Читать книгу The Aziz Bey Incident - Ayfer Tunc - Страница 7
ОглавлениеA tragic event occurred at Zeki’s tavern one night. Zeki roughed up Aziz Bey and threw him out. No one could quite remember how it began and what happened, but everyone went around making far-fetched claims. Some said, ‘Zeki started it’; others objected, ‘No, Aziz Bey was as drunk as a skunk.’ Some found fault with the patrons, and others said, ‘It wasn’t worth blowing out of all proportion.’
A few hours after the incident, Aziz Bey went home. He sat for a while in the light of a blinking bulb that settled over the room like a grave illness, and with eyes brimming with tears that just could not fall, he looked at a shattered moonlight reflected in the dirty waters of the Golden Horn and frequently obscured by clouds. The last thing to pass through his mind was the memory of a very short, but very happy time: three days spent in a hot city, blue as far as the eye could see, shaded by palm trees, dates, and other, taller palms. That happiness suddenly changed to sorrow and this was reflected in his face. The sunken old face that had given up hiding the entire suffering of a lifetime full of mistakes seemed for a moment as if about to cry, and stayed that way.
There was no one to softly close his lustreless eyes in the hours that stretched towards the morning of that cold and rainy night. No one to open the fingers crossed over each other like a childishly peevish sign, no one to place his arms as light as a bird on either side. He had slumped into his armchair. The spirit suffering inside him drifted out. He had come to the end of a ruffled life that left a fond memory in very few hearts, and found peace.
It’s all over now. The streets stretch out like a giant awakening, and as night falls on the city the locals of those streets still miss him. Gafur the mussel seller asks Boğos the Agos-seller* about him, Boğos asks Tayfur the lottery agent, and Tayfur asks the hip amputee Ibo, who sells single cigarettes out of the pack. Even Dark Hacı, who sells prayer beads and fragrances on Ağa Mosque Street, looks for him with eyes whose whites are too bright. The locals of those streets miss Aziz Bey – whose secret sorrow they did not sense for years – swaggering down the street in his thread -bare stage costume with purple satin collar and cuffs, carrying his tambur in its faded black case.
The street was orphaned.
Bahri the clarinettist contends what took place that night in Zeki’s tavern was a tragic incident. Far better for it not to have happened. Zeki went too far. Of course he was right, but he should not have manhandled Aziz Bey. On the night of the incident, Bahri returned home, lay on his bed and pondered. He didn’t know what he thought and why, but he sensed Aziz Bey was different, and that ‘such a man never deserved such treatment.’ That night sleep escaped him; just as he was about to get up he found what he was looking for: it occurred to him that Aziz Bey was a dusty souvenir of the days when his musician companions counted among respected folk. That’s when he ached inside intensely. Bahri is someone who had seen those good old days; he knows the proper way to behave with good manners. He knows very well what loyalty means. If it were not for the memory of those days, he would lose the meaning of life completely.
Mercan the darbuka player, when asked what happened said, ‘I didn’t see, I don’t know, I was in the bog, whatever happened, happened then.’ He wasn’t in the bog or anything in actual fact, he simply didn’t care one way or the other. In fact, he had sort of seen what had happened, but said to himself, ‘Who cares?’ Mercan doesn’t have the soul of a fellow musician. As if the skilful hands that beat the darbuka were not his. His mouth may sing, If the end of this love affair is going to be painful,but his mind is elsewhere. The day he parks his minibus in front of his door he’ll bid farewell to his night-time partners. All he can think of is a blue minibus.
As for Davut the waiter: he saw everything, he knows it all. He’d been secretly anticipating this for days, after all. A nasty piece of work by nature, he’s treacherous, venomous, and loves trouble. Even with nothing untoward he says, ‘I can feel something bad is going to happen one of these days.’ He is innately evil. The one who speaks out of turn most and makes mountains out of molehills all over the place. He laughs with Zeki to his face, and dances attendance on him because he’s the boss; but when he feels that Zeki has passed from merrily tipsy to drunk, he fills a bag with bunches of bananas, blocks of cheese, lamb chops by the rack, and takes them straight home.
However much Zeki says about Aziz Bey, ‘I was right, I’d had it up to here, that pillock had buggered up the business!’ he has grown listless since that night; he looks on the verge of tears. Something inside he can’t pin down aches intensely. Some days he thinks it is his stomach that is aching, on others, his heart. He closes the tavern, goes home and sits in front of the window. He looks at the lights sliding like fireflies into the city’s night, trying to discern where Aziz Bey’s now extinguished light might once have burned, and asks his wife, ‘But was I wrong Mukadder?’ his eyes brimming, ‘Who’d do a thing like that?’
And all his wife replies, unthinkingly, is, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Zeki, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, of course you wuz right,’ stretched on the bed, her hair spread out on the pillow, lost in contemplation of the clinking of the gold bangles that cover her right wrist. But no amount of vindication can mollify him; the ache inside does not go away.
As if passing slowly into the sun’s shadow, like evening falling unnoticed, Aziz Bey passed from a bright, happy face to a sorrowful one. He acquired a sorrowful past. His nose was always in the air, his head held high. Even if he had not managed to live any other way, he realised that evening, while staring at the dirty waters of the Golden Horn, that in fact he had always made this assumption. Yet he had been gravely mistaken. And again, he realised his life had been nothing but one big misconception.
He went through the streets that resemble no others, where blood-shedding rage and maddening indifference, stone-hard pain and hysterical joy, tragic births and ridiculous deaths, venomous hatred and feeble love, cats and dogs, the crooked and the straight, white and black live together as brothers and sisters of the same parents but tear each other to pieces never -theless; streets that are too complicated to be understood by those of the respectable life façade, and that resemble a brief summary of the enigma called life. He went, he turned round and came back. His relatively short life was quickly spent on a speck of earth populated by those who fed on one another.
Without knowing all this who could know who was right, and who was wrong?
In actual fact, Aziz Bey should have been seen doing his tambur taqsim at the Palace Night Club in his black costume with purple satin collar and cuffs begun by a lachrymose tailor years earlier for a famous stage artist, but left unfinished when he went blind. Aziz Bey used to run from one nightclub to the other; running being a figure of speech. He never ran; more like he could barely keep up with the offers. He swaggered, his nose always in the air, his glance always on the horizon at a lofty point that no one could see. After a great deal of reluctance, he was good enough to oblige with his tambur those waiting patiently to hear his art. Producers would queue at his door during the Izmir Fair. Even if not the most important singers, the next most important ones used to phone Aziz Bey to ask him to back them, and if that didn’t work, they would ask through a mediator. He would leave them all waiting at his door. There was a spirit in his playing; his plucking of the tambur was extraordinary. It was like nectar to those who listened. And he’d always been grumpy, too. But he had such a compelling attitude and manner, and a look that said ‘I know what I’m doing’ that those very capricious singers with painted blue eyelids, teased blonde hair, flirting in sequins, tulle and feathers, swallowed their tongues in his presence.
