A Useless Man (14 page)

I did something just now that I haven’t done in years: I drank milk. The steam in that shop, the smell of milk – it took me back across four decades – returned me to my cradle, reducing me to tears and lulling me to sleep. Yes, it’s the truth I’m telling you. It had been years since I’d got up early and years since I’d last drunk milk. There was a time when I started each new day with milk. How greedily we all clung to our mother’s breasts back then. How monstrous those toothless gums on her nipples. How sad that we have no memories of our mothers’ milk or our first sight of the world, through eyes made blurry by the tears we shed for milk …

We begin our days with milk and we finish them with wine, but this morning, from the moment that first cry rose up in me, from that first pang of hunger, I knew those days were over. Over and done with. The moment I walked through the door of the dairy shop, my old life abandoned me. And this is what I said to the flotsam that tried to come in after me: my first cry, my cradle, my mother’s milk, my loves and hates, my public face, my private life, my days of wine, and
rakı
, and cards, and women, and lust, and my many fine days in the company of friends. This is what I said to the
child who was crying for milk – the child I never knew, and would never learn to know:

“So we’re leaving you here, outside. You say you wanted to drink milk? Nonsense! We’ve had our fill of milk! What sort of man are you anyway? Shame on you. This is the last straw. This is where we part. You’ve sunk so low as to bring me to this shop. It’s all over between us …”

Turning around, I cried:

“Get lost!” And off they went, toppling over each other in the wind.

I walked into the shop like a man reborn. And how I longed to shout out the good news. I was beginning a new life! From now on I would wake up fresh as a newborn to the fragrance of hot and foaming milk, and its white mist would fill my nostrils until at last I sneezed. The milk I had taken from my mother’s breasts would come out through my nose. I would have my breakfast at a dairy shop that was foaming with the fragrance of milk. My new life would begin here. I would ascend to a world steeped in the scent of milk. After forty-two years of burning my nostrils with hot olive oil I would be delivered to this faraway land of peace and freedom, this land of milk, to begin anew.

My hands are cracked, my skin as dark as earth. I’m proud and I’m free, because at long last I have vanquished the monster in the cradle, and to mark this glorious day I shall drink in the milk foaming in my bowl like a man whose beard has gone white.

Outside it’s raining. But I am still inside. I’d seen off my past, and I was feeling fine. I don’t miss my old life, not one little bit. One bowl of milk and I’ve sent it packing. I’ve lifted up the mansion of the past. I’ve closed my eyes to the memories flashing from each window, and smashed it to bits.

And still it rains. Let it rain, what do I care? Let it rain forever. A line of poetry floats into my mind:

“We never knew the spring day when we were weaned …”

And that was when I knew I had to free myself of all the verse, couplets, novels and books. I was entering a new world. I required poems just as new. I needed to start reading new novels, viewing new paintings, and to write I needed to forge a new Turkish. I needed to seek out new sentiments, new books, new ideas. But what of the flotsam I’d left at the dairy shop’s iron door? What if they mobbed me when I left? What if they herded me back to my old bad habits? The chain that binds the milk of memory with the future – it forms a ring, doesn’t it? It’s bound unto itself. When I was back on the rainy street, when I had rounded up my runaways, here’s what I’d say to them: “What a fool I was back there in that dairy shop. Why didn’t you warn me? Please forgive me. Everyone gets like that sometimes. I hope you’re not offended by me. Forgive me, please.”

“Would you like another serving?” asked the man in the dairy shop. I drank one more cup. No, it no longer had the same effect.

The everyday world waiting outside in the rain said this to me: “Come on, now. Hurry. Enough is enough. Come out here. You need to be with us. You can’t spend the whole day in the dairy shop, pretending you’re a newborn. We’re out here waiting. We’re coming to get you. Everything and everyone is out here waiting. Time to finish this game you’ve been playing with them inside. No one’s ever born again. And even if you could be. What would happen then? In two years, no, not even two years, in two days we’d turn you back into the old you. The old you who thinks only of himself, with the same jealousies, the same ill humor, the old you who drinks too much and is a fool. We have all we need to knock you out with the old maladies. And what sort of new world did you have in mind, my dear man? A world never seen, or heard, or tasted, or written … are you serious? Come on now. Come back to the life you know. No milk for you tonight. Tonight you’re going to drink pure molasses mixed with water and grain alcohol. And then you’ll feel good, and your old hopes will come crowding back – the
fond wishes that the hand cannot grasp and the eye cannot see and can only rarely be so much as felt, and the half-baked illusions that are clear to the naked eye, and begin with wine, and overflow with drunken heroics … When you greet these old friends again, you will be ashamed of the state you were in this morning.

“Tomorrow morning when we wake you up, you’ll have a foul, fusty, pasty mouth, like you always do.”

By now the aroma of foaming milk was streaming down the walls of the dairy shop. I put on my hat. I raced out into the street. Hearing my shouts – “Stay away from me! Stay away!” – my runaways approached me softly, warily, the way doctors or nurses or guards might round in on a mental patient in distress. They took my arm. They stroked my shoulder, and then, in one fell swoop, they all grabbed my collar. And suddenly, I found myself all buttoned up inside my crazy shirt, and back in my old crazy life.

Two glasses of milk. Oh, look what you’ve done to me.

