There was one in particular, I’ll always remember him. This one brought boys with him to do the job. He’d prepare the birdlime on Saturday night … The bastard’s name was Konstantin. He had an office in Galata. A grain store. He was a broad-chested man, with thick, hairy wrists; his smile was oily and unctuous; his nose was covered with moles and his nostrils flared. A shock of unruly hair, and mincing footsteps.
If only you could see him, wrapping his fingers around those golden brown feathers, and sinking his glittering chrome teeth into the bird’s neck. Already tasting the pilaf he would sprinkle with its drop of flesh.
He was a calm and humble man. He didn’t flaunt his wealth. His neighbors liked him and all that. He never meddled in their affairs. Never gossiped. If you saw him pitter-pattering off to work of a morning, or stepping off the ferryboat of an evening, swinging his heavy string bag, you’d find nothing amiss in his massive frame, his casual air, his Karaman accent. His simple, if calculated, way of thinking. The simple, if endearing, jokes he told after throwing back a few glasses. In his natural state he could be any one of a thousand other people, measuring their lives on their way to work.
But in the fall he became a monster. In the space of an instant, a monster. Seated on a bench on the back deck of the 5:35 ferryboat, he would let his contented eyes travel over the surface of the sea. He would lift them to the wondrous late September sky. Then suddenly his eyes would light up. His entire face.
A swarm of dark brown specks would appear, in the sky and on the green-blue sea. They would dance to the right and left, these dark brown specks, before setting course to vanish as fast as they had come.
Konstantin Efendi would squint as he gazed in their wake. He would see where the brown specks were heading. Yes. It was the island. Looking around him, he would seek out someone he knew. Then he’d wink and point up to the sky and say:
“Our pilaf has arrived!”
If the birds passed close enough, he’d whistle through his teeth. With his thick lips, he would imitate their song. Once I saw a whole flock of them deceived. They circled around the boat before they left, detained by what they thought had been a friendly cry.
Then the weather changed. The lodos and the poyraz went to war over us, but on one warm, sweet hyacinth day in late autumn, when the wind had died down, when strips of cloud still hovered in the sky, he managed to locate an excellent decoy for his cage. He called in all the neighborhood boys. One by one they plucked the finches from the sky, and the titmice, the floryas and the odd sparrow. A thousand birds, yielding no more than 250 grams of flesh.
The birds haven’t come for years now. Or maybe I just don’t see them. Once I glimpsed one of those beautiful autumn days through my window. I set out wondering just where along the hillside I might find Konstantin Efendi. My blood froze when I heard the chirping of a bird. My heart stopped. But how could that be? Flying amidst the arbutus berries, the white and olive-colored clouds, the soft sunlight, and this peaceful wash of blue, a bird call can only conjure up a world of peace and poetry. Literature, art, music. Happy, understanding souls that never heed the call of greed. However far afield we travel, wherever we are in the world, a calling bird speaks one language. Konstantin Efendi is a mere hindrance. But what are we to do? The birds no longer come here. Maybe in a few years they’ll be gone forever. Who knows how many Konstantin Efendis there are in the world? First it was the birds. Now it’s our green spaces. The other day I stepped out onto the road as I couldn’t bear to crush the grass along the sidewalk. It was one of those Konstantin Efendi days. There wasn’t a bird in the sky. Before leaving home, I’d pressed a fig up against my titmouse’s cage. Cracking a fig seed, he looked up at me fondly through one eye.
I’d hung the cage on a nail I’d hammered into the wall and set off. There were no birds in the sky, but there was green grass along the side of the road … I looked down: chunks of the grass had been torn away. A little further on I noticed four boys walking ahead. Stopping at one of the loveliest patches of green, they shoveled out a clump the size of a paving stone and tossed it into a sack.
“What are you boys doing?” I asked.
“What’s it to you?” they replied.
They were just poor children, dressed in tattered clothes.
“But friends, why are you pulling up the grass?”
“Ahmet, the engineer. We’re working for him.”
“What are they going to do with these?”
“You know the Dutch leather merchant up there? They’re landscaping his garden …”
“He should buy English grass and plant it, that guy’s a rich bastard …”
“Isn’t this the same as English grass?”
