A Useless Man (6 page)

It was on one of those days when the island’s year-round inhabitants were struggling not to disclose to each other the secrets on the tips of all their tongues – who had rented houses to the fishermen, and who was to say nothing on this subject before the summer visitors arrived – when they realized that no one had seen the sallow-faced old man in town for weeks and weeks.

It was one of those beautiful clear winter days. The fishermen had gone off to the city. The streets were empty, except for a woman whose face seemed quite young, though her blond hair was tinged with white. The coffeehouse owner was having a shave, between customers, and when he saw her he said:

“So who’s this woman?”

The barber examined her closely, his narrow eyes flashing like lightning.

As if to say, good God, who is she? As if to say, don’t I know her?

“I can’t place her,” he said instead.

The woman looked first toward the coffeehouse. Two local fishermen, both Greeks, were playing backgammon in the corner. The coffeehouse owner inside was getting a shave. After glancing through the window, the woman raced for the pier. One of the fishermen noticed her.

“That’s the wife of the man who lives on the hill.”

And the others said, “You don’t say!”

The woman went over to the harbormaster. She told him that her husband had died the day before, and that her children were going hungry. She asked for some help with his funeral and burial. The harbormaster told himself that this was the first time anyone had come to him with such a request. This was not someone asking him to arrange a free pass, nor was it a bill of goods upon which he could slap a fine of five or ten lira.

“What can I do about something like that?” he said. “My job is to be here for the ferries.”

“Aren’t you a Muslim?”

“Of course we are Muslims, Madam. Praise be to God! But we are also harbormasters. I cannot leave my post. It is my duty to stay here. Please go and talk to the main porter.”

The main porter lived in a handsome two-story house in the middle of the village. As she approached the house, the woman looked as if she had something to say to the flames rising from the stove. At one moment it even looked as if she were standing in a room lit by a stove, plucking yellow – amber yellow – tobacco from a bowl, wire by wire, and relating the village gossip.

She knocked on the door.

Sitting before the potbellied stove with two children, a boy and a girl, at either side, was a swarthy man reading an old and yellowing newspaper. He was wearing glasses. Poking out from underneath his nightshirt were hairy, Herculean calves. One was resting on the other; one of his slippers had fallen to the floor. The exposed foot was extraordinarily ugly; it looked up at the woman, bruised and bulbous, like a newborn child.

“So Madam. Tell me why you’re here.”

The woman repeated what she’d said to the harbormaster. “Last night, my husband …”

“Madam,” said the porter. “Do you have any money? It’ll be hard, convincing any of my porters to go out there in the dead of winter. The rascals just won’t budge! They’re all going hungry. They’ve long since spent their summer earnings. They get no share of the fish, they could die of hunger. I could do something for you. I could, but not for nothing.”

“I have nothing left to sell. I told you. I don’t even have food for my children.”

“You must be able to find some money somewhere.”

“If I had the money to get to Istanbul, then perhaps …”

“Well, then. Here’s ten, eleven
kuruş
.”

The woman thanked him and took her leave. She ran to the bakery. With a loaf in her arms, she headed up the steep hill. A young girl ran up to her and buried her head in the woman’s skirt. Bread that wouldn’t fill her for more than ten minutes.

The woman went back down to the village. She’d remembered the district doctor. The district doctor was in the midst of his winter chemistry experiments. He’d dissolve his nitrates, turn litmus papers from blue to red, and from red to blue, produce chlorine, do an analysis of his water, check his blood pressure, sniff ozone.

When they told him a woman had come to see him, he was conducting a urine analysis. He had added some substances to the urine to find out if there was any sugar.

Eventually gases emerged from the liquid as it turned blue. Then suddenly the urine turned brick red.

“Oh, no!” said the doctor to himself. “We’re in trouble! Now why did I drink that water? No sleeping now! My God grant us our just desserts!”

Poking her head through the door, his wife said, “There’s a woman here to see you, sir.”

“I’m coming,” he said.

“I’ll make it clear to this woman that she shouldn’t be disturbing me like this,” he mumbled to himself, “I’ll show her …”

“So tell me. What seems to be the problem, Madam?”

The woman told him.

“He can’t be moved until I see him.”

“But he’s not ill. The man’s dead.”

“We shall see if he’s dead or not. How else could I know?”

“At the very least, ask them to move him.”

“I can’t go all the way out there. I’m ill, too, Madam. I’m diabetic. I’m old, the trek up there would do me in. Find me a donkey, and then I could come out. Without a donkey, I’m not budging.”

“All right,” said the woman as she left. “I’ll try to find a donkey.”

As she stepped outside, the woman saw with amazement that the morning’s summery spell had ended most abruptly. A stinging wind had blown in. The clouds were rolling toward their house in the woods, one after the other, like a great funeral procession. She ran home. Rolling the body in a sheet, she carried it outside. It had begun to snow. In the space of a minute, her nightdress had turned white. She half carried, half dragged him as far
as the top of the hill. Passing over it, she went down the other side until the ground was flat again. She was sheltered from the wind there. Here again, it was almost like summer.

It was quiet in this valley, and almost warm. Here and there, a snowflake swirled through the warm air. Only the south wind came as far as this cliff top. The north wind reached only as far as the tops of the evergreens.

A bit further along, there were more cliffs. And there, at the edge, the woman stood quivering – perhaps she was praying, or perhaps she was just cold. At first she could hear nothing. Then she did. But it was only pebbles, rolling down to the sea.

It snowed for three days. For three days, the wind howled. In three days, only three ferries stopped at the island. The head porter sat in front of his stove reading two-year-old newspapers, popping corn. The doctor ate at least a bit of pilaf every day, on the pretext of testing his urine. He just about forgot that a woman had come to see him.

