The Lost Sailors (8 page)

Before he left, he'd entrusted the truck to his elder brother, Aymur, and asked him to maintain it until he got back. He still had six months to go. He'd be crossing the Atlantic. Putting in at Panama. He didn't want to miss Panama. He'd heard it was a paradise for sailors. That was something he had to treat himself to before he said goodbye to life as a single man. A night with the women of Panama.

But Aymur had wanted to show off. On Sunday morning, he had set off in the truck for the gorges of Bilecik, with his wife and three children, his parents, and Aysel and her parents. He was drunk, as usual. He had gone off the road at a bend. The truck had crashed into a rock on the right-hand side of the road. His father had been killed instantaneously, crushed to death. Nedim had received a letter informing him when he was in Panama. The others had been only slightly injured. Broken arms or legs. Broken ribs. Aysel, fortunately, had gotten away with a few bumps. As for the truck, it was beyond repair, and had been left on the road.
Emine is giving you one more year
, his mother had written in her letter,
but he wants you to give up the idea of driving a truck.

To hell with Emine, he'd thought. And he'd cursed his brother and all his fucking descendants. He had spent the night drinking and dancing. Blowing his money, in hundred-dollar bills. The money he'd set aside for returning home, for starting his life with Aysel. Since then, he had been back to the village three times. The first time, he had fought with Aymur. The second time, he had quarreled with Emine. The last time, before he'd set off for La Spezia to catch the ship for Marseilles, he had taken Aysel to the river bank and fucked her.

She had begged him not to. She had struggled. And when he had entered her, she had wept. He had fucked her roughly, angry at the wasted years, the years he'd controlled his desire for her. All the time he had been on top of her, taking his pleasure, she had kept reciting prayers. “
Elhamdüllillâh rabbilâlemîn irrahmân irrahîm, mâliki yevmiddîn
. . .” He had never known such excitement. Aysel's body, so beautiful, so pure. Her tears. Her prayers. “God be praised!” he had murmured, after coming.

Aysel had hidden her face in her hands, still weeping. Slowly, he had taken her by the wrists and forced her to look at him.

“You're mine now. Do you know that, Aysel? You're mine. I'm going to tell your father. I took what was due to me. Don't feel sorry about it, Aysel, because I love you.”

Aysel had wept even more, and Nedim had fucked her a second time. Ignoring her pain, ignoring the blood trickling down her thigh. Because she was his now, she was his woman now.

He had left that very evening. Back to sea. Without a word to anyone, leaving it to Aysel to tell her father about her shame.

 

The day before yesterday, he'd called his mother from a public booth.

“Are you coming back for good?”

“Yes, for good.”

There was a long silence.

“It's been a rough winter,” she said. “The trees suffered from the cold.”

“Even our mulberry tree?”

“No. But it's like me, it's not feeling so good.”

“Stop that, mother! You'll live to be a hundred.”

“It's not that, son. Emine hasn't forgiven you.”

“I don't need his forgiveness. Aysel is mine. I'm going to marry her whether he likes it or not. And we'll live as we want to.”

 

Pedrag had waited half an hour for him, he learned from a Spanish truck driver when he got to J4.

“For the same price, I'll take you to Amsterdam,” the Spaniard said. “I'm leaving in twenty minutes. I just need to sort out the paperwork.”

“Fuck Amsterdam!”

The Spaniard laughed. The sun was rising over the city. The storm, he said, had been terrible. He'd never seen anything like it. The ochre tower of the Fort Saint-Jean was bathed in pink light. But no one in the parking lot paid any attention. “All that beauty, all that life wasted,” Nedim thought.

A hooker got out of a red Ford Fiesta. There was a sticker on the rear window that said
Proud to be a Marseillais
. She came toward Nedim and asked him for a cigarette. Thanks to the storm, she hadn't had a single customer. She offered to give him a blow job for a hundred francs.

Nedim laughed. “If I had a hundred francs, sweetheart, I'd take a taxi and get back to my ship.”

“I'll take you if you like.”

She drove him to gate 3A of the dry docks, parking by a warehouse belonging to the Marseilles Naval Repair Company.