“Is it any better?”
“Of course, can you really find grass better than this? That’s what the Dutchman says.”
I ran to the police station and informed them. They supposedly took action. But the boys continued to pull up the grass here and there on the sly, and the police never did a thing about Ahmet the engineer. Even though the city council has penalties for people who pull grass out from the roadside.
They strangled the birds. They ripped up the grass. They left the roads filled with mud.
The world is changing, my friends. One day soon, there won’t be a single dark-brown fleck left in the autumn sky. One day soon, there won’t be a blade of mother earth’s green hair left on the roadside. And children, this bodes ill for you. We older ones won’t suffer. We’ve already known the pleasure of birds and green spaces. You’re the ones who will suffer. But this story is on me.
Barba Antimos
On the wall is a picture of an English aristocrat at the Imperial Court, asking for the Queen’s forgiveness. But more remarkable than that is the advertisement for “The Optimus,” a modern oil lamp.
The lamp hangs from a rope on the deck of a motorboat. It sways in the wind, while fishermen underneath it heave in a net full of fish.
The canary chirps inside its cage. Restless titmice hop from one perch down to the next. The air above the stove is shimmering. Fisherman Kanari steps inside with snow on his graying blond moustache. The canary chirps again.
“Do you know Barba Antimos?”
He is a stonemason who at the age of eighty finds himself all alone on an island, far from his wife and children, as old as the pictures on the walls, and just as alive. He no longer has a boat or a fishing net, and his heart harbors no desires. His only belongings are the Priyol watch in his pocket, the red scarf around his neck, the woolen socks on his feet, and the smoke rising from his thick Maxim Gorki moustache. As for his memories – choose any year, and he’ll have little to tell you. He might tell you about a wall he mended, and that would be it. It’s not that he’s reticent. It’s just that he prefers peace and quiet. He would, I’m sure, love to spend another eighty years on this earth, building and mending and plastering walls. And dozing by the stove in the Kornil coffeehouse, while in his dreams he was already escaping through the heather to his one-room house with a loaf of bread under his arm and fresh tobacco in his case. But time is as fickle as the wind: the lodos gives way to the poyraz and then it is the turn of the karayel. As we drag ourselves through life, it’s the rhythm of our days that seem to offer constancy. But this, too, will change. One day Barba Antimos will die.
“Barba Antimos built that wall over there,” we’ll say. “He used to sit there by that stove in the Kornil coffeehouse. At eighty, his eyes were still sharp and his hands still nimble enough to tuck a cigarette inside that moustache. And when he blew out the smoke, he’d puff out his cheeks.” That’s how we shall remember him, unless we descend into oblivion first.
Today the canary is singing, while our feet turn to ice, but one day the canary will stop singing. Apostol the Greengrocer will stop feeding rakı to Marco the Donkey. Pandeli Efendi the Milkman will no longer sit beneath that magnificent image of the British Queen with Puços, the Kornil’s resident cat, in his lap. And never again will he tell us
how he was sentenced to the tombs when he’d already paid his taxes or how much effort it took to change the court’s decision. Knowing all this, I leave the coffeehouse. I leave behind the fragrant stink of rubber, fish, tobacco, and ink. I wend my way home. The moment I’m there, I’ll get started. I shall put down on paper every year of Barba Antimos’s on this earth.
The folk remedies they’d suggested for his ulcer didn’t always work. There were times when he would almost complain. The lines on his face would deepen, as if to bemoan his eighty years of stoic, noble sacrifice. Blurred by sadness, his blue eyes would seem to question human company and the rule it enforced. And perhaps these were the times when the ulcer was giving him the most pain. When he spoke directly about the ulcer, the pain was probably less severe. He had been at home for days, alone with his pain. And maybe that was why he’d come out – so that he could grumble about the pain on his way down the hill, or even before he started.
“How goes it, Barba Antimos?”
“Not so good. It’s quite troubling, sir. I can’t sleep, can’t eat. I had a little soup yesterday. But that made me …”
“It’ll pass, Barba Antimos.”
He pursed his lips. He had beautiful lips. The lips of a five-year-old child.
“The doctor at the Bulgarian hospital gave me some medicine, but it doesn’t always work. You just never know.”
