A Useless Man

by Sait Faik Abasiyanik

  My hands are cracked, my skin as dark as earth. I’m proud and I’m free, because at long last I have vanquished the monster in the cradle, and to mark this glorious day I shall drink in the milk foaming in my bowl like a man whose beard has gone white.

  Outside it’s raining. But I am still inside. I’d seen off my past, and I was feeling fine. I don’t miss my old life, not one little bit. One bowl of milk and I’ve sent it packing. I’ve lifted up the mansion of the past. I’ve closed my eyes to the memories flashing from each window, and smashed it to bits.

  And still it rains. Let it rain, what do I care? Let it rain forever. A line of poetry floats into my mind:

  “We never knew the spring day when we were weaned …”

  And that was when I knew I had to free myself of all the verse, couplets, novels and books. I was entering a new world. I required poems just as new. I needed to start reading new novels, viewing new paintings, and to write I needed to forge a new Turkish. I needed to seek out new sentiments, new books, new ideas. But what of the flotsam I’d left at the dairy shop’s iron door? What if they mobbed me when I left? What if they herded me back to my old bad habits? The chain that binds the milk of memory with the future – it forms a ring, doesn’t it? It’s bound unto itself. When I was back on the rainy street, when I had rounded up my runaways, here’s what I’d say to them: “What a fool I was back there in that dairy shop. Why didn’t you warn me? Please forgive me. Everyone gets like that sometimes. I hope you’re not offended by me. Forgive me, please.”

  “Would you like another serving?” asked the man in the dairy shop. I drank one more cup. No, it no longer had the same effect.

  The everyday world waiting outside in the rain said this to me: “Come on, now. Hurry. Enough is enough. Come out here. You need to be with us. You can’t spend the whole day in the dairy shop, pretending you’re a newborn. We’re out here waiting. We’re coming to get you. Everything and everyone is out here waiting. Time to finish this game you’ve been playing with them inside. No one’s ever born again. And even if you could be. What would happen then? In two years, no, not even two years, in two days we’d turn you back into the old you. The old you who thinks only of himself, with the same jealousies, the same ill humor, the old you who drinks too much and is a fool. We have all we need to knock you out with the old maladies. And what sort of new world did you have in mind, my dear man? A world never seen, or heard, or tasted, or written … are you serious? Come on now. Come back to the life you know. No milk for you tonight. Tonight you’re going to drink pure molasses mixed with water and grain alcohol. And then you’ll feel good, and your old hopes will come crowding back – the fond wishes that the hand cannot grasp and the eye cannot see and can only rarely be so much as felt, and the half-baked illusions that are clear to the naked eye, and begin with wine, and overflow with drunken heroics … When you greet these old friends again, you will be ashamed of the state you were in this morning.

  “Tomorrow morning when we wake you up, you’ll have a foul, fusty, pasty mouth, like you always do.”

  By now the aroma of foaming milk was streaming down the walls of the dairy shop. I put on my hat. I raced out into the street. Hearing my shouts – “Stay away from me! Stay away!” – my runaways approached me softly, warily, the way doctors or nurses or guards might round in on a mental patient in distress. They took my arm. They stroked my shoulder, and then, in one fell swoop, they all grabbed my collar. And suddenly, I found myself all buttoned up inside my crazy shirt, and back in my old crazy life.

  Two glasses of milk. Oh, look what you’ve done to me.

  Fire Tongs and a Chair on a Winter’s Night

  It’s getting on my nerves, this empty room. And that clock on the wall, tick, tick, and tocking, while the chair just sits there. The snow is coming down faster than before. It turns me to ice just to look at it. I feel like I need to do something. But I know I can’t do a thing. I could jump on a ferry and head for the city. Take my chances. It’s always there waiting for me: that street lottery with its hopes and its perils, its noise and its twists of fate. I plunge my hand into the game bag and pull out my numbers: 77 red! 19, tombola!

  Precisely nine miles between me and the city. Water surrounding me, on all four sides. The snow slows down, and then picks up again. A rooster starts crowing. A child chasing a turkey. I hear the tolling of a bell and in the distance a phaeton. Again, the rooster crows.