The truth of the matter is that he never harboured a youthful passion to become a tambur player or anything like that. It was fate that pushed him down this path. At some point in his long and blurred story the tambur stuck to his hand. He was a little flighty, resembling a bird in spirit. He was a dapper lad too and quite handsome. He was constantly falling in love with married women nearing middle age with a penchant for escapades, with broad bosoms and wavy hair. His passion would quickly pass like a soft breeze springing up on summer evenings. Women would send him ridiculous letters wet with tears, written in an uneven scrawl full of clichéd sentences of passion. He would read and then discard them all, laughing as he read them.
He would meet and part from women over and over again under the acacia trees in country tea gardens with wooden chairs. Then? Then nothing... A pack of ladies’ cigarettes forgotten on the table was all that remained of almost every woman. After smoking the last cigarette in the forgotten pack, the woman would slip from his mind and disappear. He would not even remember the women he had left without even a backward glance. Those women would look out for his coming, go to the places where they had met and wait for him; they would keep thinking about him and shed tears at night in their beds: did he care? He expected such a passion from life, one that would suddenly hit him like a slap, stupefy him, paralyse him. A love that hit one like that was what Aziz Bey called ‘passion’. Becoming a tambur player was the last thing on his mind in those days…
His grandfather used to play a little, in actual fact. Not just a little, he played pretty well. He died before his time, and the tambur became a family keepsake. Aziz Bey’s father did not appreciate its value. Not that he’d ever cared to know what it was that permeated its strings. But even so, he didn’t have the heart to break and throw away this sole memento of his father; a man who spent his life not being able to say no to anyone, being pushed around, and taking refuge only in the tambur. He put this poor dejected musical instrument away on top of the cupboard.
When he was still just a bleary-eyed child with a runny nose who turned the house upside down, Aziz Bey found the dusty, forgotten tambur where it had been left, on top of the cupboard. After that he never put down this strange toy that was several times taller than himself.
Just for fun, he would keep scraping the bow across the strings. When she heard the tambur’s sad tone, his sorrowful mother, usually up to her elbows in water with washing soda, would call to her son in pathetic agitation. ‘For goodness sake son, put it back, don’t let your father see...’ Even though she couldn’t cope with a son who wanted to play with the noisy toy all day, the poor woman managed each time to take the tambur away from him and hide it just before his father was due home. When Aziz Bey had grown a little older the tambur quietly passed from his mother and father’s room to his own.
Aziz Bey’s father was ill tempered; even if there were any delicate feelings chiselled deeply into his soul, he would not let anyone see them. His wife put up with a lot from him. The permanent frown, a fist continually brought down on the table because the food was salty, the shirt not ironed, the bread was stale; the bass voice reproving at every opportunity... But still, at night when all was quiet, when he was boozing on his balcony that almost glimpsed the sea from the slopes of Samatya, his face revealed an unexplained sadness, and he would hum those old, delicate songs that were in his head,
Who graces your beautiful rose gardenWho pleads kissing your feet…
Aziz Bey would contend his father hadn’t been able marry his true love. Not true. As Aziz Bey had written himself, he had also rewritten his father and his grandfather. There were times when he rewrote a whole lifetime. And he ended up believing it all. After his father was dead and gone, when total loneliness had finally replaced the resentment he felt, he gave his father the benefit of having finer feelings imprisoned in a corner of his heart. In actual fact, his father had married his mother out of love, but was always burdened by life, always struggling to stand upright. Instead of being a downtrodden, submissive child like his extremely sensitive and continually oppressed father, he wanted to be as hard as stone and aloof. That’s all there was to it.
As for Aziz Bey, he was a mixture of his grandfather and father; both sensitive and emotional, and yet stubborn and headstrong. And since two proud tightrope walkers tried to walk the same rope, he was in constant strife with his father. His father, a clerk at the courthouse, who shaved even on Sunday mornings and who wouldn’t step into the street without a hat, wanted his son to study to be a judge, a prosecutor, or something of the sort, but Aziz Bey was always too frivolous. Dark covered books, frowning teachers, and classrooms with windows painted halfway with grey gloss paint distressed him. Wherever there was a useless, entertaining, fleeting job he went after it. He went on kicking a ball around football pitches until his leg was injured. For a few consecutive years he was a lifeguard at the Florya beach; he liked the appreciative looks of the girls who came to the beach in convertible cars. When he developed a passion for driving, he worked a shared taxi on the Bakırköy-Taksim line. He spent the few piasters he earned at taverns and brothels. Whatever his father did, he did not study; it was his father who gave in first.
But these were teenage years, which always pass so quickly, and so did. His father retired, he began to spend the remainder of his colourless life between home and the coffee house. He suddenly went into decline. He was not able to remember the names of his friends or keep track of things. He owed money everywhere. As he sank into debt his worry and his anger grew. Aziz Bey had just come back from military service; he realised then that fleeting jobs wouldn’t earn you a decent crust; one had to hold down a proper job. He was a good-looking lad with a smooth tongue, and his father had a wide circle of friends, so he joined a firm trading in gravel. His mother and father, seeing that he got up early and went to work and returned home in the evening at the right time, began to cultivate hopes that their son would grow up and become responsible. However, this routine did not last for long. As he began to work head down, shoulders stooped saying, ‘Yes sir, no sir,’ in this gloomy, low-ceilinged office smelling of sweat, tar and onions, with its two small windows looking out onto dark heaps of sand, it began to hit Aziz Bey’s day-dreamy head what a hard struggle life really was. On Sunday mornings, when his father was not at home and he tried moaning to his mother, his mother always used to respond, ‘Perseverance my son, perseverance…’ He certainly was not going to persevere. But it went against the grain to ask for pocket money from his aloof, obstinate, white-haired father. Even if he didn’t persevere he worked patiently through the day, longing impatiently for the evenings.
It was at that time he began to frequent the taverns that opened wide the windows of his expansive soul, and that thrilled his insides as he touched the strings of his musical instrument. He was still on bad terms with his father. They did not even have dinner together any more. As soon as Aziz Bey left work he’d go to the tavern where his tambur would be waiting for him, have a table set with rakı and meze and would sing, accompanying his older musician friends,
Even if you pale and fade you are still a rose-pink mouthIf God should have a blessing for me that’s you.
He’d smile thinking of Maryam, convinced by now she was standing and waiting by the window as he passed her door every morning, and believing that he’d found the love he was looking for, since every glimpse of her shook him as if he had been slapped.
Aziz Bey’s tragedy begins with Maryam: simply because he fell in love with her. This love like a blind eye, a paralysed right arm, a heart missing a beat, always gave him pain but lived on with him.
