The Sea-Crossed Fisherman

by Yashar Kemal

  ‘Yes,’ the boy said, quite at ease now, as though this were some sort of game. ‘Look …’ He pushed open a small door into a recess that was full of sawdust.

  ‘I’m going to lock you up in here. Where’s your boss?’

  ‘He’s gone home. He won’t come back today.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Mutlu.’

  ‘Well, Mutlu, you’ll have to stay in there for a while.’

  ‘All right,’ the boy said, secretly thrilled at this adventure. ‘Did you bag a lot of money from that bank?’

  ‘A lot,’ Zeynel replied. ‘Now, get in there.’ He was just closing the door when he drew it open again. ‘I ought to gag you really. What if you shout when you hear someone come in?’

  ‘I’d be a stinker if I did, Abi,’ Mutlu declared. ‘We’re men here. A man doesn’t give another away, especially a big brother who’s robbed a bank!’

  Zeynel closed the door upon Mutlu. He took the bag of money he had left lying near the entrance and shoved it under the workbench. Then he slipped on one of the aprons hanging on the wall and, seizing the largest plane he could find, started planing a board on the bench. He went on with this till nightfall. The board had been planed to the thinness of a sheet of paper when he left off. He opened the door to the little room and switched on the light. Mutlu was lying on the sawdust, fast asleep. Who knows, Zeynel thought, how hard this child must work, how tired he must get that he can sleep so soundly … The room smelled of pine, a heady, dizzying smell. He knelt beside the boy, thinking of the many many times he himself had dropped asleep like that, tired out, insensible as a stone. He could not bring himself to wake him. Putting out the light he closed the door and crouched down, overcome by an intense weariness. If he let himself go he could drop off right there and sleep for three days and three nights without stirring. Struck with fear, he leaped to his feet, took a wad of money from his bag, opened the door to the little room again and turned on the light. Mutlu was still lying on his right side, his lips pouting, breathing peacefully. His heart swelling, Zeynel stuffed the five-hundred-lira banknotes into the boy’s pocket and turned off the light, leaving the door open. A big blue apron on the wall caught his eye. He took it down and wrapped the bag of money in it. Then, still wearing the other apron, he went out. Threading his way through narrow side alleys, he came to the Kabataş boat landing. A battered old taxi was driving down the hill from Galatasaray. He hailed it. ‘To Topkapi,’ he said.

  The driver, a seasoned old-timer, sized him up. ‘I can’t take less than a hundred and twenty-five, he said.

  ‘I’ve got a hundred lira,’ Zeynel countered. ‘Not a kurush more. What does a carpenter earn these days, anyway, boss …?’

  ‘Hop in, hop in,’ the driver said magnanimously. ‘Carpenters make a pretty good penny, I know. Still, I’ll let you off with a hundred lira, carpenter-lad!’

  ‘Thanks, boss.’ Zeynel sat down beside the driver, wedging the bag between his legs and the door. ‘You can pick up others in the back if you like to make a dolmuş.’

  In this manner they reached Pazartekke, picking up at one time or another a traffic policeman, two women, four shaggy-haired youths whose breath reeked of raki, two stooping old pensioners and a very upright former army officer who talked all the time in imperative tones. At Pazartekke, Zeynel got out and walked on towards the Old Walls.

  A light rain was falling almost imperceptibly. Zeynel knew exactly where he was going, to an old hideout of his at the foot of a huge portal. On the right of the portal, a little way inside a cemetery, was a large fig tree that hid the entrance to a small vaulted crypt.

