A Useless Man (19 page)

Could we imagine the postman uttering the very words I have just set down on paper? I ask because he never did. But just imagine that he had. Imagine his voice, hissing like a serpent. Imagine the cold, jaundiced glint in his lying eyes. Imagine all that and you can see the listener bidding the
postman goodbye, and going off to repeat the story, and not just the story, but the fidgeting. The hissing voice. The gaze. That much you would agree. So now that I am ready to write what remains of this story – beyond the episode that cost me a cigarette and a lemon soda – allow me to indulge in a modest preamble, in which I’ll reveal the secrets of my trade. From now on, I shall write in such a way as to stir you to ask, “And how do you know all this?” How I know such things I decline to say. But I can’t stop myself from saying this: maybe I live with this man. Though I won’t say that maybe he’s me. Say if I were to write, “Alone in his room, he scratched his head.” You might ask me how I knew that, or if I had seen him do it. Or if I were to say, “He wakes up in the morning with a heavy heart.” What a ridiculous line that would be! You might ask, “Are you this man? Stop playing games! Enough! How could you ever know how the bastard feels?” You have every right to lose patience … Please forgive me. I shall make the same mistake many times over in the story I am about to tell. I can no longer remember if I mentioned the remarkable affinity I feel for this man. But there is one last point I’d like to make before proceeding to the heart of the matter; though this man is a kindred spirit, I have no real connection to him. I am simply setting down what our inquisitive postman and others like him have told me. So if that much is clear …

Like the postman said, I don’t think he’s avoiding people. But surely there’s a reason he spends so much time alone … He himself might not know the reason why. As the postman pointed out, he doesn’t seem cut out for life on an island, surrounded by water on all sides. He belongs in the city, surrounded by throngs. No one here in this little place would ever talk to such a man, let alone drink rakı with him; people might befriend him early on, just to learn a bit about him, but then they would peel away, leaving him alone with his dog. No one bothers him. So let’s leave behind what the postman had to say and turn to the barber:

“It’s love that did this to him.”

So what’s this man’s problem? You cannot pretend he’s just like you or me. The fact of the matter is that this man talks to his dog! But then again, we hear of people speaking to walls, and their personal effects, to their dreams, beds, and mirrors. Some even talk to their neckties. Young girls speak to their hope chests. Young men speak to their own bodies as they make love. We know all this.

Then we have the poets speaking to women with no names, conversing with the stars and the winds, addressing lakes and distant lands and migrant birds and clouds drifting two thousand meters up in the sky. We have the fishermen, prattling away to their boats and rods and fish … but in these parts, when a man speaks with his dog, he becomes the object of ignominious gossip. Personally, I am not convinced that love made this man the way he is. For me, there’s nothing unnatural about him at all! But I am alone in this, I regret to say … No doubt the man’s not quite in his right mind … Here is my theory, for what it’s worth: people don’t much mind that he talks to his dog. What bothers them is his reluctance to speak to anyone else. And well, how shall I put this? These people spend their lives pouring their hearts out to each other. When anyone backs away from them, they thirst for answers …

Back to the rumors.

It seems that he owns two stores in the city and that he collects rent. He keeps the books for a tradesman involved in some mysterious business located who knows where. This tradesman is cut from the same cloth: he doesn’t speak much, shuns society; and he’s also a bachelor. They rarely say more than hello and goodbye.

Then there is this story:

They say that once upon a time there was a young woman he’d chat with on the ferry. There are even those who claim to have heard this eighteen-year-old girl speaking intimately with this man who was more than twice her age. They even heard him singing to her. Word finally reached the
young girl’s father: he gave her a stern warning, and there the friendship stopped. Sometimes they would both end up on the last boat back to the islands, but now the poor girl goes straight back to sit with her two friends. After wandering along the decks for a spell, he heads to the prow, there to whistle a soft folk song. Though he was known for never greeting anyone, he would always greet this girl, and – strange as it might sound – she would greet him …

But the fact is, they never really exchanged more than a few words: “Hello,” and “How are you?” and, “I hope all is well with you.”

