A Useless Man (21 page)

The sea is racing off to the Bozburun Peninsula. What part of Istanbul is that, hovering in the distance? Why is there no sound?

Another plane flies overhead. Our island must be underneath a flight path – they are always going right over us, or just to the left. The cat’s stopped grumbling. My dog’s eyes are closed. Now I can hear the crows. Time was when birds would flock to the island at this time of year. They’d fill the air with their chirping. They’d swarm in flocks from tree to tree.

For two years now, we haven’t seen them.

Or have they come and gone without my knowing?

Toward autumn I’d see families – all sorts – heading toward the highest hill on the island with cages in their hands. I’d shudder at the sight.

The older ones carried strange, shit-colored clubs.

When they reached the edge of a green meadow, they’d set down their
cage. Inside was a decoy bird. Placing the cage beneath a little tree, they’d smear birdlime all over its branches. The wild birds would hear the decoy’s lonely cry – for friendship, for company – and swoop down to help, while that bunch of bruisers kept watch from the shade of a neighboring tree. Then slowly they’d come back out into the open to walk toward the cage, the decoy, and the swarms of wild birds. Four or five would manage to break free of the birdlime and while they were flying off to be caught on yet another patch of lime, these men would gather up their quarry. Each bird a miracle of nature. Each yielding no more than a drop of flesh. Then and there, they’d break their necks with their teeth. And then pluck them alive.

There was one in particular, I’ll always remember him. This one brought boys with him to do the job. He’d prepare the birdlime on Saturday night … The bastard’s name was Konstantin. He had an office in Galata. A grain store. He was a broad-chested man, with thick, hairy wrists; his smile was oily and unctuous; his nose was covered with moles and his nostrils flared. A shock of unruly hair, and mincing footsteps.

If only you could see him, wrapping his fingers around those golden brown feathers, and sinking his glittering chrome teeth into the bird’s neck. Already tasting the pilaf he would sprinkle with its drop of flesh.

He was a calm and humble man. He didn’t flaunt his wealth. His neighbors liked him and all that. He never meddled in their affairs. Never gossiped. If you saw him pitter-pattering off to work of a morning, or stepping off the ferryboat of an evening, swinging his heavy string bag, you’d find nothing amiss in his massive frame, his casual air, his Karaman accent. His simple, if calculated, way of thinking. The simple, if endearing, jokes he told after throwing back a few glasses. In his natural state he could be any one of a thousand other people, measuring their lives on their way to work.

But in the fall he became a monster. In the space of an instant, a monster. Seated on a bench on the back deck of the 5:35 ferryboat, he would
let his contented eyes travel over the surface of the sea. He would lift them to the wondrous late September sky. Then suddenly his eyes would light up. His entire face.

A swarm of dark brown specks would appear, in the sky and on the green-blue sea. They would dance to the right and left, these dark brown specks, before setting course to vanish as fast as they had come.

Konstantin Efendi would squint as he gazed in their wake. He would see where the brown specks were heading. Yes. It was the island. Looking around him, he would seek out someone he knew. Then he’d wink and point up to the sky and say:

“Our pilaf has arrived!”

If the birds passed close enough, he’d whistle through his teeth. With his thick lips, he would imitate their song. Once I saw a whole flock of them deceived. They circled around the boat before they left, detained by what they thought had been a friendly cry.

Then the weather changed. The
lodos
and the
poyraz
went to war over us, but on one warm, sweet hyacinth day in late autumn, when the wind had died down, when strips of cloud still hovered in the sky, he managed to locate an excellent decoy for his cage. He called in all the neighborhood boys. One by one they plucked the finches from the sky, and the titmice, the floryas and the odd sparrow. A thousand birds, yielding no more than 250 grams of flesh.

