The First Stone

The body arrived on the second hot day after two cold ones, and so did not know whether to wear the coat that had not yet dried or to leave it on a bench like the overcoat of a man one was no longer waiting for. Twenty-six degrees on the digital sign of an eczane on Hürriyet Caddesi — the same numerals that on Thursday afternoon had read fifteen, the same flicker, the same green. Heat in a city that has been wet for two days has its own vocabulary: the smell of bark deciding at last to dry, the smell of stone giving back water it had taken in unwillingly, and underneath both, returning after a long absence, the smell of the city's tar — the smell, that is, of pece warming back into itself.

Pece. The word came up the way it always does, from a school whose windows did not close properly, where one read Dante in winter wearing a coat indoors. La pece, which boiled in the fifth bolgia, dense and black, the Malebranche poking at submerged shoulders with their forks: "Tra male gatte era venuto il sorcio." Pece is also, in another register, the road itself when the road has decided to admit, in the height of summer, that it is a fluid pretending to be a solid. The body had not thought of the canto in years. The heat brought it up the way pressure brings up a buried piece of metal.

The paper had reported, two stops earlier, in a kıraathane I will not name because today I do not wish to name anything that has windows facing east, that the Belediye of İzmit had decided to make its own paving stones and its own asphalt. The plant would rise this summer at Karadenizliler Mahallesi, on a parcel listed with the dry seriousness of Ottoman cadastres — 7180 ada, 169 parsel — in a quarter that bears the name of those who came from the Karadeniz, the Black Sea, and stayed long enough to give the quarter its name, but not long enough to give it their dialect, which one notices now only in the way a vowel falls at the end of a word in a phone call overheard on the dolmuş from Yahyakaptan.

The body had to sit down. It is a small thing and it is not a small thing. A city making its own stones. A city that has had stones made for it for two and a half thousand years — by the men of Astacus, by Nicomedes the First in 264 before the common era when he stood at a corner now under a bus shelter and laid what the chroniclers called πρῶτος λίθος (prṓtos líthos), the first stone, with whatever gestures one supposes were necessary; by the Bithynian quarrymen who hauled blocks for the imperial complex now sleeping under Çukurbağ; by the Ottoman selciaroli; by the engineers of the asphalt-pourings of 1976 that the body has been walking on since the rain — that city now wishes to be its own ναυπηγός (naupēgós), its own shipwright of the surface, and to launch itself outward not by leaving but by laying itself afresh.

There is a passage in the third book of the Metamorphoses where Cadmus, having killed the dragon at the spring of Ares, is told to sow its teeth in the furrows of a field he has just ploughed. He sows; the earth shudders; armed men rise out of the soil. Most kill each other; five remain; the five build Thebes. The body cannot help, in this heat, in the smell of pitch warming, in the announcement of a plant that will produce paving stones from the second half of summer, in a quarter named for arrivals — the body cannot help feeling that what the city proposes is a sowing. Not of teeth but of stones. Not of armed men but of squares, each octagonal or hexagonal, each the colour of new cement, each laid in the pattern the municipal foreman will choose on a printed sheet in an office no one will visit. The stones will rise from the earth of Karadenizliler. The city will walk on its own children.

The body's hands were warmer than the body wanted them to be. At the next table a man had been doing the crossword for an hour and had filled in only the corners. There is a particular kind of slowness that the eastern Marmara gives to a Saturday afternoon when the sky has decided to be blue without explaining itself. The body got up and walked.

It walked westward, away from the gulf, toward higher streets where the pavement was older. Somewhere — not here, but somewhere the body had perhaps been — there had been another city, also a city of arrivals, also one that wished to make its own ground; the result had been a different kind of stone, a pale paste, and long afterwards a damp had risen in those walls and the rooms had had to be sealed and the children sent elsewhere. The body did not finish the thought. It did not want to. A pigeon walked across a cracked square of old paving the colour of a tooth, and the crack was the line, and the body crossed the line, and the line did not notice. The asphalt of 1976 ticked under the heat the way an old fridge ticks at night.

At a low wall on the upper street there was a stack of pallet-loaded parke taşı — already, before the new plant existed, already someone laying — six layers high, ten by twenty per layer, each stone the same uncommitted grey. Delivered that morning, by the dust. A boy of twelve sat on the corner of the pallet eating an ice lolly the colour of methylene blue. The lolly was melting faster than he was attending to it. A line of methylene ran over the topmost stone and into the dust, and the stone was accepting it, and would accept worse before the year was out, and worse again the year after, until it was no longer the new stone but the old one, and the body — long gone elsewhere — would not be there to see.

The body went home. Pece is in the mouth tonight. Pece is the word the city makes when, in the height of summer, it lays its first hot strip down on a road that has been waiting. The road will receive. The road always receives.

Claudius, la Pece