“Could I have another cigarette?”

They looked at each other. She wasn't all that young. She could have been thirty, or fifty. Life had worn her out. A lined face. Flabby cheeks. A droopy chin.

“Here you go,” he said, handing her three cigarettes. “Part of my fortune.”

“If you like, we can have a quickie.”

He got out of the car and stepped into a puddle. “Shit!”

She laughed. A laugh that didn't bear any relation to her face. A teenager's laugh. She seemed ten years younger. He leaned toward her and kissed her on the lips.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I'm still at J4. Come see me.”

At Gate 3A, things got complicated. Nedim didn't have his entry card for the harbor. He told the watchman he'd lost his bag, his money, but he refused to let him in. He was a young guy who didn't want to get into trouble. He had to stick to the rules. There'd been too many robberies on the waterfront lately. Nedim couldn't stand it anymore. All he wanted was to sleep. To forget. To forget everything that had happened during the night. To forget Lalla's body, Gaby's fucking smile. To forget Pedrag, the road to Istanbul. To forget his village, the path leading there. To forget Aysel. Aysel. Anger welled in him again. Anger and hatred.

“The
Aldebaran
!” Nedim screamed. “The
Aldebaran
, dammit! That fucking boat over there! Just turn around, dammit! I'm not going to jump on you!”

The watchman twisted his head to look at the sea wall. Not that he needed to. He knew the
Aldebaran
, of course.

“Do you see it? Over there? That big heap of old iron.”

“Yes.”

“You've heard of it, dammit!”

“I heard the crew all left.”

“Right. They all left. Last night. And I'd also be far away from here by now if I hadn't run into a bit of trouble. Fucking city! I have to see the captain. He's still there.”

The watchman looked at his register. “What's his name?”

“The captain?”

“Of course, the captain. Not his dog.”

“Abdul Aziz.”

The watchman finally gave in. He was sick to the back teeth with Nedim. He wanted to go back to his nap, the lazy bastard.

“Do you want to go with me?” Nedim asked.

“That's all right.” He wrote Nedim's name in the register. “But you have to come back with the captain. And if you stay on board, we'll give you a new card. If you don't have a card, there's no way you'll get in the next time.”

“Go fuck yourself!”

Nedim strode across the quay, and passed between the docks to get to the sea wall. He was running on empty now. There were no other thoughts in his head. He did not even spare a glance for the sea in front of him. Blue, like the sky. A bright, limpid, immaculate sky. Washed clean by the storm. It was going to be a beautiful day. The first day of summer.

As he fell asleep, he thought of the hooker he had met. For the first time in his life he'd been offered a free fuck, and he'd turned it down. How dumb could you be?

Her face haunted his sleep. A mixture of disgust and desire. He was hot. Too hot. The girl was stifling him. He didn't want her lips on his cock. He struggled. The cabin was flooded with sunlight.

He woke with a start, bathed in sweat. And with a hard-on. The first thing that crossed his mind, even before looking at his watch, was a poem his father liked reciting. In his gentle, indulgent voice.

 

On the road of exile we found each other again

Who could say when death will trap us.

 

According to his watch, it was five o'clock. Five o'clock? The glass was cracked. Shit, the watch must be broken. He lit a cigarette, his last but one, and coughed. What time was it really? Was it still morning? Or already afternoon? There was no sound on board the
Aldebaran
. Where was Abdul Aziz? How would he react when he found him here? What would he say?

To hell with you, he muttered.

Exhausted, he collapsed back on the bunk and closed his eyes and thought about Aysel. “
Elhamdüllillâh rabbilâlemîn irrahmân irrahîm, mâliki yevmiddîn
. . .” He had a hard-on again.

“Amen,” he said.

He fell asleep with tears running down his cheeks.

W
hat had happened with Cephea? Abdul Aziz had tried to understand, without much success. She was crazy, that was the only answer he could find. While admitting that it wasn't much of an explanation. In fact, it didn't explain anything.

