A Useless Man (23 page)

When night falls you hear whispering on the dark corners, and on every street, sweet nothings in Greek …

When it rains, it floods here first, and when other neighborhoods in Istanbul are steeped in the cool dreams of an evening summer wind, the leaves on the trees in this neighborhood are still. The coffeehouses and tavernas of Yenişehir are big and beautiful and the square is drenched in light and the smell of roasted intestines, fried mussels, oysters, scallops, red radishes, parsley, fried liver, wine, fish entrails and rakı. Here you see outrageously passionate men in their fifties wearing bell bottoms, pointy shoes and red sashes. Their hair is stuck to their foreheads, and their only forays outside the neighborhood have been to prison.

He must have been fifteen when I met him. He wasn’t Yani Usta yet – he was just a boy. A dark-skinned boy with dark hair, dark eyes, dark legs.

And me? Well I was a grown man. Why should I lie – I had no money, no job. I didn’t know a soul in the world. There was only my mother. I had no one else. Yani Usta’s twenty now, and I’m pushing fifty. But he’s my only real friend. The way he can splash those walls with oil paint! It’s amazing, just amazing. But to me he’s still that dark-skinned boy. He’d put his brush down, and he’d be gone. Sometimes it was a football match, sometimes a movie. Sometimes it was a coffeehouse for a game of hearts.

If I happened to flitter through his mind, he’d come and find me. If I didn’t, he wouldn’t bother.

“Why look for you, Granddad?” he’d say.

We had this quiet beer hall. A place where I would go and sit. And think, and think. What have I done for this world? What have I seen? Why am I here? Why do I have to leave at all? What have I done?

It’s warm in here, but I still feel the chill from the snow outside. It’s six o’clock and the place is still empty. The waiter has gone into the other room. The clock on that wall can make a man nervous, and drive him to drink.
Should I wait for Yani Usta? He won’t come if I wait … And will he come if I don’t? There’s hope. There’s hope when I’m not waiting.

He’ll come and sit down across from me. What will I say to him? What will he say to me? I can never remember. Later I’ll make something up. He says this, he says that.

There are regulars here at the beer hall. There’s this one fellow who comes and sits by the window. He opens a bottle of soda. He pours in a double shot of rakı, and then a single shot. He orders a plate of dried fruit, a plate of grilled kidney, and maybe an omelet.

Yani Usta comes in. His forehead is in knots. The girl’s dad is giving him five thousand lira drachmas. They say she’s pretty enough. He knew her already but this time he was at their place for tea. “Why don’t you dance with her, Yani!” the girl’s mother says. “I can’t dance for the life of me,” Yani Usta said, “and even if I did, you can be sure I wouldn’t dance right now!” The woman still wanted to close the deal. “Talk to my dad,” Yani Usta said.

So it looks like Yani Usta won’t be coming here anymore to share a beer or two. “I shouldn’t be seen in these kinds of places for a while,” he says. “There’s five thousand lira riding on this.”

“Oh, Yani,” I say. “Those were the days! Just the other night you were a scrawny little dark-skinned boy. Now you’re all grown up. And I’m the granddad. The beer hall is the old beer hall. The tables the old tables. The world a different world. But you’re a different man. And I’m still the same old granddad. Yani Usta! I’ll always see you like you were way back when: a dark-haired, dark-eyed little devil. Remember how we’d go to the movies together? How you’d go wild sitting next to me – clap your hands, slap me on the back?

“
Viresi
,” you’d say, “did you see that? Check out that spy. See what he did? With just one punch …”

That movie theater’s gone now, too. The one with all the mirrors. On
rainy days, it stank of people and clothes. There in the first-class section, surrounded by all those boys, my heart would almost burst with love; every face was beautiful; every boy was kind; every hand was small, dirty, warm, and calloused.

Days went by and things took a turn for the worse. The drink was taking its toll. You grew up, enough to take those five thousand lira drachmas. Do you at least love the girl, Yani Usta?

“She’s a woman, isn’t she, Granddad? How could I not?”

“That’s right, Yani Usta. Women should be loved, it’s only natural, I suppose, but I love children more than women because I’ve always been a child at heart.”

“Don’t you love me?”

“You? How could you ask such a thing, Yani Usta? You? I love you very much.”

“But I’m no longer a child.”

“You are to me.”

“If you still thought of me as a boy I’d never forgive you. I’d never let it go. I’d never speak to you again, ever.”

“You’ll invite me to the wedding, Yani Usta?”

“What is it with you? Of course I will.”

For a moment we are silent. Then he asks me something and I’m not sure why:

“You go to theaters and stuff like that, don’t you? Bring me along one evening.”

“Sure, whenever you want,” I say.

We agree on Monday night. I go to the sales window early and buy the tickets and leave. When I get back Yani Usta is waiting for me, all dressed up. He’s come all right but the tickets are for the following night. There are no performances on Monday.

“Yani Usta, there aren’t ever plays on Mondays. These tickets are for tomorrow night,” I say.

“Never mind, just give me my ticket,” he says.

We drink four beers each and then we go our separate ways. The next night I am at the theater at eight. He still isn’t there. The bell rings. The curtains close. Someone comes in and sits beside me.

Yani Usta isn’t coming; he’s sold his ticket.

He’s pulled one last childish trick on me. And it’s a good one. But how strange I feel, how lonely. I’m always going to the theater alone, and usually it’s fine. I like it best when I’m sitting on the upper balcony, and the theater is almost empty. Tonight’s performance is probably the worst I’ve ever seen.

