Young Turk (33 page)

Konstantin Efendi found his voice. ‘I don’t understand ...’

‘Money’s never interested me, Konstantin Efendi. I’m happy without it.’

‘But why – such a job?’

‘It’s my vocation. Where I come from, being
kabadayι
is considered an art. Like playing the
kanun
. That’s good enough for me.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Here and there. And everywhere. Prison even.’

‘Prison?’

Orhan smiled sadly. ‘Compulsory – in this country. Like primary school.’

‘What were you in for?’

‘Matter of honour. What else?’

Another silence ensued. Serving a prison sentence, in Turkey, on a matter of honour – which invariably meant avenging insults, rapes and wrongs committed against family members – made a person special. He joined the elite – like poets, artists and leftists.

Konstantin Efendi faced him solemnly. ‘If I refuse? Call the police?’

Again, without any warning, Orhan struck at the chair to his left. That, too, smashed into pieces. ‘It’s your prerogative ...’

Konstantin Efendi bellowed, ‘That’s two you’ve broken!’

Orhan sipped his drink. ‘I’ll repair them. I’m good at that, too.’

Konstantin Efendi looked at his wife, hoping she might have something to say.

Orhan got up, fetched another glass, filled it with ice and raki, waited for the drink to turn cloudy and luminously white, then handed it to the old Romanian. ‘Here, some lion’s spunk! Let’s seal the deal.’ Suddenly abashed, he turned to Liliana. ‘Forgive me,
Madamitza
... I meant angel’s milk ...’

Liliana waved her hand flirtatiously. ‘I prefer lion’s spunk.’

Orhan nodded courteously. ‘Spoken like a true lioness,
Madamitza
... May Allah be praised for creating the likes of you ...’

Noticing that Konstantin Efendi had been listening to the exchange with disapproval, Orhan winked at him.

Even more confused, Konstantin Efendi winked back.

Orhan turned to us. ‘Everybody – drink up! Only make sure you pay!’

To give Konstantin Efendi his due, he not only refused payment for the drinks, but also closed the restaurant for lunch – a very lucrative time for business. When some of the neighbours, happily afloat on raki, teased him about his generosity and asked him why he had decided to pamper the stranger he, too, looked puzzled. One son, trying to answer for him, declared that he had a big heart – as everybody knew. Another argued that his father had admired Orhan’s audacity, a quality that he had been trying to inculcate, not very successfully, into the men in his family. A third son, much the wiliest, contended that his father must have engaged Orhan as a warden; talk of gangs – and not just Cossacks, but also Albanians and others – extorting money from businesses were not idle rumours; the protection racket was becoming a growing industry. Conceivably, the presence of a
kabadayι
might deter some of these gangs or, at least, in the event of an attack, give Konstantin Efendi enough time to alert the authorities.

But only Ebony Nermin appeared to have fathomed the real reason. ‘Because the Efendi likes him. That’s why he’s hired him.’

Big Liliana, perplexed as ever – though not as furious as she had been when her husband had closed the restaurant for lunch – turned to her as to an oracle. ‘But he’s only just met him!’

Ebony Nermin nodded ingenuously. ‘So have I! And I adore him!’

No one dared challenge that. Ebony Nermin might be slow in thought but, like the tortoise who raced the hare, she always got to the finishing line first. According to her only relative – an old aunt who had recently died – this was a gift she had inherited from her Nubian great-grandmother, who had been a famous oracle in her time and had saved the lives of at least three sultans from Seraglio intrigues. (As it happened, Mahmut the Simurg, the storyteller, had based one of his prophetesses on this great-grandmother.)

‘I will be his wife,’ concluded Ebony Nermin.

I, Attila, heard her and felt very jealous. Like every lad in the neighbourhood, I loved Ebony Nermin, even though, at almost nineteen, she was a few years older than I was. I loved her not because she was beautiful – there were other beautiful girls around. Nor because she had contours like Ava Gardner – though that delighted me, too. But because she was good through and through. A child spirit, as it is said. The only person who believed everything she was told and trusted everybody who crossed her path. She always smiled, always had something nice to say to everybody, always touched your hand gently when she greeted you, always showed her private parts on request (and never asked for money like some of the other girls). And she never ever snitched on you.

So, forlorn, I hung around Orhan. I had intended to be rude to him – maybe even glare at him and warn him that, in a few years, I would be his adversary.

To my surprise, soon after he settled in, he regaled people by reciting poetry to them. And he recited well – even shed tears now and again. He seemed to know every line written by Orhan Veli as well as many poems by Nâmιk Kemal, Fâzιl Hüsnü Dağlarca and lots of others. When people asked how he came to know these verses, he said he had learned them in the army, where the government had finally done its duty and taught him how to read and write. In fact, it was his love for Orhan Veli, he confessed, that had made him take the poet’s name as his own. This statement, contradicting his earlier contention that Orhan was the only name he had ever had, elicited a barrage of questions about his real identity.

