A Useless Man Read online

  All this while my father remained with the young woman on the divan. My father’s cigarette would flare up now and again, amidst unearthly wreaths of smoke. They were talking about weddings, young girls, young men. The burning logs in the stove crumbled and lit up Emin’s face. I fell asleep.

  I awoke at daybreak. As we set out for the rich man’s house that my father had first joined as a son-in-law, I could feel the steam of warm buffalo’s milk on my face even as the morning mist swirled in to chill my cheeks, and I could still feel the lips of the old woman on my forehead, and the thick fingers of my brother Emin still joined with mine.

  For a very long time, I was able to preserve that moment. Then the paper yellowed like a picture postcard, and the image faded.

  The Silk Handkerchief

  Moonlight shimmered across the silk factory’s long façade. Here and there I could see people hurrying alongside it. But there was nowhere I wished to go. I was making my way out, very slowly, when I heard the watchman call out to me.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “I’m just going for a stroll,” I said.

  “Don’t you want to see the acrobat?”

  I hesitated, so he went on:

  “Everyone’s going. This is the first time anyone like him has ever come to Bursa.”

  “I’m not interested,” I said.

  He begged and groveled until I agreed to take his shift. For a while I just sat there. I smoked a cigarette. I sang an old folk song. But soon I was bored. I might as well stretch my legs, I thought. So I picked up the watchman’s studded nightstick and went off to do the rounds.

  I had just passed the girls’ workshop when I heard a noise. Taking out my flashlight, I made a sweep of the room. And there, racing along the carpet of light, were two naked feet.

  After I had caught the thief, I took him to the watchman’s room, to get a good look at him in the lamp’s yellow glow.

  How tiny he was! When I squeezed his small hand in mine, I thought it might break. But his eyes, how they flashed.

  I laughed so hard I let go of his hand.

  Then he lunged at me with a pocketknife, slicing my pinkie. So I got a tight grip on the little devil and went through his pockets: some contraband tobacco and a few papers of the same sort, and a handkerchief that was almost clean. I dabbed some of his tobacco on the wound, tore a strip from the handkerchief and wrapped it around my finger. With the remaining tobacco we rolled two fat cigarettes and then sat down like two old friends and talked.

  He was just fifteen. From which I was to understand that he was new to this business, he was just a boy. You know the story – someone had asked him for a silk handkerchief – a girl he loved, a girl he had his eye on, the girl next door. He couldn’t just go out and buy one, he had no money. So after thinking the matter through, he’d decided on this.

  “That’s fine and good,” I said. “But the workshops are on this side of the building. What was it that took you to the other side?”

  He smiled. How could he have known which side the workshops were on?

  We lit up two of my village cigarettes. By now we were good friends.

  He was Bursa born and raised. He had never been to Istanbul – only once in his life had he even been as far as Mudanya. And, oh! To see the look on his face when he told me all this …

  As a boy in Emir Sultan, I would often go sledding on moonlit nights, and this boy reminded me of the friends I had made there.

  I could imagine his skin going as dark as theirs in the summer. As dark as the water in the Gökdere pools we could hear bubbling in the distance. As dark as the pits of summer fruit.

  I looked at him more closely: His olive skin was as dark as a walnut fresh from its green shell. His teeth were as fine and white as the flesh inside. In summer, and right through to the end of walnut season, boys’ hands smell only of peaches and plums in this place and their chests give off the aroma of hazel leaves as they roam the streets half-naked in their buttonless striped shirts.

  Just then the watchman’s clock struck twelve; the acrobat’s show was nearly over.

  “I should get going,” the boy said.

  I was just regretting having sent him on his way without a silk handkerchief when I heard a commotion right outside the door, and the watchman came in muttering under his breath, dragging the thief back in with him.

  This time I held him by the ears, while the watchman whacked the soles of his feet with a willow switch. Good thing the boss wasn’t there. I swear he would have called the police. “Thieving at this age,” he’d have cried. “Well, the boy can smarten up in jail.”