It’s getting on my nerves, this empty room. And that clock on the wall, tick, tick, and tocking, while the chair just sits there. The snow is coming down faster than before. It turns me to ice just to look at it. I feel like I need to do something. But I know I can’t do a thing. I could jump on a ferry and head for the city. Take my chances. It’s always there waiting for me: that street lottery with its hopes and its perils, its noise and its twists of fate. I plunge my hand into the game bag and pull out my numbers: 77 red! 19,
tombola
!

Precisely nine miles between me and the city. Water surrounding me, on all four sides. The snow slows down, and then picks up again. A rooster starts crowing. A child chasing a turkey. I hear the tolling of a bell and in the distance a phaeton. Again, the rooster crows.

That empty chair needs filling. But who would ever sit here? There’s nobody I want to see. That chair, though … doesn’t it look like it’s expecting someone? The carpenter who made it, he had a head on his shoulders. He knew this chair was destined to sit here like this, waiting for people.

I peel an orange and eat it.

I must have dozed off, because the clock stopped ticking. But now it’s back at it. The snow is coming down slower again. The tongs on the wood-burning stove remind me of the chair. Someone should take them and pull out an ember, blow off the ash, and hold it out for me to light my cigarette.

I can just see that gypsy woman selling tongs along the shacks on the hills of Mecidiyeköy. Now she’s waving the very same tongs and shouting at her husband:

“Hey old man! These tongs are different! It’s like they’re calling out for fire just for the fun of it!”

“What the hell, Kehlibar. You lost your marbles? Come on, Kehlibar! Stop talking nonsense.”

“But I’m telling you, old man. These tongs are looking for my fire!”

Her husband has gray flecks in his moustache, more black than white. He looks around forty-five. His teasing eyes are shot with blood; they speak to me of fear.

As if to say, “Never you mind. The wife’s got a screw loose.”

But like me, the gypsy woman likes the way the tongs just sit there. And not only the way the tongs just sit there: the way they conjure up a helping hand, a dear friend, and an evening of good stories. She can see it all. Kehlibar is a lonely, troubled, and mysterious woman; she lives in her imagination. Her husband is jealous beyond belief. He sends her out with the other women, to sell tongs with the other women, and he’s on pins and needles until she gets home.

I light my cigarette. I face the window, to watch the heavy snowflakes falling. And suddenly I am shrouded by bliss. Where did it come from? I just don’t know. How did it arise from such a dark mood? It fits me as snugly as a shoe on a beautiful little lady’s soft foot. But what can I make of it?

I draw back the curtains. And I am a child again, thinking about my new
rubber boots with their red lining, wondering if they’ll squeak in the snow on my way to school in the morning. Where to hang this happy moment? There beside two cloves of garlic and the evil eye? Later we tossed bird feed, millet, corn, and wheat under a cherry tree; we came out from the house with a sieve; we tied a pole to the edge of the sieve so we could lift it up; we tied a string to the pole; we threw the string down to a blue-eyed boy looking up from a lower window in the house, and he tied the end of the string to a stone and went back inside to munch on the hot orange peels drying on the wood-burning stove while he waited by the window for sparrows to fly into the trap …

Oh that miserable, foolish childhood of mine! Even you are gone. Your voice is so soft that it could be coming to me from the grave.

The wind jumps from roof to roof, slipping over the lead domes. A shadow takes shape in the sky. Growing in the mist on the windowpane, the shadow is now a crow. Now it is perched on top of the church across the street. Now why did it have to go and land right on top of the holy cross?

The north wind is blowing like mad. The old banks of snow look like corpses, bruised and purple, but the hailstones pelting down on them look like millet, glowing gold.

I might leave the house, I might go to a coffeehouse; I might think about whether or not I should go to Istanbul. I might miss the boat back and when night has fallen over the city I might stagger home on a cane. I might sit and read. I might read love stories. We might assume that human love starts here. We might close our minds to our lives, and life itself, and think only of ourselves. We might never stick our heads outside. We might drive away all thoughts of hunger and sickness and people without heating or fire or wood-burning stoves; we might lose ourselves in love stories as we unravel into dreams.

Let the fire tongs and the chair just sit there and wait. Bastards! The
birds will always fly up into the sky to look down with piercing eyes. Let’s see if they can spy one tiny piece, one tiny grain of millet.

The snow is falling. Some people come home dressed in fur, some in fancy boots, some in rubber shoes, some in spiked boots, and some holding a cane.

Winter is a nasty business! An evil thing, evil! Turn your eyes away from all the pomp! Turn your eyes from this fake Swiss landscape …

I stand up and push the ever-waiting chair under the table. And those sad fire tongs, still waiting for a human hand – I pull them out from the embers. I lay them beside the stove. The wind and snow have stopped. A cloak of silence has fallen over the village. The sky is pitch black. This vast and neverending winter night is still, is at rest, but once again gathering up more snow. I open first the window and then my mouth to curse the winter night with a foul curse I learned long ago from an Armenian fisherman in Kumkapı.

A holiday, an awakening, a miracle, a folly. It’s never going to come, and then it does. Springtime answers to all these descriptions, and many others, too … Birds and butterflies, poppies and meadows, green grass and blossoms, mimosas and oleanders, dandelions and the sound of water, gypsies and lambs … You can find them all in a classic springtime, and there’s even room for the tendril of a vine. Of all the memories I’ve lost, the most important is the sunlight in April and May.