  The rain was gathering strength and he was quite drenched by the time he reached the portal. Agile as a cat, he leaped over the cemetery wall, ran to the fig tree which was barely discernible in the darkness, and passed under the vault into the crypt. An acrid smell of dust, wet stone and moss made his throat bum. He coughed. The very sound of his coughing frightened him and he swallowed hard. With a chisel he had taken from the carpenter’s shop he started digging into the soft earth. When he had dug to an arm’s length, he opened the bag, took some money out, and shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans. He then wrapped the bag up again in the blue apron, took off the one he was wearing, laid it over the bundle and lowered it into the hole. Then he shovelled the earth back, stamped it down and smoothed the surface with his hands. No one could ever find his money now. Street children were much too afraid of the cemetery to come here and the crypt had long been forgotten by everyone else. And even if someone chanced this way, how could he suspect that there was money here in that hole, deep as a grave? He patted the ground once more and went out. It was raining as though the sky had been rent asunder. He went to the Samatya railway station and waited for a train. From there he would go and have a few drinks in Kumkapi and then he would find old Lame Hasan and give him three thousand lira. Lame Hasan was the one person in Menekşe who had always treated him well …

  11

  A tempest was raging off the coast of Menekşe. White breakers tearing in from distant Büyükada Island pounded at the shore, shaking the houses, the roads and the earth. Sheets of rain slashed through the night, cold, razor-like. In the coffee-house the three policemen were sitting in a corner playing cards and talking desultorily. Menekşe had just gone through another of those eventful days since the murder of Ihsan and everyone was commenting on the exploits of Zeynel Çelik and his gang. Three times Zeynel had riddled Fisher Selim’s house with bullets, rousing the whole neighbourhood. Finally, the night before, he had set fire to the house. It had blazed up in an instant like kindling wood, the wind fanning the flames high up over the railway station. The house had been reduced to cinders so quickly that no one could believe it. If Selim had not been such a light sleeper and so quick on his feet as well, he too would have been ashes by now.

  The loss of his house did not particularly grieve him, but he felt angry at Zeynel. The lad was turning out to be a dangerous roughneck. He had killed Ihsan out of some secret fear, but now this fear had assumed such proportions that it must be affecting his mind. Anyway, that very day Fisher Selim bought some timber and fibreboard and other necessary material and started rebuilding his house, assisted by Mahmut and Özkan. Soon the whole of Menekşe, even those who had been so hostile to him, were lending a helping hand. Some brought sand and water, panes of glass, taps, pipes, others mixed the sand and cement or planed the wood. This kind of shanty is generally built by teamwork. It draws people together and enmities are set aside.

  The newspapers were full of the exploits of Zeynel Çelik, but each gave a different version of Ihsan’s murder and not one of the photographs printed bore the faintest likeness to Zeynel. Mostly they depicted a tall, broad-shouldered, hawk-nosed man with glowering eyes under knit brows, holding a sten gun. One newspaper had spread a large photo of Zeynel over half a page, with steep mauve crags in the background. Another had Zeynel with his whole gang, the caption reading: ‘Here you see Zeynel Çelik with the gang he formed three years ago on arriving in Istanbul from Erzurum, his home town.’ There were also varied accounts of Zeynel’s life which even the Menekşe folk had begun to believe. And why not? Zeynel, they argued, had been quite a grown man when he came to live in Menekşe and that was ten to fifteen years ago! Besides no one knew what he had been doing all those years, where he had been. As for the photographs, well, after all, a man could change quite a lot after so many adventures …

  That morning, Menekşe had been astir exceptionally early. Some boys had been dispatched to get the newspapers from Küçükçekmece. Even Ibo Efendi had loosened his pursestrings for once and ordered three newspapers. When they arrived, groups assembled on the beach, in the coffee-house, outside the houses, and the account of the murder was read aloud and commented upon. Though this differed from one paper to another, there was one point on which they were all in accord. Zeynel and his gang had fired at the houses all night long, had even fired at the sea an
d the fishing boats. One paper related how Zeynel had burst into the Menekşe coffee-house with nine men, grabbed hold of that notorious thug Ihsan, who had a clean eleven murders to his credit, and after torturing him for some time had shot him three times in each eye and then had slashed off his tongue and penis before coolly leaving the coffee-house. Alerted, the police had surrounded the gangsters, but Zeynel, that old-timer, so bold and swift, had managed to break through and escape. The Menekşe folk believed it all. Very likely, they said, when Zeynel broke into the coffee-house his gang was waiting outside, but what a pity they had not seen the police surrounding him on sea and on land, as the paper wrote. Yet how could the paper say the skirmish had gone on for days and nights when that was not true at all?