  He looked scared by the time we were through with him – as if at any moment he might start crying. But he didn’t shed a tear. His lips didn’t tremble and his eyebrows hardly moved. There was only a faint fluttering of eyelashes.

  When we let him go he took off like a swallow, vanishing as if he were soaring over a moonlit cornfield.

  In those days I slept in the storeroom on the floor above the workshop. How beautiful that room was. And never more so than on moonlit nights.

  Just outside my window was a mulberry tree. Moonlight would come cascading down through its leaves, throwing flecks of light across the floor. Summer and winter I left the window open. The wind was never too rough or cold. I had worked on a ferryboat and I knew the different winds from their smells – the lodos, the poyraz, the karayel, and the günbatısı. So many winds swept over me as I lay on that blanket, each one bringing its own strange dreams.

  I’m a light sleeper. It was just before daybreak when I heard a noise outside. Someone was in the tree, but I was too afraid to get up or cry out. A shadow appeared in the window.

  It was the boy. Slowly he dropped down into the room and when he passed me I shut my eyes. First he went through my cupboard. Then, very slowly, he went through the stockpile. I didn’t say a word. The truth is, even if he’d made off with everything, I could never have said a word in the face of such boldness. In the morning, the boss would beat the truth out of me. “Take that, you dog!” he’d say. He’d tell me a dead man could have done a better job, and then he’d fire me. I knew all this, but still I didn’t say a word.

  He slipped out through the window as quietly as he had come. Then I heard a snap. I rushed downstairs and found him lying in the moonlight, while the watchman and a few others looked on.

  He was dying. His fist was clenched. When the watchman pried it open, a silk handkerchief shot up from his hand, like water from a spring.

  Yes, that’s right. That’s what happens if a handkerchief is pure silk. Crumple it up as tight as you can. But open your hand, and it shoots right up, like water from a spring.

  The Bohça

  I remember the first day she came to our house. I was sitting under the mulberry tree, telling the neighborhood boys about my day in the water. My voice was shaking as I described my adventures on the coast. My passionate report had them rooted to the spot; none of these boys knew how to swim. Their eyes brimmed with questions. But I was feverishly certain that I could read their thoughts so I didn’t give them a chance to say a thing.

  I heard someone calling to me from the garden gate. And there she was. To hide my surprise, I kept on talking.

  “Then I couldn’t touch the bottom. I was swallowing water. But I wasn’t at all scared. I was thinking of my next move.”

  “Young man, your mother wants to see you.”

  That’s what she said.

  “I’m coming,” I said.

  And I went right on telling my friends about how I nearly drowned while learning how to swim.

  After they had left, I turned back to the garden gate. She was still standing there waiting, but her eyes were on a finch that was singing in the quince tree.

  “Is that a nightingale?” she asked.

  “No, girl, that’s a finch.”

  She refused to believe me.

  “I’m nobody’s fool,” she said. “That finch already flew away
.”

  She had a rough way of speaking.

  “Shut up, girl. Don’t you have any manners? Don’t joke like that.”

  She set her sad eyes on me and gave me a long, hard look.

  I went into the kitchen. She followed me in. I tortured her with questions. Why was she here? “I used to be a wet nurse at Major Hidayet’s,” she said. In those words, more or less.

  I can’t tell you what a despicable little bourgeois brat I was in those days. I was set on making her suffer. There were bruises all over her olive-colored skin, and cuts. She had small, twisted hands with slender, purple-veined wrists that were covered in scratches.

  There were times when I spat in her face, times when I slapped her. In spite of all the abuse I hurled at her, she never stopped being kind to me.

  According to her birth certificate, she was one year older than me. The two of us were just scrawny kids full of mischief, and pretty much out of control.

