A fabl by Levent Şentürk for NCR-04 “Horoscope”

İllustration: Hakan Keleş

“Imagine a bright summer day, very much like today, in the middle of June in Istanbul.
imagine a day smelling of honeysuckles, roses and oleasters.
It is on a day like this, at the hour of noon, that the sky will darken and the air will thicken. When daylight and human breath freeze up in the air, that’s when I’ll come. Me, the crab. And not a single soul will be left unaware of my arrival.
Even before I appear, my eyes of pure gold, in the middle of Marmara,
two great whirlpools, each one the size of a neighbourhood,
will announce my arrival, sighing and groaning and singing my ballad to Istanbullites.
The sea will stand upright, first greeting the city with two huge cylinders and then introducing me – namely Crab – to you.
The ascension of my golden eyes to the surface will be like a twin sunrise,
followed by my shield-like silvery body, rising amidst a flood of gigantic waves,
creating terrible rainbows wandering the horizon, even though this may be impossible on a dark sky.
Then you will see the emergence of my two bronze clamps and their colour will be a deep,
blinding black, shining in such brilliance never before encountered on the face of the earth.
As I will have my back against Kadıköy, when my right legs burn up in flames,
those in Üsküdar will catch fire with the hot and dry air instantly hitting Çamlıca.
When my left legs ice over, the coastline of Bakırköy will freeze in a great rumbling noise
which will be normal as my toes will be over there.
I will introduce you to the dexterity of my clamps,
then in the same manner I have appeared, I will also disappear
and even though my disappearance lasts a decade,
it will be etched in your memory as a mere instant.”

And it happened just like it said it would; the crab was gone
and the next morning Istanbullites woke up to find themselves transformed to crabs.
This was the reason for its arrival: to turn everybody into a small crab.
Before its departure, it used its bronze clamps to give form also to Istanbul as a city of crabs.
Each crab nest was now behind great big walls – and they were sealed.
It gave its name to the borderline separating the two continents – and noone could change that.
It even gave its name to the dead of the future – and the wreckage is already out there.
The crabs were exalted and enthused to such an extent that they began to worship their newfound gods.
They demolished everything reminding them of the times before their crabness,
what they couldn’t demolish, they clamped their way through,
carving and grinding, decorating the city with crab sculptures,
banishing all greetings other than crabby greetings from public life,
even the names of fish were banned, anything and anyone without a crust or a hard shell, were exiled from the city
they were shouted at, called names such as “softies” or “mollusks”.
Those who remianed were now a homogenous colony – brothers and sisters even
In that very spot where the crab had first appeared, in the middle of the two black whirlpools,
they erected two globes of pure gold, a monument in memoriam.
Homogenous and fraternal, the army of green crabbies, all the tweedledums and tweedledees,
turned the metropolis to a massive dinner table adorned with all kinds of seafood
albeit tasteless and quite unappetizing.

“Unprecedented Mayhem in the City That Conjoins the Two Continents”
NCR reporter L.Ş. reports from the scene:
“The Magical Eastern metropolis Istanbul ruled by green crabs
since the early days of the twenty-first century,
is now experiencing right in the middle of the second decade,
the greatest urban uprising of its history.
In this city which changed radically to become extremely homogenized following the ‘Crusty Revolution’,
all the transformative measures taken by the Big Crab are now backfiring.
The straight nests of the green crabs have become places of trial and suffering
because it is reported that none of them know how to walk straight anymore.
All the streets stretching along straight routes
and all the straight-rise walls are claimed to have become narrow alleys and insurmountable ramparts.
Millions of youth gathered in Taksim Square
have been shouting this slogan for days now:
‘we are crabs, we have methastasized, we will win’:
Here, cancer is not just a metaphor, it is the greatest truth history has ever seen.
The immortal body of Istanbul
is being gnawed at, on all sides, in all corners and actually it doesn’t look so bad.
Not only is there no sign of an impending death
but the city seems to be living the heyday of its entire history.
Big Crab’s statement: ‘We will cut away the cancerous part’ was met with a reminder of his own crab nature to which he responded angrily by saying that ‘it was no metaphor’, and leaving the press conference,
our reporter’s question ‘Why did you turn the people of Istanbul into crab disciples?’
was left unanswered.
Those disciples control
the entire city of Istanbul now.
The rumours about Big Crab abandoning its seat of power
because “there is simply no cure” for Istanbul,
have now spread like an aggressive cancer.”