Lean on any wall on this island. Sit on it. Climb over it or pelt it with stones. Whatever you do, you will find in it his mortar, sweat, and toil. You will find no mosaics in them, no ersatz wood or stone. He makes his walls the same way they made them two thousand years ago, and they hide secrets just as old. Greek gods, epic lovers, heroes railing against injustice. Touch a wall that Barba Antimos has made, and you touch antiquity. Pull a bag of Byzantine gold out of one of his cisterns – just three years old – and you’d be hard pressed to find an archaeologist to challenge its authenticity. Grow a boxwood vine over an arbor outside one of his cottages and it won’t be long before you’re expecting Socrates himself to greet you the moment you step inside. And then, one summer night, when you’re sitting at your table drinking wine, you’ll see Alcibiades draw his blade on Socrates and say: “Fine then, have it your way. But tell me this. How can a man live as long as you have without becoming an immortal? Why, after eighty years of gathering wisdom and unearthing secrets, and finally discovering true happiness, must he leave this world behind?”
Should you lack the confidence to guess how Socrates might have answered such a question, you hold your tongue. Instead you gaze up at the stars through the dangling grapes and then down at your glass of wine. Then, with Homer at your side, you follow a path that winds among the walls and houses and hollowed cisterns that grace the island with nothing but good taste; you find the true path that runs from Byzantium to the simplicity and poetry of the ancient Greek world, and away from the monstrous villas of the modern age.
Barba Antimos never falters in the face of adversity. He makes just enough to get by. As long as his arms are strong, he brings beauty to everything he touches. But when his ulcer flares up, not even 250 grams of Halvah wedged in bread can bring him comfort. His gnarled and knotted muscles go limp. And all that’s left of him is the light in his clear blue eyes and the smoke in his blond, Maxim Gorki moustache and his long, mortar-white hair. No one remembers what he did anymore – the houses he embellished, the walls he strengthened, the lime he covered with mortar and made beautiful with his hands.
Did he know how beautiful he made everything he touched? Would he be so humble if he did? If it had been his apprentice Hristo, we would never have heard the end of it. “Now that’s one of my walls,” he would have said. “Rip out a few stones and it’ll still be standing.” But Barba Antimos – he never said a thing.
Now he lives with Diyojen in one of his own houses, but every couple of days he comes down to drink milk with his old friend and compatriot, Pandeli Usta. Some mornings I see him drinking milk in Pandeli’s dairy shop. Draining his glass, he smiles as if his face has been caressed by a mountain breeze. And his eyes look pure enough to drink; they look like milk. Barba Antimos never breathes a word of his sorrow. But I’ll tell you.
For forty years now he has carried a secret, a bitter and unspeakable secret. For forty years now, he has been pouring his grief into his walls. And some evenings, when I lean against them, I can feel them shuddering, shaking, trembling.
The Serpent in Alemdağ
The snow had already begun to fall when we walked into the theater. When we came out the square was covered in snow. A drop fell down my neck into my shirt. I shivered.
“Get your hand out of your mouth. Don’t bite your nails,” I yelled, and a couple walking ahead of us turned around.
They slowed down to get a better look at my face. I felt as lonely as I always did when he was with me. He’d come on Fridays. And the pipe-smoking plaster-cast sailor would be there, waiting to greet him.
The sun on the oilskin curtain made it exactly three. When I was absolutely sure he was coming, I’d let myself doze off. When he pounded on the door like he was scrambling up it, I’d hear it in my dream. I’d jump out of bed. I’d open the door. And there he’d be, ashen-faced, and breathing through the mouth. He’d pull a cigarette off the table and light up.
The world was far away. Here there was a cabinet, a mirror, a sailor cast in plaster, a bed, another mirror, a telephone, an armchair, books, newspapers, matchsticks, cigarette butts, a stove, and a blanket. The world was far away. There were planes in the sky.
Inside were passengers. The trains were running, too. Some brute signs a piece of paper and another gives him money. An evening coolness had emerged. And now the evening simits had come out into the world …
A simit vendor’s call floated through the room. The world was far away.
