by Ayfer Tunç
Aziz Bey, not even considering what he had left behind, was ready to embark, full of desire and strength, on a journey to a brand new home where his sweetheart awaited. As he left the house with rapid steps, he could feel his father’s eyes boring into the back of his head. It was as though he feared that his father would seize him by the shoulder with his strong fingers and bring him back to that deadly captivity, just when he was hurrying to reach the freedom he sought in faraway places and leave behind this neighbourhood, where he had been born and had grown up. As he went to the port seeking a ship to take him to a new life promising him riches, love and happiness, his father had taken his ailing mother in his arms, helped her into a taxi and was trying to reach the hospital in time, swearing on the way that he would never forgive his only and ungrateful son, and filled with a resentment so deeply rooted that it would never ever be eradicated.
There were ships in the port that day, but that the one destined for Aziz Bey was still waiting to weigh anchor twenty days later. After Maryam had written, ‘You, too, should come…’ he had secretly obtained a passport and inquired into travel by train and boat. As soon as he left home, his first job was to go to the port and stare hungrily at the ships that were to take him to his new homeland.
For twenty days, he slept in different people’s houses, stayed up all night in his regular taverns and killed time in the coffee houses. He avoided his own neighbourhood throughout. He went round to see his friends, said goodbye, telling them about his wonderful dreams as though they would surely materialise. Because his wasteful palms did not know how to hang on to money, he had not saved the necessary funds for his journey. He borrowed from here and there. He did not even call on his beloved aunt lest she try to reconcile him with his father. He talked to manning agents who recruited seamen and finally boarded a dry goods ship on the condition that he worked his passage.
As he recalled the image of his mother whom he had left behind, he waved his hand like chasing away flies; he wanted to drive away this image that wrenched his insides. Finally he reached the blue and white city so bright it dazzled the eye, far hotter than described in Maryam’s letters.
Those three happy days that he happened to be thinking about, sitting in front of the window looking at the moonlight reflected in the Golden Horn on the night of that tragic incident, constituted just a short fragment of this long period.
During the daytime, he did the heavy work shown to him by the expressionless seamen who were as hard as stone with skins leathered by a windy heat. At night, he played the tambur to allay the longing a little. Then he lay on the tarpaulin on the deck of the ship that rocked like a cradle over the foaming waters of the moonlight Mediterranean, thinking of the moment when he would meet Maryam again. What would Maryam be doing? What would she say when she saw him? Would she be at a loss for words? Would she jump into his arms for joy?
Sadly, he realised much later that he had thought about all this for nights on end in vain. Because the first moment of that meeting with Maryam who, as she had related in her letters, was working as an assistant in her uncle Artin’s shop, was extremely subdued, passionless, and even cold.
Yet neither was culpable for the cold and emotionless nature of that reunion both had so longed for. For a start, Maryam had written ‘come!’ on wafer-thin pink paper only after lying in her bed towards morning, exhausted from dealing with furs that burnt her arms and legs like pepper all day long in the city scorched by the sun. She had never considered that Aziz Bey really would be able to get up and come, and harboured a notion that this love, whose existence she found very romantic, would remain a childish poetic game played with letters.
That was the reason she had not been able to believe her eyes when she first saw Aziz Bey, who was thoroughly burnt by the sun while washing the decks during the journey and was in a pitiful and downtrodden state brought about by being in a strange country with no knowledge of the language or place. Furthermore, in place of the strong, protective, decisive young man she knew as Aziz Bey, rough even in his love, here was a poor creature, bewildered and lost like a puppy thrown out of home.
As for Aziz Bey; he was unaware of his distraught and timid demeanour. He had, however, kept his self confident, dignified bearing until the vessel docked; he had held his head high with frequent thoughts of Maryam. During the journey he had such a persuasive manner convincing those around him that he had a strong personality, that he had even impressed the sailors who had turned to stone from being all alone on the open sea. These steely-eyed, sharp-featured and callous sailors, who looked on the verge of cutting one another’s throats, could not refrain from swallowing before they ordered him to task.
