A Useless Man (12 page)

“Hüsnü, I’m leaving tomorrow. That’s why I called you here. Did Hatice tell you?”

He comes three steps closer. With one stroke, he pushes the door open. As the darkness in the room collides with the darkness outside, she cries:

“Come to the pier tomorrow morning and we can talk there. If you don’t come, I’ll leave my clothes at the gazino.”

She has stepped outside now, with Hüsnü. But Ömer doesn’t understand a thing she’s saying. Who is Hüsnü? Which Hüsnü? Which clothes, at which gazino?

The second room is locked. The man in the third room groans:

“Who’s that? Who the hell’s out there? You’ve got the wrong room, my friend.”

The handle on the next door turns. A blinding shaft of light pins him to the doorsill. Man! This light is slicing right into his brain like a bullet.

There is a bed on the floor and an overturned strawberry basket in the corner. A plateful of onions, cucumbers, and bits of tomato, and a bottle of water beside it. Is it water? Two people are in the bed. One has graying hair. He can’t see the other. Just a bit of leg peeping out from the covers. Smooth and slender. Olive-skinned. He imagines long black hair. Good, he can’t see it!

What a powerful bulb! How many watts? A hundred? That hulking, graying man has pushed the tiny olive-skinned leg into a corner. That little bump under the covers is snoring. No – not snoring. Whistling. Wheezing,
like the strops in a rakı plant. How beautiful is that? There’s nothing revolting about it. Doesn’t rakı make that sound when it passes through the alembic, and those zinc tubes? Something between a whistle and a snore? But no, it turned out not to be that little creature snoring under the yellow blanket: it is just a puppy, snatched from its pack. None of this is arousing. Well, just one thing: the protruding shoulder under the blanket. If he were not already slipping through the door and into darkness, he’d be pulling back that blanket. Kissing that shoulder. Facing the music! Maybe a matter for the switchblade. He turns to look but lets the idea go.

In the corridor he bumps into three young baker’s boys. He doesn’t argue with them because he has other things on his mind: rocky shoulder under the yellow blanket. The whiff of dust.

The boys retreat into their room. He hears the clink of coins … 
Simit
sellers always slap down their coins when they count them. There’s no other way to count the money made from
simits
. It’s one thing to wet your thumb and index finger and flick through a wad of paper cash. But slapping down coins is what it sounds like: a slap. And then another. And another.

He joins his hands. Laces his fingers. Hits his knee. Slap. Slap. Slap! Then he looks up. Our Külhanbey is acting like a little child. What if someone sees? What is the difference between darkness and childhood? But he has no time for this. He is in love. He’s broke. He leaps up the steps in fours, and now he reaches his floor.

“Hey, you in there!” he cries. “It’s me. Wake up, you bastards!”

Doors open and close. Then silence. A woman appears from behind one of the doors. He stares. She goes back inside. Then an old woman opens another door. Ömer looks at her. She says:

“Come on, Ömer, get inside.”

“You go, mother, just relax.”

“You’ll get cold, Ömer.”

Oh, the way she speaks, a booming voice, like a man. What a woman! The mother of a Külhanbey!

“Mind your own business.”

His mother stiffens. She closes the door.

Ömer turns toward the other door. On the other side of this door is the person he is waiting to see leave the
han
. He walks over and sits down. He puts his head on the mat. He drops off.

“Ömer, Ömer, get up!”

He stays silent as the tenant shakes him and sweeps him away, dragging him down the stairs. Now they are standing in front of the truck. She says:

“You have anything to say, Ömer?”

“Nah, what would I have to say, nothing!”

She presses two pale twenty-five notes into his hand. She has come into some cash, then. Ömer looks down at the money.

“Whore’s money, man. Screw it,” and he spits on the ground.

The streets of Galata are waking up to the smell of rakı.

I came often in the summer to sit in the garden of this little coffeehouse, and so no one thought it strange when I walked in that evening through swirls of snow and an angry northwest wind. The coffeehouse was in a quiet and secluded neighborhood. The bare branches of the willow trees that made the garden so charming in the warm months were now coated with snow, as was the vine from which three or four dry leaves still dangled, and I was so entranced by the scene I had just glimpsed that I reached over to the misty window and rubbed a patch clear, and there it was again, that bright white glow rising from every root, and the air tinged with violet. Night fell so quickly that the violet was gone before the lights came on inside. As the proprietor set the loveliest of his tulip tea glasses on my table, he said, “It’s beautiful here in the winter, too, isn’t it?”

He gestured at the snow that had settled over his blue chrysanthemums. “If I knew the old men weren’t going to grumble, I’d leave the lights off longer, but then, who knows, they might start snoring.”

The lights in the coffeehouse had snuffed out the snowlight. I looked around me. There could not have been more than seven or eight others in
the coffeehouse. The flames were licking the little lid of the stove whose right-hand side would soon, I knew, be molten red. Next to me were some men playing backgammon. For a while I watched them. And occasionally I would wipe a patch of the window clear, and press my forehead against the glass to gaze at the scene outside.

Leaving home that afternoon, I had been struck by the sudden silence, and by the great snowflakes falling into it: taken by the urge to walk, I turned away from the avenues that were certain to be crowded, and where I might run into friends; wishing for a place less frequented, where the snow might be left to accumulate untouched, I had boarded a tram and come here. But along the way the weather had worsened, the northwest wind had grown fiercer and the large, wet snowflakes had begun to mix with hail.

I turned to the proprietor.

“Do you have today’s paper?” I asked.