  Then there was the incident of the trussed-up policemen, which had made a great sensation in the press. The police, having received a tip-off, had set an ambush for Zeynel at the point of the Old Seraglio, in front of the statue of Atatürk, but instead they found themselves trapped in a hail of bullets. ‘I don’t want to kill you,’ Zeynel Çelik shouted, ‘but that’s what I’ll do if you don’t surrender.’ The police had no choice. Zeynel Çelik bore a grudge against policemen in general and, after tying these ones up, he taunted and tortured them and took all their guns and money. Never before had the Istanbul police had to deal with such a ruthless gangster. Besides, the papers intimated, there was an even more powerful gang behind it all.

  Then came the bank hold-up in Beyoğlu, followed by the burning of Fisher Selim’s house. Here was a windfall for the newspapers! Now they could fill up their columns every day with the epic doings of this dangerous gangster, and Istanbul, its hand on its heart, would be waiting for the morning papers with growing eagerness every day.

  One journalist had by pure chance, he wrote, come upon Zeynel only the day before, drinking whisky in an unnamed casino on the Bosphorus and Zeynel had granted him a long interview. Splashed over the front page of the paper were various pictures of Zeynel posing beside the journalist. Here Zeynel was a tall handlebar-moustached brave and the journalist said that he originated from Tunceli. First, at the age of eleven he had joined a large smuggling network, but it took him only a few years to realize he did not like black-marketeering. He defied their chief and killed him. Policemen he hated. Wherever he saw one he had pledged himself to truss him up and next time he would send his gun to the Chief of the Security Department. Zeynel, the article went on, was about thirty, cool and self-possessed and quite modest too. The reason he had shot Ihsan was because the man had murdered Zeynel’s brother. As for the bank hold-up, well, the gang needed money. They couldn’t be expected to go hungry, could they? And nothing was easier than to rob a bank. Three more he had to rob in order to secure his material independence and then he’d never touch another man’s property again. Thieving and plundering were downright sinful when you had enough money to get by anyway … Among the football clubs Zeynel was an ardent Fenerbahçe fan, and had been ever since his youth. His favourite foods were black cabbage soup, croquettes made of madimak, a herb unknown in Istanbul, and special meatballs made of mincemeat and bulgur. He also liked kebap, Antep style. He was a bachelor, but he had a girl in mind, a girl who had just graduated from university, and he intended to marry her very soon. The girl had a soft spot for gangsters, for wild men of character, and she had fallen in love with Zeynel at first sight. The journalist had wanted to know how good a shot Zeynel was and Zeynel had whipped out a gun and aimed at an electric bulb on the far side of the casino. The bulb had burst into shivers and without another look Zeynel had got into his car and driven off in full view of all the people in the jam-packed casino.

  That was it. After this, in a very short while, Zeynel Çelik’s gang had grown to redoubtable proportions and events gathered speed, a second bank hold-up taking place in Beyoğlu, a third in Şişli, a fourth in Sirkeci. At the Harem boat landing-place the corpses of three men were discovered, all three shot in the nape of the neck and all three with their trousers and underpants lowered to the knees. These were identified as three merchants from the provinces and it was thought that the trousers business was just a false trail to give another aspect to the murders. And, soon after, a couple of new corpses, mother-naked this time, were found in the underpass in Aksaray. No one doubted but that all these murders were the work of Zeynel Çelik’s gang. Every new day brought a fresh murder, another burglary or hold-up in this or that quarter of Istanbul, and also a whole spate of photographs of Zeynel, holding now a machine-gun, now a Mauser rifle, a carbine, a sword …