But this proud manner that had permeated Aziz Bey’s body, his looks, and his bearing vanished in a trice in front of the fatal feeling of foreignness he experienced as soon as he put foot on land. His shoulders drooped and an inexplicable timidity settled in his eyes. He was rendered totally wretched by a deep regret when faced with the police who pushed and shoved him, speaking with strange, misty words and loud voices and looking at great length first at his passport and then his face. When he left Customs and held out the paper with the address to find Maryam to the taxi driver, he was really frightened of the days that awaited him. That was the reason Maryam was confronted not by an Aziz Bey whose look defied at the world, but by a crestfallen Aziz Bey ready to bow to any game fate would play with him.
Thank goodness this cool, subdued and strange moment of reencounter did not last very long.
Would it have been better for Aziz Bey if it had lasted? If it had happened in a different way: if Maryam had given Aziz Bey the cold shoulder, if she had said, ‘Just because I said come, it didn’t have to be at once,’ would Aziz Bey have gone straight back? Who knows? And then, what kind of Aziz Bey would have lived in the streets of Istanbul, it is not possible to predict.
And that’s not how it happened. After a few pointless questions, asked through her confusion, she realised that she had a lover passionate enough to leave his country for her, and the soft and happy expression given to her face by this treasure lasted a whole three days.
Luckily at that time they were alone in the shop. Maryam’s father, uncle and cousins were all in the workshop. And it was lunch time to boot. As the childish surprise on Aziz Bey’s face began to fade, Maryam looked around her. It was as though the city had melted under the heat, people had fled to shady corners like insects. Maryam, seeing no one about, embraced her passionate and faithful lover and kissed him on lips that were dried and cracked by the sun.
And it was this that destroyed Aziz Bey.
That passionate kiss they enjoyed the first day in the lunch break in the dim shop subsequently came as a big shock to Aziz Bey. He was not able to explain to himself how the girl who kissed him so passionately and who went around drunk with love for three days could change so much in one day. It was quite simple, however. For Maryam the only important thing was the existence of such a lover. It was not important whether it was Aziz Bey or someone else. So because Aziz Bey would never be willing to accept this explanation, he never even considered its validity. He looked for other reasons and he could not find any.
After looking long and deeply into Maryam’s black eyes that he had missed so much, after caressing her slim white neck, they left the shop, Maryam in front and Aziz Bey behind. Although it was well after midday the sun was too hot to bear; Aziz Bey thought he would go blind from so much light. The paradise he dreamed of was much hotter than he expected and very alien too. Maryam led him round a whole lot of streets: some narrow, some wide, some shady, and some strong smelling, their colours intermingled and cloudy, then decomposing again; hoarse voices, whispers, calls, bursts of laughter, blended with interjections; where huge moustached men slept snoring in the shade. When she finished the journey, they were in front of a small, mean hotel. Speaking in the broken words of a misty language, she took the key to Aziz Bey’s room and with confident steps took him upstairs,
as though she knew the way. The room was so hot that Aziz Bey thought the walls would melt and run. Maryam closed the shutters of this small, dirty room, and the sweet gloom that enveloped the inside stopped the pain in Aziz Bey’s eyes.
Maryam came to the hotel every lunch break over those unfor -gettable three days that remained engraved in Aziz Bey’s mind. The image of the passion they enjoyed in the space of time so much longer than a long lunch break still seemed very short to Aziz Bey as the details were seared into his mind. His whole life was spent striving to tear, eradicate, scrape that image from his brain; he did not succeed. He was never able to remove this error from his being. For this reason, he lived an unhappy and irritable life; mostly angry, but sometimes as aggrieved as a motherless child.
Aziz Bey always believed he had been deceived by Maryam. Yet, if one discounted the sincere appeals in Maryam’s letters, one could hardly describe what he experienced as deception. In truth, Aziz Bey had fallen into the mistake of believing he was loved. This was all.