It would have been all right if only he had been able to think of Maryam as one of those broad-bosomed, teary-eyed women on the list he kept when he was a teenager. It would have been all right if it were just a sexual desire that had stirred inside him, if he had looked at Maryam’s body as fresh as a sapling hastening to grow, as a very thirsty person looks at a frosty glass of water, if he had just been content to desire that body. But Aziz Bey looked into Maryam’s eyes. That eyes were dangerous, he under -stood only after Maryam. If he had not kept thinking about her eyes that spoke, if he had not flushed to the tips of his toes when he saw her, if his knees had not shaken, his tongue had not stuck to the roof of his mouth, Aziz Bey would have been a man like everyone else.
What would have happened if he had been a man like everyone else? Nothing… But perhaps he would have lived longer. Perhaps he would have aged by rotting gradually, become bent and would have forgotten the song, Months pass and I’m still waiting for you to come. He would have married a woman who talked incessantly and grew fatter by the day. He would have left that semblance of an office and joined a largeish firm. He would have earned more money, each month he would have got hold of pen and paper and drawn up long accounts and each time decided to give up smoking. He would have had twin boys whose heads he would have clipped for always breaking windows playing ball, and whom he would have wanted to study to be a prosecutor or a judge, or perhaps he would have had a girl. He would then learn that his daughter had slept with all the young lads in the neighbourhood, and this would have caused him great anguish. However, he would have been so entangled with life that he would pretend he didn’t know. Feigning ignorance would not offend him; he would not question why it had not offended.
If it had not been for that touching thing he thought he had caught in Maryam’s eyes, that dripped like a bitter draught into his heart, Aziz Bey would have died one day slumped over a steel desk with a sheet of glass cut for the top, filling in the same old ledgers, because life would have ordered him to work on, even though he should have retired long ago.
And so he would have lived a life like everyone else.
But that’s not what happened after Maryam. Aziz Bey, who was spoiled by the appreciation of women whom he scorned, was transfixed one day by Maryam’s black eyes, deep as a well, looking out from behind a net curtain. ‘I was as good as bewitched’ was how he described that unforgettable moment to those who at the time he was very close to, most of whom are now no longer alive. It was as though what he experienced at that moment was not love but a divine call. What he saw was not a pair of eyes but the first sign of a strange destiny calling him to a warm but dark and mysterious world. That this world was poisonous, he realised much later.
And yet, it’s impossible to rule out the role fate in his story. If he had not worked in that office, if the way to the office had not passed in front of Maryam’s house, if Maryam’s family had not lived on the ground floor of that shabby apartment, if that pair of well-like eyes that he had fallen in love with had not been at home all day sitting in front of the window (she had left work because her boss had gone bankrupt), none of this would have befallen him.
But what had befallen him? It was just a love gone wrong; that is all. Whose life doesn’t contain an unhappy love story? However, Aziz Bey’s unhappy love story permeated his whole life like a road of no return, an illness that somehow never got better. As Aziz Bey tried to catch the mistake, he walked towards the mistake as though walking towards a yellow leaf that the wind continually blew in front of him, he just could not catch it.
Whenever he thought about Maryam he felt a sweet coolness on his tongue. A feeling tasting of peppermint roamed inside him. Then a long lasting bitterness would take its place. He always avoided remembering the time preceding this love, the moments of indecisiveness whether or not to begin, those most delectable moments, the dreamiest stage. In fact he was right to want to forget. As he remembered, he remembered how his life had changed its course and how he had been crushed under the load of a weighty misconception.
Furthermore, in the beginning theirs too was a love like everyone else’s. But fate obstructed it from progressing like every -one else’s. From chance meetings, ostensibly returning from the market as he left work; bashful smiles as their eyes met; the dropping of notes with meeting places written on them; they progressed to brief meetings out of sight that in time became longer. Kissing, making love… Cinemas were visited, boxes reserved; there was swimming at Kilyos; caramelised milk puddings eaten at pudding shops with marble tables. The house was left with little lies. Loitering in vain in front of post offices when the other couldn’t leave the house…
It would have been all right if it had carried on like this.
If Maryam’s family had not decided to go to Beirut in search of a living, this everyday love would have stretched like chewing gum and perished; what with moods, jealousies and quarrels, it would have run its course and each of them would have put it down to a youthful passion. An Aziz Bey crossed in love would have caused trouble in the taverns, gone round wreaking havoc, philandered a little longer, settled down with time and would have married a suitable girl that his mother would have found for him. The same would go for Maryam. She probably would have married a clumsy, ineffectual, cowardly shoe-seller or meze cook, who first checked his safe as soon as he opened his shop and who dozed on the sofa at night. She would have had a summerhouse on the Islands. On starry, hot summer nights she would not be able to sleep for thinking about Aziz Bey, his body full of life. Maryam would very likely be richer and would not even live in the same district as Aziz Bey. Perhaps Maryam would catch a glimpse of him while out shopping one day and be made giddy by her old love, she would walk around her house for a while like a zombie…
Anyway… That’s not what happened. Maryam came from a poor family. Her uncle Artin, a furrier, had settled in Beirut a while before. Maryam did not know that her father and uncle had been corresponding for some time and that her uncle insistently summoned her father to Beirut, to be his dependable assistant in this foreign land. One Sunday evening, her father announced his decision. They were not getting anywhere in this country. He was fed up of working himself to the bone. That is why the whole family was to go to Beirut and share in uncle Artin’s work. Although that night Maryam cried until the morning thinking of Aziz Bey, she was quickly seduced by the postcards, photographs, the smartness of her cousins and the happy smiles that came from Beirut during the week following this decision.
Maryam used to say, ‘It will only be a few months before we come back, my father won’t be able to cope there.’ She convinced Aziz Bey too. She indicated a vague departure date – today or tomorrow – but never a precise day and time, making it obvious she did not want to say goodbye.
One morning, when Aziz Bey least expected it, as he was going to the office, a horse and cart suddenly appeared in front of him in the street where Maryam lived. Goods sold to the rag and bone man were being loaded onto the cart. He took shelter in the shade of an apartment at the top end of the street and watched the armchairs, coffee tables, thin mattresses, quilts, tinned copper pans, samovar, and even old coats and winter boots being loaded onto the cart. His eyes brimmed with tears. Without moving, he watched the commotion of this family, a member of which was also the girl he loved, preparing to leave for a new country. Then Maryam, her mother, father and sister, hands akimbo, glanced at their home from outside, and loaded a few shabby old cases, tied tightly with washing line, into a chequered taxi. Waving to their neighbours, they got into the taxi with smiling, hopeful faces and departed.
That day Aziz Bey was hurt for the first time. Even if Maryam had not told him about her departure, he thought she would have been sad, tearful and reluctant; she would have turned and gone into the house a few times. In the image of departure he visualised, Maryam would sit, crying in front of the front door, her mother tugging her up by the arms, her father kicking the taxi’s wheels and shaking his index finger furiously at Maryam, while her mother stepped in front of her husband in order to stop him beating her, while her sister whispered in her ear, begging. Maryam should not have been able to get up and go at all, as she gazed towards the end of the street, looking for Aziz Bey.
