in a profession that I would never practice, and that my love of novels would never become the capacity to create them. The realization was dispiriting, but not so much to arrest the practice. I had molded myself too much into the habit of spending my mornings, my evenings writing. It was as though I was marching into a desert, and even as I understood that I would never progress through it, that the desert was infinitely expansive, I could not stop the march, could not halt — or reverse — the caravan.
It was Mahmiin who leafing through some of the pages that I had written, expressed encouragement to me that I should continue writing. “They are good. You must continue to write them,” he told me.
“But it’s not a novel.”
“Then let them be what they are, sketches, fragments, as you call them. Let them be a genre unto themselves. It’s for others to accept and assess your work, not for you to contort your writing for their tastes and expectations.”
*
What accounted for this softening of Mahmiin’s temperament? By then, he had gotten a job with a candidate for a deputy representative post. The candidate was a middle-aged political operative, a striver, and had a genuine charisma about him. The post that the candidate sought was a more consequential position than the name would seem to imply in the byzantine system of Garamdi republican government. The newspaper editorials that Mahmiiin had written during the military operation in the east had drawn some favorable attention, and now Mahmiin was assisting with the communications wing of the campaign and also writing speeches for the candidate. The work suited him, and he stayed up late into the night writing florid speeches that gave the candidate a fair amount of attention.
“Of course, he will be running unopposed, but it’s necessary to put in the appearance that one is making an effort.” He rapped the table as he said this to Yeylan and me one evening at the Duneyahsi, a tic that expressed both pride and his ineffectual attempt to hide it.
I couldn’t understand whether the change that had overcome Mahmiin was the revealing of his true self, free of the burdens of the stresses that had been placed on him, that he had placed on himself, but his new kindness was a welcome change. And for the time being at least, he seemed less tense, less intense, freer, and freer, to speak the things that mattered to him. And all of this said, there was something, in his words of encouragement, spoken in the same authoritative tone of the old Mahmiin whom I had always known, allowed me to continue writing.
I understood that I had taken the wrong approach to my travels, or that my motivation in my travels had been the wrong one. I had thought that I could escape myself, and find in the east something new and better for myself to be. As though I could accumulate the particles of the essence of the world about me. That I could escape my problems. But I understood that travelling could have nothing for me. The problem was this: that one carries oneself with one always.
And I could have seen this, because the writing that I had done was a record of repetition. I saw myself in these notes, and the mistakes that I had made in my life — so many! Or maybe there had been a mistake in how I had approached my travels. The mistake was one that I had made purposefully, and could not seem to unmake, to have pulled myself away from society. In stalking the outskirts of society, I was merely doubling, redoubling my loneliness, a loneliness that I felt even when I was with Yeylan and Mahmiin.
I had spent years searching for love, hoping to find in it a cure for loneliness, an exquisite search, inexhaustible, for an end to that feeling. The anguish I felt at being alive in the world was an anguish whose relief I found only in a woman’s body body. Yes, this was the discovery, that the relief for the ailments of the soul were to be found in the physical world. It all depended on what level of reality you choose to live at. Why not one in which the physical prevailed? It was bodies that were the blessed matter. Nesla was indistinguishable from her body — touching it was to touch her soul. Watching her eyes reduce to exquisitely pained slits in the midst of our lovemaking was to be relieved of all of my troubles. This was, finally, the only consolation that I could find these days.
I found that I understood the world at night. In the midst of my wanderings in the city, when the streets had emptied and warm lights of a taverna were the only source of illumination, I felt that in the inverse world of late evening, that the world began to make more sense. Or else, the in bed. It was just as I was dashing off to my dreams that I had the revelations that I have written here. The world, which was chaotic, disorderly, a succession of impressions without a thread to connect them, crystallized momentarily, and I had the sense of revelations, of understandings that could . It was through a novel that the world could be understood. Something linear: an argument made word by word. An imposition of order onto things.
