A Useless Man (3 page)

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.

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.