That’s not what happened. Maryam, like the others, bustled in and out of the apartment, carried belongings, and never once turned her head to look towards the end of the street. Had she looked she would have seen Aziz Bey’s eyes filled with tears, his hurt, unhappy, besotted state.
Ruling out events such as his quarrels with his father and his grandfather’s death, this departure was the first disaster in Aziz Bey’s life. The subsequent tragic events were added to this first large ring and thus Aziz Bey’s life became a very long chain woven from sad times. The good and happy days in the interim were not able to change this melancholy mood one little bit. Whenever Aziz Bey looked back on his life he saw that all that was left from all those years that had been lived, were just a few melancholy and fractured stories.
If that departure, which felt like a nail being separated from his flesh, had not taken place, this love would not really have been love. Aziz Bey went crazy with love; he was too young. He thought that there could never be a greater torment than this and that he would end up dying in the streets deliriously calling Maryam’s name. However, he did not know that there are very few moments when the body does not betray the soul: no matter how much one would love to waste away and die after great grief, one cannot succeed. The soul struggles to rise to the heavens donning a black halo but the body is worldly; it eats, drinks and lives.
Aziz Bey did not die; he could not die, but he was no longer able to notice the looks of mature women who enjoyed escapades, hooked on his dark and sharp features; he could no longer read the desire in their trembling nostrils. He lost weight; he grew pale. While his mother feared that he would contract tuberculosis, his father knew, as did the whole neighbourhood, and was proud of the mass of love affairs. He thought that this too was a passing affair of the heart and did not take any notice, saying simply, ‘such things happened to me too, he’ll recover,’ and thereby reminding his wife of his former lovers and probably breaking her heart for the umpteenth time.
After this departure, Aziz Bey began to think that it was not worth believing in love and falling under its power. Just as he had decided to be more ruthless towards women, a long letter arrived from Maryam. It was sincere, touching and extremely romantic. All Aziz Bey’s views on love changed in a trice. Man needs to love someone, and to love passionately.
He began to write long and poetic letters to Maryam. His writing was atrocious; even he had difficulty in reading it. Every morning when he arrived at the office he looked with envy at the writing of the accountant filling unnecessary ledgers with beautiful letters; even though he thought about getting him to make a fair copy of these long and extremely private letters, he was too embarrassed to suggest it. So it took him several nights to write a letter. While the light in his room shone, his father muttered angrily remembering the electricity bills and grumbling in a loud voice, ‘If you’d had your light on that much when you went to school, you’d have become a somebody by now.’
Just as Aziz Bey feared that being so far out of sight would also be reflected in Maryam’s mind, he would receive a new letter; and strangely enough, those letters arriving from a hot and distant city did not become less frequent or shorter.
However, if Aziz Bey had paid a little more attention he would have been able to see in the answering letters, written on wafer thin pink paper with painstaking writing slanting to the left with the tails of the y’s rounded and tiny circles dotting the i’s, that these letters were based not on love but on an insatiable curiosity for what was left behind. If someone not in love read these clichéd lines taken from films and novels, he or she would have easily realised that Maryam was one of those women who took pleasure not in love itself, but in the devastation it left behind. But Aziz Bey did not understand this at all. In fact he was not altogether to blame. Just as Maryam was one of those women who took pleasure from the ruined lover she left behind, so Aziz Bey was one of those men who believed that there was no woman who would not fall in love with him. The countless women who had entered his life since his youth were the reason for his self-confidence. Of course it was impossible for Aziz Bey’s distant sweetheart to forget him.
Maryam’s letters always begun with the words, ‘your days spent without me…’ and were full of questions passionately picking at the sincere feelings of the lover she left behind. Yet there was the air of an experienced mature woman rather than that of a young girl who was forced to go far away and who was impassioned by a childish love. This sweetheart whom Aziz Bey imagined biting the top of her pen while writing letters full of innocent and inquiring questions, described in the same long letters everything about her new home, its magnificence and beauty; she wrote that even though it was very beautiful, they were, in this country as hot as hell, only able to breathe at night, that their situation was rapidly improving, and she invited Aziz Bey to this new prosperous country with very sincere sentences whose reality had not been tested.
‘You come too,’ said Maryam. ‘Without you, days drag on…’
As Aziz Bey received this heartfelt invitation he trembled, little realising these sentences looked good only on paper.
And so it was these invitations, written on pink paper that seduced him.
The expected happened at the end of a day when he was lost in thought over Maryam’s letters and postcards; he was fired. Hearing this, his father kicked him out of the house in order to knock some sense into this son whose lovelorn state had lost its charm. Actually, his intention was to leave Aziz Bey outside long enough to learn his lesson and so teach by experience just what life was all about. His own father had failed to do that, leaving his son lost in a moderate and harmonious world: and hadn’t that been the best thing to do? If he had been more of a disciplinarian, taken an interest in everything, in his son and daughter, if he had forced them to study, to grow into responsible people, would he have spent his life going to and fro between a run-down house and a run-down bureau?
The idea and the deed meant well was naïve. But what his father couldn’t have predicted was where it would lead.
His father was sitting in the coffee house playing rummy when, with still two hours until the end of the workday, Aziz Bey went sauntering past. He was still dressed up to the nines, but despite his neat and pressed clothes, there was something dishevelled in his manner and air, something flighty. He had taken off his tie and put it in his pocket. In this state that handsome youth looked like an idle child who had skipped school. He walked rolling a stone over and over with his foot as if life were just a carefree, light-hearted, merry game; he looked as though he couldn’t care less about what happened tomorrow.
His father grasped it at once. It was obvious that this was going to happen. He paled and his lips trembled. He asked the coffee house owner for a glass of water. He sipped the water down. Despite his plight he sat in the coffee house until evening, abandoned the game he was playing and thought about his son who, although a fully-grown man, was still frivolous; and this made him grow angry. He returned home at his usual time to find his son lying on the couch reading a newspaper and not looking particularly upset at being fired. He was taken aback.
He imagined that his son would stand in front of him at least a bit crestfallen, looking troubled, and find some excuse, however feeble, for being fired. He gave a little cough, bent his head and found an unaccustomed tone for his voice. He sat in his armchair in a way that was neither as harsh as usual nor as mild as not to be expected of him.
‘Why did you come home from work early?’ he asked.
Aziz Bey shook his shoulders indifferently while turning the page of the newspaper he was reading.
‘I was fired…’ he said.
This statement, that issued from Aziz Bey’s mouth calmly and naturally as though it were the most normal thing, immediately strained the atmosphere in the house. His father drew a deep breath and began to speak, growing angrier, with his voice rending as his anger grew. He said whatever came to his mind, whatever was on his tongue. As he shouted sentences full of insult at Aziz Bey, his mother became more anguished and looked from her son to her husband as if tongue-tied. There was an indescribable sadness in her face. At every biting word she shuddered as if she’d been punched, and shut her eyes tightly.