The harbormaster was a thin, dry, nervous man. Now and again, something flamed up inside him. One moment he would remember this woman who had come to him, asking him to help her bury her husband, and the next moment he would forget.

But whenever the memory hit him, it was as if he were seeing his own body, dead for days, and still unclaimed.

It was another unseasonably warm day. The barber stopped shaving his customer and, pointing out the window with the tip of his razor, said, “There’s the woman from the house on the hill again. Where’s she off to this time?”

The sallow-faced woman was heading to the pier. Then she stopped. Instead, she began to walk along the shore. An old man was doing the same. He looked like one of those men who used the good weather as an excuse to come out to the islands for a stroll.

The woman walked straight over to the man. She seemed to want to tell him something. Then she gave up on the idea, smiling to herself as if something amusing had just occurred to her, and set off for the ferry that was just coming around the edge of the next island.

She was the only woman on the ferry, and the only one without a ticket. But the number of passengers disembarking at Kadıköy was the same as the number of tickets. Not a single ticket more, not a single less.

Mücahit was at the head of the rowboat, holding two little oars. I was bent over at the very bottom because rowboats always made my head spin. I couldn’t see the water. All I could see was the bright sky above me shifting like running water. Odisya was singing something in Greek. Yakup was naked from the waist up and seemed to be listening. Sometimes moonlight flashed across his blue eyes. A boy whose name I didn’t know was sitting beside me. He had an unusually small face and his body was small. Every part of him was small: his hands, his ears and his eyes. We called him “Sultan Hamit’s dwarf.”

We were crossing over to Spoon Island. Robinson’s ghost was whirling inside us: Our ship had sunk and we were on a raft, we were bound for a deserted island, where we’d build a hut …

Reluctant to share our secret Robinsons, we all fell silent; the better to keep the dream alive. Seven of us on the boat, seven Robinsons in disguise. A single word would remind us that we lived on Burgazada, and that just an arm’s length away there was Spoon Island, which looked like an overturned spoon in the moonlight – it belonged to a man; that because he had no heirs
the island would fall into the hands of the state when he died; that though the island was deserted then, it would eventually end up in the hands of half a dozen people; that they would build houses and maybe even clear the land for beaches. This enormous imaginary transatlantic liner we had built from huts and rafts and dreams and savagery would come crashing into an iceberg. Never again would we set out for Spoon Island by moonlight in search of adventure. Instead we teased Yakup and he stopped pulling off his shirt and dressing up like a savage, and he stopped trying so hard to shape his dreams to fit with ours.

When I raised my head, I saw that we were gliding into a bay with white rocks glimmering at the bottom of the sea. And there before us was a white building. Were our eyes fooling us? A building on a deserted island? Still no one said a word. Even Odisya’s Greek song died away. The little dwarf had rolled himself into a ball. The ones at the oars were angels soaked in sweat. Yakup wore the pride of an emperor. The children at the oars looked like slaves and Mücahit a cruel slave trader with a whip. The moment we stepped onto the sand, Yakup called us together:

“This building is an ancient Portuguese fort,” he said. “Portuguese pirates were the first to discover the island. They came and left the youngest one of their party behind. The fierce young pirate had disobeyed his king. Walk quietly. He might still be alive. Some say there’s a savage tribe on the island. We must be careful.”

Odisya and Yakup played the savage and the Portuguese pirate. They suddenly disappeared. Jackal went after them, barking. I was left alone with Sultan Hamit’s dwarf. The three other boys had set off for the old white building.

Spoon Island is full of cisterns. It’s very dangerous to run across the island, especially at night. We didn’t want to tumble down into the deep, dark water of a cistern hidden among the long weeds that swayed on the
hilltops. So we watched where we stepped. The dwarf and I reached the top of the island. For a moment we stopped to look. In the distance, we could see that our three boys had lit candles in the windows of the white house. Further on, we could see the young Portuguese pirate’s mansion, built when the island was a farm with pig stables and wire fences, and later abandoned. It was far too dangerous to go inside. A gardener’s shed stood ten or fifteen meters in front of the stables. We could see it from where we stood. A light appeared in the window and we slowly made our way. We knocked on the door. Odisya opened it; he was alone with his dog. He had wrapped a garland of weeds around his head. He was wearing a baggy, striped shirt, and with his tanned chest, his bare feet, his blue eyes, his delicate and slender face, he was more of a pirate than Yakup would ever be. He was as beautiful and as savage as a pirate’s child. I was overcome by the desire to be one of his bandits. His most brilliant bandit. He was our king. Beyond the door I could see across to a beach on Heybeli that reminded me of a lovely little public square, and whose lights were slowly fading like the lights on a massive ferryboat.

Odisya began singing again. Yakup and the other children would listen to him till the end, then the little ones would find us and make us slaves; then we would lay siege at the Portuguese Manor and force surrender. Odisya would sing again, and Yakup would tell a story. Then we would go home. We would argue on the way back. Yakup would refuse to speak to the ones who had spoiled the game; Odisya wouldn’t sing and little Dwarf wouldn’t indulge us with his funny games.

We three – Odisya, Yakup and I – were the only real islanders. The others lacked the patience for friendship and adventure in particular. Yakup’s parents would hear about it, and they would try to stop us from setting out to the island. That’s why our numbers could suddenly drop to three. But still we’d jump in the boat and cross over. Sometimes we’d stay until morning.

Jackal waited at the white building’s open door while we slept inside, spinning our dreams from torn fishnets, corks and hooks. None of us ever told the whole truth. I only understood Greek. Odisya spoke good Turkish, and Yakup knew the odd broken, sweet phrase in Greek.