So what’s up, Yani Usta? Where were you tonight? If you didn’t show, well, you didn’t show. So what? When I see you in the street, you’re still that little boy beside me in that movie theater with all the mirrors. That doesn’t mean I can’t feel something like a steel fist, wrenching my heart. But enough about that! Don’t take it so seriously. It’s nothing! Don’t get upset. Forget it, Yani Usta! Just flash me a smile when you see me. Don’t get upset – that’s the last thing I wanted. What’s a night at the theater anyway? Nothing, damn it! Not when there’s friendship in the world. That’s one thing that hasn’t died.

They all have beautiful eyes, and when they’re still alive you might imagine their scales on a woman’s dress, or pinned to her breast, or dangling from her ears. Forget diamonds. Forget rubies, emeralds, and carnelians. There isn’t a gemstone in this world that can outshine these scales.

If they could, women would waltz into ballrooms flashing this living iridescence; fishermen would be millionaires and fish would have all the glory and fame. But the moment a fish dies its scales go dull, until it’s as gray as an old doll. Unless, like the fish in this story, it had had no burning, shimmering scales to lose. The poor thing had no scales at all. The Dülger is olive brown with a light, faint touch of green. It’s the ugliest fish in the sea, with an enormous, toothless mouth that glistens translucent white, like nylon. It spreads open wide the moment it surfaces; and once its mouth opens it never closes again.

Did I say that it’s a dirty olive brown? And as flat as a pancake? Did I say it has two dark spots on either side that look like fingerprints?

Once upon a time the Dülger was a terrible sea monster: it wreaked havoc on the Mediterranean long before the birth of Jesus Christ. After
which the Greek fishermen began calling him
Hrisopsaros
, Christ’s Fish. Woe to the Likyan who slipped overboard. Who knows how many Carthaginians the Dülger dragged into the sea, how many Jews it tossed up into the air? It sliced them and diced them and chopped them into bits; it threw them in the air and poked them and stabbed them. It pummeled and battered them and tore them into pieces. The Dülger was the most fearsome creature in the Mediterranean, and pirates, undaunted by man, beast, lightning, rain, misfortune or torture, turned white upon hearing its name.

One day Jesus was strolling along the seashore when he saw a group of fishermen abandoning their boats. He could see that terror had gripped them. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Oh Lord,” they cried. “We’ve had enough! Enough of this monster! It’s dashed our boats and ripped our people to shreds. And the worst of it is that we no longer dare go out to fish. We are doomed to go hungry and die.”

In his humble robe, Jesus stepped toward the sea that was the raging Dülger’s domain. Pinning the largest between his long fingers, he pulled it up out of the water, and, pinching it tightly, he bent over and whispered something into its ear.

And from that day on, the Dülger has been a meek and rather miserable creature, its frightful appearance notwithstanding. For the Dülger is covered in protrusions that might be mistaken for nails or files, or chisels, adzes and saws. There are even bulges that resemble pincers, and there are thorns of all sizes between its bones. Surely this is how the Dülger came to be called the woodworker fish in Turkish.

Its motley collection of tools is covered by that membrane you might take for clear nylon. It is paper-thin and gets a little thicker, a little darker, toward the tail, which is much like that of any other fish.

The instant a Dülger bites your line, it’s at war with the world and the
sea. We can only imagine its fear. It has already left its world behind. Even if it breaks free from the line, it’ll just lie there flat on the water’s surface, its wide eyes staring mournfully. Then you’ll pull it up into the boat and for many minutes you’ll listen to it wail. Oh, that moan. Only the Dülger and the Red Gurnard give out this pained cry. As they lie dying on the boat, they wail and gasp. When a net falls over a Dülger, it is fury incarnate.

One day in front of the fishermen’s coffeehouse, I saw a Dülger hanging from an acacia tree newly blooming with white and red blossoms. It was dark brown, as if it had just come out of the sea. And it seemed entirely still, as lifeless as a stone. But I thought I caught its paper-thin membrane quivering over all those tools, as soft as silk. I’d never seen such a dance, yes, that’s what it was, a dance: it was the dance of an invisible inner breath. But the body was lifeless, utterly lifeless: only the membrane was trembling, shivering with pleasure and delight. This was a dance of death. It was as if its soul was leaving its body in little breaths, slipping through its paper-thin membrane, leaving not so much as a whisper behind.

You know the way a ripple will cross the surface of the water on still summer days. That was how it looked to me. But the fish was dying, so perhaps these were tremors of pain. Perhaps we would prefer not to know. It was, after all, an extraordinary way to die. Did the fish believe it was still underwater, swimming happily along the sea floor? Night had fallen. It could feel the sand tickling him. The eggs were there and the male seeds were swaying in the waters above, or so it thought. It was seized by a moment of lust. Then, to my horror, it slowly began to fade, casting off its color, turning ghostly pale. Or did it just seem that way? Was it really changing color? No need for me to take a closer look – I knew I was right.

The edges of its membrane along its sides began to quicken the dance and from one second to the next turned even paler. I could sense the fear in its heart, a fear that we all know: the fear of dying.

Now it knew. Its life at the bottom of the sea was no longer. Its flat body would never again drift through the currents, or bury itself in dark waters and green seaweed. It would no longer wake in a cool light showering down from the surface, or splash its tail about in the dance of green and blue daylight, casting off its seeds before racing to the surface. No more dozing in the iridescent seaweed, no more rubbing that set of tools against barnacles for a good cleaning. It was all over.