Video with English subtitles
Inspired by Bilge Karasu's book "A Long Day's Evening"; the video performance has been performed and shot in a courtyard, underground.
The story is set in a monastery in Byzantium, at the times of iconoclasm. The body represents the 3 protagonists of the story: Andronikos, sentenced to a fatal torture because of his beliefs, his close friend Ioakim who carries a burden on his conscious till his last days and a wounded fox saved from the neighborhood kids and brought to the monastery for recovery...
The torture that last for 8 days and ends on the 9th with the death of Andronikos, Ioakim reminiscencing Andronikos through the fox who falls sick and is about to die...The body moving about the cellar, the sketches on the wall and the voice are elements adding up to express this story which questions beliefs, ideals and heroic acts.
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Bilge Karasu’nun ‘Uzun Sürmüş Bir Günün Akşamı’ adlı hikayesinden etkilenerek yapılmış video performans, Galata No.9 sergisinin 1 ay konuk olduğu bu avluda gerçekleştirildi.
Hikaye, Bizans’ta resim yasağı (ikonoklazma) döneminde bir manastırda geçer. Beden hikayeden 3 karakteri temsil eder: İnançları yüzünden sonu ölümle biten bir işkenceye mahkum edilen Andronikos, onun en yakın arkadaşı, ömrünün sonuna kadar vicdan muhasebesi yapan İoakim; ve mahalle cocuklarinin elinden yaralı olarak kurtarılıp İoakim tarafından manastıra getirilen tilki…
Andonikos’un 8 gün süren ve 9. gün ölümle biten işkencesi, İoakim’in hastalanan tilki üzerinden Andronikos’u hatırlaması ve tilkinin ölümü beden ve çizgi aracılığıyla ifade edilmeye çalışıldı.
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Text: Bilge Karasu, A Long Day’s Evening
Metis Publishing, 10. Edition, January 2010
Translation: Aron Aji
The little fox used to not run or skip but leap from one column to the next. He had placed a big bowl in front of the animal, which he had filled with moistened pieces of bread mixed with scraps. To get the bowl from his cell, the bread, the scraps from the kitchen, he had tied the animal to the base of a column. But the little fox, curled into a ball between two columns, would not budge. In all likelihood, the animal knew that it was saved from the man’s punishing hand, from the children’s pokers, their kicks, their roaring laughter, or that it was spared the senselessness of trying to press its muzzle against a wall or sniffing endlessly around the base of the walls, but that was the extent of its knowledge. The animal would not even tilt its head back to lick its wound.
Yet in the days that followed, the little fox had managed to heal its wound, even learned to play without tugging at the long, slender chain that Ioakim had tied around its neck instead of the rope. One by one, the animal had devised sundry games all by itself—hand-biting, chasing, hide-and-seek. At first, the other monks had said nothing to Ioakim, viewing his interest in the animal as a youthful fancy.
But a few weeks later, when the little fox’s tail regained its fullness, its shiny whiskers began curving like bows just the way a healthy animal’s would, some of the monks had changed their attitude, some arguing that this childish fancy was dragging out too long, others beginning to wonder whether Ioakim would ever dedicate himself to religion or prefer instead tending to animals that belonged in the circus. Some had thought that the fox had a foul smell, that it kept soiling the grounds, even that it was sinful to keep an animal like this in a monastery. Flush with anger, Ioakim would persist in taking care of the little fox as long as the Abbot did not object.
He shared his own food, his own bread with the animal. He let it drink from the fountain. Water belonged to no one. Its chain was long enough to allow the animal to come up to the trough to lap the water’s edge. Although the fox always finished what Ioakim served him, he began to notice that the animal’s food bowl was never empty. Which meant that there were others who tended to the little fox. He therefore turned a deaf ear to the complaining monks. In time, they, too, came to recognize that they had to accept the existence of the little fox, giving in to the irresistible neighborliness. One day, right after lunch when most of the monks were walking around the courtyard, Andreas had walked straight to the little fox, began playing with it. It was as though the entire monastery had been waiting for such a gesture. From then on, few monks could resist joking around with the animal, if not playing chase or hide-and-seek, at least letting it nibble at their hand, or teasing it by pretending to steal food from its bowl. The fox had become most everyone’s pet, a property of the monastery. Everyone loved it.
