A Useless Man (4 page)

Ahmet was sixteen, but his birth had yet to be registered. He had the flattest of noses and the narrowest of foreheads and jet black hair that shone with glints of midnight blue. He already had whiskers. Inside his navy serge suit, his body looked slender, athletic, and perfectly formed. When his father presented him to the registrar, the man did not hide his displeasure.

“Shame on you!” he said. “And why was it, I wonder, that you’ve taken so long to register this young man’s birth? What sort of tricks did you pull during the census?”

During the census they’d hidden him in the hayloft. There had been rumors of another war. Ahmet was just twelve years old at the time, and their only son, but the army could still have taken him. That’s what they’d reckoned. It had turned out differently, but what did it matter? Ahmet wasn’t like Turkey’s other children. Ahmet’s father was Rüstem Ağa and even after the threat of war had passed, there had still been a need for precautions.

The registrar asked, “Is this boy twenty yet?”

It had been decided that sixteen-year-old Ahmet had been born in 1909. And that he was to marry a twenty-six-year-old woman born in 1911.

It was a dark autumn night, and the rain was pelting down. The sky was wandering the streets. A band of men holding lanterns was hurrying Ahmet across the village square, which was littered with the crushed husks of chestnuts. Pulling Ahmet to the back of the group, Black Abdi said his piece once again:

“Ahmet,” he said, “I’m your best man. So now listen to me carefully.” (Here he paused.) “When we’ve pushed you in there and closed the door on you, what you do next is kneel down on the rug and pray twice for God’s blessing. Do you understand?”

The rain was really coming down now. The gutters were gushing, and the lanterns were far ahead of them. They had forgotten to look out for puddles. Their trousers were sopping wet.

The young men in the coffeehouse wiped the mist off the windows; seeing Ahmet pass by with his best man, they smiled. The old men, whose minds were on their taxes, rose to stand at the door, sending him on his way with strange jokes.

Ahmet was so startled that he fell into a pile of chestnuts and hurt himself. As Abdi lifted him up, he called out to the men who were racing away with their lanterns.

“Wait for us, will you?” Then, turning back to Ahmet, he said, “The rest you know. You’re old enough, and big enough. Don’t make me spell it out for you.”

Ahmet said nothing. The chestnut thorns still stung. He was chewing on something, but were they questions, or were they chestnuts? It was hard to tell. His mind was fogged by the
rakı
they’d given him, and then they’d pulled him into this procession, and now their will was his command.

As they led him along, they showered this lean, solidly built and bright-eyed boy with taunts that seemed somehow serious.

Gülsüm’s house was so very far away tonight. The rain was coming down
even harder now. They were almost running. When at last they reached the house, the women inside threw open the door. The groom was covered head-to-toe in mud. The women brushed him off. His navy serge suit was now the same color as his hair. The wet, shiny down on his cheeks made this ugly child look almost handsome. He seemed to be wet from perspiration, not rain, and after he had wiped his face with a cloth, it looked red and polished like an apple.

His eyes were downcast; he was still picking thorns out of his hands. They brought him coffee and, paying no heed to Abdi’s advice, he knocked it back. He hadn’t trembled like this since his circumcision four years earlier. Then they brought him to his feet and, pounding with their fists on his back, they pushed him into a room, and then closed the door and left.

The room had a low ceiling and was lined with hanging bunches of grapes, apples, pears and quinces. There was almost no light, and the stench of fruit was so strong it made him dizzy. But it wasn’t just the fruit. Hovering above it was the hint of fine muslin, a bride’s dress, and a fine body underneath.

He went over to the open window and shut it, and for a moment he lingered, looking through the glass to watch the men and women coming out of each house to join the lantern procession. With his hands he wiped the fly droppings from the top of the dresser and adjusted the photograph of a soldier. He turned down the gas lamp. The woman was standing before him, utterly still. And now he caught sight of the prayer rug. Folding it up, he threw it into a corner. Pausing before the mirror, he looked at his red face. The woman was sitting by the window now. And there in the corner was the empty mattress, just like Black Abdi had predicted. “You are going to sit down next to her,” Black Abdi had said, “and for an hour at least, you are going to talk to her.” But what could he say to a girl he’d never met? His head was on fire, and his nerves were playing on the edges of his bones,
one by one. Again, he examined himself in the mirror. For a long while he stared at the lantern wick, as if he were searching for something, and then, with one twist of his thick hands, he extinguished the flame. He could see the woman sitting by the window, staring out into the night and the rain.

Quietly Ahmet walked over to the bed and sat down next to her. He pressed his head into his trembling hands … He couldn’t think. He could hear the rain pelting down, and the crowd outside growing louder, but everything else was spinning around inside him. The wheel was unraveling. He was falling down a well. The problem wasn’t in his head, he thought. It was everywhere else. If only the dogs could stop barking, if only the rain would stop pelting down like this for just a moment, then he could think. Bright bolts of lightning cast the room in a blue light. Until now, he had thought himself locked in a room alone somehow, but now he saw the large frightened eyes of the woman sitting across from him. He began to wonder if that blue light came from inside this ghostly creature and her white muslin şalvar. Was it the chestnut thorns that were making his hands ache? Or was it that he’d eaten so much that evening? Was that why he felt so much pain and heaviness in his stomach? His sight was blurred, his mind fogged, his sweat cold. Seized by a malarial seizure, he curled himself up into a tiny ball.

Toward morning, he woke to find the woman curled up at the other end of the mattress, still dressed in her muslins, or almost.

