A Useless Man (22 page)

Did he know how beautiful he made everything he touched? Would he be so humble if he did? If it had been his apprentice Hristo, we would never have heard the end of it. “Now that’s one of
my
walls,” he would have said. “Rip out a few stones and it’ll still be standing.” But Barba Antimos – he never said a thing.

Now he lives with Diyojen in one of his own houses, but every couple of days he comes down to drink milk with his old friend and compatriot, Pandeli Usta. Some mornings I see him drinking milk in Pandeli’s dairy shop. Draining his glass, he smiles as if his face has been caressed by a mountain breeze. And his eyes look pure enough to drink; they look like milk. Barba Antimos never breathes a word of his sorrow. But I’ll tell you.

For forty years now he has carried a secret, a bitter and unspeakable secret. For forty years now, he has been pouring his grief into his walls. And some evenings, when I lean against them, I can feel them shuddering, shaking, trembling.

The snow had already begun to fall when we walked into the theater. When we came out the square was covered in snow. A drop fell down my neck into my shirt. I shivered.

“Get your hand out of your mouth. Don’t bite your nails,” I yelled, and a couple walking ahead of us turned around.

They slowed down to get a better look at my face. I felt as lonely as I always did when he was with me. He’d come on Fridays. And the pipe-smoking plaster-cast sailor would be there, waiting to greet him.

The sun on the oilskin curtain made it exactly three. When I was absolutely sure he was coming, I’d let myself doze off. When he pounded on the door like he was scrambling up it, I’d hear it in my dream. I’d jump out of bed. I’d open the door. And there he’d be, ashen-faced, and breathing through the mouth. He’d pull a cigarette off the table and light up.

The world was far away. Here there was a cabinet, a mirror, a sailor cast in plaster, a bed, another mirror, a telephone, an armchair, books, newspapers, matchsticks, cigarette butts, a stove, and a blanket. The world was far away. There were planes in the sky.

Inside were passengers. The trains were running, too. Some brute signs a piece of paper and another gives him money. An evening coolness had emerged. And now the evening simits had come out into the world …

A simit vendor’s call floated through the room. The world was far away.

A ticket collector is stapling tickets; a man and a boy are poring over a newspaper. A strong young man is stretched out on the bench. A good-looking, powerful young man with dark eyebrows. To my right lies an emaciated creature with his hands stuffed in his pockets. The boy has stopped reading. His overcoat is rolled up under his head. He’s stretched out, too. I’m in the lower cabin of a ferryboat.

It’s Friday. School’s out. We live on Kirazlı Mescit Street in Süleymaniye. I’m around seventeen. I can remember the pine tree at the Münir Pasha Konak. That enormous pine in the high school garden that probably burned in the fire. The frescos in oil paint on the ceilings of the Münir Pasha Konak have long since turned to smoke and ash. The bedbugs burned, too. My bed and my blanket and my tears, all burned: the pools burned; the evergreens burned; memories, those memories burned; that sunburnt boy burned; the books that brought me here, all burned.

I have to find some imitation sheepskin to sew into my overcoat.

It’s Monday. I’m in the ferryboat’s lower cabin again, and again it’s snowing. Again Istanbul is ugly. Istanbul? Istanbul’s an ugly city, a dirty city, on rainy days especially. Are other days any better? No. They’re not. On other days the bridge is covered in bile. The back streets are covered in rubble and mud. The nights are like vomit. The houses turn their backs to the sun. The streets are narrow, the merchants cruel, and the rich indifferent. People are the same everywhere. Even those two asleep on the bed with the gilded frame – they’re not together. They’re alone.

The world is filled with loneliness. It all begins with loving another human being, and in this world, it ends the same way.

It’s so beautiful, Alemdağ. So very beautiful. And at this time of day, with those trees – they’re more than fifteen meters high … And with the waters of Taşdelen and the serpent … But on winter days the serpent’s in its cave. Let it be. The weather’s mild in Alemdağ. The sun rises through the trees’ scarlet leaves. Warmth descends from the sky in bits and pieces, piling up on the rotten leaves. The Taşdelen is a thin little stream. We refresh ourselves with a jug of its water and listen to it burbling through us as we undress and wash ourselves. We frolic in the water with all the other creatures who have come to drink here: a rabbit, a serpent, a blackbird, a partridge, and a goat that has escaped from Polonezköy to toast to our health.

And when the serpent cries “Panco, Panco,” the goat, the partridge, and the rabbit freeze as if they’re cast in plaster. And they’re white as plaster. I pull a sharp knife from my pocket and cut off a few noses; the others I slash just below the wing. Once the blood is flowing, they come to life again. They leave me and run off to Panco.

I can see Panco’s smile sliding toward the scar on his angry, bloodless face. He kisses the partridge on its beak and tugs the rabbit’s whiskers. A serpent coils around his wrist. He’s brought a ball, a football. I’m the goalkeeper. The other goalkeeper is the serpent. The rest are stretched out over the leaves, playing in the sun. For hours they frolic. When the ball flies into our goal, the serpent and I stand to the side and watch: We’re spoiling the game.

It’s so beautiful, Alemdağ. So very beautiful. Istanbul is covered in mud. Its taxi drivers keep driving through puddles, heedlessly splashing water over pedestrians. And heedlessly, the snow keeps seeping inside us.

A woman hurls a cat from the fifth floor. A woman and a foreign man stand over it.

There’s a light stream of blood running from its nose. The man says:

“Il est mort d’hemoragie, le pauvre.”

