The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  ‘Of course,’ Atom Salih grinned. ‘He kissed my hand, so why shouldn’t we?’

  Remzi’s short rattleboned body leaned through the doorway. ‘It was him kissed my hand,’ he shouted.

  ‘What!’

  Salih was about to pounce on him again when Remzi retracted. ‘All right, brother, all right, I kissed your hand first.’

  ‘So you did,’ Atom Salih said proudly. He took Remzi’s arm and, with weaving steps, the two of them made for the tavern across the road.

  Tongues were loosened after that. The men began picking Fisher Selim to pieces.

  ‘Does anyone even know where he comes from?’

  ‘Remember when he was sick and I nursed him? Three whole months I cooked soup for him and bought him medicines. And all the while I begged and pleaded with him … “Look, Selim,” I said, “you’re in a bad way. Tell me where you’ve hidden your money … Isn’t it a shame to let all that money rot away uselessly? Look, Fisher Selim, I’ve been taking care of you all this time, washing you and all … Even shaving you with my own hand! You’re dying anyway … I’m not asking you for anything. Only show me where the money is. It’s not right that this country’s money should go to waste …” He was at his last gasp, yet still he waved me away. So I picked him up and carried him out to his boat. “You can croak in your own boat,” I said, “no need to soil my house!”’

  ‘You’re lying, Osman! I remember very well, you never took him out to his boat.’

  ‘I certainly did! But he was back by my hearth the very next morning, moribund as he was. So I fed him for another month …’

  ‘Well, he paid you quite a tidy sum for it!’

  ‘What? With all those soups I cooked?’

  ‘If he’d died, his boat and everything would have been yours.’

  ‘As though you looked after him for love! How much money did he give you?’

  ‘A mere ten lira! The miser! There never was such a stingy fellow.’

  ‘He’ll soak week-old crusts in water and gulp down the mush!’

  ‘He eats only bread and the small fry of his catch …’

  ‘Gobbling them down all raw, like a seagull!’

  ‘Has anyone seen him eat anything else?’

  ‘Someone gave him an orange once – was it ten years ago or fifteen? He kept it for a whole week, only smelling it. Then at last he peeled it and sliced it very thin and spent all day eating it!’

  ‘A man who’s got heaps of money!’

  ‘He doesn’t put it in a bank either.’

  ‘Where can he be hiding it?’

  ‘Who knows? Under the sea probably.’

  ‘With seamarks only he knows about.’

  ‘After he got over that illness, it was as if I never existed!’

  ‘Yes, he never even said hello to Osman …’

  ‘And he took care not to be sick again!’

  ‘Out of pure stinginess!’

  ‘He’d realized illness is a costly business.’

  ‘And death too …’

  ‘So he’ll never die!’

  ‘That old handwoven parka of his, he had it on his back when he first came here years ago.’

  ‘One shirt has to last him seven years at least.’

  ‘He won’t even wash his underpants for fear they’ll wear out!’

  ‘Oh, he killed Ihsan all right!’

  ‘Did you notice how he snatched the revolver from Zeynel’s hand and threw it down? And then ran away?’

  ‘Just so we shouldn’t do anything ourselves.’

  ‘The double-crosser!’

  ‘As tight-lipped as he’s tight-fisted …’

  ‘Measuring his words out of a dropper …’

  ‘Who’s ever seen the inside of his house, eh?’

  ‘He won’t let a soul step over the threshold …’

  Süleyman rose, flinging his arms out wide. ‘You all witnessed it. Selim helped Zeynel escape. If the police …’

  ‘He actually whisked him out of our hands.’

  ‘Any one of us could have caught him.’

  ‘Easily …’

  ‘It’s because we all took it for granted that Selim …’

  ‘It’s because we were all frozen with fright,’ Laz Erkan broke in. ‘That’s the truth of the matter. Wetting our pants, we were, with that revolver pointed at us!’

  ‘And Zeynel heaping insults on us all the while …’

  ‘The miserable wretch …’

  ‘But it was Selim made him do it, that’s certain.’

  Süleyman’s head was swathed in a white cloth, like a turban. ‘I was so shocked, it was like an invisible hand was pinning me down.’