So that’s all the gossip I have on the man. That’s all anyone knows. But there is one creature on this earth who could reveal to us his deepest secrets. And that, my friends, is his little dog. A bright-eyed dog with a wet nose, and a golden coat that flutters in the wind … Now this dog belongs to him, not me. I mention him here only to make a point. Unless the dog is a figment of my imagination, at least in part? The fact is that the poor man will never manage to make the small creature understand how he lost his illusions, and let his fears get the better of him, to be left all alone. Dogs are not, and never will be, creatures of the word. If they want to show their owners some affection, they lick their hands and dash about wagging their tails. But here’s what I know from my imaginary dog:

“He got up early that morning. I heard a soft whistling, and I raced over to him …”

I suppose if I let the dog tell the rest of my story things would take a turn for the worse … The long and the short of it is that I decided one day to make friends with the man who sat on that low wall every evening, smoking his cigarettes, lost to his own thoughts. I walked over to him:

“Beyefendi
,” I said. “If you don’t mind …”

“Oh, but of course,
efendim
, please sit down.”

I lit a cigarette. I sat down beside him. As I stroked his dog, he felt the need to speak first:

“You’re an animal lover?”

“
Beyefendi
, I adore them.”

“Truth is I was never very fond of them. But I’m quite used to them now. This one’s mother once belonged to an old lady who ran the little hotel I used to live in. Long before this one was ever born. The poor woman died. Her dog stayed with me from then on. I was very fond of that lady. Then some time passed. The dog died. It was a girl. This one here’s a boy. Back then someone wanted to take him away and I was going to give him up. But I kept him as a memory of his mother …”

That evening we didn’t share anything more interesting than this. Neither of us understood politics, nor did we have any interest in the subject. We could do little more than confirm each other’s beliefs: which is, of course, to say we talked politics. When I got home that evening, I couldn’t understand why the postman was so interested in this fellow. He was the most ordinary man in the world. Even the wealthy shopkeeper who lived across the road was more interesting than him. Wouldn’t you agree? His thoughts are mired in olive oil, green beans, flour, and garbanzo beans; he’s rolling in money, his children go to the famous schools and take dancing lessons and wear expensive clothes … And his daughter – she speaks such beautiful English! She graduated from a private college, no small feat! How pleased that’s made her father! How proud she’s made him! He’s more than happy to tell you the whole story: how he came here all the way from Chios to work as an errand boy at a corner shop, how in time he took over the business, how the owner continued to stop by to see him now and then, and how one day he offered his own daughter’s hand in marriage … His life, as he tells it, has been one long, thrilling ascent. Up and up he went, achieving one miracle after another. But how could people seeing only his tiny little shop in the fish market have any concept of the enormous storehouse just below? The Kurd at the door is impenetrable. The same could be said of the bleak iron shutters of the Byzantine warehouses
beyond. Everything’s there in that tangled, medieval labyrinth where the carts pile up one on top of the other and porters walk along dark, oily conveyor belts, shouting as they go. The shopkeeper is fair-skinned. But his wife is olive-skinned. So, can that blond and honey-eyed son really be hers? He has a classic Grecian nose. And broad shoulders. He reminds his father of Alexander the Great. Yani Efendi is a well-educated man. He adores his son. His daughter, too. He’s so very proud of her English. But in Greece they are dying of hunger. In the coffeehouse he seems despondent. At home with his wife, he’s driven to tears. Sipping his coffee, he says, “Why not buy five, ten kilos more than we need and put them to one side, my sweet Eleni. You just never know!”

But that’s as far as I can take Yani Efendi’s life story … My fault entirely! As tired as I was, I still managed to retrace his steps. I was like Balzac, plotting the life of a perfumer. But you can’t really expect me to burst into the man’s home and compose a great novel, rattling off details of a place I’ve never seen.