  That empty chair needs filling. But who would ever sit here? There’s nobody I want to see. That chair, though … doesn’t it look like it’s expecting someone? The carpenter who made it, he had a head on his shoulders. He knew this chair was destined to sit here like this, waiting for people.

  I peel an orange and eat it.

  I must have dozed off, because the clock stopped ticking. But now it’s back at it. The snow is coming down slower again. The tongs on the wood-burning stove remind me of the chair. Someone should take them and pull out an ember, blow off the ash, and hold it out for me to light my cigarette.

  I can just see that gypsy woman selling tongs along the shacks on the hills of Mecidiyeköy. Now she’s waving the very same tongs and shouting at her husband:

  “Hey old man! These tongs are different! It’s like they’re calling out for fire just for the fun of it!”

  “What the hell, Kehlibar. You lost your marbles? Come on, Kehlibar! Stop talking nonsense.”

  “But I’m telling you, old man. These tongs are looking for my fire!”

  Her husband has gray flecks in his moustache, more black than white. He looks around forty-five. His teasing eyes are shot with blood; they speak to me of fear.

  As if to say, “Never you mind. The wife’s got a screw loose.”

  But like me, the gypsy woman likes the way the tongs just sit there. And not only the way the tongs just sit there: the way they conjure up a helping hand, a dear friend, and an evening of good stories. She can see it all. Kehlibar is a lonely, troubled, and mysterious woman; she lives in her imagination. Her husband is jealous beyond belief. He sends her out with the other women, to sell tongs with the other women, and he’s on pins and needles until she gets home.

  I light my cigarette. I face the window, to watch the heavy snowflakes falling. And suddenly I am shrouded by bliss. Where did it come from? I just don’t know. How did it arise from such a dark mood? It fits me as snugly as a shoe on a beautiful little lady’s soft foot. But what can I make of it?

  I draw back the curtains. And I am a child again, thinking about my new rubber boots with their red lining, wondering if they’ll squeak in the snow on my way to school in the morning. Where to hang this happy moment? There beside two cloves of garlic and the evil eye? Later we tossed bird feed, millet, corn, and wheat under a cherry tree; we came out from the house with a sieve; we tied a pole to the edge of the sieve so we could lift it up; we tied a string to the pole; we threw the string down to a blue-eyed boy looking up from a lower window in the house, and he tied the end of the string to a stone and went back inside to munch on the hot orange peels drying on the wood-burning stove while he waited by the window for sparrows to fly into the trap …

  Oh that miserable, foolish childhood of mine! Even you are gone. Your voice is so soft that it could be coming to me from the grave.

  The wind jumps from roof to roof, slipping over the lead domes. A shadow takes shape in the sky. Growing in the mist on the windowpane, the shadow is now a crow. Now it is perched on top of the church across the street. Now why did it have to go and land right on top of the holy cross?

  The north wind is blowing like mad. The old banks of snow look like corpses, bruised and purple, but the hailstones pelting down on them look like millet, glowing gold.

  I might leave the house, I might go to a coffeehouse; I might think about whether or not I should go to Istanbul. I might miss the boat back and when night has fallen over the city I might stagger home on a cane. I might sit and read. I might read love stories. We might assume that
human love starts here. We might close our minds to our lives, and life itself, and think only of ourselves. We might never stick our heads outside. We might drive away all thoughts of hunger and sickness and people without heating or fire or wood-burning stoves; we might lose ourselves in love stories as we unravel into dreams.

  Let the fire tongs and the chair just sit there and wait. Bastards! The birds will always fly up into the sky to look down with piercing eyes. Let’s see if they can spy one tiny piece, one tiny grain of millet.

  The snow is falling. Some people come home dressed in fur, some in fancy boots, some in rubber shoes, some in spiked boots, and some holding a cane.