Aziz Bey was branded a rogue, a beggar and a good-for-nothing. Insulting sentences verging on curses reverberated round the walls of the room; yet a joy as light as an egg white that froths the more it is whisked, unexpectedly began to form inside Aziz Bey. The father, unaware of the letters calling his son to a hot country scented with a mingling of smells of spices, flowers and lemon, finally booted him out of the house. He told him that he was only fit for common brothels and the filthy streets.
‘Don’t stand there any longer soiling this decent and honourable house!’ he said, ‘Get lost!…’
At that point, his mother had covered her face with her hands. Aziz Bey quickly left the room and went to his own room. He filled the case that he had put on his bed and had looked at for days but somehow had not had the courage to fill, he, took his tambur and left. He had intended to say goodbye to his mother, but at the door he met his father.
‘Are you still here?’ said his father. ‘Haven’t you fucked off yet?’
Tears sprang to Aziz Bey’s eyes and he flushed. He looked at his father bitterly, and slammed the door with such force that the glass decorated with ironwork in a tulip design fell out with a crash. At that point, his mother, whose heart had been beating abnormally fast since the beginning of the quarrel, collapsed on the floor, no longer able to stand the burden of this disaster.
Aziz Bey, not even considering what he had left behind, was ready to embark, full of desire and strength, on a journey to a brand new home where his sweetheart awaited. As he left the house with rapid steps, he could feel his father’s eyes boring into the back of his head. It was as though he feared that his father would seize him by the shoulder with his strong fingers and bring him back to that deadly captivity, just when he was hurrying to reach the freedom he sought in faraway places and leave behind this neighbourhood, where he had been born and had grown up. As he went to the port seeking a ship to take him to a new life promising him riches, love and happiness, his father had taken his ailing mother in his arms, helped her into a taxi and was trying to reach the hospital in time, swearing on the way that he would never forgive his only and ungrateful son, and filled with a resentment so deeply rooted that it would never ever be eradicated.
There were ships in the port that day, but that the one destined for Aziz Bey was still waiting to weigh anchor twenty days later. After Maryam had written, ‘You, too, should come…’ he had secretly obtained a passport and inquired into travel by train and boat. As soon as he left home, his first job was to go to the port and stare hungrily at the ships that were to take him to his new homeland.
For twenty days, he slept in different people’s houses, stayed up all night in his regular taverns and killed time in the coffee houses. He avoided his own neighbourhood throughout. He went round to see his friends, said goodbye, telling them about his wonderful dreams as though they would surely materialise. Because his wasteful palms did not know how to hang on to money, he had not saved the necessary funds for his journey. He borrowed from here and there. He did not even call on his beloved aunt lest she try to reconcile him with his father. He talked to manning agents who recruited seamen and finally boarded a dry goods ship on the condition that he worked his passage.
As he recalled the image of his mother whom he had left behind, he waved his hand like chasing away flies; he wanted to drive away this image that wrenched his insides. Finally he reached the blue and white city so bright it dazzled the eye, far hotter than described in Maryam’s letters.
Those three happy days that he happened to be thinking about, sitting in front of the window looking at the moonlight reflected in the Golden Horn on the night of that tragic incident, constituted just a short fragment of this long period.
During the daytime, he did the heavy work shown to him by the expressionless seamen who were as hard as stone with skins leathered by a windy heat. At night, he played the tambur to allay the longing a little. Then he lay on the tarpaulin on the deck of the ship that rocked like a cradle over the foaming waters of the moonlight Mediterranean, thinking of the moment when he would meet Maryam again. What would Maryam be doing? What would she say when she saw him? Would she be at a loss for words? Would she jump into his arms for joy?
Sadly, he realised much later that he had thought about all this for nights on end in vain. Because the first moment of that meeting with Maryam who, as she had related in her letters, was working as an assistant in her uncle Artin’s shop, was extremely subdued, passionless, and even cold.
Yet neither was culpable for the cold and emotionless nature of that reunion both had so longed for. For a start, Maryam had written ‘come!’ on wafer-thin pink paper only after lying in her bed towards morning, exhausted from dealing with furs that burnt her arms and legs like pepper all day long in the city scorched by the sun. She had never considered that Aziz Bey really would be able to get up and come, and harboured a notion that this love, whose existence she found very romantic, would remain a childish poetic game played with letters.
That was the reason she had not been able to believe her eyes when she first saw Aziz Bey, who was thoroughly burnt by the sun while washing the decks during the journey and was in a pitiful and downtrodden state brought about by being in a strange country with no knowledge of the language or place. Furthermore, in place of the strong, protective, decisive young man she knew as Aziz Bey, rough even in his love, here was a poor creature, bewildered and lost like a puppy thrown out of home.
As for Aziz Bey; he was unaware of his distraught and timid demeanour. He had, however, kept his self confident, dignified bearing until the vessel docked; he had held his head high with frequent thoughts of Maryam. During the journey he had such a persuasive manner convincing those around him that he had a strong personality, that he had even impressed the sailors who had turned to stone from being all alone on the open sea. These steely-eyed, sharp-featured and callous sailors, who looked on the verge of cutting one another’s throats, could not refrain from swallowing before they ordered him to task.
But this proud manner that had permeated Aziz Bey’s body, his looks, and his bearing vanished in a trice in front of the fatal feeling of foreignness he experienced as soon as he put foot on land. His shoulders drooped and an inexplicable timidity settled in his eyes. He was rendered totally wretched by a deep regret when faced with the police who pushed and shoved him, speaking with strange, misty words and loud voices and looking at great length first at his passport and then his face. When he left Customs and held out the paper with the address to find Maryam to the taxi driver, he was really frightened of the days that awaited him. That was the reason Maryam was confronted not by an Aziz Bey whose look defied at the world, but by a crestfallen Aziz Bey ready to bow to any game fate would play with him.
Thank goodness this cool, subdued and strange moment of reencounter did not last very long.
Would it have been better for Aziz Bey if it had lasted? If it had happened in a different way: if Maryam had given Aziz Bey the cold shoulder, if she had said, ‘Just because I said come, it didn’t have to be at once,’ would Aziz Bey have gone straight back? Who knows? And then, what kind of Aziz Bey would have lived in the streets of Istanbul, it is not possible to predict.
And that’s not how it happened. After a few pointless questions, asked through her confusion, she realised that she had a lover passionate enough to leave his country for her, and the soft and happy expression given to her face by this treasure lasted a whole three days.
Luckily at that time they were alone in the shop. Maryam’s father, uncle and cousins were all in the workshop. And it was lunch time to boot. As the childish surprise on Aziz Bey’s face began to fade, Maryam looked around her. It was as though the city had melted under the heat, people had fled to shady corners like insects. Maryam, seeing no one about, embraced her passionate and faithful lover and kissed him on lips that were dried and cracked by the sun.
And it was this that destroyed Aziz Bey.
