A Useless Man (9 page)

It’s evening. I know it is when the lady shuts the wooden blinds over her patisserie windows. There’s a soft yellow light inside. She’s switched on the electricity. Salomon puts a candle on his crate of oranges and the man who sells salted bonito plugs in a three hundred watt bulb. He slices red onions; they are the color of cyclamen and they shimmer as alluringly
as lipstick or nail polish. Salted bonito! They conjure up the inner thighs of a voluptuous, olive-skinned Greek woman!

When ladies of the night want to be left alone, they step out of the
meyhane
with their misfortune and slip into my street to sidle up to me. Oh my miserable street!

There are two
meyhane
with live Turkish music on Street Number One. Taxis idle outside while drivers and prostitutes wander between the cars. Someone once told me that car antennae aren’t really lightning rods put there to take a sudden bolt, but I was still fooled when I first saw them, the bright metal rods flashing white like lightning in the rain.

That tiny little tail on the back of an enormous beast of an automobile; I love that menacing and maniacal twitching. In the rain I stop in front of my tripe soup restaurant, pull my hat down over my ears and watch with what I imagine must be baleful eyes the people passing, and I pretend I have just been dropped into this neighborhood from a distant land without women, and am now searching for the one with whom I can share my sorrows.

Ten minutes later a man much older than me walks past. He’s a burly fellow with a gray moustache, and though he has a full head of hair, it’s gone gray. A driver spots him and says:

“Hey there. What’s up?”

“Hello there, boys,” he says.

Then he rattles off a few lines of dusty verse. When he’s moved on, a driver says:

“He’s an educated man, but twisted. Has a weakness for the young ladies. The younger and more wretched the better … What a fool!”

The educated man heads for the nightclub across the street. A little later, I head in after him. He walks toward the musicians and sits down right in front. He’s a clean, well-dressed man, his hands, his hair, and his moustache are immaculate. He can’t be more than fifty. There are one, two, three, four,
five women in his booth. The sugar daddy levels his eyes on the youngest. They have her order him a drink and they bring him a pomegranate cooler with four or five drops of rubbing alcohol. They bring him one more. The man calls out to a coy girl with sweet round eyes and whispers into her ear before he begins to drop off. He falls asleep, his elbow propped on the table, but every now and then when the violinist in dark glasses strikes up a solo in a screeching that blends perfectly with the band, cutting through the soft chatter of the women, he moans, “Allah, Allah.” The waiter Bekir told me how he rests his head on the chest of the girl he’ll eventually leave with and how until then he sleeps there and weeps and sings and recites verse. Never more than these five things (for example, he never laughs). Then he goes back to sleep. Now he’s deaf to the cries of the infamous brute from who knows which part of town, who flashes into the joint like lightning and screams at I don’t know whom; he’s still fast asleep when the
meyhane
proprietor – who hails from the Black Sea – moves in on two gangsters, throws them into the street and smashes the window front of a rival club. Some nights he even misses the young goliath who barges into the place with the rain and the snow, and (out of courtesy, perhaps, or just to make himself look important) sets up one of the chairs reserved for the tired, old singers to button up the trousers of a plump horn player, whose cheeks and neck and hair and moustache and coat collar are all soaked in sweat, who then proceeds to produce the most god awful screech on his thin little horn. The horn player is the last act with the band. He comes out around eleven, heaving his body about on two thick, short, fat legs. He takes off his velvet coat, tosses it in a corner of the room and salutes the blind violinist. The drummer whispers something to the blind violinist who cuts off the horn player’s salute. And the zither player’s taut, freshly shaved and alum-smeared face, hardly visible behind the singer, suddenly collapses into a million crinkles. The horn player sits down. Shouldn’t there
be buttons on his pants? Or have they popped off because he’s so fat? The tassels on his green scarf dangle out of his fly. Some notice and laugh and the nightclub proprietor signals to him with a wink and a nod. Embarrassed, the horn player stands up, turns his back to the audience, takes a few moments to adjust his pants, sits back down, looks around the room, then pulls a cigarette case out of his pocket. It seems like he might roll a cigarette – but no, he pulls a reed out of one of his horns and puts it away. Then he takes out another one, surely the best one, or rather he pretends to be taking the best one out just for this night. That’s when I always leave.

I haven’t been anywhere else in Istanbul for seven years apart from this street. I’m afraid. I’m worried that I might get beaten up if I go further afield, or robbed, or lynched, and who knows what else – just the thought of leaving these streets fills me with confusion. Anywhere else, and I feel out of my depth. Everyone looks so frightening. I wonder who they all are, these people on the streets. The city is so huge, and everyone’s a stranger. Why do they even make these cities to pack in this many people, when people don’t like each other anymore? I just don’t understand. Is it so that people can deceive and humiliate and murder each other? How can it be that so many strangers would wish to live in the same space?

If nothing else, a neighborhood is still a neighborhood. My shop could burn down, and I could go hungry. But somehow I have confidence that the man who sells me tripe soup with lots of lemon every afternoon will serve me until I die. And Saloman will keep handing me a bruised orange or two when I pass by, and to the half-dressed Jewish children on the street. My clothes might be old and ragged by then, they might not let me in, but the lady will still serve me a coffee at the door.

These are pipedreams, I know, but they show you how much I love my neighborhood. I don’t want to see anyone else anymore, most particularly old acquaintances. Sometimes I run into one of them passing through my neighborhood.

“So finally! So this is where you’ve been hiding, is it?”

I lower my head and look down as if to say, what’s the problem with that?

