Preserved in a massy black resin which shines in spite of the crowd's vulnerability, Stuck Inert, unrecognizable words dried in the sun for a thousand years or more Nothing perished there in the pit The sand only pours over your head a long crackling slope It moves if you wait long enough The way volcanic traces eerie, reexamined, emerge (The shape of a shoe, the shadow of a tree) contact the original upheaval (Meaning, you must choose) The crowd steps out of the swamp Immersed thoughts sift, germinal, in shaped and when chosen The shoe hides beneath a flat rock or travels with you subterranean, hard and soft, racing the trees To deal with fear Camille Guthrie I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors.... They were afraid of the secret inside themselves as if fearful of a past sin that could not stay buried in the past for all eternity. Eventually they forgot about the pit, its memories and secrets as well as what it contained, like instinctive animals who scratch some dirt to conceal their disgrace. One morning, waking up from a black nightmare that seethed with human faces, I discovered that the pit had been covered over. It was then that I understood with horror, gripped by the same nightmarish feeling, that the pit had been turned inside out, and it now rose out of the site that was once called the pit. They had a new way of referring to this new space that brought mystery and death up to our very windows; they called this dark well the air shaft. Orhan Pamuk from The Black Book         Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book (A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York 1996) is translated by Güneli Gün.