The birds haven’t come for years now. Or maybe I just don’t see them. Once I glimpsed one of those beautiful autumn days through my window. I set out wondering just where along the hillside I might find Konstantin Efendi. My blood froze when I heard the chirping of a bird. My heart stopped. But how could that be? Flying amidst the arbutus berries, the white and olive-colored clouds, the soft sunlight, and this peaceful wash of blue, a bird call can only conjure up a world of peace and poetry. Literature,
art, music. Happy, understanding souls that never heed the call of greed. However far afield we travel, wherever we are in the world, a calling bird speaks one language. Konstantin Efendi is a mere hindrance. But what are we to do? The birds no longer come here. Maybe in a few years they’ll be gone forever. Who knows how many Konstantin Efendis there are in the world? First it was the birds. Now it’s our green spaces. The other day I stepped out onto the road as I couldn’t bear to crush the grass along the sidewalk. It was one of those Konstantin Efendi days. There wasn’t a bird in the sky. Before leaving home, I’d pressed a fig up against my titmouse’s cage. Cracking a fig seed, he looked up at me fondly through one eye.

I’d hung the cage on a nail I’d hammered into the wall and set off. There were no birds in the sky, but there was green grass along the side of the road … I looked down: chunks of the grass had been torn away. A little further on I noticed four boys walking ahead. Stopping at one of the loveliest patches of green, they shoveled out a clump the size of a paving stone and tossed it into a sack.

“What are you boys doing?” I asked.

“What’s it to you?” they replied.

They were just poor children, dressed in tattered clothes.

“But friends, why are you pulling up the grass?”

“Ahmet, the engineer. We’re working for him.”

“What are they going to do with these?”

“You know the Dutch leather merchant up there? They’re landscaping his garden …”

“He should buy English grass and plant it, that guy’s a rich bastard …”

“Isn’t this the same as English grass?”

“Is it any better?”

“Of course, can you really find grass better than this? That’s what the Dutchman says.”

I ran to the police station and informed them. They supposedly took action. But the boys continued to pull up the grass here and there on the sly, and the police never did a thing about Ahmet the engineer. Even though the city council has penalties for people who pull grass out from the roadside.

They strangled the birds. They ripped up the grass. They left the roads filled with mud.

The world is changing, my friends. One day soon, there won’t be a single dark-brown fleck left in the autumn sky. One day soon, there won’t be a blade of mother earth’s green hair left on the roadside. And children, this bodes ill for you. We older ones won’t suffer. We’ve already known the pleasure of birds and green spaces. You’re the ones who will suffer. But this story is on me.

On the wall is a picture of an English aristocrat at the Imperial Court, asking for the Queen’s forgiveness. But more remarkable than that is the advertisement for “The Optimus,” a modern oil lamp.

The lamp hangs from a rope on the deck of a motorboat. It sways in the wind, while fishermen underneath it heave in a net full of fish.

The canary chirps inside its cage. Restless titmice hop from one perch down to the next. The air above the stove is shimmering. Fisherman Kanari steps inside with snow on his graying blond moustache. The canary chirps again.

“Do you know Barba Antimos?”

He is a stonemason who at the age of eighty finds himself all alone on an island, far from his wife and children, as old as the pictures on the walls, and just as alive. He no longer has a boat or a fishing net, and his heart harbors no desires. His only belongings are the Priyol watch in his pocket, the red scarf around his neck, the woolen socks on his feet, and the smoke rising from his thick Maxim Gorki moustache. As for his memories – choose any year, and he’ll have little to tell you. He might tell you about
a wall he mended, and that would be it. It’s not that he’s reticent. It’s just that he prefers peace and quiet. He would, I’m sure, love to spend another eighty years on this earth, building and mending and plastering walls. And dozing by the stove in the Kornil coffeehouse, while in his dreams he was already escaping through the heather to his one-room house with a loaf of bread under his arm and fresh tobacco in his case. But time is as fickle as the wind: the
lodos
gives way to the
poyraz
and then it is the turn of the
karayel
. As we drag ourselves through life, it’s the rhythm of our days that seem to offer constancy. But this, too, will change. One day Barba Antimos will die.