  The police had tracked Zeynel Çelik to the house of that convicted sexual pervert, Rifat Ardiç, in Unkapani. The skirmish lasted through the night. Towards dawn, as the firing from the house had ceased, the steel-vested policemen charged in with a volley of machine-gun fire and came upon Rifat Ardiç, steeped in his blood, lying on the floor, one hand clasping the door-knob. And that wasn’t all. Inside, hunched over an automatic pistol, lay a girl, her head blasted to bits, her brains stuck to the wall, her crumpled blood-drenched skirt dried stiff as a tarpaulin. She was clasping the automatic pistol, so one paper said in the caption under her photo, as though it were her lover. A dark, long-necked, curly-haired boy of about fifteen was slumped in a corner. His blood had run along the floor to gather in a pool on the threshold. Two more persons, huddled under a sideboard, were moaning in pain, obviously hit by the last volley as the police burst into the house. They were swiftly transported to hospital, but their case was hopeless and they died on the way.

  Members of the press had been present at this last operation. Of course they were rather disappointed to find that Zeynel Çelik had somehow escaped, but they had plenty of material with the photographs of all those other bloody corpses. Besides, Zeynel Çelik had lost the most valiant member of his gang, the gangster girl who was known as Thompson-Toting Fatoş. On the whole, it was much better from the journalists’ point of view that Zeynel should have got away, and in such a spectacular manner too, jumping from rooftop to rooftop. How could the police have foreseen that he would break out of the house through the roof? Next time, they would put a watch on the roofs as well …

  The Istanbul police were being showered with tip-offs. It seemed as though the citizens had nothing else to do. Only yesterday morning, at the very same time, twenty-three Zeynel Çeliks had been spotted in Samatya, thirty-seven in Beyoğlu, nine in Tarabya, ninety-six in Bebek, three in Eminönü, seventy-one in the Spice Bazaar, one in the Vegetable Market, forty-six in Eyup, one in Menekşe, three in Florya and twenty-seven in Aksaray. And so it went on, the police doing their best to follow up all these leads. One day, in Dolapdere, they managed to capture alive and without a scratch five members of the gang, but again Zeynel Çelik slipped through their fingers with the cunning of a fox. The men sang like nightingales about their bank robberies, about what kind of person Zeynel was, but of the stolen loot there was no trace. How could there be? Would Zeynel let anyone have even a whiff of a single kurush? Another time, in Kasimpaşa, the police cordoned off a house and subjected it to a barrage of fire. Six members of the gang fell into their hands, wounded, but not that fiend Zeynel Çelik. Again, in the neighbourhood of Umraniye the police arrested fifteen men belonging to Zeynel Çelik’s gang and they all confessed to their crimes. Every one of them worshipped Zeynel. He was brave, he could never be caught, he was larger than the largest champion wrestler, a very devil. There was something magic in his eyes. Just one look from him and a man was mesmerized and, were he the Chief of Police himself or the Minister of the Interior, he would find himself at Zeynel’s beck and call …

  Once, the police came upon Zeynel Çelik in a car near the Karagümrük Stadium, but before they even had time to draw their guns a crowd had gathered, forming a protective circle around the car, and both gangster and car disappeared into thin air. That night, the inhabitants of that quarter were soundly beaten up at the police station, but of Zeynel Çelik there was not a trace.

  All
over Istanbul the police were hunting Zeynel, leaving no stone unturned, organizing raids every day, every hour, making up to a dozen arrests daily, killing a few people, but for some mysterious reason Zeynel always eluded them.

  Zeynel Çelik was the topic of the day in every coffee-house in Istanbul. In Menekşe people talked of nothing else. Here all kinds of stories were being told. What a good fisherman he was, what a marvellous shot … How once, when Arapoğlu’s skiff had sunk off Hayirsiz Island, Zeynel had swum all the way from there to Menekşe, and in a raging tempest too. How he never went out without his two guns at his waist, how he could shoot a sparrow from a tree with one shot, without even taking aim …

  A wind of panic was sweeping over Menekşe. Not one of the people here had ever been kind to Zeynel. They had sent him out fishing in freezing weather without paying him anything. They had made him work for nothing, ordering him about like a servant. And now they lived with the constant fear that Zeynel Çelik’s gang would come in the night and set fire to their houses, shooting down anyone who attempted to get out.