A Useless Man (25 page)

So there you go. The town is
haram
, it’s sinful. I can imagine it now, all those little twenty-five watt bulbs glowing, and all the flies. I want to explain why – why I can’t go downtown. But what use would that be? Who’d care?

I put on my hat and my fisherman’s jacket and I wrapped a scarf around my head like I had a toothache. I went out and walked past the coffeehouse. He was there, he was there.

I came back home. I got into bed and turned off the light. I thought for a while. I thought about killing anyone who said I couldn’t go into town, no matter who it was. It was the first time I’d ever had a thought like that.

I got dressed again and went back out. I went straight to the coffeehouse. I walked to the far end and sat down. His face went bright yellow when he saw me. His lips were trembling. In the coffeehouse mirror I saw the white, jaundiced face of a man. I flinched – it was me. I got out of there fast.

“Iskanavi,” I said, “I’ll have a coffee. Now about that attic story …”

He was broke and in a bad mood.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” he said. “Your salt is dry. But mine – δεν εíναι, no.”

I could finish the story like that. It would be one of my classic endings. It could be, but no. I don’t go into town, I don’t go into that bright white coffeehouse. I don’t sit down opposite someone who doesn’t want to see me, and I don’t say a word to the proprietor.

I’m at home, in my room. I can’t go into town. I have a fever of thirty-nine degrees. I’m cold and trembling. Sometimes I’m on fire. My mother rubs vinegar on my temples. No more reading, she says. It’s time to sleep. She turns off the light and leaves. I listen to the sounds around me. The dogs on Spoon Island are still barking. The wind is pounding the windowpanes, rattling the doors. I switch on the light …

Well that would be another kind of ending, but this isn’t it either. No, this isn’t the one either. I can’t go into town, and that’s that.

Lately I’ve been spending my nights in a very strange neighborhood. There’s this black haze that rises from the sea around nine o’clock. It spreads and spreads, until it has enveloped us all. As the neighborhood sleeps, a cool breeze wafts through it, seeking human company, but settling down with the stray dogs and the lonely cats in the dark, quiet streets. Until the new day dawns, that’s all there is.

Once there was a Greek entrepreneur who ran two dynamos on diesel. This was the only source of electricity; a yellow, morbid
courant continu
that turned us all into ghostly and indecipherable blurs. Now the municipality and the entrepreneur have had a disagreement and the lights are out. Who knows where these dark streets might take you after half past eight?

As for the residents – those who are fond of their wives stay at home all night, smoking at their windowsills, planning the next day’s arguments.

In the distance you only see the torches made of rags dipped in any gasoline they could lay their hands on. The flames slash through the darkness. Staring out over this haunted landscape, they catch glimpses of the
houses along the coast. They track the lights and the sounds; they drift off into a trance that is not quite sleep; they see the crabs.

I spoke about these long, dark nights with a Turkish lady who went to a private lycée (a lady, no less, who speaks both English and French!) and she said:

“Even the people there are too dark!”

Thick mustachioed Greek fishermen, scrawny bare-legged children, Kurdish porters whose windpipes are bursting from their throats, ninety-year-old Greek women, the postman and the delivery boy at the corner shop. They can all count themselves among those people, and so can you and I.

So there I was, conversing with this woman. Someone else was standing a little further on. The greengrocer was in his corner, and the delivery boy was halfway up the hill, beautiful and forlorn.

I didn’t disagree with her. What would be the point! She is on casual terms with the head of the neighborhood. She gives men ideas, and women advice.

I went into Istanbul that day. And I am writing this description of a boy on the Tünel for the boy on the Tünel, not for this woman – I have long since given up on her.

We entered the Tünel in Beyoğlu. There weren’t many people traveling down the hill just then. We were in the second-class car. There were three soldiers in a corner, a woman of a certain age with her daughter-in-law, and further on there was a noisy Armenian group on their way to catch a boat, and the boy, and me.

He had tucked his bare feet beneath the seat as far back as he could. You wouldn’t have noticed them unless you had been paying close attention. The train hadn’t started moving. The gate dividing the first and second-class cars and the gate to the platform kept opening and closing.

Then they closed with a sigh like the breath of a fish pulled from the sea.

His fingers were curled under his ear lobe and his mouth hung open. His other hand was on his knee; it was filthy and black, but despite the dark olive color of his skin his nails were pure white. His fingers were long and slender. The patterns on his shirt were like oil paint and so pale they were almost white.

He wore a mother-of-pearl hook fastened tightly around his thin, grimy neck. Now for his face …

His nose was flat, his mouth wide open and salivating. His large, dark brown eyes were brimming with an innocence that was almost inhuman; they were literally white with astonishment. His hair was a mess, and flecked with cigarette ash.