“Barba Antimos built that wall over there,” we’ll say. “He used to sit there by that stove in the Kornil coffeehouse. At eighty, his eyes were still sharp and his hands still nimble enough to tuck a cigarette inside that moustache. And when he blew out the smoke, he’d puff out his cheeks.” That’s how we shall remember him, unless we descend into oblivion first.

Today the canary is singing, while our feet turn to ice, but one day the canary will stop singing. Apostol the Greengrocer will stop feeding rakı to Marco the Donkey. Pandeli Efendi the Milkman will no longer sit beneath that magnificent image of the British Queen with Puços, the Kornil’s resident cat, in his lap. And never again will he tell us how he was sentenced to the tombs when he’d already paid his taxes or how much effort it took to change the court’s decision. Knowing all this, I leave the coffeehouse. I leave behind the fragrant stink of rubber, fish, tobacco, and ink. I wend my way home. The moment I’m there, I’ll get started. I shall put down on paper every year of Barba Antimos’s on this earth.

The folk remedies they’d suggested for his ulcer didn’t always work. There were times when he would almost complain. The lines on his face would deepen, as if to bemoan his eighty years of stoic, noble sacrifice. Blurred by sadness, his blue eyes would seem to question human company and the rule it enforced. And perhaps these were the times when the ulcer
was giving him the most pain. When he spoke directly about the ulcer, the pain was probably less severe. He had been at home for days, alone with his pain. And maybe that was why he’d come out – so that he could grumble about the pain on his way down the hill, or even before he started.

“How goes it, Barba Antimos?”

“Not so good. It’s quite troubling, sir. I can’t sleep, can’t eat. I had a little soup yesterday. But that made me …”

“It’ll pass, Barba Antimos.”

He pursed his lips. He had beautiful lips. The lips of a five-year-old child.

“The doctor at the Bulgarian hospital gave me some medicine, but it doesn’t always work. You just never know.”

Lean on any wall on this island. Sit on it. Climb over it or pelt it with stones. Whatever you do, you will find in it his mortar, sweat, and toil. You will find no mosaics in them, no ersatz wood or stone. He makes his walls the same way they made them two thousand years ago, and they hide secrets just as old. Greek gods, epic lovers, heroes railing against injustice. Touch a wall that Barba Antimos has made, and you touch antiquity. Pull a bag of Byzantine gold out of one of his cisterns – just three years old – and you’d be hard pressed to find an archaeologist to challenge its authenticity. Grow a boxwood vine over an arbor outside one of his cottages and it won’t be long before you’re expecting Socrates himself to greet you the moment you step inside. And then, one summer night, when you’re sitting at your table drinking wine, you’ll see Alcibiades draw his blade on Socrates and say: “Fine then, have it your way. But tell me this. How can a man live as long as you have without becoming an immortal? Why, after eighty years of gathering wisdom and unearthing secrets, and finally discovering true happiness, must he leave this world behind?”

Should you lack the confidence to guess how Socrates might have answered such a question, you hold your tongue. Instead you gaze up at the stars through the dangling grapes and then down at your glass of wine.
Then, with Homer at your side, you follow a path that winds among the walls and houses and hollowed cisterns that grace the island with nothing but good taste; you find the true path that runs from Byzantium to the simplicity and poetry of the ancient Greek world, and away from the monstrous villas of the modern age.

Barba Antimos never falters in the face of adversity. He makes just enough to get by. As long as his arms are strong, he brings beauty to everything he touches. But when his ulcer flares up, not even 250 grams of Halvah wedged in bread can bring him comfort. His gnarled and knotted muscles go limp. And all that’s left of him is the light in his clear blue eyes and the smoke in his blond, Maxim Gorki moustache and his long, mortar-white hair. No one remembers what he did anymore – the houses he embellished, the walls he strengthened, the lime he covered with mortar and made beautiful with his hands.