But never mind. What I meant to say was that Yani Efendi had me so intrigued for a time that I forgot about the other one, the man with the dog, who once upon a time had kept everyone guessing – even me. Had I cared to do so, I could have joined him any evening on that little wall and drawn him into yet another tiresome conversation, from which I might have learned all manner of things. But no, I’ve had my fill of oddballs. No good can come of them! I’m saving myself for the ones who rejoice in life! This man hardly
has
a life … He has no one but his dog. He speaks to his dog and no one else. Bearing that in mind, let’s return to the postman’s observations:

“My good sir, this man has never once treated another man to a coffee. But please, let’s step into this gazino here and have a cup of coffee together. Oh, the things I could tell you about him … You could never imagine …”

“Some other time, some other time!”

I couldn’t be less interested. It’s Yani Efendi I want to know about now. I’ve just become friends with his son.

But five days on, he’s beginning to wear on me. He does have his charms, if only he’d stop talking! Now I can talk as much as any man about films and dances and poker games and women’s legs. But with this one, it’s the same every night! There’s no harm in it, I know. But one evening he takes it upon himself to mimic a matinee idol, a certain John Payne. Now I might enjoy speaking to the man himself, were I in America, but what business does this John Payne have, talking to me in Istanbul? That was our final conversation. These days, when we see each other, we just exchange a few laughs. In a few days, we won’t even do that … Meanwhile I’ve more or less given up on the idea of writing about the life of Yani Efendi. I’ve gone back to the man and his dog. Good that I took a long break from him. His shyness must have got the better of him that first time. But this time he even offered me a cigarette. And then, just for my sake, he scolded his dog:

“I was really beginning to worry about you. Where have you been, my friend? You just disappeared.”

“Just a little cold, but it kept me in bed for the week,
beyefendi
!”

“You’re feeling better now, I hope?”

Then he told me how he once caught a cold that simply wouldn’t go away. But even so, he couldn’t keep himself out of the sea, and so he’d spent the entire summer sniffling. Here was this man, who’d told his own dog he never laughed. But today he couldn’t stop! It seemed to me the dog was flashing him a funny look: no doubt the result of a long chat with the postman!

I suppose it’s time I told you more about the postman. As I’ve already said, I found few failings in him, beyond his habit of ferreting out other people’s secrets – tidbits about their little failings and predilections, the sorts of things that should never go beyond four walls.

Is the postman a good man or is he not? What do I care, either way?
All that matters is that I can’t help liking him, even though he gets on my nerves. He has this infuriating habit of planting himself three paces behind me, and staying put. No chance of talking to anyone else after that. There is little I have to say to the world that I can’t say loud and clear, but when I see this postman sitting there, drinking in my every word, I can’t help myself. I fly into a rage. I forget whatever it was I wanted to say. Whatever it was, I just wanted to say it slowly. And then I remind myself: “The bastard can take two words out of a sentence and add twenty new ones, and come up with a whole story, so watch out!”

This is, in fact, what happened: We have a mutual friend named Ahmet. He rents a room for the summer season from Mademoiselle Katina. The other night he went for a swim. Two friends of his were speaking about it just a couple of feet away from the postman:

“You know Ahmet from Katina’s house, well he went for a swim in the sea last night despite all that wind. He told us to come in too but …”

From this the postman extracted three things exactly: “Katina, Ahmet, last night …” And this is what he said to his barber:

“Now hello there, barber! How about helping me get rid of this rubble? But listen to what I have to tell you. You know Ahmet, who stays in one of those houses on the hill? Last night he took off in a rowboat with none other than Katinaki, the daughter of the famous chocolatier. They rowed all the way over to Heybeliada. Then they hopped into a phaeton and it was off to Çamlimanı! I watched them from that promontory. First I saw them rowing across the channel. Then, a little later, I watched them make their way along the lengthy shore road in a lit carriage. I swear I saw that phaeton with my own two eyes. The driver was waiting for them in Abbaspaşa. Oh! How sweet it must have been, Barba. You’ll remember it rained yesterday. You know how sweet it smells in that pine forest after it rains! But who will ever know the scent of lavender in Katinaki’s hair? Oh lord! Barba, it’s
enough to drive a man mad! As for this Ahmet Efendi, he’s not bad looking himself, is he? What eyes he has! Thin as a whip, too! Let’s hope he wasn’t too hard on that delicate Katinaki!”