  ‘Of course,’ Ibo Efendi said. ‘If not, you would have done something.’

  Süleyman’s hand went to his head. ‘Yes, I would …’ He thought better of it. ‘Anyway, Selim’s at the bottom of it all. Are you game? When the police come back …’

  ‘Yes, yes …’

  ‘I’m not!’ Laz Erkan said.

  ‘Count me out too,’ Mahmut said.

  ‘Well, we don’t need dogs like you,’ Süleyman retorted. ‘We’ve got plenty of witnesses.’

  ‘A murderer!’

  ‘And that business at the beaches?’

  ‘Tell them, Yusuf!’

  ‘What can I say? We used to go pimping together …’

  ‘Why, the bastard …’

  ‘The things we did to make money! I squandered mine in the bars of Beyoğlu, but he saved his.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Father Hakki growled, shaking his mane of white hair. ‘He never went pimping with you or anyone else. He may be a miser, a coward, a little mad, but he wouldn’t sell women or steal or anything like that. I’ve known him for years. And he wouldn’t lie either.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t lie,’ Ibo Efendi admitted.

  ‘And don’t forget he’s been very useful to the village,’ Şaban said. ‘It was he who thought of hiring out rowing-boats to the young people who come over from Istanbul.’

  ‘Hah, that was just so they should fuck in his boat!’ Süleyman scoffed. ‘As though he did it in a good cause, the pimp!’

  ‘Be quiet, Süleyman,’ Mahmut snapped. ‘That’s going too far.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ Ibo Efendi said, ‘we all saw how he let Zeynel escape. We can tell the police.’

  Just then Fisher Selim’s tall frame loomed in the doorway.

  ‘Come in, come in, Fisher Selim,’ some of the men called, rising in a flurry to greet him.

  Selim sat down at an empty table near the door. ‘Only think!’ he said. ‘If I’d had just one bullet left, I’d never have let him escape. Just one …’ He fell silent.

  No one spoke. Şaban brought him some tea, steaming in its glass. Fisher Selim drank it down in three gulps, placed some money on the table and rose to go.

  As soon as he was out of the coffee-house, the men were at him worse than ever.

  ‘Mark my words, that Zeynel won’t let him get away with it!’

  ‘He’ll kill him sooner or later, just as he killed Ihsan.’

  ‘Skin him alive, Zeynel will!’

  ‘You can’t treat a man like that.’

  ‘Snatch his revolver away from him and spit in his face!’

  ‘Would Zeynel ever swallow that?’

  ‘He’ll take his revenge.’

  ‘Selim’s taken fright already. All in a flutter he is, can’t keep still for a minute.’

  ‘Like a bitch with a burnt paw!’

  ‘Oh, yes, Zeynel will skin him alive …’

  ‘After killing Ihsan …’

  ‘And perhaps he was right to do it.’

  ‘Maybe there was something between him and Ihsan.’

  ‘It’s not good to meddle with a man who’s just killed.’

  ‘Our Prophet has prescribed that you touch not the snake that is drinking water …’

  ‘Ah, he’ll get his deserts, that Selim, sure as fate!’

  ‘Sooner or later �
�’

  3

  When such things are going on, I stay away from Menekşe for weeks, even months on end. Of course I long to go there. Of course I miss my friends, Skipper Nuri, old Kazim Agha, Ilya, Master Leon, Tartar Ali. Yet I cannot bring myself to sit in that coffee-house. I cannot look anyone in the face, just as though I were the guilty one. The world is like that, I know. People are like that. There is nothing I can do about it. That’s what I try to tell myself, but it’s no use. I cannot bear it. I feel as though something dirty, something evil, something hostile has rubbed itself against me. How could they do this to a man like Fisher Selim and still sit and drink tea with him, talk to him, play backgammon with him? I simply cannot understand it.

  I wish I had a tiny island here, near Menekşe, and on that island a small house, just two rooms, and a garden where I would plant olive saplings which I would coax into growth by caressing them with my eyes every day … The olive grows so quietly … It is the most humble of trees. Who knows, perhaps it puts out only one or two leaves each year …? So it would be the grandchildren of the people living on my island who would eat the first fruit of these olive trees, never knowing who had planted them … How silvery their pointed leaves would be in the sunlight! I would also like to have a greyhound. And a foal too, a thoroughbred that I would raise myself. The other houses on my island would always be open to me, as familiar as my own, the people living in them closer than brothers. We would run to each other’s aid, sharing everything, joys and sorrows alike.