He spent the Maryam-less hours of these three days scarcely able to contain himself, waiting for her to come. On the fourth day, Maryam did not come. Aziz Bey was frantic. He wandered along the corridors of the hotel, he sat in the lobby, he went outside the front door. Lunch break ended, the sun bowed down; as much of the evening he could see from the window of his room slowly descended upon the city, turning it from purple to navy blue. The city metamorphosed, became alive. It became colourful with the lights that filtered through the darkness. But Aziz Bey was not even aware of this. Although he had eaten nothing all day long he did not feel hungry. There was a pain bigger than hunger inside him. As he burnt with the heat, he soaked a white towel turned purple from over-washing and placed it on the nape of his neck, he tossed and turned on the bed. He could not sleep until the morning. He spent the night watching the insects wandering about the creaking floorboards of the hotel room and jumping up with a start at the sound of every footstep. He went out with the first light of the morning passing in front of the young hotel clerk, who leant back asleep in his chair, his mouth open and his face and eyes covered with flies that were landing and taking off. He squatted on the ground and gazed at the road for a long time.
That day during lunch break Maryam stopped by for five minutes. She was coolish, apparently indifferent. She had no intention of asking after Aziz Bey, nor of talking about the job they would find for him, their fresh hopes and wonderful dreams.
To Aziz Bey’s ‘Why didn’t you come yesterday?’ she just said, ‘I was busy in the workshop, I couldn’t leave.’ Aziz Bey could not tell her how he worried about her, how he felt like a blind person not knowing the language or his way around this city. He only managed to kiss the edge of her lip, just touch her curly black hair. That was all. When Maryam left, he lay down on his bed, and a stupid smile spread over his face. If only for five minutes Maryam had come, hadn’t she? He was happy.
But on the next day she did not come.
That day Aziz Bey had a feeling that there was something funny going on. Something very slender broke inside him. He sat in front of the window, whose shutters he had closed. Hours passed. When one panel of the shutters opened by itself, he saw that the fallen stars of lights from the city had filtered into a sky wrapped in a dark navy blue. He felt as though he had awoken from a long dream. He wiped his tear filled eyes, calmed himself down and walked around the room. A touching expression of acceptance of fate settled on his face. At that moment, he felt completely alone in the world, forlorn and forgotten.
He longed passionately for his mother’s sagging soft white neck. If he had been in Istanbul now and been able to bury his face in his mother’s warm, white neck, his sorrow could have been somewhat abated.
While looking at the bright lights of this terribly hot city, he remembered that it was time for the musical show at the tavern in Samatya that he visited every evening. The friendly group of musicians must have already come in, one by one, taken their positions, and drunk their first sips of rakı. He thought that they would start a little later with a violin or lute improvisation and that they would soon be lost in a world of their own by giving their souls up to the music that had permeated their cells. He took the tambur that he had not taken in his hand since the day he arrived out of its cover and began to play.
Black eyes do not heed my wails
Come oh dimple, come to the rescue…
He put down the tambur and cried his heart out and then felt better. He went and washed his hands and face with this hot city’s water that didn’t know how to be cool. He sat on the bed and counted the remainder of his money. He then went out, without straying too far from the hotel, went into a shop and ate a tomato salad with hummus and drank a Turkish coffee with cardamom. For a while he wandered around the streets whose sounds and smells had changed with the coming of night, then returned to his room. He was tearful. He was hurt. He felt he had been deceived. He wanted to sleep for a long time and when he woke up find himself in Istanbul as the young Aziz who had not as yet been dealt life’s blow. To see that all he had been through had been a bad dream… But no. That harsh reality was real. He was alone and helpless in a foreign land.
Aziz Bey would fall into a similar situation once again at the end of his life. Then too he wanted to go to sleep and when he awoke see that that tormenting phase of his life had never happened. Like so many people whose lives were stamped with regrets…
He lay on his bed. But it was too hot to sleep.