And when I awoke in the morning, I would lose the thread of things. Whatever revelation I had gained the night before had evaporated in the night. I was like the myth of the man who dreams the world anew every day. Forgetting the old world of the day before, and by doing so, obliterating it.
The consolation was that sometimes Iriane was there with me on those fresh mornings. And her warm body was curled up next to mine, and I would drape my arms around her and feel a kind of peace. What I could not admit at such moments was that I felt that there was an unplaceable wrongness to our relationship, a flaw in the design like the fatal miscalculation in the engineering of a spaceship or a skyscraper that would cause the , but the solution to the anxiety that I felt was to curl up with her further. I knew that our love was not the love that I desired, and yet the only way to console myself of this miserable fact was to nestle myself more deeply inside of her.
*
In the mornings, I used to walk Iriánè to the metro. Our hands were entangled in each other, and we moved wordlessly until I sent her off above the steps that led down to the station. And we would kiss, a kiss which at the moment it was made seemed to ensure that.
From the metro station each morning I would watch the city guised in blue smog, that alongside the, remembering the first time I had seen the city like this, how lovely, it had seemed, and how large the world was then. The world had seemed so alien when I was young. It was a world composed of images and their essences, it was a faerie world. That other place. A shot of rain-soaked pines, <swaying>, a painting of a riparian meadow, a photograph of a girl holding a baby lamb. The dreamlike quality of the world had given it meaning. The world was more solid now, more sensible, in a way, no longer as mysterious, no longer as veiled, but the sense of meaning that hung behind that veil was no longer there, either.
Imagine four miles of immense, triple battlements, covered with ivy, surmounted with hundreds of towers, and on either side of the road, Garamdi burying-grounds — the loveliest spots on earth — full of enormous cypresses. I have seen the ruins of the great cities of the east, up and down this continent, but I never beheld a work of nature or art which yielded an impression like the prospect on each side from the Seven Towers of the Garamdi capital.
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages in Garamdal
Letters from Madelyna
I still received letters from Madelyna, and I was still always too late in responding to them. She asked me to describe the sights and sounds of Garamdal, so that she could recreate it, for herself. Was it really the way that it looked in movies and television dramas? Oh and, by the way, she also wanted to know what were the people like who I knew there — was I making friends? I didn’t tell her about my love life, and she was able to deduce from the lacunae in my responses to her, the existence of a girl. I had told her about Iriánè, of course, but that was a year ago, and I had never informed her that we were together again. There was a lacuna in our correspondance in the shape of a woman, and this was something that Madelyna could detect, so that I knew that she was aware that I was with someone. And I knew that she would attempt to draw it out of me.
I think of one of the final conversations that we had together, when I was living in Varrenia. About love, of course, which was the great subject that we discussed.
“And what have they taught you, these women of yours?”
“The same thing that all love teaches us: that we are capable of being loved.”
And I understood that the conversations that I had had with Madelyna recur in all places, in all ages — Madelyna and I being, like all human beings, merely temporary vessels for the fanciful musings, the fleeting whimsies of a universe that is continually forgetting that it has already had every thought, contemplated every idea, felt every emotion, experienced every circumstance. All people are the same self reincarnated in various guises, the explorations made by any of us a mere retread of visitations made eons ago. Also, the space of conversation is not infinite, but bounded and finite as the surface of a spherical planet. And just as certain geographical territories have been trampled ceaselessly by the passage of ancient armies, our conversation, this conversation between a man and a woman — about love, in which we had to make ourselves heard, understood, sympathized with… — has recurred in an infinity of occasions.
The chronicles of the Garamdi Empire, which span millennia are divided not <as one would expect> by the reign of kings and emperors, but by a recondite system that matched the state of the empire with <the calendar year>. The court astrologers and archivists in the reign of Emperor Aminin divided the history of Garamdal into a series of ages, marvelously . And these ages ran pastward and so deeply that the earliest ages … when the world was still cooling beneath the mists of creation.