A ticket collector is stapling tickets; a man and a boy are poring over a newspaper. A strong young man is stretched out on the bench. A good-looking, powerful young man with dark eyebrows. To my right lies an emaciated creature with his hands stuffed in his pockets. The boy has stopped reading. His overcoat is rolled up under his head. He’s stretched out, too. I’m in the lower cabin of a ferryboat.
It’s Friday. School’s out. We live on Kirazlı Mescit Street in Süleymaniye. I’m around seventeen. I can remember the pine tree at the Münir Pasha Konak. That enormous pine in the high school garden that probably burned in the fire. The frescos in oil paint on the ceilings of the Münir Pasha Konak have long since turned to smoke and ash. The bedbugs burned, too. My bed and my blanket and my tears, all burned: the pools burned; the evergreens burned; memories, those memories burned; that sunburnt boy burned; the books that brought me here, all burned.
I have to find some imitation sheepskin to sew into my overcoat.
It’s Monday. I’m in the ferryboat’s lower cabin again, and again it’s snowing. Again Istanbul is ugly. Istanbul? Istanbul’s an ugly city, a dirty city, on rainy days especially. Are other days any better? No. They’re not. On other days the bridge is covered in bile. The back streets are covered in rubble and mud. The nights are like vomit. The houses turn their backs to the sun. The streets are narrow, the merchants cruel, and the rich indifferent. People are the same everywhere. Even those two asleep on the bed with the gilded frame – they’re not together. They’re alone.
The world is filled with loneliness. It all begins with loving another human being, and in this world, it ends the same way.
It’s so beautiful, Alemdağ. So very beautiful. And at this time of day, with those trees – they’re more than fifteen meters high … And with the waters of Taşdelen and the serpent … But on winter days the serpent’s in its cave. Let it be. The weather’s mild in Alemdağ. The sun rises through the trees’ scarlet leaves. Warmth descends from the sky in bits and pieces, piling up on the rotten leaves. The Taşdelen is a thin little stream. We refresh ourselves with a jug of its water and listen to it burbling through us as we undress and w
ash ourselves. We frolic in the water with all the other creatures who have come to drink here: a rabbit, a serpent, a blackbird, a partridge, and a goat that has escaped from Polonezköy to toast to our health.
And when the serpent cries “Panco, Panco,” the goat, the partridge, and the rabbit freeze as if they’re cast in plaster. And they’re white as plaster. I pull a sharp knife from my pocket and cut off a few noses; the others I slash just below the wing. Once the blood is flowing, they come to life again. They leave me and run off to Panco.
I can see Panco’s smile sliding toward the scar on his angry, bloodless face. He kisses the partridge on its beak and tugs the rabbit’s whiskers. A serpent coils around his wrist. He’s brought a ball, a football. I’m the goalkeeper. The other goalkeeper is the serpent. The rest are stretched out over the leaves, playing in the sun. For hours they frolic. When the ball flies into our goal, the serpent and I stand to the side and watch: We’re spoiling the game.
It’s so beautiful, Alemdağ. So very beautiful. Istanbul is covered in mud. Its taxi drivers keep driving through puddles, heedlessly splashing water over pedestrians. And heedlessly, the snow keeps seeping inside us.
A woman hurls a cat from the fifth floor. A woman and a foreign man stand over it.
There’s a light stream of blood running from its nose. The man says:
“Il est mort d’hemoragie, le pauvre.”
The cat was tossed from a fifth floor window, the woman tells me in Turkish. We push the cat closer to the thick, high wall behind Galatasaray High School; by now it’s clearly dead. The woman on the fifth floor throws coal into her stove. The weather’s so cold. If only it would snow. Even when it snows, there’s some warmth in the air.
When did Panco get back from Alemdağ? Here he is, walking past me. He’s with a friend. He acts as if he’s sidestepping a dead cat. Our arms graze against each other. Walls open. People hold grudges for years, but if they both feel the same way, they kiss and make up and say enough is enough. I turn around. Panco is still walking down the street with his friend, laughing. The pool of the Munir Pasha Konak was reduced to ash but the slimy green water is still there. You can’t see the bottom, but when I close my eyes now I can see the glimmering ten lira coins. Once we gave our friend, the future governor, fifty kuruş to jump into the pool with his clothes on.
A Useless Man Page 15