Though the rain had lessened, it was still pouring down on the half-lit square. The dogs were still barking. The cattle were passing, their wet bells ringing in the mist. They were followed by gloomy shepherds, surrounded by goats and cowering under their sacks.

Gülsüm was awake now, too. She looked pale. She was trying to smile. The morning light from the window cast a mist over the hanging fruit. Ahmet was thirsty. He seized a bunch of grapes. With a second bunch of
grapes in his hands, he approached the pale girl on the bed and popped two grapes into her mouth. How bright she looked in the half-lit room as, saying nothing, he pressed his thick, wet lips against her neck.

The sun rose, flickering in the mirror and their eyes. They opened the curtains.

The crowds had gone. They were the last two men on the bridge. One was dressed like a laborer, and the other – who looked to be about the same age – like a sailor. They were sitting side by side, smoking in silence as they looked across the water in the direction of Üsküdar.

Üsküdar is best seen from a distance, and now, as it slept, its dark shores lit here and there by red lights, it looked so distant, and beautiful, as to be forever out of reach.

The sailor turned to his companion. “I have an aunt in Üsküdar,” he said. “We could go over and visit her one day.”

“Maybe. We’ll see.”

Sinking back into silence, they watched a motor launch pass beneath the bridge. The barges trailing behind it were carrying full loads, tied down with tarpaulin. They must have been carrying some sort of grain – wheat, or barley, or corn. They had that softness.

As the laborer watched the last barge slip under the bridge, he looked at the load that he had decided must be wheat, and for a moment was tempted to jump into that softness. He tried to hold the words back. But couldn’t.

“I wish I’d jumped right in,” he said.

“Just like in the movies, eh?”

The laborer didn’t answer. He didn’t answer, but he smiled.

It was a winter night in the middle of Ramadan. Turning together to look at the old city, they looked at the lights strung up between the minarets.

“I love those lights,” the sailor said.

And the laborer said, “So do I.”

On weekends one of these men would take himself off to Galata. The other to Şehzedebaşı … On very rare occasions, they would come together to the bridge to watch the night. They whiled away the night watching the lights of Üsküdar and the great ships of Galata, the smaller vessels tied to the piers, and the motor launches pulling barges that were sometimes empty, sometimes full. They knew from these evenings that they could count on one another; just by exchanging four or five sentences, they knew they were good friends.

Each time the laborer came here and saw a barge loaded down with wheat, he had to fight the urge to climb over the railings and drop himself into it. Sometimes he would say this to his friend, and his friend would say:

“Just like in the movies, eh?”

Then they would go home, or, if they had this conversation early enough, they would suddenly remember a movie house in Yüksekkaldırım, and so they’d go there and sit together in the front row.

No matter what film was showing, it left them happy and smiling. They didn’t say a word on the way home. And that night one of them would dream of kissing his Galata friend like the tough guy in the film. Meanwhile, the other dreamed of taking his friend to the darkest street of Şehzedebaşı and burying his nose in the palms of his hands and kissing them. These dreams would rob them both of sleep and make wrecks of them.

“Did you sleep well?” one would ask.

And the other would say, “I sure did.”

If one of them smiled, the other would fall asleep right away. If he didn’t, he was already asleep.

It was a white, moonlit night. Light puffs of smoke were rising from the ferries docked along the pier. They made a man yearn to set out on a long journey. Now and then a ferry would approach the pier and behind it a second ferry, lit by a second light, to send a flurry of passengers up and down the gangplank.

Suddenly, the laborer said:

“Why don’t we go with them?”

The other said:

“Let’s go, then.”

They slept in the same room. One was from Sivas. The other from Izmir. One worked at the pier, tying up the ferries as they docked. The other worked in a mill. The room they shared cost them four lira a month but they never once spent an evening in. They hardly ever saw each other. One finished work at nine. The other would come back at twelve and go straight to sleep. The room was pitch black. Hardly any daylight came in through the grilled window that looked out onto a grimy, musty courtyard. One man’s bed was on the right-hand side of the room, and the other man’s bed was on the left. Because he had no quilt, the laborer slept in his clothes. The other slept in his shirt and shorts.

One had to be back on his ship by six in the morning. The other started work after noon. If ever they both woke up at six, the sailor, whose boss was a Greek, would say:

“And a fine
kalimera
morning to you, my son.”

Not knowing that
kalimera
was Greek for good morning, and thinking
his boss had said
karamela
, the laborer would respond with his own bit of nonsense: “One caramel for me, and one caramel for you!” And together they would laugh.

One day they fired the sailor. A falling out with a harbor official. This was all he told his friend:

“He called me a son of a donkey, and I smashed his jaw.”

His friend said:

“I wish you hadn’t done that.”

These words so upset the man that he went for three days without eating, and without asking his friend for help. The other thought he must be living on his savings, so he didn’t ask him how he was. Then the sailor found work in the Paşabahçe glass factory. He was going to board there, too, and so he bid his friend farewell. They embraced each other. That last evening, they went out again to the bridge.

“We never made it over to Üsküdar to see my aunt,” the sailor said.

“No, we didn’t, did we?” said the man from Sivas. “But maybe we’ll still get there one day, my dear friend!”

How beautiful the moon looked in the sky above. It could tear a man up just to think about how strange it must be, up there on the moon. If only we were there, just the two of us, they thought, if only it was just the two of us, safe inside that moon … But neither man spoke. Neither man could find the words. Just then, they heard a motor launch puttering across the smooth waters. And behind it, barges. Again, carrying wheat. The laborer gazed down at the wheat-laden barges passing just beneath them. But this time he had no desire to jump in.