“People always said you could have ended up anywhere …”

The former friend will add:

“But damn it, you’re still drifting, aren’t you?” It’s not about giving up the idle life, it’s about giving up altogether, but I can’t explain that to him. Some say:

“I know the deal, you rascal. You’re chasing someone …”

The truth is, I’ve even stopped chasing after myself. But I still love that dark Jewish girl, the carpenter’s friend, the one with the dark spot eyes, and the voluptuous hands. I can only dream of the other warm and sweet-scented corners beyond her legs.

Yesterday I decided for no reason to venture outside the neighborhood. I went to Unkapanı and then up to Saraçhane. Istanbul had changed so much since I’d last seen it. I was dumbstruck. But enjoying myself, nonetheless.

Clean asphalt, broad avenues … What a splendid aqueduct – from a mile away, it looked almost like the Arc de Triomphe from a whole mile away! The Gazanfera? Madrasah just beside it: so bright and white and charming. I visited one park after another, to take refuge under the trees. And as I wandered fearfully through the city, I saw people, people everywhere. I walked as far as Kıztaşı. I started down the hill from Fatih. Now I was in Saraçhane. I looked up and saw workmen on the top of a building they were demolishing. There used to be a hamam around here. That must be the building they were tearing down. I felt an overwhelming desire to go to a hamam.

Well, it seems there’s no harm in saying it, seeing that I’ve already embarrassed myself enough: I hadn’t washed in seven years. In all that time it never even crossed my mind. But now I was itching, a terrible itching all
over! I thought I had fleas. So I went into the hamam and I washed, oh how I washed! I washed off all the years of caked filth. I felt much better when I was done. But the sweat, so much sweat! Everywhere I rubbed I was sure to peel off bits of skin, grease, grime, or whatever it was. I was shocked at how much grease and grime a human being could carry. My skin was positively caked with it.

I left the hamam and got on the tram, thinking that I’d go home and then back out to Teşvikiye and the surrounding districts. But once my head hit the pillow I fell asleep and slept for a full twenty-four hours. I woke up the next day at two and hurried out for a bowl of tripe soup.

“God praise, Mansur Bey, you look the picture of perfect health,” Bayram said.

I couldn’t tell him I’d been to a hamam. I asked for soup without garlic. Then I went for my stroll. I was in Maçka by nightfall. A different world entirely. Back home I promised myself I wouldn’t leave my neighborhood for another seven years, but it didn’t happen that way. Something was making my head spin, and for the next two days my life made no sense. Can you guess what I got to thinking? That I’d sell our store and my apartment. And you know that nightclub I was telling you about, the one with the live music? And that girl working outside taking orders, you know the one with the small forehead. Well, I’d take her as my lover. And a year after that I’d die.

I’d jump on a Bosphorus boat one day, taking my seat on one of those benches at the back, and somewhere near Arnavutköy or Bebek, I’d stand up, check to make sure no one was looking and, if I was alone, I’d climb over the railing and jump into the sea.

The church was just across the street from us. It was hemmed in by pines, which at twilight would sink into shadow, leaving the brick walls of the church to glow red and hot against a dark blue sky. Often we’d see a crow or a poet seagull landing beside the cross on the roof, which, lacking a bell tower, had been restored many hundreds of times by Greek master builders of the Orthodox faith (or others oblivious to it), and at times like these it seemed more like the home of a Byzantine feudal lord than a church. It wasn’t an ugly building, but it wasn’t pretty either. It had only one main dome; where there should have been smaller domes, there were holes and crenels that looked like gutters. By day it all looked rather crude and tired, but when the evening blues and greens turned dark enough to seep into the color of the tiles, the church looked so close you almost thought you could reach out and grasp the cross on the top and pull away the entire tableau, without so much as frightening a bird away, to stencil it onto a dark blue background in your notebook or hang it on your wall, to savor forever after. That’s how the church looked to me on May evenings. As a child I was always trying to get those evenings onto the page, perhaps I lamented the fact I wasn’t a painter or a child putting stickers in his notebook. The bell
tower was in the front yard, though you couldn’t really call such a thing a bell tower. It had two bells: a big one that rang on the days someone died and a small one that rang to announce ferryboat and prayer times to the village. I first saw Papaz Efendi sitting cross-legged with a black hat in his lap on a board between two pines, a little behind the bells. His beard was pitch-black, and so were his eyes. He was wearing a raw silk shirt that he seemed to have slipped into without using his hands. It shimmered in the sunlight. The greasy tufts of hair hanging over his forehead gave him the look of an unruly child.

“Hello, sir.”

“Hello, Papaz Efendi.”

“How are you, sir? We’re neighbors, I believe.”

“That’s true.”

Whenever he flashed his bright teeth beneath his black beard, he suddenly looked less Orthodox, less Byzantine. Having shed his churchman’s mask, he would take on the delightful aspect of a workman relishing a meal.

“Tell your mother I’ll be tending the garden over the winter.”

“I’ll tell her.” And I did.

Early next morning I found Papaz Efendi tilling the garden with a spade. His long raincoat hung over an apple tree like a scarecrow. He had pale, muscular arms and long, white fingers that kept a firm grip on the spade. Leaning over, he picked up a handful of dirt:

“I love the earth for its quiet, its humility, its passion, its peace. The earth is the source of all life. How could anyone be more alive than the earth? That’s why they say we’re made of the earth.”

“So you’re a philosopher, Papaz Efendi?”

“Oh I’m not a philosopher and I’m not a priest. I’m a human being without any earth to call my own. Or home, or religion.”

“Religion?”

“In a way, absolutely. But if there’s a God, I suppose He created us to live. On those terms, I can accept Him.”

He paused.

“But let’s forget all that. Think of the earth …”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Sixty-three.”

“What?”

He stood straight and tall: There wasn’t a pinch of spare flesh or flab on his body; well proportioned and straight as a rail, nothing he didn’t need.