That passionate kiss they enjoyed the first day in the lunch break in the dim shop subsequently came as a big shock to Aziz Bey. He was not able to explain to himself how the girl who kissed him so passionately and who went around drunk with love for three days could change so much in one day. It was quite simple, however. For Maryam the only important thing was the existence of such a lover. It was not important whether it was Aziz Bey or someone else. So because Aziz Bey would never be willing to accept this explanation, he never even considered its validity. He looked for other reasons and he could not find any.
After looking long and deeply into Maryam’s black eyes that he had missed so much, after caressing her slim white neck, they left the shop, Maryam in front and Aziz Bey behind. Although it was well after midday the sun was too hot to bear; Aziz Bey thought he would go blind from so much light. The paradise he dreamed of was much hotter than he expected and very alien too. Maryam led him round a whole lot of streets: some narrow, some wide, some shady, and some strong smelling, their colours intermingled and cloudy, then decomposing again; hoarse voices, whispers, calls, bursts of laughter, blended with interjections; where huge moustached men slept snoring in the shade. When she finished the journey, they were in front of a small, mean hotel. Speaking in the broken words of a misty language, she took the key to Aziz Bey’s room and with confident steps took him upstairs, as though she knew the way. The room was so hot that Aziz Bey thought the walls would melt and run. Maryam closed the shutters of this small, dirty room, and the sweet gloom that enveloped the inside stopped the pain in Aziz Bey’s eyes.
Maryam came to the hotel every lunch break over those unfor -gettable three days that remained engraved in Aziz Bey’s mind. The image of the passion they enjoyed in the space of time so much longer than a long lunch break still seemed very short to Aziz Bey as the details were seared into his mind. His whole life was spent striving to tear, eradicate, scrape that image from his brain; he did not succeed. He was never able to remove this error from his being. For this reason, he lived an unhappy and irritable life; mostly angry, but sometimes as aggrieved as a motherless child.
Aziz Bey always believed he had been deceived by Maryam. Yet, if one discounted the sincere appeals in Maryam’s letters, one could hardly describe what he experienced as deception. In truth, Aziz Bey had fallen into the mistake of believing he was loved. This was all.
He spent the Maryam-less hours of these three days scarcely able to contain himself, waiting for her to come. On the fourth day, Maryam did not come. Aziz Bey was frantic. He wandered along the corridors of the hotel, he sat in the lobby, he went outside the front door. Lunch break ended, the sun bowed down; as much of the evening he could see from the window of his room slowly descended upon the city, turning it from purple to navy blue. The city metamorphosed, became alive. It became colourful with the lights that filtered through the darkness. But Aziz Bey was not even aware of this. Although he had eaten nothing all day long he did not feel hungry. There was a pain bigger than hunger inside him. As he burnt with the heat, he soaked a white towel turned purple from over-washing and placed it on the nape of his neck, he tossed and turned on the bed. He could not sleep until the morning. He spent the night watching the insects wandering about the creaking floorboards of the hotel room and jumping up with a start at the sound of every footstep. He went out with the first light of the morning passing in front of the young hotel clerk, who leant back asleep in his chair, his mouth open and his face and eyes covered with flies that were landing and taking off. He squatted on the ground and gazed at the road for a long time.
That day during lunch break Maryam stopped by for five minutes. She was coolish, apparently indifferent. She had no intention of asking after Aziz Bey, nor of talking about the job they would find for him, their fresh hopes and wonderful dreams.
To Aziz Bey’s ‘Why didn’t you come yesterday?’ she just said, ‘I was busy in the workshop, I couldn’t leave.’ Aziz Bey could not tell her how he worried about her, how he felt like a blind person not knowing the language or his way around this city. He only managed to kiss the edge of her lip, just touch her curly black hair. That was all. When Maryam left, he lay down on his bed, and a stupid smile spread over his face. If only for five minutes Maryam had come, hadn’t she? He was happy.
But on the next day she did not come.
That day Aziz Bey had a feeling that there was something funny going on. Something very slender broke inside him. He sat in front of the window, whose shutters he had closed. Hours passed. When one panel of the shutters opened by itself, he saw that the fallen stars of lights from the city had filtered into a sky wrapped in a dark navy blue. He felt as though he had awoken from a long dream. He wiped his tear filled eyes, calmed himself down and walked around the room. A touching expression of acceptance of fate settled on his face. At that moment, he felt completely alone in the world, forlorn and forgotten.
He longed passionately for his mother’s sagging soft white neck. If he had been in Istanbul now and been able to bury his face in his mother’s warm, white neck, his sorrow could have been somewhat abated.
While looking at the bright lights of this terribly hot city, he remembered that it was time for the musical show at the tavern in Samatya that he visited every evening. The friendly group of musicians must have already come in, one by one, taken their positions, and drunk their first sips of rakı. He thought that they would start a little later with a violin or lute improvisation and that they would soon be lost in a world of their own by giving their souls up to the music that had permeated their cells. He took the tambur that he had not taken in his hand since the day he arrived out of its cover and began to play.
Black eyes do not heed my wailsCome oh dimple, come to the rescue…
He put down the tambur and cried his heart out and then felt better. He went and washed his hands and face with this hot city’s water that didn’t know how to be cool. He sat on the bed and counted the remainder of his money. He then went out, without straying too far from the hotel, went into a shop and ate a tomato salad with hummus and drank a Turkish coffee with cardamom. For a while he wandered around the streets whose sounds and smells had changed with the coming of night, then returned to his room. He was tearful. He was hurt. He felt he had been deceived. He wanted to sleep for a long time and when he woke up find himself in Istanbul as the young Aziz who had not as yet been dealt life’s blow. To see that all he had been through had been a bad dream… But no. That harsh reality was real. He was alone and helpless in a foreign land.
Aziz Bey would fall into a similar situation once again at the end of his life. Then too he wanted to go to sleep and when he awoke see that that tormenting phase of his life had never happened. Like so many people whose lives were stamped with regrets…
He lay on his bed. But it was too hot to sleep.
When Maryam did not come the next day or the day after, he was charitably concerned that maybe something had happened to her. If that were not the case, Maryam would certainly have come. He went to the furrier shop of Maryam’s uncle, Artin, risking getting lost in those muddled streets. He had a bad feeling inside. He thought he would find the shop closed. The shop would surely be in a cheerless, sorrowful state: the shutters rolled down, the lights off, as if everyone had gone off in a hurry…
But the shop was open and cheerful. It looked as though it were participating with all its inner being in a commercial life full of hustle and bustle. He drew near to the shop, stood in the doorway and looked inside. Maryam was not there. Instead, a thin bony man with a moustache that resembled a toothbrush dipped in black ink, and a fat youth whose drenched handkerchief lay on the nape of his sweaty neck, were talking and looking at a fur coat they had spread on the counter. He listened to them carefully. When he distinguished ‘Artin’ a few times among the Arabic words spoken in a booming voice by the boy, he realised that the man with the toothbrush moustache was her Artin. For a moment he thought about going in and asking about Maryam, but as uncle Artin turned, sensing someone standing in the doorway, he quickly drew away from the door of the shop as if caught red-handed and crouched at the bottom of a wall. It was as though his heart beat in his throat. He went to the corner of the shop window and looked in. Being the summer season there was just a short jacket made of fox fur dyed blue in the window. Aziz Bey could see uncle Artin laughing cheerfully from behind that jacket. There was nothing untoward. But then, there was no Maryam either.
