A Useless Man (5 page)

Ömer lunged at the woman with a curse that was swallowed up by the northwest wind, the same wind that had earlier ripped the bandana from his head. But it still made the youngest boy in the tavern jump. Next to him was a man of about forty-five, who said:

“Sit down, my child.”

The youth looked up fearfully. This man did not want to kidnap him: he wanted his soul.

The drinking had begun well before nightfall. The trams had long since put on their lights, but as always Ömer still kept the lights turned off in the tavern. It was easier to talk and drink in this half darkness.

Eventually, the lights came on, timidly and one by one, but almost of their own accord, without the flick of a single switch. With each five-watt bulb taking five or ten minutes to light up, it was an hour before they were flickering in the darkness, casting light on Ömer’s foul temper.

Once the lights were on, the tavern took on its usual appearance. It was, Ömer thought, noisier than hell. There were gangsters, laborers, fishermen, and Greeks and Armenians of uncertain trades; they talked about
everything, though their lips were sealed. In this tavern even the innocent could hear thieves and pickpockets plotting their business without fear or loathing. In the tavern’s mirrors, they could look into the eyes of those turned away from the crowd, who were curled up, and unable to walk, and in those eyes you could see memories of an incident, an assault, a murder.

The woman whom Ömer had just cursed was rubbing her crimson cheek.

“Ömer Ağa, what came over you just now? I never meant to offend you. You took it the wrong way.”

“I know exactly what you meant. And I can handle my own business.”

Now Karabet the fiddler stepped inside. This was a man the gangsters respected. In their eyes he was an artist. Large or small, they all looked up to him. In his face, his clothes, and his manner, there were still the traces of the many years he’d spent in prison as a young man, and it was manifest in the music he played for them.

“Stand a little to the side, at least,” Ömer told him.

Karabet might have seen this as an insult. Had Ömer pressed one of the gangsters like this, they would’ve been all over him. The fiddler moved to the side but made it clear that he was ready to draw his blade. Ömer pointed at the singer with the reddened cheek.

“Don’t poke your finger into men’s business ever again, do you hear?”

It was a woman sitting just behind who answered on the singer’s behalf: she had bright eyes, crooked teeth, and bleached blond hair; she was old and Greek, but still as sociable as a cat.

“Don’t worry, Ömer,” she said, pressing one hand to her cheek, as if in pain, “Don’t you worry one little bit. Zehra here is never ever going to poke her finger into men’s business again.”

She played it for laughs, and she did such a good job of it that even the solemn-faced Karabet cracked a smile. As she sank into her chair, Zehra muttered, “Whore!” between her teeth. Even Ömer laughed as he came
down the steps from the musicians’ stage. The tavern, which had fallen silent, now filled with laughter, as if on cue. The stink of rancid olive oil and anise wafted back into the room and soon it was as if nothing had happened. The gangsters drifted back to their intimate conversations, heroic tales, and love stories, pouring out their hearts. Except for two strangers gazing absently out the far window. One of them called over the waiter to ask, “What happened?”

As if sharing a secret, the waiter bent over and whispered into the man’s ear. This man then whispered the news to his friend, as lightly as if he were cooling their
meze
with his breath.

“That woman … apparently she pointed at that young man over there, and said that Ömer must have turned him the other way.”

The two men looked cautiously at Ömer’s table. He was staring into his
meze
, lost in thought, while the hard-faced forty-five-year-old man next to him offered him consoling words, with calming gestures. Next to this man was a youth who looked to be about twenty. His cheeks were pink and plump, his skin white. When he smiled he looked ugly, there was a gold tooth that every now and then shimmered in the back of his mouth. His eyes were dull and without luster. His hair was soft. His shoulders were narrow, his manner rough, but for all his swaggering, there was something of a woman in him.

By the time Ömer left the tavern with the forty-five-year-old man, it was very late. They wandered drunkenly through the damp November streets, hearing no one.

Turning to his companion, Ömer said, “Get rid of this one. He’s a worthless piece of shit. A coward.”

The forty-five-year-old man turned to the youth who was three paces behind them, shoulders hunched.

“Go home, my boy, and get some sleep.”

The boy vanished with the wind, saying nothing. The men continued in
silence until they reached the shore. Here there were boatmen, still waiting for customers despite the late hour, but when they saw these two they made no offers. After jumping across several rowboats, the men reached out for a guard rail. They pulled up a cover, and warm air hit their faces. In the pitch dark below, they could hear snoring; as they made their way in, the embers of cigarettes lit up a few faces. They stopped short in front of one of them, as if they were surprised to see him, and knelt down before him. This man was tall, tall as a corpse. His face was white and in the light of his glowing cigarette it was like a painting made of broken glass. He sucked in on his cigarette and then stubbed it out.

“Idris. Hey, Idris!”

Yawning on his bed, the man looked around. His voice was soft and calm.

“Who are you? Why are you here?”

“Get up, Idris. It’s me … Ömer.”

“Who’s that next to you?”

“Who do you think? It’s Mavro.”

“Oh, Mavro, is it? What’s up?”

“What do you think? We have work to do.”

“What work?”

“Nightwork, you fool!”