The Sixth Age of Beauty, when Aramayo Irimia sculpted the statues of the gods, and the imperial architects … laid out the grid for the tombs at Varenys. Or the Tenth Age of Splendor, marked when Maroosh Ikafia’s men lowered their bows and sheathed their swords at the gates of Ijif. Dozens, hundreds of such ages are marked in the annals of the empire. And these ages were reckoned not only in retrospect but also prospectively. A victory in battle would, a period of prosperity would herald a new golden age, the decadence of which might lead to the proliferation of art and scientific and technological advancement. But towards the end of the empire, these were extended such that unpredictable events would always immediately succeed the announcement of an age. Thus, an Age of Beauty would be marked by decadence and an Age of Peace was inevitably the prelude to war.
– Alastair Pennignten, Voyages in Garamdal
Yeylan is engaged to a cousin
On the evening after Mahmiin’s candidate won the election, he and Yeylan and I went to celebrate his achievement. We drank at one of the otudoor pubs alongside the main street, and Mahmiin had spoken with his characteristic self-assuredness. “And now they would like for us to develop a strategy for the presidency. A five-year plan. Of course, he’s not one I’ll want to hitch my wagon to forever, but if we can carry him far, ” He’d foresworn women for the time being, it seemed. He no longer brought girls around. Or else he had finally realized that the pretense of introducing us to the women in his life was an unnecessary aspect of our friendship.
Afterwards, Mahimiin had to beg off to celebrate with the rest of the campaign’s team, Yeylan and I walked along the quay again as we had several months previously, when he’d discussed the war with me. Yeylan told me that dolphins had once swum in the bay. “What happened?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. The old story. Pollution. Too many ships passing through.” His great-grandfather had been a ferryman, back when the bay was one of the.
When we reached the metro stop, we gazed out together at the lights from the city. The apartments and skyscrapers across the bay shone bright. In the twilight these were a deep blueish slate.
“I am engaged to be married,” Yeylan announced to me, suddenly. It was just like him, to share an important piece of information at the last possible moment. He pulled out a photo from his wallet. She was pretty, and scandalously young. That I questioned whether it was real. “I didn’t want Mahmiin to know. It’s why I tell you now and not earlier.”
“Why not?”
“Perhaps I did not want to steal his thunder. Let him have his moment in the spotlight with his victory. You know he values moments like this. Also, he would have asked too many questions.”
In the space of my silence, Yeylan continued: “She is a cousin of mine.” I lifted my eyebrows. “But it is a distant cousin! Part of the reason I did not say anything is that Mahmiin would think that I was being very backward if I said that I was marrying a family member.”
I asked her how he’d met her.
“We have been writing each other.”
“Do you love her?”
“Oh, it’s the right question to ask, but I don’t know how to answer it. I feel that I’m getting the age when one must be married, and these questions mean something else at this age.”
“Does she love you?”
“I hope so.” He smiled. “Maybe we can learn to love each other.”
He asked me if I had seen Nesla. I told her that I had, and described the visit that I had made to her house. “I’ll tell her that you asked about her. Maybe she would like to see you too.”
Yeylan: “You know, I was jealous of the two of you, you and Mahmiin, because you had the courage to talk to her. Both of you did. I should have been more daring in my life. I was always too much of a coward. But you showed me a way. You travelled.”
“I wasn’t so brave. I wasn’t brave enough to do the things that I should have done.”
I asked him about his university work. His philosophical idea was being fleshed into a dissertation. It was wrong of me to have been skeptical of him. Although I had not been enthusiastic, his advising professor seemed to have been taken by the work, and had greeted it with enthusiasm.