  One winter night she came to me in a dream. She was wearing a black dress, and her sun-bleached hair was draped over her chest, or, rather, it clung to her long and supple neck. Her breasts were no larger than turnips, and how pale her face, despite her olive skin, and such perfect feet. In those days there was a man I saw in my dreams whom I first identified as my grandfather, and later understood to be the old dervish saint, Nurbaba, or Father Christmas. In this dream, he took my hand and hers and joined them together.

  “You two must stop fighting,” he said.

  With that, the old man lowered his bushy eyebrows until they touched the tips of his lashes. From then on we never quarreled again. It was the dream that did it – I want to make that clear. Yes, it was a dream. A dream that changed us.

  We were holding hands under the mulberry tree. The finch was warbling in the quince. The sky above us sparkled with giant stars. A moon as large as a pebbly, reedy cove was hanging over the horizon and a lake. As we walked toward the moon, it merged with the shore.

  That’s as much as I can remember. Anticipation is clearer and crisper than the thing that lingers on our tongues. But as the dream began to fade, I did almost taste the strange fruit that once drove a man from paradise. Or so I recall.

  The next morning I found the real sun hanging in the sky. I broke the ice in the garden fountain and I washed my face. But I still felt like I was dreaming.

  Then I saw her in the courtyard, holding in her right hand a cloth we used for polishing shoes. Her face looked unwashed. Her almond eyes were swollen and there were spots on her neck that looked like flea bites.

  I leaned over her as she polished my shoes and when my lips touched her hair I was gripped by a hunger I had never felt before. I pulled out a few strands of her hair, and as I walked to school I examined them, very closely. I might still have been dreaming. Half of each strand was jet-black, and the other half a warm yellow.

  My conversations with her went something like this.

  “Girl, you haven’t polished my shoes.”

  “I swear I did, my young sir.”

  “I just said you didn’t!”

  She’d look at me standing there with those strands of hair in my hand – half black, and half yellow – and she would freeze. And collapse into silent tears. The more she cried, the angrier I would be.

  “Girl, did you rip this?”

  “I swear to God I didn’t, my young sir.”

  “I say you did!”

  I never gave her the chance to deny it twice.

  “I was looking at the pictures, young sir!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I like them.”

  There was something I wanted to say to her one day, after she told me that. I can still remember the words. It went something like this: I like you, too, girl. I like you more than those pistachios I so adore but never share with you. But do I crack open the shell and eat those sweet green nuts, just because I love you?

  “Girl!”

  “What’s wrong, young sir?”

  “Nothing …”

  “Young sir!”

  “What’s wrong, girl?”

  “Nothing …”

  We were standing together under the mulberry tree. We never did have a chance to talk to each other about nothing being wrong. But it seemed as if we both felt we had. She had her head in my lap, and her scent all around me. It was a summer afternoon when mother caught us there. I scrambled through the garden gate, ran down to the shore and stayed in the warm water till evening. Later I was back in the garden with the boys from the neighborhood. But this time, I had nothing to be excited about. Pretending to listen, I kept glancing over at the garden gate. But she never came out for me. Eventually the boys left. I walked back into the house. I went to look for her in the kitchen, but she wasn’t there.

  Everyone knew that she kept her bocha in a corner of the storage room. When something in the house was missing, it was the first place we would look. Without saying a word, we’d go through her bocha with its patchwork of red, white, yellow and navy blue squares.

  I went into the storage room, heavy with the scent of oil. I looked for the bocha, but it was gone.

  Wedding Night

  Ahmet was sixteen, but his birth had yet to be registered. He had the flattest of noses and the narrowest of foreheads and jet black hair that shone with glints of midnight blue. He already had whiskers. Inside his navy serge suit, his body looked slender, athletic, and perfectly formed. When his father presented him to the registrar, the man did not hide his displeasure.

  “Shame on you!” he said. “And why was it, I wonder, that you’ve taken so long to register this young man’s birth? What sort of tricks did you pull during the census?”