It was the second day after he'd gotten back from Adelaide. Cephea had just put the children to bed. They had sat down on the terrace, to have a couple of margaritas. Cephea had a knack for making margaritas, always putting just the right amount of salt around the rim of the glass. Looking out over the roofs of Dakar in the still of the night, he started talking about the journey. It was something he always needed to do. To tell her about the world.

The
Kananga
had sailed up the Gulf of St. Vincent and moored in the sheltered outer harbor of North Haven. “A place where no one ever went of his own free will,” as sailors liked to say.

Beyond this strip of flat, steaming scrub, bristling with sheet-metal huts, was Port Adelaide, with Adelaide behind it. Port Adelaide consisted of a temple, a church, three bars, a hotel, a brothel, the town hall, a post office, and about a hundred houses. A sailors' town. Further still was Taperoo Beach, where, according to Radar, their Swedish radio operator, “young girls from good families lived as recluses, and you could fuck them for free, if you knew how to go about it.”

Abdul had laughed as he quoted these words.

“Girls from good families. All sailors dream about that. Everyone has a story about a girl from a good family somewhere in the world.”

“Uh-huh . . .” Cephea had said.

He had sensed a weariness in that “Uh-huh.”

“Are you all right?”

“I'm tired.”

And she had gone off to bed without finishing her beer, leaving him alone with his margarita and his travel stories. He took a swig of the beer, but didn't enjoy it. Cephea's absence hurt him. Whenever he came home, he liked to feel that she was close to him. She and the children. To convince himself that he was a man like any other, a father like any other. That he had a family, and this family represented his only roots in this world.

The journey this time, for the Hamburg-Süd line, had been a particularly long one. La Spezia, Fos-sur-Mer, Barcelona, Piraeus, the Suez Canal, Djeddah, Port Elizabeth, Sydney. He had written to Cephea every day. All through their married life, they had written to each other daily when he was at sea. It was his way of keeping her in his heart. Mostly, he would write to her about his love, his desires. His fantasies, too. Freely, without holding anything back. He never talked about his life at sea, the ports they put in at. He kept that for when he came home. For those evenings on the terrace drinking margaritas.

He joined her in bed a little while later. The silence of the terrace, the view over the city, even the alcohol hadn't calmed him down. He needed to have her next to him. To feel her body. Her body put his mind at rest. Every time, her beauty brought him back to the land of the living.

He undressed quickly in the darkness, and slipped into the bed beside her. From the way she was breathing, he knew she wasn't asleep. She had her back to him, and was pretending to sleep. That wasn't like her. Slowly, he stroked her buttocks, then slid his hand between her thighs.

“I'm tired,” she said again, pressing her legs together to stop his hand from moving.

“Cephea,” he murmured, taking his hand away.

His erect cock pressed eagerly against her buttocks, looking for a way in. She had always said she liked it when he was impatient to fuck her. It wasn't the same as those afternoon naps they took, when Cephea's mother was looking after the children, and they made love, careful not to make the bed creak—or the table, the times when she lay down on it and opened her thighs. They would bite each other's shoulder or neck to stop their cries echoing through the house.

He was breathing heavily. His hand continued on its way along Cephea's thigh, paused at her stomach, then moved higher. He grasped her right breast and started caressing it, teasing the nipple. He knew Cephea liked that.

In his hand, her breast grew hard. She yielded, and he was relieved. He held her tighter. With his knee, he parted her legs slightly. She had stopped resisting. He let go of her breast and let his hand move down to her cunt. His fingers slipped into the moist cleft. Cephea sighed and arched slightly. The happy moment came when her round, firm buttocks rose toward him. He entered her forcefully.

Their fused bodies became one long undulating movement, slow at first, then faster and faster. With both hands, he grabbed Cephea's buttocks and parted them, the better to penetrate her. Each time he went deeper. When she started to convulse, his thrusts became faster. He was still kneading her buttocks. He heard her moan. Her orgasm was going to be very intense. He came, very quickly, in a few hard thrusts, indifferent to the creaking of the bed, the children asleep in the next room, the darkness shrouding the city, the freighters getting ready to cast off from one port or another, the vastness of the oceans, the loneliness of sailors, the fragility of men under the starry vault of the world.