I abandon my dreams of being a novelist
<There is the Garamdi writer, a capitaline, who called his city a “melancholy city,” and who makes the distinction between old cities and young ones. The capital was a very old one, founded in ancient times, it was said, even before the arrival of the Garamdi, and had lived through the various Golden Ages of the old Garamdi empire. The remains of these ages were scattered about the city. All about it were the signs of past glory, of a vigorous youth and middle-age, and now there was only this: the romantic decadence that made it so lovely to wander.>
Perhaps this was what I was attempting to capture.
Of course I did not listen to Mahmiin’s advice. The writing that I had done — about Varrenia, about Garamdal — seemed. I abandoned it, simply, just as years previously, I had abandoned my translation of Kundra. These pages, though I never published them, still offer me a great sense of, and I read them with an excitement, tenderness, and a sense of … towards my younger self. Perhaps I could have written the novel that I’d dreamed of writing when I was young, perhaps I could do so now… but then I think that I am far away from that time, and the freshness of those feelings has gone, and with them the sense of meaning behind them.
I realized later that I had been composing, in my descriptions of my love affairs with women, a kind of essay about love. And this essay had no thesis, or at least none that could be expressed in words, was an essay above words. It was a collection of feelings. I have this carried this essay with me. It has ceased, some time ago, to need words. The complexion of my feelings towards women has , and I understand how important it is to have feelings towards women that are beyond love.
Love was no longer the grand chimerical thing, composed of my longing and desire. I didn’t know whether love was greater parts attraction, or the fear of being alone. It seemed unnecessary to understand and analyze love. Truer to live within its embrace.
Nothing is the way that it is. I remember Biridana’s statement. She was right: nothing is the way that it is.
Just as the love that I had sought when I lived in Varrenia was different from the love that I had sought as a younger man, the love that I seek today is further still different from the love that I had desired when I lived in Garamdal. Waking in the mornings with Iriánè or Nesla, with the presentiment that the whole thing was a doomed, a presentiment that I attempted to ignore.
Thoughts on Iriane
There was a time when I was living by myself again. After Iriane’s message to me that day, I had slept alone for the first time in a long time. In the early mornings, when it was still dark outside, and the sounds of the city had finally quieted, I would find myself roused from sleep and unable to return. I awoke with a misery that could hardly be understood as mere heartache, a sense of the hardness and impossibility of life. I didn’t know how I could go on living without Iriane.
I was in love with her. It was as simple as that. And the understanding of this was less realization than my comfort in admitting the fact to myself. If I found in Nesla comfort, then in Iriane, I felt true desire. And perhaps this was only because she was the one who was absent.
Later, I weighed the merits of different women, women of different nations, different provinces, different cities — all so very different from each other. Nesla was different in this way… Iriane in that way… and what was appealing was their difference.
A universe forgetting that it has had every thought, felt every emotion, experienced every [experience].
There was the woman you were in love with, and there was the woman you were with. And the gap between the two.
I wished to be rid of this country, rid of my failings. Indeed, I wished to be rid of everything that
“I would hate that,” she said to me.
The city was beautiful in the mornings. I rose and walked, and I understood that these would be my final days here. That the work that I would engage in would not be here. I walked past the gates where Mufendis had given his speech proclaiming the republic. I would find a reason to live, I decided, other than love. “And what have you learned,” Madelyna had asked me once, “from all these women of yours?” What had I learned? What was there, ever, to learn? A moment happened and it was already locked in the past. You were in love with someone and then you were no longer in love. I have forgotten the details of all of my relationships. When I think of Nesla’s tears I could not remember them as a single episode, but in an eternal imperfect tense. My feeling a yearning that could never be satisfied because it was a yearning for the past. My wish that they would remember me, if not fondly then at least with some feeling. A wish that I could make to no one, that I could record in my notebook, filled uselessly with words. <The only inheritance I had from the past, and an imperfect one at that>. I was inspired finally. The words I wrote at this time, I have still. They are fragmentary, and I understood that I would impose meaning on them later, that it would be the same meaning that they had had for me when I had written then. I will try to excavate it for meaning. There was a part of myself that was still there: sitting at my writing desk, looking out the window over the city of temples, the haze of the city’s smog that shrouded the skyscrapers in the distance, the world endlessly vast beyond.