Although he had tried very hard to remember the way back to his hotel, he got lost in the muddled streets of this city that looked both very like, and not at all like, his own city. His temples throbbed. He felt desperately tired. The deep pain inside him confused his poor mind and slowed his steps as it tried to find the street that led to his hotel. He was so paralysed by the vast variety of words he heard, not a single one of which he understood, that he could not even stop someone and tell him the name of his hotel. He went in and out of many streets. He passed through districts bearing different souls of the city. After finding himself in tiny completely unexpected squares and after drinking water cupping his hand to a street fountain, he finally reached his hotel bathed in sweat, when the redness of the sun had already covered the sky. He paused as he passed the clerk, who was engaged in combing his wispy moustache in a hand-held mirror. He looked hopefully at his face wondering if he would slip him a note, a chit, give him news that would in an instant wipe out all his sorrow. The clerk just smiled. He went up to his room, washed his hands and face and sank down onto his bed. He did not want to believe that Maryam would not come again; he went to sleep.
He waited at the hotel for Maryam for a whole eleven days, hoping she would come. Twice a day he went to the restaurant he had got to know and had a bite to eat. Every morning he went down to the bench that could be called the reception and paid the clerk the money for the night he had stayed. He sat in a corner looking onto the street in front of the so-called lobby and at night played his tambur in his room. The agony of foreignness that had left deep scars on his life took the place of the agony of love. Finally his money ran out.
Words full of bitterness and rebellion were growing inside him. He could neither stay nor return. If he wrote a letter to his father or close friends asking for money, by the time it arrived he would have died of hunger. He felt very deeply the pain of having come to this city with great hopes where he knew no one and where he had not a single friend, only to be disappointed. He wandered around the city for a few days, but he didn’t even know the two or three words necessary to be able to get a job. He passed in front of building sites, not being able to explain that he would carry stones if need be, looking with a vacant expression at the workers running about like ants, then returning to his room, hopeless and despondent. Soon he would not be able to pay for the hotel and the clerk who liked to accompany the cheerful songs on the radio would seize him by the collar and sling him out.
That day he wandered around the city yet again and returned to the hotel with his hands empty. It was getting towards evening. Again that beautiful redness had settled on the city. There was no one in the hotel where only vagrants and lonely people stayed for a few days and then left, whose corridors were always empty, where occasionally a cry or a strange shout rose and died away. Despite the fact that Aziz Bey had opened the windows and the door wide, not even the slightest breeze could be felt. He took his tambur and sat on his bed. His woeful voice wandered round the corridors of the empty hotel, reaching even the ear of the young clerk, who was sitting, leaning back in his chair as usual.
My heart, the day has ended again with separation; the sun has set.Shame, hope has deceived you yet another day, my heart…
The clerk was drawn towards this music, whose words he did not understand but which quietly penetrated his heart. To be able to hear better, he went upstairs and put his head round the door of Aziz Bey’s room. There was reverence and wonder on his face, but Aziz Bey who was lost in the melodies of his own music did not even notice it. The song ended and when Aziz Bey lifted his head he saw the clerk in front of him, looking at him with a broken smile. Knowing full well that the clerk did not understand, he said, ‘That’s how it is mister clerk. Look, hope has deceived me yet another day.’
All he ate that night was bread.
The next day he felt weak and spent the whole day in bed, turning first one way then the other. Towards the evening he got up and, looking at his growth of beard in the mirror whose silvering had flaked off, he thought how he must first find someone who understood his language. Wasn’t there a consulate or something in this city? At that point the clerk came. He was speaking continuously in the city’s complicated and misty language, but in a really noisy and excited way, as if trying to tell Aziz Bey something. He pointed to the tambur lying on the bed. Aziz Bey smiled, he thought the clerk wanted a song, took the tambur and sat on the bed. However, the clerk took Aziz Bey by the arm, showed him his clothes and succeeded in explaining to him with weird movements that he wanted him to follow him.
Aziz Bey got dressed in a state of bewilderment, took his tambur and followed the clerk. Dusk had fallen. It was as though the people of the city who could not go out during the day because of the heat had now flowed onto the streets and they were full of lights, alive. There was a delicately sweet fragrance in the still hot air. It was as if a sharp scent of jasmine pervaded the air from somewhere and in a funny way also gave Aziz Bey the will to live. This time he felt pleasant things filling him and his feet fairly flying along the city streets, which he had hitherto wandered in a mood of hopelessness and angst.
The clerk walked very fast, greeting everyone and making rude remarks to strange men with bohemian faces, while looking behind him from time to time to see if Aziz Bey was coming. They were progressing towards the city’s nightlife. The clerk stopped in front of a highly decorative, low door with Arabic writing in shiny letters. He pushed the door open and signalled to Aziz Bey. They went down some steep steps and came to a large area divided into sections by columns covered with mirrors. A few feeble lights lit this dark basement decorated in burgundy velvet; the nightclub that had long since sent home the clients of the night before was preparing for its new patrons.
Aziz Bey looked around; there was a lack of feeling inside him. A little later a well-built Arab, moustache and hair sparkling with brilliantine, wearing a pin-striped suit and waistcoat appeared along with a few well-fed men. Pointing here and there, he was giving some orders in a loud voice in words that were a mixture of Arabic and French. He was attentive, he was firm. When he saw the clerk his face softened. They embraced and began to talk immediately in loud voices, laughing heartily from time to time.
Aziz Bey had shrunk terribly, he had crumbled. His shoulders had fallen, his head was spinning slightly. He thought he was melting in the shadow of this huge Arab. He swayed. At that moment he felt the clerk’s hand on his shoulder. Both looked at Aziz Bey and began to speak. The clerk’s face revealed his respect for, and praise of, Aziz Bey, but at that moment Aziz Bey failed to understand this; he was too alone and estranged from everything to understand and be happy. The Arab took a cigarette from his case and lit it and his signet ring dazzled Aziz Bey for a moment. He addressed Aziz Bey with a pleasant expression on his face. He made rapid movements in the air with his large-fingered hands as if he wanted to explain something.
But Aziz Bey, a cock crowing in his own dunghill, a lion in his own neighbourhood, clever, proud, even conceited, did not understand a word of what the two men were saying. He just looked. Finally the clerk could not stand it, took the tambur and thrust it into Aziz Bey’s hands. It was then Aziz Bey under - stood that they were asking him to play. The clerk pulled up a chair, Aziz Bey sat down and began to play the tambur that had been placed between his knees.