  How often have I not dreamed of such an island! Dreamed that the people on it multiplied, that they never hurt each other, that the fishermen did not take little children out to sea in wintry weather, making them pick the fish out of the freezing nets, without even paying them their due afterwards … Dreamed that children were not beaten or abused, that they did not line up like birds on the shore in the cruel northwester, eyes large with anxiety, waiting to unload the incoming fishing boats, so as to earn a little money, barely enough to buy a handful of dried sunflower seeds, a simit, a ticket to the movies …. Dreamed that Laz Mustafa never again has to go hoeing day after day in the parsley, radish, cabbage and lettuce plots out by the city walls, his hands hard as rubber wheels, so as to feed his nine children with a bare crust of bread. Yes, even Laz Mustafa is happy on my island. Every evening he dresses up his nine children in neat clothes and takes them for a stroll on the wharf. Young girls and lads in couples row out across the deep blue sea. They fish, they make love in the sun. Nobody disturbs them, nobody even looks at them … Tartar Ali’s son would never have set fire to his boat and perished in the flames. And Bekaroğlu, that best of men, would find happiness by marrying the widow Hatçe, who had been left with eleven children to raise. I can see those children running out joyfully when they spy his skin-and-bones figure trudging up the slope, and helping him carry the heavy fishing nets still wet from the sea … All kinds of pleasant things happen on my island. People give free rein to their dreams. They are not ashamed, not afraid that these dreams may never come true, not laden with the curse of having to bury their hopes deep inside them …

  And my island in Menekşe will always be there as long as I live, and I and Mahmut and Ilya and Master Leon the mason will never grow tired of weaving dreams about it. One day we’ll find a way of luring Ahmet from his wicked life and make him settle there. Another day, we’ll throw out drunken Haydar who bothers and abuses that poor old whore, Zeliha, banging on her door in the middle of the night … We would have greyhounds on our island, with long slim legs, narrow arched bodies, lovely to behold, but we would not take them out rabbit-hunting. We would all be friends on my island, men and greyhounds and rabbits, too. Yes, we would dream dreams on my island and believe with all our hearts that they could come true.

  Could there ever be any such place in Menekşe? Have we not let our dreams get the better of hard reality? Is not Istanbul city close by, noisy, dirty, swarming, laying new traps every day to set its inhabitants at loggerheads, sowing evil, enmity, exploitation, death? Or is this dream island, is our life there, more real than anything else? I defy anyone to answer that question. Who can say whether our true life is not in our dreamland, on that island of Menekşe?

  What do you think, Fisher Selim? I wonder if he knows what went on in the coffee-house, if he is hurt, incurably wounded at this proof of men’s viciousness … How will he act when we meet again? Will he turn and give me so much as one look, even unfriendly, out of those sorrowful deep-set blue eyes of his? I listened to but a small part of what was said about him. Who knows what those Menekşe folk have been inventing since? And, as sure as I’m alive, one of them must be retailing all the gossip to Selim day by day, watching with relish how his face changes from anger to pain, from disgust to despair. Or why bother to talk so much if Selim is to hear never a word? Does he know, then, does every remark relayed to him pierce his heart like a greasy bullet? Or does he give a contemptuous laugh, secretly rather flattered at being the object of so much talk, even if it is only malicious gossip? You never know with him, he talks so little, and even then it is not like other people. A sudden burst of words, and off he goes, head hanging as though ashamed of himself.

  Well, anyway, I did not go down to Menekşe, but Mahmut came to see me several times. He seemed no different, cheerful as usual, but somehow subdued. We’d sit on the edge of the cliff and he’d talk about this and that. Then one day, without so much as a greeting, he said: ‘Are you sore at me, brother?’

  I did not reply. He sat down beside me. His arm touched mine. Involuntarily I drew away.

  ‘So you are sore at me,’ he said.

  I only laughed.