Ioakim now thinks that the little fox had taught the monks that even an animal deserved love. That the world contained other things worthy of love... That beyond loving God, they could also love God’s creatures... But did they acknowledge this fact? Those for whom loving an animal, caring for it, was a sin, did they not accept that human beings, animals, plants, rocks were all God’s creation? Did the act of loving God require not loving His creatures? Yet, he should have thought of these then, spoken out then, not now. To think these thoughts now amounts to regressing. By now, he ought to have gone beyond these ideas.
Why does one like watermelons, figs, grapes, wine? Why does one reel with the excitement of seeing them anew at the end of each summer, at the start of each winter?
They loved the animal. No one saw or noticed the chain around its neck. Even the little fox seemed to have forgotten. If it acted annoyed by its bondage, complained about its chain, at the first hint of discontent, everyone would have rushed to unchain it. Instead, the chained animal behaved as if it lived in its own forest, or did it seem so to him?
One November morning following a night of endless rain, Ioakim had found the little fox violently shaking underneath its rags. Ioakim is shivering. He is shivering now. There is a light breeze, a gentle wind. Not much to make one feel cold, but Ioakim is shivering. Is he still walking? Has he stopped? How can he be sure at this moment?
So much thinking, so much remembering, stopping instead of walking, almost tracing his steps back, does it all mean he does not want to reach that point, get to the top of the hill?
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The little fox had been ill. Although its shivering had abated, it had been lying listlessly in its pile of rags. Yet, by the time he remembered the animal again—the night when he flung his exhausted body out of bed to rush out into the dark courtyard—nine days had passed. Andronikos had died little by little in the course of these nine days. Proving time after time the colossal futility of heroism, its boundless absurdity, he had died, becoming in the process a hero himself. Yet Ioakim was alive; aside from his exhaustion, his self-reproach mixed with disgust, he had no troubles while he stood beside the fox.
He had pushed his hand through the folds of rags, looking for the animal’s mouth, waiting for the sharp little teeth to sink into his flesh. Instead his hand had come to rest, quite unexpectedly, on a parched muzzle burning like fire. The mouth would not open, the teeth would not sink into his flesh. The animal was still sick. The food had been crusting in its bowl, untouched. He had noted this by feeling the food with his other hand. Perhaps the fox would die. From hunger, from thirst. Dying from hunger was probably more agonizing than dying from illness.
He wonders whether he had really meant what he had thought at the time.
Tormented by Andronikos’ death, had he decided that another being he so loved had to die, too? Loving himself, he had to kill himself, too ... First the fox, then himself.
Pulling the animal out of its bedding, He had pressed its limp body against his chest, unloosened its chain. It had kept trembling in his arms. Perhaps because of fear or the scorching fever.
He had walked to the gray, coffin-like stone tub plunged the fox in the water, his swiftness or his rage entirely uncharacteristic of him.
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Nine days later.
The corpse of the one who had lain on the ground for two days, thrashing about every so often like a drunk, someone who had been actually drunk, not drunk with anything he had consumed but drunk with speaking, drunk with letting out, drunk with air, the one whose words, caught in the rush of an unintelligible garble, had sounded as if arriving from faraway places.
Only then, at the very end, Ioakim had been able to lift his head—his senses overwhelmed with the crisp air, the black frost—dragging his feet toward his monastery. None of this is about remembering this or that; in reality, he is not even thinking about the one who died. He is merely sorting out his accounts now.
Perhaps, too, trying to postpone the little fox’s death a little longer. Perhaps the little animal had not reconciled to death. Ioakim had decided that it had to die.