  Winter is a nasty business! An evil thing, evil! Turn your eyes away from all the pomp! Turn your eyes from this fake Swiss landscape …

  I stand up and push the ever-waiting chair under the table. And those sad fire tongs, still waiting for a human hand – I pull them out from the embers. I lay them beside the stove. The wind and snow have stopped. A cloak of silence has fallen over the village. The sky is pitch black. This vast and neverending winter night is still, is at rest, but once again gathering up more snow. I open first the window and then my mouth to curse the winter night with a foul curse I learned long ago from an Armenian fisherman in Kumkapı.

  A Story about Springtime

  A holiday, an awakening, a miracle, a folly. It’s never going to come, and then it does. Springtime answers to all these descriptions, and many others, too … Birds and butterflies, poppies and meadows, green grass and blossoms, mimosas and oleanders, dandelions and the sound of water, gypsies and lambs … You can find them all in a classic springtime, and there’s even room for the tendril of a vine. Of all the memories I’ve lost, the most important is the sunlight in April and May.

  Of all the seasons, spring is the one that a man over forty cannot face without some sadness. Where has she gone, that girl whose hands went suddenly pale? That wind that turned her pale? That fast-beating heart? They’re right, the ones who divide life itself into seasons. We each have our spring, our summer, our autumn and winter. For us, spring comes much later than it does for animals. A horse has its springtime when it’s one. Well, all right, maybe two. A lamb can become a ram at six months. But a child can’t really understand springtime before the age of twenty. Any taste of it before then is a false spring. That’s the sort of story I’m writing here: it’s about one of those false springs.

  Exactly thirty years ago, I was twelve years old and living in an Anatolian city. My father was a civil servant. We’d arrived in this city in late summer. We’d struggled through a bad winter – snowdrifts as high as a man. Then one day, spring came. The snow melted. The snow melted, but it wasn’t the sun’s doing. It was the rain’s. In Anatolian cities, spring begins with an afternoon deluge. In the mornings the sky is a bright blue, and the sun looks as cold as if it’s sparkling on snow. Toward eleven, a black cloud rolls in – it could be from the east, or the west, or the north. Ten minutes later, it begins to pour – pour like water from a glass. And that’s it, for the rest of the day. Great lashes of rain, one after the other. Through my window I could see a dark green pasture, known in the vicinity as “Black Meadow.” I would never have felt the urge to burst out of the house screaming like a madman if not for that play of colors on the meadow that, like the sea, soaked up every pigment of the sky.

  I had been in poor health all winter. Every time I went out into the cold, my head would spin. Then there was this strange, oppressive stretch of rain and black clouds, with three gloomy days for every bright one, but there was also spring, filling the air with the aroma of earth and meadow, people and barns, and all I wanted to do was shout and cry and then lie still.

  One morning I was gazing at the ceiling. The clouds hadn’t rolled in yet. The sky was still sparkling. I lay on my mattress, wondering how long it would be before the rain came. Just then a bright bird flew through my room. I sat up in bed. It flew past again. Then, on the wall to my right, I saw a band of light flicker and disappear. Then it vanished. I rubbed my eyes. When I looked again I could see a bright circle, shaking and trembling. It seemed to be trying to pin itself to the wall. This was light reflecting off a mirror – it could be nothing else.

  I jumped out of bed to look out the window. Our upper garden looked out onto the garden of the house beneath us. The light on my wall must have come from a mirror somewhere over there. She was sitting on a wicker mat among the peach blossoms. Behind her she had placed a chair. She must have been sixteen or seventeen. I did not leave the window. When the light from her mirror touched my eyes, I didn’t shield them with my hands. I looked straight in front of me, eyes unblinking.

  The next day I, too, had a mirror in my hands. When the light from my mirror hit her eyes, she’d avert them, smiling faintly. This game never lasted longer than half an hour. She would race back into her house with rain dripping from her hair, and I would return to my bed. The next day would bring another beautiful morning, and it would always be her mirror that arrived first, racing across my room to hover trembling on the wall, as if looking for a hook to hang from. And again I would look straight into her mirror light, my eyes unblinking; as she shielded her beautiful eyes, we would together gaze at mine. Then the clouds would roll in, with the afternoon deluge. Nothing else interested me, and that is why I paid no attention to the horse carriage that stopped outside our house one morning. Only my mother caught me playing with my mirror. She had an odd expression on her face as she took in the garden, the girl, the light from the mirror, and the mirror in my hands.