The heart is tired now of shedding tears with your love.
Because there are no tears left in the eye, it has sobered with patience now…
He shut his eyes tightly to stop the tears falling. In spite of his hands trembling and his voice sounding tearful, the Arab smiled with pleasure and the clerk was looking at Aziz Bey with a broad, stupidly naïve smile, as if taking pride in this work of art. The song ended, the big burly Arab patted Aziz Bey on the back patronisingly, as if praising a child who had memorised his times tables well. He smiled and left saying a multitude of words to the clerk. The clerk took Aziz Bey by the hand, brought him over to a corner and seated him down, then disappeared under the gloomy lights.
Aziz Bey was alone, helpless and melancholy. He was tearful. His hand, still grasping the tambur tightly, was sweaty. He was such a stranger to everything, he could not find even a tiny clue to help him understand his state. He could not even think of a face-saving interpretation to enable him to sit up straight on the burgundy velvet chair. His face was as sad as a child who had lost his mother in a crowd and was waiting for her to find him. No doubt if he had seen this childish, tearful, deprived expression, that pitiful state would never have been erased from his memory, and his relatively short life would have been even more brief. But luckily there was not enough light for him to see himself in the broken mirrors that covered the columns from top to toe.
A little later, a waiter left a tray on the coffee table in front of him. Two round flat loaves, a few meatballs and a little green salad. Aziz Bey did not even consider it an offering made out of pity for a poor stranger. Yet although he was fainting with hunger, he ate the food unhurriedly, ridding his mind of any thought of pride. A few hours later, the lights of this vulgar place glitz brightened, and the tables began to fill up. Aziz Bey was lost in contemplation of these sweaty, noisy men of this baking hot land, happy in their own world.
While he was watching them swallowing the drink they had poured into small glasses, watching their smiles, their hearty laughter, and their constant embracing of their long haired, tired women with greasy-looking complexions, he heard a sentence right in his ear.
‘You are the one from Turkey?’
He started. A slim, handsome young man with a very thin moustache stood smiling in front of him. They were about the same age. While Aziz Bey was searching his mind for an explanation for this scene the young man had already drawn up a chair and sat next to him.
‘So a tambur? And one with a bow too.’
An excited delight appeared on Aziz Bey’s face. The deepened, hardened lines that had formed, and resembled a dried corpse in the desert, softened and he smiled.
‘With a bow…’ he said ‘Left by my grandfather…’
The eyes of the Armenian filled as he put out his hand and touched the tambur. He looked at Aziz Bey. It was as if he was not looking at a poor foreigner far from his homeland, but at a souvenir of Istanbul. An inappeasable longing appeared on his face.
‘What part of Istanbul are you from?’ he asked.
‘From Samatya. Do you know it?’
‘Don’t I just? It’s near our place. I’m from Kumkapı… My name’s Toros.’
With these words that fatal foreignness in Aziz Bey blew away and vanished like cigarette smoke slowly escaping from an open window; he relaxed. It was not as if they were seeing each other for the first time, but were two childhood friends that had grown up in the same street.
The sweat-bathed musicians had taken a break from enter -taining the merrily sizzled patrons in that complicated language with its strange intonation and unaccustomed melody. Now, there was a loud hum all around. While the Arab boss wandered among the customers with an attentive look, the waiters carried mezes and drinks on large trays to the tables, from which bursts of laughter, belches, misty guttural words, startling shouts mingled together, and a careless vibrancy carried on heedlessly. Aziz Bey and Toros – who’d fled from Turkey for a crime he had committed six years earlier – stared at and talked to each other non-stop, in a mood in complete contrast to the others. At that moment, homesickness had bound them together, as though making them blood brothers. They had a feeling of humiliated partnership brought about by having walked the same streets, boarded the same trains, cat-called at the same girls, and sworn with the same words.
‘Are they still eating blue fish?’ asked Toros. ‘It’s been six years since I’ve tasted an Istanbul blue fish.’
That night, Aziz Bey started to play in the tavern of Toros from Istanbul, where Armenians who had emigrated from Turkey regularly went, occasionally bringing with them large bosomed, long-legged, pale-skinned Arab Christian girls in low-cut dresses, young enough to be called children. It was poorer and less showy than the Arab’s tavern. But it was tremendously exciting. The patrons attacked Aziz Bey’s music like a glass of water.
Even if the music in the tavern awoke in Aziz Bey’s soul a state to be pitied, a feeling of being an orphaned child; singing songs about Istanbul reinforced the longing he felt for the city and increased his desire to stay alive and return to his country. There came a moment when he forgot that there were thousands of kilometres between him and his beloved city and when he went outside he thought that he would find himself in the rough cobbled streets of Samatya, where a strong sea wind blowing would carry the smell of seaweed to his nostrils and if he listened carefully to the silence of the city he would hear small ripples beating very softly against the shore.
*
Many years later, after Aziz Bey had really become Aziz Bey, one night when he was alone, he had sat down and made an account of his life, and written about the first night he played in Toros’ tavern in both columns. Toros was the only person in Aziz Bey’s life to whom he felt both great gratitude and whom he would have preferred never to have met. It was Toros who had appeared suddenly in front of him just at a moment when all his hopes were exhausted, had prevented Aziz Bey from falling from the threshold of misery into the darkness of non-existence.
Yet it was the offer made that night by the same Toros that marked the route he was to take for the rest of his life. It was still the same Toros who was the instigator of his taking the step into this unappreciative, ungrateful, disloyal profession, entertaining drunks whose souls changed like their faces as the bottles emptied. Drunks who did not know how to behave, but went on crying, shouting, vomiting, laughing or becoming aggressive. This way, he became content with whatever tips this noisy, worthless gang felt like giving, turning music into a plaything in the hands of drunks, making it louder from time to time to increase the euphoric atmosphere and like a beggar expect something in return for this strange entertainment.
This feeling of inferiority created by this job had so hardened Aziz Bey that for the rest of his life, even in the most important moments when he should have been compliant, modest, or humble, he had always failed. If asked, he’d deny that this superior, obstinate manner ever hurt him.
Until that tragic incident that took place in Zeki’s tavern.
Every night for roughly six months, at a quarter to ten, he got onto a fairly high stage, sat on a wooden chair, placed his tambur between his knees and opened the night with a taqsim overture. At daybreak, he got up from his wooden chair and on his way back to the hotel he counted backwards the number of days still to go; not 99, 98, 97…, but 1, 2, 5, 56, 73, 144… He was counting an unknown number of days. He knew both the east and the west of this city that was yet to be divided either in people’s minds or on the map. He saw too that this city’s weather could become cooler, and that its cats ate from rummaging in the rubbish bins. He got used to its cooking. While looking out of the window of the disintegrating hotel, absorbed with the washing hanging from the balconies of the multi-storied apartments, he kept thinking of his own streets.
