Everything would instantly change when she was observed by a lens.
She would constitute herself in the process of posing and transforms herself in advance into an image. Just as the mood of being an image without any referent.
Talih Çiftçıkmaz believed that she will have twin babies since her childhood. She was dead sure that she will have a daughter and a son. She was also sure of the names of her babes. She will call her daughter Leyla and her son Çakıl. There was a “twin case” repeated once every three generation in her family. Twin babes were also not a rare case in the family of her husband Mr. Gürbüz. The grandmother of her husband had twins exactly like her grandmother. To the best of their knowledge, the grandmothers of their grandmothers had twins too. This chain “twin case” repeated once in every two generation in both families intersects Mrs. Talih. Mrs. Talih who believed that she will have twin children when she was a child, when she met the family of her husband and learned about this similarity, she perceived it as a sign and decided since then that both her husband is her soul mate and their babies will be twins. She loved her babies severally during her pregnancy. She called them separate names. She apportioned her growing belly for her twins. Doctor Mr. Selahattin Bey had difficulty to explain to the young woman who passionately tells the rule “twin case” based on their family tree and therefore claims that she is pregnant with twins that she is pregnant with one girl. The thing doctor does not know that Mrs. Talih’s pregnancy started with two different cells of enzygotic twins but, as the days goes on; one of the cells refused to grow and embedded itself in the other cell. Mrs. Talih who has never learned that one of the twins hidden in the other cell did not believe in the doctor who saw a single baby in her abdomen and went from a doctor to another and told tirelessly her family tree again and again to those who listen to her. She left every doctor she went by receiving the same sorrowful information and wrestled with the feeling of losing one of her twins. When her daughter was born, she named her Leyla Çakıl. As her daughter grows up, she discovered the baby she thinks she lost during her pregnancy in Leyla and silently watched Çakıl in Leyla.
Briefly, name of the character is Leyla - Çakıl. But her name is also on the rocks like herself all the time. While she is sometimes Leyla and sometimes only Çakıl, she sometimes prefers to be both or none of them. Some people know her only as Leyla and some as Çakıl. Those who know her as Leyla are unaware of Çakıl and those who know her as Çakıl are unaware of Leyla. Some people know her both names but choose one of them to call her. Some of them choose Leyla, some choose Çakıl. She is sometimes Leyla Çakıl and sometimes Çakıl Leyla. She is sometimes all of them and sometimes none of them.
Her real birthday is 23 December 1981. But because of the instance of her grandmother, her birthday was registered as 7 January 1982. While this difference of several days does not change anything for her grandmother, it sneakingly creates a big chaos in Leyla. Although she was born as the youngest baby of the year, she was forced to play the role of oldest babe of the year. Thus, Leyla Çakıl has two birthdays just like her names. Her mother arranges every birthday party for her daughter on 7th of every January according to the date written on her identity card. But her father gives the birthday present in the morning of December 23 before she gets up prior to the party. Some people know her birthday as December 23 and some people celebrate Leyla Çakıl on January 7. Those who know December 23 and who know January 7 are unaware of the other celebrations of Leyla Çakıl. There are people who choose to celebrate her on one of these dates or both dates. Some people know both dates but do not remember to celebrate even on one date and confuse and forget. Her own birthday is sometimes end of the year and sometimes beginning of the New Year for Leyla Çakıl. It is sometimes all of them and sometimes none of them.
Leyla Çakıl lives on her own, away from her family and in a home having a wooden bay window and with her cat and a mixed bag of flowers.
The widest wall of Leyla’s house is filled with the mirrors that bought by her at various times and possessed by her in various means, in various manners and colors and dating from different periods of time. Every mirror has its own past, history, experiences and memories. For instance, she found one of them in the chest of her grandmother and fell in love with; another one was brought by her mother from Morocco and another one bought by her father from an auction and she won one of them in a game of chance in an amusement park. But anyhow, pasts of the mirrors intersect the lifes of both Leyla and Çakıl on the wall of Leyla Çakıl. Some of these mirrors have luminous surfaces, the glazes of some mirrors peeled from place to place and some of them are broken and some are skewed. Although every one of them is an object under the name of “mirror”, in fact, they reflect the image differently. So to say, Çakıl’s every image caught in each mirror introduces a different side of her to her. (This circumstance did not reach radical cases as mush as the strange relationship she has established with the photos in respect of her image. What distorts the image is not her imagination but the different, skewed, broken, luminous or rough surfaces of mirrors.) In a corner of the wall on which these wide-ranging mirrors are hung, there is a part on which the photo frames are hung. Within these frames, there are photos of her mother, father, sibling, cousins, distant cousins, aunts, grandaunts, uncles, granduncles, maternal grandmother, granny, paternal grandmother, great-groundmother, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, some teachers of her and four lovers, two friends and her cat and many flowers of her. But there is not any reflection of her image in any photo. One frame on the edge is hollow by contrast with the frames with photos. Leyla leaves this photo frame blank in order to put a photo of her for a long time. But, all photos she attempted to put could stay in that frame for one hour at most and transferred their place to the emptiness by the end of an hour. Leyla Çakıl seeks to find a photo that she will believe it reflects her in depth. However, the frame always remains empty.
The life of Leyla is directed by her rituals. Another habit of her that she carries out without failure is to tell her day to the ‘patience stone mirror’. It is named by her based on the story told by her grandmother. In contrast to her coevals, people around and many famous writers, she keeps her journal without writing. While she keeps her journal, she uses a mirror instead of a notebook, voice instead of writing and sounds of words instead of a pen. She keeps her journal face to face with her dear mirror of patience against her image reflecting from the mirror sometimes during the sunset towards evening, sometimes when she wakes from her sleep in the night and the pillow mark on her face still maintains its redness with bleary eyes, sometimes when her eyes is still bulgy but astute in the morning, sometimes when the blaze of verve enlightens her face and all the time. They say “verba volant scripta manent” but somehow, the words of Leyla are almost engraved in the mirror’s history one by one and almost create pages on its glazed surface layer by layer.