He pressed a newspaper into my hand. Though my thoughts now turned to the day’s rumors, I continued to dip in and out of the conversations around me. These were the usual desultory discussions about how hard it was to make a living. Now and again a door would fly open, sending in a great gust of wind, and a man would blow on his hands as he crossed over to the stove. Once he had warmed himself, he would find a perch somewhere, or lose himself to a daydream, or join two men who had been perfectly content playing backgammon by themselves, and, despite their protests, become their unwanted third.

A number of grave-faced middle-aged men joined the old men on the long divan. I was a long way away from them. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could see they were at peace. For the longest time they sat there in silence. And then a moment arrived when I realized that no one had come into the coffeehouse for quite some time. The proprietor’s little clock was facing the other way so I couldn’t read it. More time passed.
More people left. At last the proprietor turned his clock around for me. It was half past ten. I was feeling so drowsy that I couldn’t summon the energy to get up and go. Sensing that I would be on my way soon, the proprietor said:

“If you live nearby, there’s no hurry. We’re open till one. Do you really think you could find a better place than this?”

“Oh, all right,” I said. “Make me another tea. With a slice of lemon.”

Just then a man came inside. He was blanketed in snow. Even his eyebrows and eyelashes were white. He walked over to the stove. Swept off the snow. Collapsed into a chair. He was young, this man, very young. The snow melted to reveal a round, white face.

All conversation stopped. The backgammon players in the corner slammed the wooden box shut and left. The silence grew deeper.

I examined the young man. He was sitting in a chair, staring straight ahead. The old men sat still and solemn on their sofa. In their eyes I could see a touch of malice. The proprietor was sitting in front of his stove, his head between his hands. It is a terrible thing to sit in a public space in silence. Ten minutes passed and still the fearsome silence continued.

The young man kept throwing his left leg over his right, and then his right leg over his left. He couldn’t seem to make himself comfortable in that chair of his. From the waist up, he looked like a student at an exam. A student shifting in his chair and then looking up, to make sure the examiners hadn’t seen his crossed legs beneath the table. One of his shoes was a scrap of old tire covered with red patches; he had tied it to his foot with a piece of string. On the other foot was an old gym shoe that gaped open like a fish, with its sole swinging.

The silence continued. I kept hoping for someone to say:

“The devil passed.”

Or:

“A girl was born!”

And then we would all laugh.

But still no one spoke. Once again, I turned my gaze toward the new arrival. It was not his face that drew me now, but his forehead. It was blank and unlined. He wasn’t wearing a jacket. Instead he wore a loose, collarless shirt, white lined with black. Over this he had wrapped a bulky, dirty white sweater, held together in the front with a hook needle.

By now my curiosity had got the better of me. I sat there, unable to move.

Just then the coffeehouse door opened and another man walked in. He went straight over to the old sages.

“He’s called for you,” he said. “His mind is still clear but I’d bet my life on it, he won’t last till morning. He keeps going in and out. Ali Ağa, he’s asked for you. And you, too, Sergeant Mahmut. And if you want, you can come, too, Hasan. He was very fond of you.”

The three elders rose to their feet. Though they did not so much as glance at the young man seated by the stove, their eyes somehow managed to bore into him as they passed. It was as if they were deliberately looking away from him. He watched them go, his large eyes pleading.

The proprietor had not offered him so much as a glass of tea. When he came over to take my own glass, I said, “Make the poor boy some tea. You can put it on my tab.”

The proprietor shut his eyes and opened them again, giving me the oddest look. Then he walked away, to get the young man his tea, I thought.

As he passed before him, the young man jumped to his feet. He stood right in front of the proprietor, who circumvented him, still refusing to acknowledge his presence. As he walked off, the young man said:

“It’s my father, isn’t it? He’s dying, isn’t he?”

The proprietor said nothing. This was a hateful, evil, painful silence.
Then the ice melted. But his answer made no sense to me, and it hurt the boy.

“He’s not your father.”

The young man said nothing. He rushed to the door, suddenly full of purpose, but couldn’t get it to open.

The proprietor said, “I hope you aren’t thinking of going home. Your aunt’s son is at the door waiting for you, and he’s ready to kill you.”

The boy paused to think. He had lost all resolve. His face dissolved in confusion. Driving himself through the wind that was trying to hurl him back inside, he left.

For a time, I kept my questions to myself. The proprietor had his back to me. He was making a lot of noise washing something. I waited for him to finish. But whatever he was doing, he was taking his time. At last he turned around.

“For God’s sake, tell me what’s going on!” I cried.

As he removed his apron, the proprietor seemed to search for words.

The door opened. Another young man came back in, an old man at his side.

“I gave him his blessing. Has the other one slipped away yet?”

The proprietor’s hands were behind his back, clutching the ties of his apron. Instead of untying them, he did them up again. He came over to my table. It was as if he thought I needed to hear what he had to say.

“Kamil Ağa, the driver, he’s just died. That dog you saw over there by the stove, that was his son. But he took his sister down the wrong path. His father cast him out.”

Then he turned to the other men.

“He has no honor. He says so himself. But not out of remorse. He came back hoping for his inheritance.”

One of the old men arranged his face to show that he was impartial.

“Even if he showed remorse,” he said, “there would be no forgiveness.”

I have no idea why I asked the question that now came to my lips. Why I didn’t pause to consider what effect my foolish words might have.

“What happened to the girl?” I asked.

Then something strange happened. Without so much as lifting their eyes, these men exchanged glances. No one spoke as we sank into a very different sort of silence.

Without lifting their eyes, they challenged the silence, and its stillness.

“Why did you ask?”

“What was the point?”

“Was that the only thing you could think to ask?”