When Maryam did not come the next day or the day after, he was charitably concerned that maybe something had happened to her. If that were not the case, Maryam would certainly have come. He went to the furrier shop of Maryam’s uncle, Artin, risking getting lost in those muddled streets. He had a bad feeling inside. He thought he would find the shop closed. The shop would surely be in a cheerless, sorrowful state: the shutters rolled down, the lights off, as if everyone had gone off in a hurry…
But the shop was open and cheerful. It looked as though it were participating with all its inner being in a commercial life full of hustle and bustle. He drew near to the shop, stood in the doorway and looked inside. Maryam was not there. Instead, a thin bony man with a moustache that resembled a toothbrush dipped in black ink, and a fat youth whose drenched handkerchief lay on the nape of his sweaty neck, were talking and looking at a fur coat they had spread on the counter. He listened to them carefully. When he distinguished ‘Artin’ a few times among the Arabic words spoken in a booming voice by the boy, he realised that the man with the toothbrush moustache was her Artin. For a moment he thought about going in and asking about Maryam, but as uncle Artin turned, sensing someone standing in the doorway, he quickly drew away from the door of the shop as if caught red-handed and crouched at the bottom of a wall. It was as though his heart beat in his throat. He went to the corner of the shop window and looked in. Being the summer season there was just a short jacket made of fox fur dyed blue in the window. Aziz Bey could see uncle Artin laughing cheerfully from behind that jacket. There was nothing untoward. But then, there was no Maryam either.
Although he had tried very hard to remember the way back to his hotel, he got lost in the muddled streets of this city that looked both very like, and not at all like, his own city. His temples throbbed. He felt desperately tired. The deep pain inside him confused his poor mind and slowed his steps as it tried to find the street that led to his hotel. He was so paralysed by the vast variety of words he heard, not a single one of which he understood, that he could not even stop someone and tell him the name of his hotel. He went in and out of many streets. He passed through districts bearing different souls of the city. After finding himself in tiny completely unexpected squares and after drinking water cupping his hand to a street fountain, he finally reached his hotel bathed in sweat, when the redness of the sun had already covered the sky. He paused as he passed the clerk, who was engaged in combing his wispy moustache in a hand-held mirror. He looked hopefully at his fa
ce wondering if he would slip him a note, a chit, give him news that would in an instant wipe out all his sorrow. The clerk just smiled. He went up to his room, washed his hands and face and sank down onto his bed. He did not want to believe that Maryam would not come again; he went to sleep.
He waited at the hotel for Maryam for a whole eleven days, hoping she would come. Twice a day he went to the restaurant he had got to know and had a bite to eat. Every morning he went down to the bench that could be called the reception and paid the clerk the money for the night he had stayed. He sat in a corner looking onto the street in front of the so-called lobby and at night played his tambur in his room. The agony of foreignness that had left deep scars on his life took the place of the agony of love. Finally his money ran out.
Words full of bitterness and rebellion were growing inside him. He could neither stay nor return. If he wrote a letter to his father or close friends asking for money, by the time it arrived he would have died of hunger. He felt very deeply the pain of having come to this city with great hopes where he knew no one and where he had not a single friend, only to be disappointed. He wandered around the city for a few days, but he didn’t even know the two or three words necessary to be able to get a job. He passed in front of building sites, not being able to explain that he would carry stones if need be, looking with a vacant expression at the workers running about like ants, then returning to his room, hopeless and despondent. Soon he would not be able to pay for the hotel and the clerk who liked to accompany the cheerful songs on the radio would seize him by the collar and sling him out.
That day he wandered around the city yet again and returned to the hotel with his hands empty. It was getting towards evening. Again that beautiful redness had settled on the city. There was no one in the hotel where only vagrants and lonely people stayed for a few days and then left, whose corridors were always empty, where occasionally a cry or a strange shout rose and died away. Despite the fact that Aziz Bey had opened the windows and the door wide, not even the slightest breeze could be felt. He took his tambur and sat on his bed. His woeful voice wandered round the corridors of the empty hotel, reaching even the ear of the young clerk, who was sitting, leaning back in his chair as usual.