I run into Nesla again
In bed, Nesla would tell me about her childhood: “In the village,” she began. “In the village, people would stare at you for wearing trousers.”
“Of course I rebelled against it. Anyone would have. Anyone with sense, who wasn’t afraid. I thought that, because I was rebelling, that I must be different, special. It sounds… conceited, perhaps. Like I must think that I am superior to other people, because I set myself apart from them, but, in all honesty, it didn’t even occur to me to see it that way. I felt different in a way that a foreigner feels different, I experienced something like culture shock towards my own culture. I was always shocked that people could so easily conform to the restrictions imposed on them by society. Now, I have met many other people who have rebelled against that kind of life. And I understand that the people who do not rebel have their own reasons not to.”
She looked at me glumly. “I regret the part of myself that was rebellious.”
“When I was sixteen, I shaved my head. I hated to look like a woman. I don’t mean that I wanted to look like a man — I don’t know what I wanted to look like, but it wasn’t about my looks. What I wanted to do was to cut away those parts of myself that could be controlled by others, that belonged to others. Leave as little of myself as I could that was a public entity. I hate to look at photographs of myself from that time. I thought that I could change things. Instead, I ended up looking like a fat boy.”
She spoke about her time living with her bohemian friends: “I felt that I should be a special person. I was always seeking out bohemianism, because it was the kind of thing that I’d read about in books. I found that I could be around people who were special, who were different from what is normal.
“It was fun. We drank a lot. And talked a lot. I think this is how young people should live, really. But it was done too much. We drank to excess. We talked to excess. And we talked about things that were not truly interesting to me. I had to change myself, and my opinions to become a part of that group.”
Of her boyfriend, she spoke only obliquely. “I can’t be with a man if I have the sense that that he will take me away from myself. And it doesn’t have to be someone that he did. It would only have to be the way that I felt when I was with him.”
“Perhaps that’s cruel,” she admitted, “to punish someone for something that isn’t his fault.”
“I would hate it,” she said, “to live in another person’s conception of love.”
“You never write,” she remarked, “about the women whose hearts you have broken.”
Never mind, I decided. I would find a reason to live other than love. Would undertake a career other than that of a writer, would do something besides fiddling with novel that I would never finish. The travels that I’d dreamed of making, I would now abandon. Would return home, would settle down. Would live, rather than gloriously, seriously.
And Nesla… prone to bouts of melancholy, who I caught staring out at the rain. I asked myself if Nesla would be a part of the decision I had made to right my life. I suppose that I had decided already that she wouldn’t be. And I was merely biding my time to tell her this. To make any sort of decision. In my mind, I was already mentally preparing the arguments that she would use against me, was trying to absolve myself of any blame in putting an end to our relationship. It was a dispiriting exercise.
I asked her if she still wished to leave the country.
“I like my life the way that it is now. It is a quiet life. Oh, I would, if the opportunity presented itself to me, I suppose, but I have learned to be content with what I have.”
She looked at my wryly. “You think: Oh, women have abandoned you. That you have been left forlorn, heartbroken. The hearts that you yourself have broken. I cannot say that it is the wrong look for you. There is something attractive in it.”
Madelyna’s letters to me in the present day
The letters that Madelyna sent me from Varrenia when I was living in Garamdal became the first letters of our now decade-long correspondence. Madelyna still writes me, and I still respond to her letters too late. Our friendship a responsibility that I have failed to live up to, and which causes me as much pain as the relief from it. The irony is that the relationship that should have offered me relief has only given me cause for grief, of self-recrimination at my own laziness in the maintenance of our relationship.