  ‘But Ilya also said things about him, and Tartar Ali and Father Hakki …’

  ‘They’d never do that, Mahmut,’ I said.

  Mahmut was confused. His hands opened and closed. ‘But it’s true he’s a coward,’ he shouted.

  ‘So are we all,’ I said, ‘you too, me too …’

  He stared at me doubtfully. ‘You too? Me too?’ And then, bending his head, he murmured again: ‘You too, me too …’

  ‘All of us …’ Silently, I cursed the whole world. If men were not such cowards, could they ever be so cruel, so hateful to each other, cheating, killing, enslaving, destroying? Humiliating others, browbeating them? Crazy, forgetting how to love and be loved … Would the hand extended be so icy? Would they have lost all power of reasoning, only capable of aping others? Forever obsessed by death and never realizing the futility of the obsession? Would they be so insensible to the earth under their feet, to the sky, the stars, the streams, the flowers, the high mountain peaks, to light itself? How could they exist without love, affection, friendship, their hearts never stirred, never beating warmly like a bird’s for a lover, for a faithful face?

  ‘You’re right, brother,’ Mahmut said as if I had spoken out loud. ‘Forgive me, but …’ And he muttered something I did not catch.

  ‘Speak out,’ I said. ‘I won’t kill you.’

  ‘Then, why …?’ He hesitated. ‘Why didn’t you …?’

  ‘Why didn’t I do something?’ I took the words from his mouth. ‘Why, indeed?’

  ‘I suppose a man gets carried away by the others, by what’s going on about him,’ Mahmut went on. ‘You get confused, you can’t think coolly …’

  ‘That’s how it is.’

  ‘Still, I for one shouldn’t have done this to Fisher Selim. He’s always been kind to me …’ He clenched his fists. ‘Just let me hear them say one more word against him! By God, I’ll scatter those people in the coffee-house to the winds.’

  ‘It’s no use,’ I said. ‘You’ll never stop them. They can’t do without their bout of gossip.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he assented, crestfallen. ‘They’ve always been like this about Fisher Selim.’ He rose to go.

  After a while I got up too and walked down the slope to Menekşe, passing under the bridge of the lopsided little railway station to emerge be
side the sea. And there, sitting in his boat a little way offshore, was Fisher Selim, mending a net. He lifted his head and our eyes met. He looked startled at first, then he smiled.

  ‘Hello, Fisher Selim,’ I said.

  He waved his huge hand.

  ‘Have a cigarette,’ I said.

  Seizing the oars he drew the boat alongside the wooden jetty. The boards creaked and shook as I stepped up to him and held out the packet of cigarettes.

  We smoked in silence. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the distance. At last he spoke, just one word.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing in the direction of Hayirsiz Island.

  ‘You don’t say!’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘But I thought there weren’t any left.’

  ‘Only a few. Here and there, like drunken creatures …’

  ‘What a pity,’ I sighed.

  ‘Yes, but if I don’t catch it, someone else will.’

  ‘They ought to forbid it.’

  ‘If only they would … But who listens to prohibitions! Dynamite fishing is forbidden too, but who listens?’

  He was absorbed once more in his work and I sat on there, on the wooden jetty, legs dangling over the water. Several planes passed overhead to land at Yeşilköy Airport. The sea stretched out to the distant shores of Bursa, a glittering expanse. There was a smell heralding the lodos wind in the air.

  ‘It won’t rise,’ Fisher Selim said without looking up from his net.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The lodos, of course.’ He smiled and his strong white teeth gleamed. ‘Sometimes it plays the coquette with you, like today.’ He looked at me. ‘So you like the sea? Why don’t you come with me tomorrow? Who knows, you might be lucky and we’ll see it.’

  I was overjoyed. Certainly other people must have gone fishing with him before, but I felt somehow that I was the first to have been honoured with a genuine, heartfelt invitation. ‘I’d love to,’ I said with enthusiasm. ‘I’m sure we’ll find it.’

  He seemed pleased at my eagerness. ‘Tomorrow then, at three. Here.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  He swung to the oars and rowed away, not stopping till he was in front of the presidential summer residence. I saw him bending over his net. The boat was swaying gently on the calm sea.