The cat was tossed from a fifth floor window, the woman tells me in Turkish. We push the cat closer to the thick, high wall behind Galatasaray High School; by now it’s clearly dead. The woman on the fifth floor throws coal into her stove. The weather’s so cold. If only it would snow. Even when it snows, there’s some warmth in the air.

When did Panco get back from Alemdağ? Here he is, walking past me. He’s with a friend. He acts as if he’s sidestepping a dead cat. Our arms graze against each other. Walls open. People hold grudges for years, but if they both feel the same way, they kiss and make up and say enough is enough. I turn around. Panco is still walking down the street with his friend, laughing. The pool of the Munir Pasha Konak was reduced to ash but the slimy green water is still there. You can’t see the bottom, but when I close my eyes now I can see the glimmering ten lira coins. Once we gave our friend, the future governor, fifty
kuruş
to jump into the pool with his clothes on.

Panco took his friend to a coffeehouse I’d never heard of. It was on the first floor of a building at the back of a little courtyard, this coffeehouse. Beside the front door was a little shop selling aluminum pots and plastic cups. When I saw them stepping through that door, curiosity got the better of me. I walked in behind them. I looked up, and there was a glass door in front of me. Beyond it was a large room filled with people playing backgammon and cards. There was a pool table in the far corner. Everyone looked up when I walked in. It must have been the sort of place with a regular crowd, because each and every one took a long look at me. No question of sitting down and ordering a coffee – it would be living hell. So I pretended to be looking for someone. Our friend Luka was there, at least. He was a mason, a painter. I could ask after him. He wore glasses. He was a Greek citizen, but really he was Albanian. I’d ask the owner about him. Then I saw Panco shielding Luka, with his own face averted. Then he looked right at me as if I were someone he was expecting, someone from long ago. He
attempted a smile. Curse you, you cuckold. I turned around, but before I left, I glanced over my shoulder. Again, I could see his overcoat’s fur collar.

I felt better when I saw the fur. I cast my mind back to the rabbit, the partridge, and that warm and beautiful, wondrously slippery serpent. And the blackbird. And Alemdağ. And the waters of Taşdelen, and the rotting leaves, and the white sun hanging over them, quivering like jelly.

Surely you’ve heard some of the names Istanbul has given its neighborhoods? I can’t praise them enough. They’re sublime, truly sublime. Preposterous some might be, and misleading too, but, oh, the images they conjure up! Memories come flooding in so fast I begin to wonder if it’s a film I’m watching, here in the darkness of my mind.

Before you even shut your eyes, you see a mill churning water in the orchards of Dolapdere, and in each orchard, a well with an enormous bucket and an old workhorse with a scarf wrapped around his eyes; you hear squeaking as water drips from the bottom of a bucket; you hear clattering chains, as the mill horse’s muscles twitch and sunlight dances in the water flowing through the wooden runnels. The workhorse pauses, then picks up speed as a gardener cries out in surprise, and then we see the bright pink heels of a barefoot Albanian girl, and cucumber flowers in a coiled red moustache, and swirling cigarette smoke as an angry gardener in his fifties lights up; and a brazen bitch with a dark nose and a dark mouth and a wet tongue that is a shade of pink we rarely see anymore – but we see the fur on her back in hackles, and her tail circling angrily in the air …

You can reach this neighborhood from anywhere in Beyoğlu and go as far as the bus station, but I took the most enchanting route of all: I walked down through Elmadağ.

Elmadağ is on a steep hill. Its houses stand upright in neat rows. Strolling down through this neighborhood you will find neither apples nor mountains – just a pavement long since crumbled. Now you’re in a poor neighborhood. You see little makeshift houses of wood, stone, sheet iron, and cardboard. You see naked children and coffeehouses stripped bare – no mirrors here, or straw, or chairs. People mill about in the neighborhood square and their accents tell you where they’re from. Someone says:

“Brother, ain’t your girl in the factory?”

Another:

“Hey there, Rüstem, they fire your olive-skinned girl again? She’ll be out on the street selling trinkets.”

This neighborhood is as noisy as a festival – everywhere you can hear drums, wooden horns and fiddles. Old men sporting dark moustaches and thin trousers wander the streets, and their women make your heart jump with their pungent scent. In the mud you can see the tracks from last winter (no not last winter, a winter long before that) and horseshoe prints unwashed by the rains that fell the day after Mehmet the Conqueror took Constantinople. There’s a sharp reek of ammonia along the base of the wall. It stings your eyes as you continue down the hill, past a printing factory that is busy churning. Most of the young men in the neighborhood work there. The miserable unpaved streets surrounding it stink of pulp, ammonia and Moroccan leather. This is Watermill. When you’re back on the asphalt you can walk on to Yenişehir. Aghia Vangelistra looms like a feudal castle on the right, and in the evening, on saint’s days, the great church is alight with candles and chandeliers, and when you look inside you half expect to see counts and dukes in powdered white wigs dancing the polka with princesses in low-cut gowns.

Hundreds of Christian girls from here come of age in Beyoğlu, toiling away in all the shops: tailors, barbershops, nightclubs, clothing shops, patisseries, bars, seamstresses, furriers and cinemas; their brothers become the city’s masons, painters, jeweler apprentices, lathe men, button salesmen, carpenters, joiners, and master locksmiths. Maids and servants begin life here, too.

You run into all sorts in this neighborhood: remorseful pickpockets; heroin addicts just out of the hospital; fortune-tellers; Balkan immigrants from 1900 and 1953; old-world thespians; handsome young toughs with bob knives; petty crooks, con men and gigolos; mothers pimping daughters and husbands seeking customers for their wives; the smell of lamb cutlets, hunger, rakı, love, lust, good, evil, and the opposite of every word.