  “Come on now,” she said. “Get dressed.”

  We got into the carriage. Behind us, they’d tied on two trunks to carry our belongings. My father had a new posting. Off we went. As we passed through a forest, the sun came bursting through the clouds, lighting up the new leaves on the trees, and then disappeared. And, with a pang, I remembered the mirror light that I would never see again. I burst into tears. My father asked:

  “What’s wrong with this one?”

  I buried my head in my mother’s scarf. I have no idea what she conveyed to my father, if not with her hands, then with her eyes, but neither said a thing. Somehow knowing that no one had the courage to stop me, I cried my heart out.

  And now, whenever a light happens to pass across my window in the springtime, I remember that day with the sweet sadness we all share at that time of year, with a restless beating heart. Thirty years have passed since that day. Never once have I flashed a mirror in anyone’s face, and never once has anyone flashed a mirror into mine. But if a light happened to pass through my room on a spring day, as fast as a swallow, I don’t know what would become of me.

  Sinağrit Baba

  We were five rowboats at Hell’s Point. A beautiful January evening. A southern wind. Splashes of red rippling over the sea. Long, vast, dying waves the color of strong linden tea. The boats rocking heavily in the sea, fishing poles in suspense, silent souls …

  Does a creature lurk beneath us, woven from the darkest of the seven colors, drifting through the hushed and twisted caverns thirty-eight fathoms deep? How can it be, that Sinağrit Baba has left the hunt so soon? He’s the king of the deeps, lavishing kindness and magnificence on all he leaves in his wake. His jacket, noble but cruel with its shimmering rainbow scales. He is rushing back to his palace; it’s made of gold, emerald, coral, and mother-of-pearl, all twinkling in the dark blue.

  Sinağrit Baba hasn’t said a word in his life, he’s never married and he’s always lived alone. How many tragedies has he watched from his cavern’s emerald window? How many fishing lines has he dragged into the sea?

  But tonight he will choose a line and put an end to his long life. He will end his long life while every scale on his jacket is still sparkling, and long before mayonnaise is smeared over his flesh. Though there is still time before he is devoured by that pale and sticky creature, the wretched stingray, he knows he should surrender now to that intelligent creature from
the strange world above, to be feted at a sumptuous feast served with white wine.

  Sinağrit Baba sniffs one of the lines. It belongs to the fisherman Hristo. He’s a flawed man. Greedy and always calculating. Yes, he’s poor, but he’s not proud. Sinağrit Baba favors poor men with some pride. He drifts to the next line and sniffs. Hasan’s line. Forget him. Forget his temper, too. Underneath it, he’s a coward, and Sinağrit Baba favors the brave. He tries another line. Fisherman Yakup is a good man about town, charming, loveable, and sometimes crude. But he has a jealous streak. Sinağrit Baba doesn’t favor jealous men. Forget him, too. The next line belongs to a stingy man. Whereas Sinağrit Baba favors generosity. Nevertheless he tries the bait and, tearing off half a Spanish mackerel, he flattens the hook entirely and swallows the bait whole before its stingy owner yanks up his line.

  “Holy mother, Nikoli,” he says. “He’s completely flattened the hook.”

  With Nikoli’s bait in his belly, Sinağrit Baba tries to find a flaw in Nikoli. Surely he’s flawed. First of all, he’s a drunk. And he’s immoral and self-centered. But he’s also generous and brave. He’s hardly a coward. He’s poor. He’s proud. Sinağrit Baba favors the poor and the proud, but not Nikoli’s brand of pride. Sinağrit is after something just a bit different: a pride that’s timely and true; but no, that’s not quite it either, it’s something you sense in the way a fisherman holds his rod, something about him that goes down to the very roots of his hair, the best of humankind. Sinağrit Baba can’t flatten a fishhook borne by a proud hand, or sever his line, or make away with his barrel swivel.