Which just made him laugh. ‘Orhan is what I answer to!’ he avowed repeatedly.

That merely increased his mystery.

And soon, inevitably, we boys, graciously gave up on Ebony Nermin. We saw, within days, that she truly adored Orhan. She would get up at the crack of dawn, wash quickly, run to the
lokanta
, find him wherever he had chosen to sleep – the yard in the summer, the kitchen in the winter – and gently wake him up. As he performed his ablutions, she would prepare his breakfast. He was a frugal eater – some bread, cheese, olives and onions. Then she would line up two glasses of raki – raki got a person going much better than coffee, he claimed – and three cigarettes which he smoked one after another to open up his chest. After that, he would move to his table which was at the back of the restaurant, near the kitchen, but with a clear view of the dining area, and set up his stall for the day. He would put a stool – he once explained that people got up faster from a stool than from a chair – at the head of the table, then place two chairs – chairs that he might have to smash up as a warning to disputants – on either side. Thereafter, he would line up two empty raki bottles on the table, each within easy reach of a hand. (He would keep the bottle he was drinking from underneath the table, in an ice bucket.) Finally, he would strap his stiletto on to his left calf – he was left-handed – then, almost ceremoniously, perch on the stool. Thereafter, he would shut his eyes and meditate, for a quarter of an hour or so, to attain the
kabadayι
spirit. Ebony Nermin would sit on the floor by his legs and spend the time until nine o’clock either staring at him in adoration or telling him things in her candid way that would make him smile with a tenderness I have never seen in another man.

Around nine o’clock, Liliana and her sons and nephews would come down to clean up the place and set the tables. (Orhan was never involved in the running of the restaurant; that was not part of a
kabadayι
’s duties.) At ten Konstantin Efendi would bring in fresh produce from the market and the whole family would start cooking for lunch. At this juncture, Orhan would go out into the yard and train. And we boys, or rather those of us whose families could not pay the fees for secondary school, would watch him. At midday, Ebony Nermin would go to work – she cleaned people’s houses – and Orhan would return to his table and sit there until four in the afternoon, when the restaurant closed for a couple of hours to prepare for the evening trade. During this interlude, he and Ebony Nermin would retire to their quarters – which Konstantin Efendi had provided for them by allowing Orhan to partition the storeroom – and talk about babies and the future. (Yes, within three months, they had married. The wedding reception given by Konstantin Efendi and Liliana, to which all the friends and regulars of the restaurant had been invited, is now part of the neighbourhood’s folklore.)

On the dot at seven in the evening, Orhan, like a genial janissary officer, would take up his post again and, sipping his raki, would keep falcon eyes, until closing time – around midnight – on customers and swarms of itinerant vendors selling flowers, lottery tickets, prints of the Exordium and beads against the evil eye. He would be particularly vigilant when the Gypsy belly-dancers put on their show. These artists, shuttling between all the restaurants in the vicinity, were constantly pestered by lewd, drunken men.

At about ten, Ebony Nermin, having finished work, would return to the
lokanta
, where she hung around until closing time. Konstantin Efendi always offered her food, but she never ate until after midnight, when Orhan took his second meal of the day. (To keep lithe and alert, he never ate on duty.)

Their love, as Liliana told everybody, was more miraculous than the virgin birth. Where or when had anybody seen a man devote himself to a woman as if she held in her person all the blessings of the world? Where or when had anybody seen a man caress his woman’s face and kiss her spontaneously, every other minute? And not just her cheeks, but her lips, arms, hands, fingers, knees, even feet? Even more to the point, where or when had anybody seen a man have his woman walk by his side, index fingers locked tightly, instead of a pace or two behind him? And in public! In front of everybody! Even in front of the imams! Not to mention the police, gendarmes and government officials!

A year passed.

Long before then Orhan had ceased to be an outsider. One of Konstantin Efendi’s sons and two of his nephews had emigrated to America to make what they called ‘real money’. (By all accounts, they were well on their way to achieving their objective with a chain of hamburger parlours.) This made many in our community assume that, when Konstantin Efendi and Liliana decided to retire, they would offer Orhan a partnership with their remaining sons and nephews. Indeed, they had grown so attached to him that they treated him as a member of the family. Most of the neighbourhood would be hard put to remember that Orhan was still an employee, still the Romanian’s
kabadayι
.

By then also, Orhan and Ebony Nermin had crowned their marriage with a baby daughter and were keen to have more children. (After her marriage, by Liliana’s edict, Ebony Nermin was called simply Nermin.)

Orhan and Nermin proved a perfect couple – certainly the happiest the old-timers had ever seen. But neither his love for Nermin nor his responsibilities as a father slackened Orhan’s devotion to his job. In fact, he manned his post with even greater vigilance. For in those days we kept hearing that a consortium of gangs, lusting after the protection racket’s easy loot, was parcelling out Istanbul into exclusive territories.