  During the census they’d hidden him in the hayloft. There had been rumors of another war. Ahmet was just twelve years old at the time, and their only son, but the army could still have taken him. That’s what they’d reckoned. It had turned out differently, but what did it matter? Ahmet wasn’t like Turkey’s other children. Ahmet’s father was Rüstem Ağa and even after the threat of war had passed, there had still been a need for precautions.

  The registrar asked, “Is this boy twenty yet?”

  It had been decided that sixteen-year-old Ahmet had been born in 1909. And that he was to marry a twenty-six-year-old woman born in 1911.

  It was a dark autumn night, and the rain was pelting down. The sky was wandering the streets. A band of men holding lanterns was hurrying Ahmet across the village square, which was littered with the crushed husks of chestnuts. Pulling Ahmet to the back of the group, Black Abdi said his piece once again:

  “Ahmet,” he said, “I’m your best man. So now listen to me carefully.” (Here he paused.) “When we’ve pushed you in there and closed the door on you, what you do next is kneel down on the rug and pray twice for God’s blessing. Do you understand?”

  The rain was really coming down now. The gutters were gushing, and the lanterns were far ahead of them. They had forgotten to look out for puddles. Their trousers were sopping wet.

  The young men in the coffeehouse wiped the mist off the windows; seeing Ahmet pass by with his best man, they smiled. The old men, whose minds were on their taxes, rose to stand at the door, sending him on his way with strange jokes.

  Ahmet was so startled that he fell into a pile of chestnuts and hurt himself. As Abdi lifted him up, he called out to the men who were racing away with their lanterns.

  “Wait for us, will you?” Then, turning back to Ahmet, he said, “The rest you know. You’re old enough, and big enough. Don’t make me spell it out for you.”

  Ahmet said nothing. The chestnut thorns still stung. He was chewing on something, but were they questions, or were they chestnuts? It was hard to tell. His mind was fogged by the rakı they’d given him, and then they’d pulled him into this procession, and now their will was his command.

  As they led him along, they showered this lean, solidly built and bright-eyed boy with taunts that seemed somehow serious.

 
Gülsüm’s house was so very far away tonight. The rain was coming down even harder now. They were almost running. When at last they reached the house, the women inside threw open the door. The groom was covered head-to-toe in mud. The women brushed him off. His navy serge suit was now the same color as his hair. The wet, shiny down on his cheeks made this ugly child look almost handsome. He seemed to be wet from perspiration, not rain, and after he had wiped his face with a cloth, it looked red and polished like an apple.

  His eyes were downcast; he was still picking thorns out of his hands. They brought him coffee and, paying no heed to Abdi’s advice, he knocked it back. He hadn’t trembled like this since his circumcision four years earlier. Then they brought him to his feet and, pounding with their fists on his back, they pushed him into a room, and then closed the door and left.

  The room had a low ceiling and was lined with hanging bunches of grapes, apples, pears and quinces. There was almost no light, and the stench of fruit was so strong it made him dizzy. But it wasn’t just the fruit. Hovering above it was the hint of fine muslin, a bride’s dress, and a fine body underneath.

  He went over to the open window and shut it, and for a moment he lingered, looking through the glass to watch the men and women coming out of each house to join the lantern procession. With his hands he wiped the fly droppings from the top of the dresser and adjusted the photograph of a soldier. He turned down the gas lamp. The woman was standing before him, utterly still. And now he caught sight of the prayer rug. Folding it up, he threw it into a corner. Pausing before the mirror, he looked at his red face. The woman was sitting by the window now. And there in the corner was the empty mattress, just like Black Abdi had predicted. “You are going to sit down next to her,” Black Abdi had said, “and for an hour at least, you are going to talk to her.” But what could he say to a girl he’d never met? His head was on fire, and his nerves were playing on the edges of his bones, one by one. Again, he examined himself in the mirror. For a long while he stared at the lantern wick, as if he were searching for something, and then, with one twist of his thick hands, he extinguished the flame. He could see the woman sitting by the window, staring out into the night and the rain.