The Portal (F)

The article, from the Hurriyet Daily News, offered a comment from a 57-year-old Cezmi Korkmaz, who according to the story is the last witness to a person being lost through The Portal. My friend Sam Richter, who played shortstop with me when I played second base in Sarasota in 1963, faxed the clipping over from his office at the University of South Florida. The story only reported that Korkmaz was there and that he was 9-years-old at the time. Mostly, the reporter focused on the decision by the government to seal the entrance in 1983.

Two months later, through a contact at the Ministry of National Education, I was seated in front of Mr. Korkmaz at the Kirit Café after the lunch rush. He spoke with a British accent after the fashion of a man who earned a degree at an English university, his an undergraduate degree in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

 

After a few pleasantries and inquiries after each other’s families, I put the question to him. “Will you tell me about Altan Tilki? Please.”

 

Mr. Korkmaz looked at me for a moment, and then he nodded his head. “I was 9. Altan Tilki was a friend of the family and wanted to take photographs of the tower and then the sea from that summit. He paid me a few lira to carry a bag of lenses and a lunch basket.

 

“He was a tall man and I had to walk quickly to stay up with him. A few times on the steps along the cliff I fell behind and he would turn and scowl at me. But then he would raise his camera and shoot several frames of the sea below.”

 

“Do you know if those pictures might be seen?”

 

“I do not know. He has a great granddaughter in Pursaklar, or so I have been told. I do remember he was short of breath when we got to the foot of the tower on the other side away from The Portal.

 

“He took more pictures of the sea, and then he stood very close to the stone wall and took a photograph nearly straight up the tower. I remember because the clouds were very high that morning.

 

“When we moved around to the north side of the tower where The Portal opens, Mr. Tilki bent down and picked up a fragment of stone and scratched a chalky line across the stone path that led to The Portal. He told me to stay behind the line at all times, no matter what I saw or heard.”

 

“What was he planning to do?”

 

Mr. Korkmaz looked off and seemed to be in some way back in that moment. “Dr. Cooper, he was going to take a photograph of the inside of The Portal.”

 

I leaned forward in my chair. “The legend says no light could penetrate that space.”

 

“No. No light could enter that darkness. He told me again to stay behind the line that he had drawn, and he changed cameras, and with no hesitation he walked up the 20 or so steps to The Portal and stood just outside the opening.

 

“Mr. Tilki stood so his toes were just at the threshold and extended his camera into the darkness and clicked the first shot.  The flash went off but none of the light penetrated the interior. Then, the first of the smells came.”

 

“Smells?”

 

“First, I could smell cumin and believed my mother’s sarma was being prepared right beneath my nose. Tilki reached the camera into the darkness, but kept his feet planted outside the opening. Again a flash, but the light seemed in some manner trapped in the bulb.

 

“Next came, even more strongly, the smell of mint. My mouth watered. My mother’s manti, no doubt. Tilki leaned forward so that his face was through The Portal, but again the light of the camera did not escape into the darkness. The smell was so strong. I wanted to run to his side.”

 

Mr. Korkmaz took up his cup of coffee and sipped slowly. He set the cup down and very carefully wiped his lips.

 

“I will tell you that I have a bad heart, Dr. Cooper. In all other ways, I have been blessed in my life. One’s memories cannot always be certain. What happened next is the truth.”

 

“Yes? Go on.”

 

“It was the cinnamon in the end. My mother’s pudding, I smelled it a hundred times as a boy. It was so strong that I thought myself in a cloud of cinnamon. I was surely in my mother’s kitchen. Tilki leaned into the darkness so that only backs of his legs and his heels were in the light.

 

“I ran, I ran toward The Portal. Tilki turned and for a moment his face and his feet and his knees were in the light, but somehow he fell back into the darkness just as I got to within several meters of him. He was vanished.”

 

“Vanished? Gone where? How?”

 

“I do not know, Dr. Cooper. There was no sound. He did not cry out.  Nothing. Not a sound came from The Portal.”

 

“What did you do?”

 

“I gathered up the bags and ran as much as I could down to my home. I told my parents what I had seen and about the smells. The police came and they took my report, but I left out the part about the cinnamon. It was in the papers for a few days because Tilki had taken photos for Time during the war.”

 

“Have you been back up there? To The Portal?”

 

“Never. And as I am blessed, I will not return in this lifetime.”  Ladson 2014