When the doors closed – I was standing right beside him – he lifted up his head to look at me. I had already assumed my position. I was looking elsewhere, with grave contemplation. First he lowered his eyes, and then his face. Then I started watching him again. The smile on his face was so faint and so true; how it lit up his lips, his eyes, his eyebrows …

Oh, to see the joy of this ride in the face of a twelve-year-old boy! Maybe I was that happy my first time, too. We see such joy in children all the time. They clap their hands and cry:

“Look, father! Look how wonderful it is!”

Nothing could stop us showing the joy we felt.

But this boy on the Tünel – he is trying not to show it. Rattling and shaking, we rumble down the hill. Now he is watching the lady standing with her young daughter just across from him. They aren’t even looking at him. He seems to relax a bit. Again he looks up at me. I pretend to be deep in my newspaper. He relaxes even more. But then he senses something; he feels my eyes on him, and other eyes, too; and the light and the diabolical slamming of the wheels against the tracks. He can no longer take pleasure
in this. There’s that little smile again; that tiny, fearful, forlorn burst of innocence. Now from a distance we watch the slow and heavy opening of the hemisphere of the door on the Galata side of the Tünel line; he is watching and so am I. The little smile is still fixed on his face. Now we’re on the other side. The little boy’s face is glistening like a freshly peeled almond. A bright streak passes across his dark, dark face. It could be a waterfall, it could be a torch. It washes him clean as it bathes him in light. But it passes too quickly for me to see it. The flame flickers, and then there is that sad little smile again. This time he catches me. He catches me watching him. The smile vanishes. I have smothered him with the tired fears of a man who has been on the Tünel a hundred, maybe a thousand times, but still worries it might collapse on him. The doors grind open. As he races away on his long, slender legs, with his pure, white finger nails flashing, I manage to catch up with him. We are out of the Tünel now. Wandering through the evening crowd, his mouth falls open, as he marvels at the speed of his journey, as he watches the next wave of passengers, hurrying up to Beyoğlu. It is almost as if … yes. It is almost as if he is taking the scene into his mouth.

Elated, he races away. I watch him go. Even those wide, torn patches on his trousers look pleased. Sewn with large stitches and ripped at the bottom, they speak of the wonders they witnessed, there in that seat on the Tünel.

His black legs plunge into the crowd.

Everything about him tells you that he spends his winters in a tinplate house and his summers in a tent.

We built these funiculars for people, so that they could get to the top of a hill in a single moment. But for a child who doesn’t want to show the joy he feels when he rides it for the first time, the Tünel is also a slide.

I won’t be so bold as to say that if we can’t make our funiculars as slides,
it’s because we don’t appreciate the children who feel such joy on their first ride down. That would be flattering myself. That would be assuming I had the power to build such a slide myself! Let them come to me with their tenders! But what I will say is this:

“Nothing is too much for these people.”

Tonight in Edirnekapı a mother will listen to the story of a boy riding the Tünel. “Then this man with these enormous eyes started staring at me,” he’ll say. “And after that I just couldn’t enjoy myself.” He’ll tell his mother how he just couldn’t find it in himself to smile at those strangers. Let alone show them his white teeth. He’ll tell her what he heard along the way, and what he couldn’t say, and they will be as happy as if they had just taken a ride on the Tünel.

Born in 1921, Mehmet Dalgır was a big, blundering man whose forelock only half concealed a narrow forehead. His mouth hung open. His shirt was ripped open, and his skin was dark, almost purple. His eyes were vacant, drained of everything but dread.

“Can’t you see, Mr. Judge? I’m trembling like a leaf.”

His face went into spasms as his left arm twitched.

“You see, my head’s not in the right place …”

“Where’s your head?”

“On my shoulders.”

“And your mind?”

“It’s just not there. I lost it. I even spent some time in the loony bin. But if I get off, I’m sure to get a job. I’m a carpenter, you see. And I know all the tricks. Why would I lie? I know them all. Forgive me and I won’t do it again. I’ll go straight to a carpenter and … I’ll take whatever he’s willing to pay me for the week. Just to make ends meet.”

“It seems like your mind’s all there, Mehmet.”

“It comes and goes, sir.”

“Do you have a criminal record?”

“I do, sir. There was that time I took my uncle’s coat. That’s why all this happened. I stole those clothes so I could pay him back. Oh, that coat! That’s what got me into all this trouble in the first place. That coat’s the one to blame.”

“Were you given a sentence?”

“I was. A month in jail, but I haven’t done the time yet, honored sir.”

Now his trousers were trembling. So, too, was his shirt, whose reverse side was as purple as a bruise, and the ripped rubber around his feet.

In that moment of silence, I looked at Mehmet Dalgır’s profile: his mouth was ajar, and on his chin was a straggle of black stubble: half a face and half a mind. A frightened child: half calculating and half pleading.