In a recent letter, she enclosed a photograph of a four-year-old girl in a hooded cape, seated in a white tent in woods that exist only in a faraway part of the world, smiling like a cherub. Love is not what I thought it was when I was young, Madelyna wrote. Do you remember the talks that we have had about love? I have realized that the arguments that we have had about love were the arguments that only the young people are capable of having.
Even then I knew that love was not what it was said to be, but I think now that it is something different from even the different thing that I thought it would be. I do not know if I am explaining clearly my thinking, but I think that it is like this: Love is a series of illusions, and when you think that you have seen the thing clearly, you find that it is only the latest illusion.
The illusion when I was young was that love was like a novel, and that there is an end to it. I did not think that marriage could be the end of love, but I did think that such an end existed. I no longer feel this way, that there is an end to love. There are so many surprises along the way.
[…]
I have seen the marriages of my friends. I have listened to my friends speak about their husbands. I understand how lucky my own situation is now, our situation [between herself and her husband]. I understand how rare is a happy marriage. Understand me, I do not think that that marriage is the height of love, even a happy one, and I do not think that marriage is about love. I see how many are the compromises I have made, and that we have made. Still, I think that a happy marriage can be very rich. Perhaps a life of love is very rich as well, but I do not see its appeal any longer. I see that both are illusions. The so-called ‘happy marriage,’ the so-called ‘true love.’ Life is only the illusions you choose to believe in at any moment, which mirages that you choose to follow. I have gone into the desert with the man who is my soulmate. Maybe it is an illusion that we are chasing after, but I hope that we can make it real.
The conversations about love that I had with Madelyna years ago when I was in Varrenia were the conversations of young people. We were trying to define what the thing was. Perhaps that conversation never resolved, but they were predicated on other things. What we lacked was an understanding of time. Being older, and, at least nominally, more experienced, I believed that I understood the component of time. But I didn’t. I understand that component a little better now.
When I visited her in Varrennia some time ago, I remarked that it seemed that neither of us had changed much.
And Madelyna had said to me: “You haven’t changed at all.”
“Haven’t I?” I asked, smiling embarrassedly.
“Ah, but don’t you know?,” Madelyna said to me. “People do not really change. And so why should you be any different?” She was right. I didn’t change. I began my life as a fantomok, and now live as a fantōsō, which is a dreamer, and also a ghost, and also a fugitive. But it’s not true that people do not ever change. On that same visit, I went to the last free-standing house on B___nyv street, and knocked on the door. A young woman had answered, her pales eyes beaming up at me brightly as she smiled.
“I used to live here, many years ago,” I stammered, discovering that something had caught in my throat. “When Madame Vira was the proprietress,” I continued, trying to blink away my tears.
More with Nesla
But it wasn’t like that, I insisted. We had been in love with each other. But then, I remembered my relationship with Iriane, and I felt that it was impossible to know the degree to which our relationship was as symmetrical in its feelings as I would have liked for it to be.
I think about Iriane
My writing life
Updates on Mahmiin
Letters from Madelyna
Updates on Yeylan
I abandon my dreams of being a writer
I meet Nesla again
We talk about Iriane
We talk about love and her life and my life
We sleep together
She doesn’t talk for a few days
She apologizes she knows that I’m lonely — she’s lonely too
We say our goodbyes
I begin my preparations to leave the country/go to the east
The city in the mornings
I laughed.
“Would I have anything to write… when it comes to women?”
“But don’t you feel that you have done some disservice to the women whom you have been with, whose hearts you have broken, not to make any mention of them?”
I didn’t tell Madelyna that I had met Nesla again, and in my letters to Madelyna, she may have sensed a lacuna in the shape of a woman.
“I don’t know why. It’s not you. Don’t take it personally. I didn’t feel less lonely, afterwards. That was all.” She sighed. “I would want to be in love in the way that I was in love back then.”
“If you have feelings for her, then go to her, try to win her over. There is something of value there, to be truly in love with someone.”