The tall man searched for his shoes. The damp of the night came through the open hole that they now slowly climbed through. After jumping again from rowboat to rowboat, they reached the muddy shore. Here Ömer asked for the time.

Someone said, “It’s half past eleven.”

They began to walk. Everything was shut, and all they could hear were the whistles of the night watchmen and the indistinct rustlings of night, and ghostly footsteps.

They arrived at an all-night coffeehouse. From the outside it looked as
if it were lit by a gas lamp, but there was just the one twenty-five watt light bulb, and the people inside could barely see each other. But once inside, the overwhelming stench of misery needed no illumination.

“Ali! Hello!”

In a Persian accent, someone said, “Ömer Ağa! How good to see you!”

“Fine, then. Three teas for us, if it’s fresh. Where is the
simit
seller?”

“He’ll be back any minute. My tea is freshly brewed.”

Two tiny naked creatures were asleep on the sofa. Even in the darkness, you could see that they weren’t covered, and though the coffeehouse was warm, they were shivering. Ömer stepped over to these creatures; in the darkness he could only see their noses, which were as small as watermelon seeds.

“So what are these, Ali?”

Ali went to Ömer’s side, his face stricken.

“Street children, the poor things. We had to take them in. What else could we do?”

Ömer turned around to look Ali straight in the eye. Then with his giant hands he tugged the rug off the wall.

“So that you don’t pity them free of charge,” he said. “Throw this rag over them. Can’t you see they’re going to freeze?”

Once covered with the rug, the little boys burrowed into it without waking. Turning around to hug each other, they sank into the deep sleep of childhood.

In front of the stove was an opium addict who made his living selling fish off the end of the bridge. He was silent, lost in his dreams. Fish, huge fish, each one as big as a monster, seaweed that made their lures sparkle beneath the green sea, a caique laden with harbor prawns, mermaids, whelks as big as giants …

Next to him was a dark-eyed child of fourteen or fifteen. His curly hair was blacker than black. He wasn’t sleeping, he was staring at the embers
of his cigarette. Ömer went over to sit next to him. The others sank into chairs and were soon half asleep.

Then there was a little incident, so small that it disturbed neither the silence in the coffeehouse nor the sleeping opium addict. Springing to his feet, in his hand the switchblade he’d taken from the palms of another, Ömer cried, in a voice as calm as it was assured:

“We were just joking, Karayel! We were just joking!”

The child sitting next to him took in a breath, as deep as the sea. He spoke like the wind.

“I can’t take jokes like that, Brother Ömer. For jokes like that, I’ve thrown seven knives. And seven knives have come back.”

In his strange Black Sea accent, the swarthy boy kept talking about his lowly, coarse, deceitful deed. Ömer looked at him with a surprised smile.

“It was a joke. A joke! Karayel. Don’t I know you? Ali, go make us another four teas. And go find the
simit
seller and bring him back.”

Ömer had a hard time persuading the boy that it was all a joke. But now they were four people, sitting together in a huddle. Four people speaking in whispers too low for anyone else to hear. Until Mavro raised his voice to say to the one next to him:

“So there you have it. Just the boy we were looking for. He’ll know what he’s doing, too. All he has to do is give us one quick whistle.”

Then there was more whispering, again loud enough to hear. When Ali came back from looking for the
simit
seller, he found them on their feet. Biting into their warm
simits
as they stepped into the street, they vanished into the night.

Seen from below, the house up on the hill seemed perfect. It was the sort of house that a grocer or a businessman or a rake might dream about during his youth, or a retired teacher or a novelist, churning out great works – the sort of house where an exiled politician might wish, in vain, to end his days.

It opened onto a road that almost looked as if it had been created by the fallen rocks themselves. On a Sunday you might see a courting couple or two, but on other days, it seemed to recede into itself, affecting that odd anonymity that is not unique to roads. There are a few islanders who like to come this way, but even they prefer to walk the road after dark, to watch the stars – or so it seems to me.

On one side of the road is the least visited part of the island: a place where the pine trees grow into each other. There’s no room even for a path. That’s why you find no naughty lipstick-soiled handkerchiefs under the pine trees, or newsprint, or sardine cans. On the other side of the road is what seems from a distance to be a beautiful house: on closer inspection it turns out to be two ugly houses. Both sit on the side of the road, hemmed in on all other sides by the forest.

From a distance you might think that those dwelling inside these houses had come to fulfill dreams of living happily ever after, smelling the pines and the north wind, or that they had come to sell chickpeas or lull themselves to sleep under a pine tree, dreaming of a nation free of pines and all else, but no one beyond chickpea sellers seemed to know. That’s how quietly they lived in these houses. In winter, when the village barber saw a sallow-faced man in his middle years running toward the ferry just as it arrived, he would turn to his customer and say, “That’s the old man who lives in the house on the hill.” What gossip they had all came from this. The old man would return with his arms full of small parcels and then he wouldn’t come down for weeks. And the island’s year-round inhabitants below would engage in their usual gossip and backbiting, until the fishermen came from the Black Sea and they stopped; instead they would try to rent out their rooms to them, on the sly. Unless it was rented on the sly, it could not be rented in the summer to visitors coming to the island to relax and swim in the sea. Because fishermen are bachelors. Bachelors, and also fishermen … True or not, fishermen’s shirts were said to be infested with lice.